2025-11-23 Kinetic Energy
I finally think that Kinetic Energy is ready for testing. It's a small Traveller-like game in 20 pages. Like I said elsewhere:
As a role-playing game author, I am mostly driven by my need for
shorter texts. I play something I like and I wonder whether I could
make it shorter, keeping just the ideas I like, maybe mix in some
ideas I've seen elsewhere, and call it a day. As such, my games
aren't very original but they are very personal. These are the games
I like to run.
Another big driver is the need for games in German. Many of my games
therefore started as "short German player-facing house-rules" – the
rules I thought were most important, in German, and short.
Then the games get translated into English and sooner or later the
games start to diverge because I use them with different groups, at
different times. My hope and my curse is that the games are driven
by the needs of my tables.
And so I started my quest for "Fantasy Traveller" by writing Helmbarten, translating that to Halberts, trying to add my referee advice in Knives, thinking about a German Classic Traveller and writing Weltensegler with Hasran, and another attempt at a short Science Fiction game with Frotz resulting in Kinetic Energy.
I feel I still need some tables to generate a system that fits the setting as I envision it.
But now, for "playtesting", I feel I should either write a mini-setting generator, or do a little solo gaming to see how it feels. Do I like the characters and creatures being generated? Does the implied setting work for me? What kind of stories emerge from this setup?