Years ago I was working on a version 7 release that had some minor layout and mechanic fixes but then I got busy and it languished on the vine. I didn't intent to drop it, but it got set aside and I just didn't pick it back up. I could say the reason is because I got busy with work, or I was busy with moving, or some other excuse, but those are not really the reasons. I was still playing lots of games and I still had time to work on the game. To be honest Beacon had been kind of slowing down even before all that stuff anyway. I remember I was running a Ashen Stars online game and being obsessed with early reports of Blades in the Dark rules and trying to figure out how to merge these ideas with the Ashen Stars setting. I think that if I had still been as fired up over Beacon I could have still found time to tinker with it. I think I didn't finish up the v7 release because I couldn't make it necessary. There wasn't a solid real problem I could identify that needed fixing, just a general looseness that I was trying to resolve.
I had other games to play too. When I first started working on Beacon I was simply looking for a d20 game that I wanted to run. This was during the 4e/pathfinder era and what was out there at that time was just not my style of game, there was so many stat blocks and skill trees and just so many fiddly rules. I worked on Beacon and read all the wonderful home-brews and OSR blogs it revitalized my interest in in the system. Then a funny thing happened, D&D 5th edition dropped and it actually wasn't that bad, and at the same time all those OSR inspired games like Adventurer, Conquer, King, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics came out as polished books and there was a ton of good stuff to play with and everyone was fired up to try them out. The final straw I think was that Blades in the Dark arrived like Aphrodite stepping out of the foam. I really really liked the ideas in Blades and I have to say that running it (via Scum and Villainy) was excellent fun and a real learning experience for me. In any case suddenly there were too many good games out there I wanted play and to run, and a lot of new ideas I hadn't even thought of. So I left Beacon alone, it was good enough and there was not really any direction to take it.
So why come back now? The only good reason really; I want to run it again.
I have been running other games for a while now, and I think that I can step back into playing Beacon with some fresh perspective. I also have some particular ideas gleaned from the last couple years, specifically from online play. I think I want to run a game on Roll20 and use an updated version of the Beacon character sheets since I really want Beacon to support that style of play. For online play my sweet spot seems to be a simple shared display for maps/whiteboard, an integrated dice roller, and very importantly online character sheets. When I ran Ashen Stars on D20 it was good and I really enjoyed displaying files and marking up maps, however we didn't have the character sheets integrated in the session, and had to use google docs which became somewhat of an impediment. It worked and it was a very fun game, but I think it would have been better with some additional IT support. So I would like to revise the existing Beacon Roll20 sheets to remove the integrated dice rollers and add more features for tracking consumables and ideally links to an online rules compendium. I got a Pro subscription for Roll20 so that I can work on these things. I also think I would like to run a game in the style of Ben Robbins' West Marches campaign since I believe that Beacon is suited for that style of play. The original Beacon world maps were directly inspired by the West Marches posts and although I incorporated a lot of those ideas into subsequent games I've run, I haven't actually run a true player driven sandbox style game. So maybe its time for that. I also have an idea to leverage Discord for this.
As soon as I thought about running the game I started to get ideas of what changes I wanted to work on. Lots of ideas, too many ideas really. I had to clamp down those and remind myself of the core purpose of the game and then the purpose of the update. I want to focus on a few aspects of the rules to streamline play, but more than that I want to update the presentation and work of assets to support this concept. A lot of other ideas I had would change the narrative focus, or would take Beacon further from its compatibility with other d20 systems, so I am going to leave those things out.
I thought that this might be a lot easier to get motivated if I had a plan for what I want to put into this version, so here it is:
- Incorporate advantage/disadvantage mechanics to streamline most roll modifiers;
- Change the horribly named Fabrication skill into a more meaningful Crafting skill and add some additional rules to support this concept;
- Work a bit on conditions, fatigue and permanent injury;
- Better Focus the game to support the West Marches style play and online play in general;
- Possibly finish and release seventh level spells;
- In addition to an updated PDF, release the new rules as a Roll20 compendium and update the Roll20 character sheet;
- Look into re-implementing combat initiative using an idea Mike Mearles posted for D&D.
- Generally clean and polish and tweek the game so it is robust and light.
