Welcome back to a couple of familiar faces...

One of my first full scale projects that I ever completed for an RPG was The Starfarer's Kit for Traveller. Since I own the rights to this and Captain Sturmhammer's Command Cards, I'm in the process of giving them a quick facelift before putting them back online for free. I have some minor tweaks to do in completing the facelift for The Starfarer's Kit before posting that (basically adding in the Creative Commons license language) and then find a site to post my material to since it appears I can't do that here on Blogger.

More to come, so stay tuned!

Pax et bonum,

Dale

EDIT: And The Starfarer's Kit is now online! You can download it from here. Be advised that previewing the document will not give you an accurate view of the content. For some reason 4Shared's preview function hates fonts (at least it hates Optima as far as I can tell) and replaces the offender(s) with Times New Roman. Go figure   o.O


This work by Dale Meier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at freestar-games.blogspot.com.

The best laid plans...

It would seem Grand Designer is pointing me in a new direction with Freestar Games - namely to get back on the original path I had plotted for this venture. Having found out how complicated the whole business permit and license bit is as well as being ignored by the local Small Business Administration folk, I've decided that I am indeed going to be offering all my products for free.

At the same time, while I did receive some feedback about character folios, the overwhelming sentiment was that it should be for free. Considering that you can find free fan-designed character sheets for a variety of games out there, it's understandable that players aren't going to want to spend money on a redesigned character sheet. My thanks goes out to Grimace on the D6Online forums and Rust over on the SFRPG discussion forums for their insight and honest feedback on the matter.

That being said, the DriveThruRPG storefront is coming down as anyone posting product to that site has to sell at least one or more products, and understandably so. And so we return to the original motto of my venture - Freestar Games: Where good things come free!

Pax et bonum,

Dale

POSTSCRIPT (1/23/12): The local SBA folks called back, but I told them of my decision. What's that old saying about being a day late and a dollar short?



This work by Dale Meier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at freestar-games.blogspot.com.

Dipping my toes in the (dice) pool

An important part of designing any product is market research. So, I'm checking to see what the response is to the idea of selling illustrated character sheets. I know "character folios" do a little bit of business. I also know that I personally don't mind if a character sheet is illustrated - sometimes it helps to envision a character; at the same time, the illustration doesn't always match up with my idea of how the character looks, including gender and the appearance of their race, gear, etc.

At any rate, the idea is to present players and GMs with character sheets (with and without character illustrations). I know when I run a convention game, I like to include an illustration of each pregen character, so I hope that will be a plus for GMs.

Below are thumbnails of the front page designs for my OpenD6 Adventure and Space sheets. The fantasy sheet is in the works. I'll be posting on several forums to get some input and hopefully it will be positive enough to merit going through with the project(s) as for-pay PDFs. Feel free to let me know what you think. As an added bonus, I'll be releasing the blank character sheets as freebie PDFs on DriveThruRPG once they're complete.

As a side note, I'd like to do illustrated sheets for each of the games I have licensed if the response for each game is positive.

Pax et bonum,

Dale

This work and designs herein by Dale Meier are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at freestar-games.blogspot.com.

A new year and a new look

While 2011 was the year of the slow start, 2012 should have a quicker pace. As you can see, some changes have been made on the website, including the addition of links to the games behind my licensed products and a DriveThruRPG storefront link.

 Expect to see the return of a couple of familiar Traveller products in the coming days as well as some new stuff across the board!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Good Night!

Dale Meier


This work by Dale Meier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at freestar-games.blogspot.com.

Greetings from the Core, pt. 3: Freestar Philosophy

Welcome back! Friday can't come soon enough.

