Saturday, November 19, 2016

The Real Challenge of the Mythos Machine

The real challenge of the Mythos Machine is that it gives a great deal of power to me as the GM to create any kind of world I want, with any races, classes, equipment, and adventures I can imagine, and it is completely flexible in terms of genre and story. Space Pirates? No problem. Dinosaur-Men vs. Bat-Monsters of the Writhing Jungle World? Yup. Can do. No problem. See the challenge yet?

The challenge is that you can create anything you can imagine, and it's kind of hard to do it just right. Like in my Space Pirates world idea... what equipment really belongs in this kind of World? I can create anything I want... but what do I want? How much of it? How many variations? Why I can go hog wild with this and create a huge myriad of things that ... well, it can become something of a quandry, actually.

And so the challenge is in thinking about, carefully, wisely, what belongs in my World? For example... What kind of mystical categories might fit? What schools of magic? What spells? How the schools and the categories mix and match can create complex arrangements, and beautiful ones. But it can also create a daunting maze if you don't reign things in such a way that the pattern works clearly for you and your players.

So that's the challenge of the Mythos Machine. You have to take the building process seriously or you might wind up building something too complicated. It's a matter of judicious use of your creative capacity. You need to learn to reign your ideas in, and keep things succinct so you can balance your world and keep things manageable.

Anyway, for those who might want to try it out, the Mythos Machine is in perpetual free open beta the Mythos Machine Beta Site. It's geared for GMs who want to create their own Worlds, and provides a traditional style light-weight system named Elthos RPG to do it with. And very flexible. You can find out more about it at http://elthos.com
If you have any feedback on the rules or the Mythos Machine, there's a feedback button. Please let me know what you think. Thanks.

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