Hey Crazy Cadre!
Its been a busy few months for Crazy Cockatoo Games, mainly focused on our upcoming RPG roleplay system called FxRPG.
We've done a lot of internal testing of the FxRPG rules, and from this we made a significant change that affects how initiative order is managed during conflict. We revisited what we wanted out of initiative handling, and centered it around what you choose to do to determine the order of actions. This allowed us to create a simple flow that plays smoother at the table and provides some exciting tactical choices without increased complexity.
We've now run 3 session of FxRPG publicly with this change, one at ConQuest in October and two at KublaCon Fall in Santa Clara, CA this past week. This new "Action Cycle", as we call it, was very well received and made action rounds flow much smoother.
Our playtesting also rendered a second change, which is quite impactful, though it is not a rules change but a format change. We decided to replace the character sheet with character cards that are laid out on a playmat. These cards essentially track what a character sheet does, but in a more interactive way. Since FxRPG relies so much on where equipment is equipped and focuses so much on character unique skills, it became apparent that we needed something more flexible than a single piece of paper. We used this new format at KublaCon for two separate sessions, and a few felt it was as good as a character sheet and the majority felt it worked very well; win!
Our feedback from these last game convention sessions have really shown us that FxRPG is very solid and very well received by different audiences. And they have loved the one-shot set in Explorers of StarSea, our main setting for FxRPG. It has been a blast showing a preview of all of what FxRPG and EOSS have to offer.
Now, some exciting news about FxRPG. Our initial plan for FxRPG was to release it as a roleplay system without a setting, and then build out Explorers of StarSea as a living and ever-expanding setting for FxRPG on World Anvil, and this is still our plan. However, after playtesting over the months, it has become clear to us that FxRPG is best explained and learned within a tightly integrated story context rather than as an independent system. So… we have started working on a micro-setting for the first official printing of FxRPG! This micro-setting will be specially designed to teach and learn FxRPG. We can hardly wait for you to see it - those few with whom we have shared the details can hardly wait to play in it!
We actually have more to say about our other games that we are working on, but this newsletter is already too long. So, we'll save that for the next one!
As always, thanks for being a member of the Crazy Cadre and keep playing those #crazyfungames!
The Crazy Cockatoo Games® Team
https://crazy-cockatoo.com