Announcing Terminal Thirteen

Roleplayers and nerds take note, there is a new RPG in town and it is good.

Terminal Thirteen

It is the game the the real Desi decided to ‘play herself’ in that lead to the Paradox War Trilogy (although perhaps not directly as only a few scenes from the game made it all the way into the novels).

It’s a game I started developing back in the late 80s, and played in school, and throughout University under a number of names and incarnations. This version is the definitive, most balanced and most fun version of the game so far. And I hope you will give it a go if you like RPGs at all.

The pages are still a little “work in progress” right now, with too few images and too little background information for me to consider making an actual book of it yet, and I am working on some pages to automate some of the fiddly parts of character creation and so on (which is tricky to tie into the WordPress architecture, but I’m sure I’ll get there), but what you should have is a full roleplaying system that you can play for free.

The system can handle playing any sort of character you may care to imagine, once years ago a friend of a friend was asked what he wanted to play, he asked what the limits were, I told him there were none, people had played gods, demi-gods, children, real people, wizards, warriors, and werewolves. He asked smirking if he could play a ‘Half-Borg-half-Q’ character, I smiled and told him, of course he could, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fun as he thought, a character that powerful just wouldn’t be fun, unless he was also a Sith Lord… Munchkins aside though, really, if you can imagine it, the core system will let you play it, and what’s more you’ll be balanced against the others in your party and still have room to improve and progress.

As far as I know it is the only Omniversal Roleplaying Game, that without any extra modules or purchases will literally let you play anything. If you want to run not just any genre, but any genre-mash, then T13 is the system that will let you do it. You can run games set anywhere, anywhen, anyhow and don’t even have to have all the player characters be from the same universe, its just that flexible.

Writers may find the way the game handles plots useful for their own plotting, as the system gives Refs (and writers) delicious new ways to think about symbolism, central conflicts, characterizations and story-telling. This isn’t the sort of game where you find every session is telling the same story, or that your players get bored of your main plot, at least mine never have.

Why not take a look and let me know what you think.