Angels - the Game of Divine Stories (coming March 2012) is a game where players portray the servants of God in a war for human souls. Even before making this game, the topic of God's Angels have always been something of a cool concept to us. So, for those interested, here's our list of blatant influences on the game world and general reading that helped shape our thoughts about these beings.  

*** In Nomine ***
Aaron has been a fan of Steve Jackson Games since he went looking for a game that he could GM a space game with for his players in high school. Stephanie has raised in a Christian home and church and believes in Angels. So, when Steve Jackson Games announced a game about Angels, there was something there for both of us. We started playing In Nomine the day it was released, met the author of the game at GenCon before it arrived in stores, and made it our go-to fun game for years. We have all the supplements, read every book 3 times, and even wore out a copy of the core rulebook. Eventually, we started moving the story forward in our games, blew up the world, started over again, and morphed it into something so non-In Nomine, we almost forgot what the original game was like. In Nomine is a very strong influence for Angels, and if you are familiar with both games, you will likely find a few familiar elements in it and some winks and nods to the great game that we spent so much time playing.

*** White Wolf Games ***
When we went looking for how to write the game book, we had a few options. We thought about doing it like our 2011 release WyshMaykers with a story telling about the world, but we couldn't get it to work right (we have lots of stories thought out of the deal). We thought about making it 3 book (rules, Setting, and Print2Play) each as a separate item. That didn't feel right. We even through about just putting the Setting book out as a supplement to -U- the Game of Stories. Finally, Aaron picked up an old Vampire the Masquerade book while going through stuff in the basement. From then on, he was determined that the book be a factual, "this is our world, differnetly" type style of writing and layout, with the rules being sectioned off a little more. This one worked... especially with the influence below.

*** Lucifer, the comic book ***
The Lucifer comic book from DC Comics / Vertigo Comics is one of the best representations of the character of Lucifer we hae ever read. No, really. He is a beautiful, blond, blue-eyed, selfish monstronsity that does as he wants in hopes to be his own being and not one of God's pawns. Mike Carey and Peter Gross nailed it, and we truely believe "L", as we call him, acts and look just like he did in the comics.


*** The NOOK ***
Stephanie has a Barnes & Noble Color NOOK. She loves her NOOK. She reads a lot more on her NOOK than she does real books these days (outside of comic books, that is). Because her NOOK has allowed her to read more, we decided to cater to that. When we were designing a layout and fonts and whatnot for the PDF of the book, we loaded it on her NOOK and checked out what it looked like. 8.5 x 11 inches was too big for the page, especially with sidebars. So, we opted for a smaller size. In effect, the NOOK made the decision for us to make a tablet edition of the Angels book. We're working on how it will work for the Print On Demand side of things.

*** The Bible ***
Angels is non-abashadly a game about Christian ideals. It has the death of Christ being a major turning point in the war. It tells about the creation of the world from an Angelic point of view. It even goes as far as saying that if you don't know God, you go to hell. A lot of the philosophy behind the game world comes from the Holy Bible. Above all of the things listed above, the Bible had the the most influence on the game. Because of this, Angels is a game for mature audiences who can handle a a point of view that may not reflect their own. Of course, the great thing about role-playing games, is that you can morph them into whatever you want, or use them to explore ideas. Hopefully you'll do both.

Next Time: More about the biblical influences.

One of the big things we've been working on this year is our new role-playing game. We're going to release it in March of 2012. We've been working on it all year this year. While we're at the end of the process (including playtesting), we thought we'd let you in on our process that seems to have taken shape in developing our role-playing games. With WyshMaykers and this new one almost under our belt, a definite best practice and process has been solidified. 

*** The Overall Flow *** 
Making a game is basically like running a project in an office job, only more fun. You come up with your requirements, you determine your resources, you delegate or hire whatever it is you need to make the dream happen, and you work a lot on the follow-through of the plan. Beyond that, it is just details. 

*** The Requirements *** 
The primary requirements for any role-playing game can be simplified into 6 basic things: The game system, the setting, the art, the flavor text, the format(s), and the playtesting/editing. Sometimes there are a few extra considerations, but most stuff falls into those six. 

