Announcing the coming of HH2E!

Hey, folks! My first entry to the Haghexian devlog!

It has been over half a year since I first published HH, and a lot of things have happened since then. As HH came to the public as a finished product, I have never really paid attention to its further development; as a very simple ruleset, I thought it would be static, with no new improvements other than minor adjustments in the future, if ever necessary. A little time after publishing HH, its hard sci-fi twin came to the world, NONLOCALITY, as I have changelled myself in writing a tiny game for DriveThruRPG's PocketQuest 2023. NL has a few improvements over HH, like linking skills to assets more clearly and directly, but apart from that, the HH project has been dormant since then. Until now.

About two weeks ago, my Discord group was trying to schedule a midweek one-shot - damn, it's been hard to play regularly these days - and one guy said that, even busy-busy as he was, he would do anything to come and play if the game was Shadowrun. Well, I have never played Shadowrun, and personally the setting was never that attractive to me - but I took the bait! With this guy coming, we would have a minimally acceptable number of people to play and have fun. Now, I had to finish working and then learn Shadowrun in a few hours before the session!

First attempt: try finding a ruleslite version of SR - I already knew that SR was tough. Found Anarchy - too expensive for an one-time game, and probably not that lite. Second attempt: try finding quickstart rules or SR hacks. All of them, too much to my single-neuron brain, not simple at all. But in my searches, I learned that SR is a d6-pool, skill-based game - like HH and NL... I came across this Reddit post, and also this one: the first one links attribute bonuses to various races, and the second one presents a barebone list of attribute-based skills. Then, I designed my HH+NL+SR hack on the fly before the session by planning the following:

• during character creation, a PC would first define her race - then her attributes (a non-game term in the hack) would be set;
• with her attributes set, a PC would then choose her skills (a true game term) from the attribute-based skill list, having some advantages when choosing skills whose attributes matches those favored by her race - I won't go into details here, but I might write a post about that on the NL's page in the future;
• having her skills chosen, the PC would then choose her assets from the NL asset table based on her skills;
• after that, PC would just need a name - she was ready to go!

The session started (three fellow-players and I), in ten minutes we had the PCs ready and they point-crawled a five-room dungeon, randomly created with Mörg Borg's dungeon generator and made sci-fi by myself on the fly, and - more importantly - we had a blast! The guy who came only to play SR said it will be only version of that game he will ever play and know!

For me, playing that one-shot made me realized that there's still a lot to explore with the HH project. At the time when HH was first published, among cumpliments and the good reception of my game, a few people have rightly pointed out that the creative options for PC creation in HH were so broad that it was even hard to pin them down and create a PC quickly - as I have originally planned. I realized that issue in a few HH games I ran, and honestly speaking now, that made me disapointed with the project and myself. Now, over six months later, after playing HH but with a few, necessary constraits, the fire of my mental forge is kindled again, and a second edition is definitely coming! Creative limitation is a thing after all...

On one hand, my intention is to make HH1E free to play and soon available to use under the Creative Commons license. On the other hand, HH2E will be a cheap set of self-contained, foldable leaflets with its own artwork (I have comissioned its cover art today actually) and lots of content, such as:

• a complete ruleset leaflet, similar to the HH1E leaflet but updated, while keeping the OSR principles and philosophy;
•  a gamemaster's leaflet of constraits for guiding the PCs throughout all the aspects of a game - exploration, social interaction and combat - limiting their possibilities, but not their agency;
• a leaflet bestiary with typical, old-school fantasy monsters, ready to chase off and kill PCs;
• many leaflets describing the constraits of settings and game worlds inspired by Appendix N books and other sources;
• many leaflets with adventures, especially five-room dungeons, with each room described in one of the leaflet's six faces, having a general, free-of-spoilers cover in the sixth face - suitable for all modes of play: solo, GM-less and GMed.

Those are just the things I have at the top of my head right now. More things will come up. It's ambitious, I know, but it's happening already! I don't have dates for HH2E, nor I intend to; its a personal project, it will come when it has to, as things should go. This is just the beginning...

Thanks to Lucas, Bruna and Lúcio for playing that amazing HH+NL+SR crossover, and also thanks to Guilherme "Morre" for the insightful conversations on game design and industry.
P. S.: as a physicist, I really liked to use the term constrait (frequently used in Physics) here, in this utterly different context...