Before I got caught up writing about making pacts with monsters, I had a few ideas for BCG play aids and supplementary material. Right now, all these projects are on hiatus until I finish Monsterpunk. Some of them may be finished after that, while others will probably never happen.
The first of the play aids would be a GM screen. For simplicity's sake, it would come in the form of printable inserts to use with something like this: The main reason that I never made one is that BCG already comes with a fairly comprehensive quick rules reference. There are a couple of things that aren't in there (mostly expansion material like new terrain and the transpatial randomizer tables), but overall I thought there wouldn't be much of a need for one. The subject of a GM Screen does come up every now and then though, so I figured I would make one. To the five pages of the quick rules reference, I was going to add Ally Reinforcements, Troubleshooting and the Transpatial Randomizer tables. Adding up all this stuff made it go to a total of 13 pages - a little bit more than a GM Screen is meant to handle. It might be possible to trim it down to 6 pages with some creative summarizing, we'll see.
The second set of play aids I thought of were a number of random idea tables. These were pretty fun to make at first, including Character names that would be right at home in any Gundam or Tomino series, such as Tetsu Terfing and Akasha Apostolo. Mecha names forged in the fires of mount ham like God Grangunner and the Wingbein Powered. Weapons of every shape, color and flavor like the Lunar Gunblade and the Atomic Shotgun. Unfortunately I ran out of ideas around that time. I was going to try writing disguised company and product names (like WcDonalds and Starducks) when I got caught up in other things.
The third idea was to make a couple of ready-to-play missions that could be used for oneshots or as a starting point for longer games. The problem here is that BCG is a setting-agnostic system where the plot revolves around the character's goals and needs. Any given Operation should be tied to one or more PC Themes and help advance a larger plot which... Doesn't work well for a standalone oneshot concept. These issues, incidentally, are why BCZ features five operation scenarios without any plot to them. One way to go about this would be to use the setting in the core book, including premade characters and writing a story arc for them to cover multiple episodes rather than just one. This would be a much larger time investment though, I'm not there's enough interest to make it worth the effort.
There was also an idea to print a deck of ability cards listing what all the abilities in the game do, reminiscent of what D&D 4E had. The main problem here was one of production costs: The game has around two hundred Powers, Upgrades and Weapons between BCG and BCZ - not counting enemy or character-scale abilities. Illustrating all those cards isn't free - on the contrary, it is quite expensive. This is one of those ideas that were discarded and will probably never happen.
The last and possibly most ambitious of these ideas was to put out there a Custom Weapons Creation system. The big problem for custom weapons is that the system is inherently an exploitable mechanic and begs to cause balance problems. I originally thought this could be fixed by writing pages and pages of guidelines and advice for what to allow and what not to allow... But I really, really wouldn't hold my breath hoping for that to work. If it were to be released at all, it would come with a huge disclaimer saying you're on your own if there's any balance problems.
In the end I set all these ideas aside to focus on Monsterpunk. If there is interest for these, I may change my mind and go back to them earlier. If you want them and want them this year, drop me a comment.
Until the next update, Gimmick Out.
