It's the Magic: Campaign Sloggin'

A few weeks ago, Terry and I were sitting around bored whenever we began chatting about Magic games we'd like to see.

Terry wanted the magic Holy Grail of the Magic: The Gathering: The Roleplaying Game. He wanted to run a campaign in Magic's rich multiverse. The rub, as it always is, was the system. Everyone wants to cast the spells from the cards, but then you have to find a way to integrate that with dice, character sheets, experience, etc. without making everything into an unwieldy mess. I know D&D is doing a pretty good job of having character sheets exist alongside cards right now, but that's an established game, not something we're making up around the dinner table and trying to sell to a friend market saturated with tried and trusted games.

It's the Magic: The Great Gates

Better Know an Abandoned Project

As I may have mentioned a few hundred times, there was a Great Designer Search held by the folks over at Wizards to see who would be the newest Magic card designer. Some other guy won, but before they started weeding out participants for quality, I was involved.

The initial take on the GDS2 was to focus on the collaborative nature of card design. To this end, they put up a wiki specifically for these designs, plus whatever else. Hopefuls would put up their block ideas, complete with mechanics, settings, etc., and would work with one another to refine those ideas. I was on a boat for most of this is sucking bandwidth through a coffee stir, so my participation was...limited at best. To the credit of many of the other participants, they remained active after being eliminated and helped the remaining contenders compete for the final spot, marking themselves as merits to the community.