Alexander Hamilton once said, "Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." While gaming is a fun pastime for many players and GMs, there should be more to it than just having fun. Tracy Hickman, creator of the Dragonlance series and setting, wrote a trio of essays about morality and ethics in gaming. In the third essay, he stresses that gamemasters are teachers whether they want to be or not. In gaming, especially gaming with younger players, it is vital to remember that every action (or lack thereof) has one or more consequences. Hickman summarizes this idea by saying:

      "Games which allow action without consequence are, at best, lazy. At the worst, such games teach a false view of the world to their participants.
       "The nature of conflict requires consequence.
       "We expect things to work a certain way. If they don't, they should at least work consistently wrong. If this weren't true, we wouldn't be able to plan anything. Imagine a world where every time you tried to use a hammer, it worked differently.
       "In role playing games, we expect our mace to do a certain amount of damage when we strike an opponent. If it didn't, we'd suspect there was some magical or other reason for it. Otherwise, we would all start complaining to the referee that he was being unfair or not following the rules.
       "This simple rule of action and consequence seems to be an obvious one. Unfortunately, the rule is seldom extended to the adventure or campaign. Pillage a town? Sure, as long as you don't mind the Baron and his army riding in hot and unending pursuit. Poison the King? O.K., so long as your prepared to deal with his brother, the paladin, and his army. Kill hostages? Fine, if you remember that each of those hostages has nearly a hundred relatives who will be willing to pay any price for your hide.
       "The characters' actions in a role playing game must have lawful consequences just as surely as we expect a mace to do damage. Anything else would be a lie."

This is the philosophy I run my games under. Additionally there is always the undercurrent of good vs. evil with good ultimately triumphing in the end. This is also the philosophy I write under. A majority of the material I write will be family oriented; occasionally something I write will be geared for more mature GMs and players, but I hope to keep that to a minimum.

That, in a nutshell, is where I and Freestar Games stand. In closing, if anyone is interested in reading Tracy Hickman's essays, they can be found here:


The Ethics of Fantasy, Part 1: That Evil Game!
The Ethics of Fantasy, Part 2: Concerned about Role-Playing
The Ethics of Fantasy, Part 3: The Moral Imperative of Fantasy

Some of you may recall that I talked about putting some of my material up for sale with the profits going to charity. I have since rethought that idea, not out of malice or selfishness, but out of a desire for transparency. While putting one's material up for sale for charity is undoubtedly a good act, it does open the door to some problems. It is all too easy on the Internet for someone to say or make it appear they are doing something virtuous when in reality they are doing the opposite. It is also all too easy to accuse someone of doing something disingenuous when in reality they are doing the right thing.

Given the environment I'm creating this endeavor in and the background I'm coming from, I've decided not to give such an opening to anyone who might wish to smear my name by leveling false allegations. As such, I've decided that if I want to donate to charity, I'll do it on my own.

At the same time, I encourage anybody who shops on Drivethru RPG or RPGNow to invest in the charity bundles, either as a publisher by adding their products to the lists, or as a buyer by purchasing the bundles. OneBookShelf, the company running both sites have a solid reputation with regard to charity bundles.

In other news, I've indefinitely shelved my hopes of running a Traveller game. It was very difficult to find players and coordinate schedules. As such, I'm currently working on playtesting an idea at Nuke-Con 2011 here in Omaha. This project, which we'll call Project B for the present, is something that I hope will make it easier for fledgling gamers to get involved with Pathfinder, especially those players who don't have the funds to invest in the core rules right away.

That's all I'm divulging for now. I'll keep you posted on the project's progress as time goes on.

Later!


This work by Dale Meier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at freestar-games.blogspot.com.

Greetings from the Core, pt. 2: History

Sorry it's taken so long to post again. A lot of changes have happened in my household and life has been a bit hectic lately.

So, were was I.... Right, my gaming history and philosophy. I started gaming at age 12, and like a lot of my fellow gamers from the 80s, cut my teeth on Basic D&D. I had always been enamored with RPGs after seeing them in a couple of the Christmas catalogs in the early 80s. I always wondered what the games were like and was particularly curious about D&D since I had grown up watching The Hobbit, A Flight of Dragons, and other animated fantasy movies on TV.

So, I talked my mom into finding a copy of what is now known as the Moldvay edition of Basic D&D at an area secondhand store. I delved into the contents of the game, finding only one defect in the set - a missing d8. After that, I scraped up enough money to buy some other books, including a copy of Ian Livingstone's "Dicing with Dragons", the AD&D Fiend Folio, and my first issue of Dragon Magazine (#126, to be exact).

