Thursday, February 18, 2016

Why the Elthos RPG Mythos Machine?

Some people might be asking, Why should I try out this Elthos RPG Mythos Machine thing? Who is it for, really?

I'd like to tackle that question for a moment. Elthos RPG is for people who want a medium-weight but highly distilled RPG that follows the traditional RPG tropes from the days of yore. The Mythos Machine is the web application that comprehensively supports the Elthos RPG. It is a utility that helps you to create and maintain your Worlds of any genre, and also does all of the number crunching for the game system. It handles character generation for your players, and lets you quickly fill out adventures with randomly generated NPC or Monster groups according to your own configuration for your world.

The Elthos RPG Mythos Machine is in Open Beta. As such it's not quite finished, and does need some polishing. But that is being worked on steadily and improvements are being made constantly.

Basically, this system is designed for World Builders who want to have the computer handle as much of the number crunching and record storage as possible. It's for creative types who want to spend more of their time on the creative aspects of RPGs, and less on the niddling details.

Configuring your world is a matter of selecting the genre(s) you want, creating a base world, and building out from there. It's a creative process, but one that requires a thoughtful approach.

The system is not really designed for those who do not want to work at creating their worlds. But it's purpose is to focus that work on the creative aspects by creating a simplified and automated system for the mechanics.

Ok that's the basic idea. I encourage people to give it a look and see if this might be for you.

The truth is, work will continue to be done on the Elthos RPG Mythos Machine, but gaining the support of the community would very much help validate that the concept is worthwhile (after all - maybe it isn't), and that would help tremendously in ensuring that it continues to develop and enhance in ways that people will find genuinely useful.

What it doesn't do is try to run all the other systems out there. It focuses on one core system, the Elthos RPG, which I think is a pretty solidly good system, and this way the worlds created with it will have a common foundation via which all kinds of materials can be easily transferred and shared between GMs. I would like it to become the basis for a mutual collaboration society of Gamemasters and I'm hoping that people will give it enough of a chance to see how they might be able to use it as such. Again, it's not finished. But it's working towards what I think is a pretty grand and lofty goal.

For an indpedent appraisal of the project, please read Mark Knight's Review here: http://rpgknights.com/elthos-rpg-more-than-meets-the-eye

If you are interested in joining the Elthos RPG Mythos Machine Open Beta please hop on over to http://elthos.com and create a free account for yourself. Once you've logged in you will come to the Main Screen on which are Tutorial Videos that explain how the system works.

Ok I hope you'll give it a look and let me know what you think of it, both conceptually, and in terms of the implementation. Do you think you might find this, or something along these lines, useful to you?

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