Reduction: Mission 1 - Moving As A Team

Here's a runthrough of Mission 1 from the campaign Reduction, which I am designing... That's me playing with "Pancage" (new to the game Alien Swarm).

I like the top-down shooter format. I feel it's a better way to teach people "squad tactics" because it doesn't have the tunnel-vision that the first-person shooter format has. First person shooters (like Call of Duty) make people myopic: they're good for teaching shooting, but lousy to teach people how to move with your team-mates. Top-down shooters give people an all-around team perspective. Of course, we're dealing with "aliens" here, but imagine what else we could do with the format?

See the blog for Reduction at PrepareToDrop.com

Fire Zone

Fire Zone: 1998: Front Cover Design

20th Century Military Roleplaying & Miniatures
Fire Zone is a tabletop roleplaying-slash-miniatures game I designed and wrote.

I've just uploaded it to Scribd...  Get it there for free.You can see the entire 280-page game manual there. It works well as a sourcebook for a modern military RPG campaign you might be running... I'd say it even works as a read unto itself - as a reference book. So you may find it interesting, though it's probably a bit too complex to be playable.

(Pardon the low-rez scan... It took me an entire day to scan the 1998 draft.)

Fire Zone has a long story. It contains a pretty extensive Design Notes section, in the manuscript - but I want to include some context in this post.

Along the Edges of Zeitgeist
Really, it is the anchorpoint for most of my thinking and design work around modern combat subjects. It begins in 1984, when I began to gamemaster Traveller, the roleplaying game, in a serious way.