1. 'Company' IDs.

Since I first put finger to keyboard, about 18 months ago my publishing 'ID' was going to be Omnihedron Productions. Its a nod of the head to both the wonderful world of Zenith by Grant Morrison and it was integrally connected to the generic system I was going to use with my first game, MI:666. In a true show of 'cart before the horse' of course, MI:666 has been consigned to the large lever arch file of doom and Duty & Honour has become the centre of my gaming world.

Oh this one could get fruity.

A question came up last night during our D&H test regarding game balance and characters of differing experience. In D&H you choose how many campaigns you have served and that gives you a number of points to spread around. The more campaigns, the more points. Whilst the seperation between raw recruit and grizzled veteran is far closer than it was before there is still a gap.

Mike Sands, Jason Pollock, Stefan Tyler and myself got together here in Wellington to play test the latest draft of 'Duty & Honour' by Neil Gow. First off, there were a lot of positives expressed round the table but, as is the way of these things, there is a lot of stuff that needs re-written, changed or fundamentally altered in some way. Then again, that's only to be expected, as the game is still at a very early stage of development and I believe this was the first external play test.

I had the lads around for the first playtest of the new version of Duty and Honour and wow - was that a brutal, heart-wrenching, annoying, eye-opening and fundamentally WONDERFUL experience.

First up, anyone that has printed out a copy of the game already to playtest I have to say that I'm sorry but so much of that game is utter pants and needs to be fixed. Skills that have no purpose, stats that have no purpose (stats with no purpose ffs!), missing uses for Talents and a chargen system that can simply be done better and quicker. I was stunned.

This morning, I cycled down to Wellington library cafe to do some writing and, more specifically, to make a concrete start on reading the text of some games in development that have been past my way. While my main comments on Duty and Honour are contained within the text itself (which I'll pass back to Neil in the near future), I thought I would share my experiences of testing the character creation chapter.

Well, I looked over what I had and I decided that barring one small rules change it would be better to get it out there rather than going through a constant iterative editting process. Therefore you can now download a playtestable version from the following URL.

http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/dhplaytest1.doc

Whats there are the rules without much art at all and some mission sheets for the characters that are created in the chargen example. You can also download a character sheet from

http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/dhcharacter.doc