Development Progress

FIRST! I figured this would be an opportunity to write a little about myself, PERIHELION and its roots. My name is Andy and I'm an "older" UK-based gamer that has been playing RPGs since the early '80s and writing them for almost as long. Over the years, I've worked on small collections of house rules for games I've run, written tabletop and LARP systems that have been run for many years with what I feel is a good degree of success, and both started and never finished far too many projects.

A few years back I picked up a book about the gangs of Manchester, England at the start of the 1800s and inspired by the stories, not to mention horrified by the brutality back then, started work on a project named after one of Manchester's worst slums of the time, a place called Angel Meadow. I wanted to make the events that started the industrial revolution feel "punk" and, nicknaming this genre "cottonpunk" I set about writing. The focus was on a system that illustrated the social injustices of the time and in which the players took the roles of protestors, agitators and other "troublemakers", fighting back against the slow, inevitable growth of industrialisation and demise of the working classes. It was...hard going. At my heart, I'm a sci-fi guy. I love cyberpunk, I've run the RTG game on and off since I bought CP2013 when it first came out. But putting the "punk" into "cotton" was difficult without everything going, well, very steampunk. I added fantastical elements, I dabbled with urban horror, but try as I might I couldn't get away from the steampunk vibe (and as much as I love all things punk, I'm really not a fan of steampunk).

By the point I decided to sideline the project, I had an untested game engine based around a D10 dice pool, a bunch of mechanics for ability checks, combat, healing and an overly complicated set of rules for social conflict. It seemed a waste to totally can the project and so, after a bit of thought, I began work on PERIHELION. 

I started writing PERIHELION the way I always do: I broke down a document into chapters and sections, then began by writing up an outline of a timeline of events for the setting. I started by plugging in ideas from books, TV series and movies that were an inspiration for the game. The Cyberpunk and Eclipse Phase roleplaying games; Neill Blomkamp's movies, especially Elysium; the Takeshi Kovacs books by Richard Morgan, and Neal Stephenson's Seveneves; the TV series based on The Expanse books. It was rapidly becoming apparent that my new social injustice was going to be a near-future version of my Mancunian Victorian slums, just on a global scale and so the ideas started to take form: a global climate crisis, an elite autocracy that tosses aside the rest of humankind to preserve their way of life, hard science, high tech for the privileged and low-tech for the working classes, the all-seeing eye of technology everywhere.

The next step was to copy and paste the bits from the Angel Meadow project that would work for PERIHELION. This step went remarkably well, so I was happy that the game engine was generic enough to be transferable. I pared down the skill list and swapped some skills out for new, relevant skills (Computers, Air Vehicles, etc.) It was May 2021, a couple of months after deciding to stop work on Angel Meadow, by the time I'd got everything over and the first pass at editing done.  Now the hard work began...writing all the things.

I've been working on PERIHELION since then, writing a little - or sometimes a lot - each day. I've needed to split out the rulebook into multiple Google Documents as I'm hitting the GDoc size limit, so editing is going to need to be harsh, and clinical and most likely leave the corpses of many darlings in its wake. As of writing, my progress is approximately:

• Introduction: 100%
• Timeline: 100%
• Game Mechanics: 100%
• Injury, Death, Healing, Character Combat: 100%
• Influence & Social Mechanics: 100%
• Respite (downtime) Mechanics: 100%
• Travel, Scale, Movement: 100%
• Vehicle Combat: 100%
• Spacecraft Command & Combat: 100%
• Advanced Rules (Drugs, Engineering & Manufacturing, Gravity, etc.): 100%
• Life in 2098:
  • Humanity Redux (Earth, Mars, Jupiter, the Lagrange Orbitals, Corporations, Factions, etc.): 20%
  • Entertainment & Leisure: 30%
  • Law, Order & Punishment: 0%
  • War & Conflict: 0%
  • Common Technology: 15%
  • Travel & Communication: 10%
  • Space Technology: 10%
  • Weapons, Gear & Equipment: 65%
• GM's Guide: 5%
• A Short Adventure: 0%
• Appendices: 20%

Art is non-existent, barring a cover image, so if you're an artist, get in touch (I'm mainly interested in old-school 80s black and white line work, much like can be seen in the old Cyberpunk 2013/2020 rulebooks).

So here we are, progress continues at my own pace and I'm hoping to start playtesting with my gaming group sometime in the first quarter of 2022. Until then, I'll keep watching the news for inspiration and joking that the game writes itself.

Stay frosty!

-- Andy

Updates

2021-12-12: Completed Respite (downtime) Mechanics 

2021-12-20: Completed Vehicle Combat (100%) and updated Advanced Rules (90%). Almost there with the rules side of things now, one last Xmas push!

2021-12-24: Completed Advanced Rules (100%)

2022-01-02: Completed Timeline (100%)

2022-02-22: 80% complete with editing and layout of the character creation + players section. Work underway with playtesting and laying out the core rules.