*** The Resources ***  The next thing is the Resources. We're small fish, and the only money we use to fund our games (for now) is money made on previous games. One day we may do a kickstarter project, but for now, what we have works for what we want to do. That being said, we have a limited pool of resources we trust and use. Primarily, we do everything in-house. Aaron does the art (he's getting better, honest) and the first pass of most of the writing. Stephanie does some of the writing and the (brutal) editing. Everyone (Aaron, Stephanie, family, friends, and whatnot) helps in the playtesting, with Stephanie being the lynch-pin in the process. So, beyond the sweat-equity put into our games, there are very little outside resources. 

*** Making it Happen ***  Once we know what we want and know who's working on what, we begin the longest part of the process, making it happen. It usually comes in phases with the rule being made (or altered), a quick playtest using a skeleton of the Setting, then Setting writing and flavor-text writing happens (with playtesting going on during the writing to flesh out things). Then an artless 1st draft is reviewed for editing. Then, the art begins to get drawn while more playtesting comes about. And Finally, the cover and the art are placed in the book with the final editing comments. All the while, we are making sure we stick to the core idea of the plan, and make sure we follow-through on the original plan. Quite franly, we'll probably do an entire post about this later. 

*** The Release ***  After all the work is done, we finally release the product on the date specified by the project plan. This is the fun part. It is great to see the sales come in, the comments on the boards, and even do a little promotion of the product. It is also in this part of the game that we look for ideas and things that people want to see next in the line or as a supplement.

In WyshMaykers, characters can make anything they can imagine come true with a wysh. When building the game a few things that we tried just didn't feel right, and no amount of Wyshing could make them work for the game we wanted to create. Here a few of the things that ended up cut out or re-worked for the game.  

***Wyshing as a Stat or Ability***
WyshMaykers uses -U- the Game of Stories for its mechanical game base. In -U- anything that is not an attribute, a Study, or an Item is an Ability. When we first began, we made the power of wyshing an Ability. Since dots in an Ability could be used and added to an attribute when attempting that Ability, it gave players 2 chances (at minimum) to make a successful wysh (X + Wyshing Ability). When going through the game with that, it made wyshing feel a little cheap and the math of X + Wyshing + Studies or Items was more cumbersome than we liked. So... we nixed the idea of characters having that Ability. Less math, the better.  

Our next though was to have Wyshing as its own attribute along with Action, Thought, and X. We quickly found that X just wasn't getting used all that much as a lot of the social aspects of the game that X usually covers was being done by the players and not die rolls (guess we had very social players, huh.).    

Finally, we opted to use the core rule of -U- the Game of Stories that the X attribute stood for anything not Action and Thought... including wyshing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  

***Colleges***  
Wyshing is a pretty broad ability. It lets a person do anything they can imagine. One of the ideas we toyed around with was a list of subjects people could wysh about. Players would then have to buy a study in a certain area of knowledge and could only make wyshes about that part of knowledge. For instance, a character could have Water Wyshing as a Study; this would allow them to make wyshes only about water and things involving water. This, however, led to a lot of game-world questions and answers we didn't like. Who taught them how to wysh about that area of knowledge? Why did they get so limited? How in the world do you limit that? The questions got worse as we started coming up with the colleges of knowledge. In the end, we decided to allow characters to be able to wysh about whatever it is that they knew about. Much easier to jump in playing and a whole lot less questions to answer. Don't worry though, we will probably still use the idea in a later game.  

***The Human Factor***  
One of the things that we personally find intriguing is the normal people vs not-so-normal people conflict in games and fiction. The idea goes something like this: Super-powered individuals can do things that normal folks can't. So what happens when the super-powered people decide that normal folks are wrong? How does the normal folks protect themselves and regain control of their own destinies?  

Because we liked that idea, we played with an anti-Society of non-WyshMaykers hunting down those with the power of wyshing. The idea, however quickly fell apart, and the Setting did not really support the idea beyond a single campaign. Instead, we decided to just concentrate on the struggles within the WyshMaykers.  

To see what worked in the game, feel free to pick up your own copy of WyshMaykers ( http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=94202&affiliate_id=229603 )

In the game WyshMaykers, players have the opportunity to play characters that can do anything they want. THey are not the only ones, however. There is, in fact, an entire group in the game world of people with the same ability: the Society of WyshMaykers. THis group watches over the WyshMaykers in the world and makes sure that three basic laws are upheld so that the world does not devolve into a puddle of mud via a wyshing war. When we built the Society, we had some thoughts on what it was, what it wasn't, and how it could be used in games of WyshMaykers.


