Happy New Year! For the first minipost of 2006, here’s an article by John Kim: Buffy Adventure Design.
It’s full of tips for creating adventures that reflect the Buffy TV series — which can easily be applied to any game you want to have a TV-like feel.
Many of his references to what’s “in the book” are parts of why I was suggesting the Angel corebook in the Holiday Shopping Guide.
No immediate comments as to trying to improve the essay itself, though it’s got some food for thought.
A friend of mine just picked up the new version of Buffy, which I’m assuming has a lot of sections in common with Angel. Between your recommendation and John’s essay, I’m definitely interested in seeing what I can learn from it. 🙂
I’ve got the original, rather than revised, Buffy corebook, but yes, many sections are very similar. The new Buffy corebook is a revision, rather than a 2nd edition — no old material is invalidated, and the changes that were made were done so to bring about mechanical consistency with Angel. Further, most (if not all) of the new information in the revised corebook will show up in Welcome to Sunnydale, whenever it makes it out of approval hell and to the printer.
The differences that are there are reflective of the difference in tone between the two series — as Doyle said, in Angel, “it’s time to make with the grown-up talk now.”
Sounds good, Jeff. I probably wouldn’t worry about which edition I picked up, since my interest would be in the GMing material, not the actual rules. It sounds like both games would work for that. 🙂