Now mind you, this was during the height of the satanic panic of the 1980s. Televangelists were plying the airwaves espousing the dangers and evil influence of D&D, heavy metal, and almost anything else they didn't agree with. At the same time 60 Minutes did its wonderful little hack job on D&D, adding more fuel to the fire. At any rate, in reading Livingstone's book, I was confronted by a passage which shocked and caused me extreme worry - mainly the statement that RPGs can be addictive. By that time, I was eating, breathing and sleeping D&D much to the concern of my mom. Wanting to be a "clean cut", Christian country boy (I lived on a farm at the time, but that's another story for another time), I packed away my D&D stuff for a year and concentrated on wargaming through FASA's The Last Starfighter and Star Trek tactical games.

So what brought me out of my self-imposed exile? Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. As a kid of the 70s and 80s, I grew up with Star Wars, collected and played with the toys, saw the movies, and so forth. When Star Wars: The RPG hit the shelves in 1987, I had to do a lot of fast talking to convince her this wasn't going to be a repeat of D&D, and it wasn't. I kept my grades up, behaved, and lo and behold on Christmas morning I opened one of my presents to find the hardcover 1st edition rulebook.

From then on, I learned about other RPGs and started building up a library at the end of my senior year of high school. Pendragon, Paranoia, Toon, Gamma World, the list grew with the exception of one game - D&D. At the time, I was convinced that D&D was the black sheep, the bad influence of gaming and avoided it like the plague. Once I got out of college and joined the working world, I eliminated that little bit of wrong thinking.

On a whim, I started collecting the old first edition AD&D books shortly before D&D 3e came out. Of course, that didn't last long. Once I did that, my jump to D&D 3e was quick. My gaming library continued to grow, including Alternity, Call of Cthulhu (The X-Files and Millennium TV series fueled my interest in the game and still do to some extent), Traveller, Legend of the Five Rings and even the Usagi Yojimbo RPG joined the ranks of books on my shelves. And so here I am today.

*looks at the clock and sighs* Well, I should close out for now. I've got work in an hour and need to get ready and get going. I'll be back soon to wrap this all up. Take care for now.


This work by Dale Meier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at freestar-games.blogspot.com.

Greetings from the Core, pt. 1: Welcome to the Nebula

Hello, folks! My name is Dale Meier and this is the Freestar Nebula, a creative blog and site I'm building as an outlet for my free RPG projects based on license from a number of different companies and for several different systems.

If you've been on the web, especially places like RPGNet and SFRPG, you might remember my name being tied to a company called Hell Creek Sanitarium. That's in the past; no offense, but any questions asked about my departure from that organization will go unanswered. I'm looking to my future and Freestar Games is it.

The motto of Freestar Games is "Where good stuff comes free." That's right. Some, if not all material produced by Freestar Games will be free under a Creative Commons license shown at the bottom of this post. In order to keep within the word and spirit of the OGL and related licenses, it is an Attribution-Share Alike unported license.

Licenses I'm supporting will include, but not be limited to:

• Mongoose Publishing's Traveller RPG
• Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder RPG
• Pinnacle Entertainment Group's Savage Worlds RPG (Savage Fan license)
• D101 Games' OpenQuest RPG (tentative)
• Adamant Entertainment's Icons RPG (tentative)
• the OpenD6 System

Materials I produce will be available in PDF format from a site yet to be determined; there may also be the possibility of materials being put up for sale with all profits to go to specified charities, but that is yet to be determined as well. I'll also be featuring updates and character info from my personal Traveller campaign, "Flight of the March Harrier". Longtime Traveller fans will recognize the adventure as being a classic (I'm not going to post the title in case any of my players read this blog before our first session); the system we'll be using will be mainly Mongoose Publishing's Traveller RPG with any holes or trouble spots being patched by material from one of the other editions as we see fit.

Well, that's all for now. Part two will cover my own gaming and publishing history as well as my mission, hopes, and dreams for Freestar Games.

Pax et bonum (peace and all good)

Dale Meier


This work by Dale Meier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at freestar-games.blogspot.com.