***What the Society Is and Isn't***  
The Society is, at its core, a group of WyshMaykers that have talked the vast majority of WyshMaykers into following their rules. In the game world, they serve a necessary purpose of a structured community empowered with the responsibility with keeping the world safe from their own kind. They don't want the world to know about the ability of wyshing, nor do they want WyshMaykers to get too far out of hand. It is an interesting balance to try to keep, really.  

The Society is not a bunch of power-hungry evil people bent on world domination. Well... they could be, but that's not what they tell everyone. The Council that leads the Society is really not all that power-hungry though. They alreadt have all the power they could want, and there is somethAs such, they are not meant to be the evil empire in the game, but characters may see them that way. The Society is also not interested in making all the other WyshMayker's lives more difficult with their laws and enforcers. They truely believe that the laws they have in place protect both WyshMaykers and normal humans from each other. At least, that's how they began. As with all great intentions, they sometimes can end up being roads to bad places.


***Intended Uses of the Society***  
When we made the Society, we really intended for them to be the lever for the Story Referee to use to help control the game. There are three laws that the Society enforces, as well as some courtesies that they expect people to follow. If characters do not respect these things, the Society could possibly come down on them so hard that their head would spin. Of course, this is all dependent on how reaching and obtrusive the Story Referee wants the Society to be. If the characters are not Wyshing for millions of dollars in their pockets every two hours, the Story Referee may very well keep the Society off their back. It really is a social, game world mechanic meant to be a control for the game so that the story can move forward. We totally encourage players to use the Society however they need to keep the story going.  


***Alternate Society*** 
A possible way to play the Society is to play it as the exact opposite of what it was intended to be: a dark, world-conquering group bent on control of all human will. To this end, they become an evil empire to rebel against, and something that the players' characters can take down and/or run from. It's worth a try, at least.


Check out the Society of WyshMaykers in WyshMaykers the Game of Magical Stories ( http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=94202&affiliate_id=229603 )

In the game of WyshMaykers, characters can make anything they wysh come true. Anything. Because Anything is such a large swath of possibilities, two things had to be ingrained in the game system: Creativity and Ambiguity.  

***Creativity***  
Becasue anything is possible with a Wysh, we really kept the game mechanics light. Or rather, we used the light game mechanics from -U- the Game of Stories. See, in core game of -U-, there aren't a lot of crazy modifiers or target numbers or difficulty charts and whatnot. Characters just get a number of chances to succeed at things and roll dice to see if they succeed or not. That fit really well into encouraging the open creativity of the game that we wanted to have. We wanted players to be able to shock one another with the crazy things that they wyshed for. We wanted Story Referees to try to account for wyshes that might unbalance the game. We wanted players to have to react to the unexpected using their mind, their stats, and their dice. The lack of heavy math and terribly complicated charts lent itself to this free-flowing no-holds-bared experience very well.

***Ambiguity***
As we played the game, it became apparent that sometimes it was nice to have something mechanically that the Story Referee could use to limit the players in some way. We came up with the optional Modifiers table. With the modifier table, Story Referees could reduce the number of chances a character had to succeed at making a wysh. Some of the restrictions were easily identified (number of people affected). Some we left ambiguous on purpose (like complexity and beleivability of a wsyh). The ambiguity worked well and allowed the Story Referee to justify and control the flow of the story in the face of creatively destructive players. This then fed into the the creativity of the game even more as it allowed Story Referees the chance to be creative in limiting players, and players a new boundry to be creative within. 


Both Creativity and Abmiguity play into each other heavily in WyshMaykers. Give the game a try: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=94202&affiliate_id=229603

WyshMaykers, if you haven't picked it up yet, is a story-telling game about individuals who can make anything they think come true. Like all stories, there is a theme or two to this one. Feel free to blatantly harp on them in your own games of WyshMaykers.  

***Power Corrupts*** 
One of the themes, and the most sinister, is that power corrupts people. This is kind of a deep philosophical question more than a statement. Does having the ultimate power to make what you want happen make you corrupt or were you corrupt already? Are people naturally good or evil at the get-go? Does giving someone a weapon make them violent or does it give them a tool to carry out their tendencies? This theme is hinted at in the Larkin's story in the book, and it is something that is really fun to explore in the game.  

