Cavernia Playtesting Results

Ok, JohnCon 2009 is over. We ran a nice long Cavernia session (using 3.5 rules not Pathfinder) and we received some valuable comments from the players that is leading us to make some minor tweaks to some of the mechanics (a couple of spells needed some minor tweaks).

We have now decided that with the imminent release of Pathfinder we would just go ahead and drop plans for releasing under 3.5 rules and go all Pathfinder instead. Due to the closeness of Pathfinder to 3.5 rules that's really not as hard as it might seem. In addition, we are now in the final editing/clean-up phase where we are fixing typos and adding a bit more details to some of the thinner sections.

We are moving next into the stage of acquiring art. If you know of anyone who would like to get their art into our book please let us know. We have an extremely limited budget but we can buy a few things. Ideally we would be looking at some sort of profit sharing scenario but if anyone has any other ideas we're all ears.

Cavernia Playtesting....

Well we are approaching our 3rd annual informal gaming convention amongst ourselves we like to call "JohnCon". JohnCon is basically a 3.5 day weekend where I get rid of the wife and kids and have the gang over for 3.5 days of uninterrupted gaming goodness. Last year I ran a massive, non-stop high level 3.5 game that was intended to be the closing chapter on my last long running campaign. We played from Thursday 7pm to 2am, got up Friday around 9 then played till 2-3am again. Got up Saturday and played ALL FREAKING DAY Saturday till 2-3am then finally got up Sunday and wrapped things up by noonish. Needless to say the house was a wreck having all of the guys over, what with all of the snacks and beverages etc but in all it was pretty fun. I was, however, wiped out after DMing for that long. That was a truly herculean effort and I don't think I could/would do it again, though I do enjoy DMing.

So this year I told the guys that I want someone else to step in and run something at least part of the time. I still want to run something for one of the days, just not the entire weekend. So Brian has chimed in that he'd like to run Cavernia Friday and Sunday, which is good for me! We get a chance to playtest some of the new things and I get a break.

My other buddy is probably going to run a high level 4E game Thursday evening (we all gather at my place after everyone gets off of work on Thursday) and I am probably going to run a Castles and Crusades game all day Saturday. I'm considering running an old RPGA module that had a scoring/point system detailed in it as well as it had specific time requirements, ie, the players get 3 hours to complete task X then do scoring etc. I'm thinking it should be fun.

Come on July for JohnCon '09 and come on August for Pathfinder RPG FINAL!