![\"dice\"](\"https:\/\/www.matthewcoxbooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/dice-536x400.jpg\")
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So about twenty years ago (1996-ish) I got an idea.<\/p>\n
For the better part of my teens and into my early twenties, I\u2019d been pretty deep into roleplaying games. (At this point you\u2019re probably feeling shocked that a Sci Fi author has geekish hobbies, right?) Anyway, there\u2019d been a lot of 2nd<\/sup> Edition D&D, but always with that annoying gnaw that something bugged me about the mechanics.<\/p>\n Somewhere I got it in my head that I could make my own game\u2026 and I did\u2026 dozens of times. I can\u2019t even count the number of systems that I came up with, tinkered with for a few weeks or months, then forgot about. (Some of them never even made it off a notebook page).<\/p>\n A handful stuck around and represented the bulk of our (my and my friends\u2019) game time, though we\u2019re far from the days of the \u2018playing till dawn\u2019 benders of the old days.<\/p>\n To circle back to the 1996 thing\u2026 around that point I realized that we\u2019d been pretty much sticking to fantasy gaming, and I wanted to do something different. Of course there were a couple of \u201cnon-fantasy\u201d RPGs out there like Car Wars or R Talsorian\u2019s Cyberpunk, but as anyone with a small degree of chemistry knowledge knows, mixing two reactants together often produces effects. In my case being young (and broke) + being (some people accuse me thereof) creative, I wound up making up a game system I named \u201cDivergent Fates.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1996, the groundwork for this system started. Later that year, I had a sourcebook and\u00a0big plans to follow it (Main rulebook, Mars book, Space book, and so on). As it turned out, we were more interested in playing than making more content\u2026 so the world grew in little bits in scraps of notes and excel files (automated character sheets) and other \u201creminders\u201d to add things to the rules.<\/p>\n Fast forward to 2012. A former supervisor I worked with at the time suggested I write; I\u2019d been handling\u00a0an email queue, and he asked me if I\u2019d ever written anything like a novel or fiction. (In truth, I had\u2026 a 400k+ word monstrosity of a fantasy novel that I\u2019m still not sure if I\u2019ll ever look at again. They say all writers have one of these in a deep dark closet somewhere\u2026 I\u2019m still not ready to break the wards guarding it.) Up to that point, all of my writing had been toward the gaming end of things and I never gave serious consideration to writing (and marketing) novels. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea.<\/p>\n Anyway, I thought for some time between writing fantasy or Sci-Fi, trying to pick a direction. At the same time, it occurred to me how similar the concepts were between coming up with plots and characters for a roleplaying game session and writing a novel. The biggest difference is there aren\u2019t \u201cplayers\u201d involved to throw the storyline off course when they do unexpected (cough<\/em> stupid cough<\/em>) things. I\u2019d been creating characters and storylines for most of my reasoning life; transitioning the effort from gaming to novelization seemed like a logical next step. Since Divergent Fates\u00a0felt more \u2018unique\u2019 to me than adding another fantasy game to\u00a0the massive amount\u00a0already\u00a0out there, I decided to get back into writing while using the world I\u2019d established for the RPG as a backdrop.<\/p>\n Virtual Immortality was the first novel I wrote after making the decision to get back into writing. Perhaps this was a lofty starting point (I\u2019m glad it worked) since it had a complicated story, shifting POV characters, and a lot of ground to cover. The inspiration for it came from a tabletop session of DF, though (obviously) much had to change between roleplaying session and novel. (If I tried to capture everything<\/em> that happened at the table the book would\u2019ve been twice as long, and it\u2019s already huge.)<\/p>\n Anyway \u2013 twenty years ago, I wrote Divergent Fates the roleplaying game. The original idea behind the title was the political discontent between Earth and Mars, where the people of Mars wanted to split away from Earth and go their own way.<\/p>\n Now, twenty six or so novels later (Fourteen of which take place in the DF world) I had a lot more source material to work with, but I also had been harboring a lingering discontent with the system mechanics. Something about it (and I still<\/em> can\u2019t say what it was) bothered me despite my friends all saying they thought the system was fine.<\/p>\n From Deus-Ex Human Revolution<\/p><\/div>\n The feeling wouldn\u2019t go away, so I wound up rebuilding the mechanics of the system from the ground up, simplifying some things that were inanely complex, and adding in all the stuff I\u2019d come up with in the twenty years since the game first took shape.<\/p>\n Divergent Fates version 2 is in beta now, a sourcebook finished in first draft. I\u2019m not sure if people even still have interest in tabletop gaming in the days of the PlayStation and Xbox, but it\u2019s here\u2026 and it feels a bit like watching a kid grow up.<\/p>\n So about twenty years ago (1996-ish) I got an idea. For the better part of my teens and into my early twenties, I\u2019d been pretty deep into roleplaying games. (At this point you\u2019re probably feeling shocked that a Sci Fi … Continue reading ![\"cyborg-anime-characters-u1\"](\"https:\/\/www.matthewcoxbooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/cyborg-anime-characters-u1-700x366.jpg\")
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