***Want*** 
When someone really wants something they are willing to do some crazy and inspiring things. To woo a woman, men write poetry, perform acts of valor, and a sundry of other things. To pass a test, students study insane hours living off of high-caffeine beverages and pizza. We work hard for things that we want. Most of the time, we grow from these experiences and it shapes us as people. WyshMaykers explores a world where people get what they want without the work. How does that affect a person? Do they become lazy? Do they stop "growing" as human beings? Do they want anything after some time? 

***Selfishness*** 
A few religions and some not-so holy philosophies preach some form of the many over the good, or that concentration on the self is a sure-fire way to bad things in this world or the next. The idea of wyshing for things is inherently selfish. People ask for things that they personally want. Even if what they ask is for another person's benefit, the WyshMayker is the person that wants to see that thing occur in this world, thus, the Wysh is somewhat selfish. If a character has any of these religious or philosophical notions about the removal of the self, being a WyshMayker become either a dangerous temptation, a curse, or a mixed gift.  

***Gifts***  
If a person gives you a gift for your birthday, you can either use it, throw it away, re-gift it at a later date, let it sit around and collect dust, or deny the gift. wyshing is a gift to the characters in the game. What players do with the gifts is really important to the story/world. Do they appreciate it, abuse it, let it go stale,or ignore it? How do they use the gift given? What a person would do with unfathomable power is really a fun thing to watch as a Story Referee, as is makiing Supporting Cast Characters with different takes on what they do with the gift.  

Well, that really covers most of the major themes for the game that we had in mind and we enjoyed exploring. If you had some others, let us know by commenting to this post.

WyshMaykers is an interesting world in which characters can make anything they want to come true. It's a pretty cool concept, if we do say so ourselves. It does, however, have a funny name, we admidt it. So... why all they Y's? Here's the reason:  
The game originally started as Wish Makers. A quick Google search told us that that was not a good business idea. The name was taken (not surprising) and was linked to the Make-A-Wish Foundation that we occasionally support. This was a game about magic and power, not something that should probably be confused with charitable work. So, we started looking for alternatives. The word "Wysh" wasn't taken and still sounded similar to the concept, so we started gravitating to that and it became the first part of the name.  

As we developed the game we remembered the old nursery rhyme-thing "Star light, star bright. First star I see to night. I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish tonight." We liked the oath-like concept about having to say things to make your wishes come true. It reminded us of Green Lantern (of which Stephanie has a shrine to in the living room). We also thought that the "I wish I may" part was kind of an odd and unique line in the rhyme. Don't know why, it just felt that it didn't quite fit. On a whim, we included the "May" part of it into the word "Makers" and it just stuck into production and the Y's tied the two words together. Thus, WyshMaykers.

So... short answer: We didn't want to step on toes and we wanted to tie and old nursery rhyme line into the game.

The game WyshMaykers has finally been released after... well... quite some time in development. For those of you curious about such things, we wanted to give you some behind the scene things that made the game you )hopefully) have downloaded from DriveThruRPG (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=94202&affiliate_id=229603).  

** Inspiration ** 
The Inspiration of WyshMaykers came from 2 things, really: an old RPG experience and some modern-day classics. 

First, Aaron started thinking about the coolest, most deadly magic spell he and his brother came across back in their old role-playing game days: the Wish. Back in the day, there was an adventure in which a character in the party got a chance to make a wish. the player went off and honestly crafted exactly what he wanted his character to say for the Wish. The character said this well crafted thing and, of course the person running the story found a loophole and used it somewhat against the amazing, multi-part request. In truth, a good time was had by all.  

Second, we (Aaron and Stephanie) were reading (respectively) The Dresden Files and Harry Potter books for leisure. Both books were about modern-day wizards in cool, fleshed-out worlds. While discussing the respective books, Aaron started reminiscing about that old wish spell and how interesting it would be to see modern-day wizards with that god-like ability. 

The two ideas (the wish with modern-day wizards) began to gel, some ideas were played out, a quick Setting was drafted, and viola, WyshMaykers was born. 

Next Designer Notes:  Some of the Whys