D20 Vaporware

[Sleepy Voiced]

Dune D20. The announcement for that got me to get the 3.0 PHB, just to see what the D20 system would be like. I have no regrets about getting back into D&D with 3rd ed, but Dune would have just been so cool.
Also Bard's Gate, I have given up entirely on that though.

 

[der_kluge]

The Age of Man by Mind Eye Games (I think).
It had a great Elmore-style cover and seemed to be a post apok game which looked like Shadowrun after the bomb. Some big bads from a fantasy dimenson 'port in and give us doomsday, now Mad Max survives with his elven back up.

Fall of Man.

I have a Fall of Man t-shirt which says "fall, 2003" on it. I wonder how much it's worth?

 

[Crothian]

Fall of Man.

I have a Fall of Man t-shirt which says "fall, 2003" on it. I wonder how much it's worth?

give you a dollar for it.....

Ya, Fall of Man would be cool to actually see. Also, there was a d20 Future setting the Mystic Eye Games was going to do, but the writer then said he was going to try to find a different company for it. It might have been Rodney Thompson who was doing it, don't recall though.

 

[HellHound]

THREAD HIJACK, PART THE SECOND!

You, sir, are my new god. I never even knew that site existed.

Can everyone guess what I'm listening to now?

Wow... me neither, Phil.

Now also tuned to KMFDMRadio!

 

[Werther von G]

"Justin Bacon's The Art of War" from Troll Lord (which sounds really cool, but I have mixed feelings about due to disliking the author as a person)

Which reminds me of "Instrument of Destiny," an Egyptian themed module due from Atlas Games.

 

[maddman75]

Although it wasn't vaporware, I was a little miffed that Fields of Blood didn't really turn out to have everything it originally promised: Originally advertised management rules for realms as small as a single tower to "mighty empires" or something to that affect. Was also disappointed to see the rules for running NPC kingdoms were MIA upon the books release.

Allow me to pimp my Realm Management rules. This is the rough version, I plan on doing some revisions before too long.

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=121125

 

[Alaric_Prympax]

EDIT: Oh, yeah, d20 vaporware. Well, there was Earth 1066, which really staked out some ambitious plans, and we occasionally heard how it really was coming along, but nothing yet.

Hey ColonelHardisson, I remember those threads. Heck, I started most of them. They still have a website that I check frequently but it hasn't been updated since late 2003. I was going to ask once again in Dec '04 but I decided not to but to wait a little longer since we were told that it would be out in a few months. Also I wanted to see if they would ever update their site. 15 months later still nothing, unfortunately this is the very definition of vaporware. What a shame, I was willing to purchase all their books and still will if they ever come out.

 

[Kesh]

Delta Green d20. Hell I'd buy it if I could find the old BRP version anywhere for a reasonable price. Sure it's coming (they say), but it has been awhile.

Seconded.

 

[grodog]

Which reminds me, the company I wrote for in the Eighies sold their adventures to TSR, which announced them in Dragon Magazine, then never printed them! TSR Vaporware! (Along with R.I.P. and a few others as I recalll. TSR did that a certain amount.)

The company was the Companions Inc. out of Bath Maine, the Islandia Campaign was the book that became vaporware. As I recall Roger E. Moore did not like the Companions adventures because the bad guys ran around doing bad things rather than waiting in their dungeons to be slaughtered... This was during his 'anti dark gaming' period, about when I stopped playing AD&D for the first time.

I hear (via the Acaeum boards) that the original Companions versions of those adventures were quite good TheAuldGrump: were you one of the authors of them?

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I hear (via the Acaeum boards) that the original Companions versions of those adventures were quite good TheAuldGrump: were you one of the authors of them?

In the adventures I created some of the magic items. In the location books (books of interesting rooms, wilderness locations, and the like, all with 25mm. maps - a rarity in the eighties... more common now) I had a few more substansive entries. I was also a playtester for the company. The main writers for the company were Wm. John Wheeler and Peter L. Rice. Peter owned a game store in Bath, Maine called the Toy Soldier. I haven't heard from Mr. Wheeler in about twenty years now, sometimes I wonder how he's doing. Peter I touched bases with every now and again.

They were good adventures, with timelines that crossed several modules, sometimes concurrently. Characters could end up having to deal with several plots that were happening at the same time, by villains that all had their own (not always compatible) goals.

Roger E. Moore objected to the villains going and doing things that were, well, evil. He wrote a review for Plague of Terror in Dragon Magazine that harped on that fact. I suspect that he was one of the voices that prevented the D&D version from ever seeing the light of day. The villain in question villain was a kidnapper of young women, not the main villain, and in fact his plotline pretty much screws up that of the major villain in town, and does not interact with the other major villain in the wilderness adventure Brotherhood of the Bolt, which happens at the same time, not all that far away. The timelines provided kepth the villains and heroes alike hopping.

It is nice to hear that they are still well regarded.

The Auld Grump