Welcome to this minuscule corner of the vast gaming world. I'm Steve Plambeck, an old-school table-top gamer from, well let's just say from days of yore.
I started a few game design projects long ago, and now that I'm "retired" I'm dusting off a few to finally complete, with the plan to publish two or three more titles in this space in the not too distant future. I hope a few people will find and enjoy them. They are on themes that were already old when I first had these game ideas in the 80's and 90's. And yes, they have all been done to death many times over in the decades since, and that's probably what puts the ancient into Ancient Wisdom games. Whether there's any wisdom to be had remains to be seen!
Back in the day I had the impetuous, even arrogant notion I could do several things better than other designers had done, or at least with a different spin that might be appreciated. And while I stepped away from gaming for a long time, I assumed any good ideas I may have had were thought up and tried out by others many times over the intervening decades. Surely, it had "all been done".
Well, I guess it all hasn't been done. I cannot (for example) find a tactical starship combat game published in all this time I'd really like to play myself, or even try out. Nor has a better FRPG come down the pike, at least not from what I can ascertain. So maybe some of the projects I was doodling long ago do deserve to be finished and unleashed after all.
This first publication is a case in point. I designed and printed my own personal kit of gaming tiles for fantasy gaming, and was using them in the late 80's. I had the novel plan of combining hexes with right-angle corridor tiles to make labyrinth design and setup much easier. There wasn't a product like them available at the time, so I invented my own system, used it, and left myself notes on how to improve it. Returning to the subject all these years later I'd have been perfectly content to save myself work and simply buy a set of gaming tiles. Now that I've looked at probably 200 sets or publications along these lines, dating from the late 70's to yesterday, I find it hard to believe I couldn't find anything even close to what I wanted. Shop online and browse the gaming forums and you'll find perhaps hundreds of hexagonal tiles with squares on them. Many fancy and beautiful ones have been produced. But those are the opposite of what is needed for games where combat and tactical movement occur on hexes. Surely somewhere, at sometime, somebody else came up with the idea of putting combat hexes on uniform rectangular tiles. But if they ever did, it seems there was absolutely nothing like that in or out of print to be found today. So that was the impetus behind the first publication you'll find available here: The Perpendicularly Perfect Tunnels & Corridors Kit.
Of course "perfect" is always an exaggeration. Humans aren't perfect, so neither are any of our works. But you may just find PPT&C to be "better" than what you've used before, and I hope (if you play one of those RPGs that require hexes for combat resolution) you'll give this publication a try! And please feel free to criticize, review, or send complaints my way :)
Steve Plambeck - November 2019
I started a few game design projects long ago, and now that I'm "retired" I'm dusting off a few to finally complete, with the plan to publish two or three more titles in this space in the not too distant future. I hope a few people will find and enjoy them. They are on themes that were already old when I first had these game ideas in the 80's and 90's. And yes, they have all been done to death many times over in the decades since, and that's probably what puts the ancient into Ancient Wisdom games. Whether there's any wisdom to be had remains to be seen!
Back in the day I had the impetuous, even arrogant notion I could do several things better than other designers had done, or at least with a different spin that might be appreciated. And while I stepped away from gaming for a long time, I assumed any good ideas I may have had were thought up and tried out by others many times over the intervening decades. Surely, it had "all been done".
Well, I guess it all hasn't been done. I cannot (for example) find a tactical starship combat game published in all this time I'd really like to play myself, or even try out. Nor has a better FRPG come down the pike, at least not from what I can ascertain. So maybe some of the projects I was doodling long ago do deserve to be finished and unleashed after all.
This first publication is a case in point. I designed and printed my own personal kit of gaming tiles for fantasy gaming, and was using them in the late 80's. I had the novel plan of combining hexes with right-angle corridor tiles to make labyrinth design and setup much easier. There wasn't a product like them available at the time, so I invented my own system, used it, and left myself notes on how to improve it. Returning to the subject all these years later I'd have been perfectly content to save myself work and simply buy a set of gaming tiles. Now that I've looked at probably 200 sets or publications along these lines, dating from the late 70's to yesterday, I find it hard to believe I couldn't find anything even close to what I wanted. Shop online and browse the gaming forums and you'll find perhaps hundreds of hexagonal tiles with squares on them. Many fancy and beautiful ones have been produced. But those are the opposite of what is needed for games where combat and tactical movement occur on hexes. Surely somewhere, at sometime, somebody else came up with the idea of putting combat hexes on uniform rectangular tiles. But if they ever did, it seems there was absolutely nothing like that in or out of print to be found today. So that was the impetus behind the first publication you'll find available here: The Perpendicularly Perfect Tunnels & Corridors Kit.
Of course "perfect" is always an exaggeration. Humans aren't perfect, so neither are any of our works. But you may just find PPT&C to be "better" than what you've used before, and I hope (if you play one of those RPGs that require hexes for combat resolution) you'll give this publication a try! And please feel free to criticize, review, or send complaints my way :)
Steve Plambeck - November 2019