It hit like a brick. I’ve been constantly trying to either make my own system, build something new, use the newest rules, whatever. I’ve been trying too hard.
Why take something and reinvent it? The 3.5 d20 System and d20 Modern were great, solid, well reviewed and put-through-its-paces system that was built for a good many systems, modified for different settings. It was all over the place in its time and for good reason. I can spend so much time reading and researching, or I can focus myself and build a setting instead of a system. The pieces are all there already, I just need to take them, put them together, and print them out.
I can throw everything I need together and put it in a book that works. I don’t need to sell it, just make it for my players in my campaign. I could make it a nice, full color, laid out book and have a hard cover print out, or something more simple and done as a PDF for people to have a digital copy of. For art, I can use AI art if I must, but have a large library of images as well. Or at least I did, I’m not sure if it still exists in one of my cloud drives or not anymore. A certain company used to make the art available for all their books, so I would download them as the book came out and save it. Save it somewhere anyway.
So now, what do we need, and how to we make it work?
There are two games at work, and I’ve got enough time to put the rules together for each of them with the intent to play it in the future. d20 Xenomega will be based on d20 Modern rules with Urban Arcana, d20 Future, and all the other rules thrown in there. I can make a players guide and a Monster Manual, as well as a reference book of charts and tables for running the game, but I don’t really need a “How to run this game” chapter since, well, I’m the only one who will be running it most likely. I do need to make a section dealing with money and currency though since there are a few different types of money in the d20 Modern system.
I don’t need some items from those books, such as space ships and some vehicles, as well as super advanced (TL9) weapons and armor as they don’t exist yet in the post-apocalypse of Xenomega.
To break it down, there will be a player book (races, skills, feats, classes), a monster book (monsters and aliens), and a tech book. That should really be it.
For Aerinwohl, we have a player book (races, skills, feats, classes), a monster book (or maybe just the same monster book), and a magic/psionics book.
To further simplify things, we can find where there is an overlap, and combine those. Humans are everywhere, some of the races will be the same, like elves and dwarves.
Skills have a huge amount of overlap, so that could be handled in one rule chapter. Feats is kind of hit-or-miss, depending on what I use for some. There are some feats that only apply to modern tech and weapons, some that only apply to magic. But magic and psionics do exist in Xenomega as well as Aerinwohl, so that’s a go.
If we dissect the chapters of the core books, we have:
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With that laid out, I think the best way to proceed with things is to break it down into books for Fantasy (Aerinwohl), and modern/future (Xenomega). Depending on how big they get, we can have books for Races, Classes, Magic, Psionics and then one big book for Skills, Feats, Combat, and finally, and maybe one separate book for Equipment.
I think that’s it. I just need to do lots of copy and pasting, some formatting, and then pay to get it printed somewhere. I used to have an account somewhere that would do printing on demand, so maybe I can get that again and print out hardcover books there.
