Interest Check: "Magic Realm"

I'm working on a re-boot / re-imagination of Avalon Hill's Magic Realm. I would like some people to play test it.

I have designed over 30 games in the past few years. Mostly variations on Maze Rats or 2400, but also some really original stuff. People seem to like playing the games I write - I have lots of repeat customers on DTRPG.

This game is one of the original ones. It's inspired by Magic Realm, and hopefully will feel familiar, but it's different in many significant ways.

Some features:
- a blissful faery queen's market place, where the unwary can be trapped forever;
- a grim and boding faery king's fortress, hard to access, but ...;
- five distinct villages;
- five distinct forests;
- five distinct heaths;
- five distinct mountains;
- five distinct caverns;
- six different categories of magical songs;
- a streamlined dice-pool combat system with discarded dice (mashup of original Magic Realm chit system with @scarik's advanced Chainmail system);
- saving throws using dice of various sizes (thanks for this idea as well, @scarik);
- distinct rules for magic, missiles, melee, and other stuff (NO unified theory here);
- sixteen distinct (pre-gen) characters to play.

Any interest? This would be a one player action post per week game. Each player action post would have a game-day's worth of planning (three or four major actions). I'm thinking post on Sunday or Monday and we have the next five or six days to resolve the actions.

This sounds like an interesting gameplay loop that's a bit different from most games. Could you elaborate on how the gameplay is supposed to work? I'm not familiar with Magic Realm.

What bowl said and: What kind of story are we telling? You describe a setting and some mechanic, but are we telling the story about Billy that got stuck in fairy land? Or the political intrigues of the summer and winter court?

The Magic Realm board roleplaying game brought together concepts from PbM and roleplaying games under a totally new rule set that enabled simultaneous competitive or cooperative play by up to sixteen players. A key concept was the daily plan of action, where a player would write down before each game day started what their character intended to do that day. There was one character (I think it was the cunning Swordsman) who could deviate from plan in response to events. An expansion character (I think the Gypsy) could just write down her plan step by step throughout the day. Otherwise, unexpected events would de-rail the character's day and they would just halt.

The default story for Magic Realm was exploration of a faery realm by mortals from various eras, an Elf, and a Dwarf. Magic users, warriors, and a priestly type would interact with each other as allies or competitors in a race to accomplish various goals within one month (when the realm would vanish).

I'd like to start with the exploration thing and twist toward the intrigues thing. Good question, runekydig!

I have a rules pdf that is ... not complete ... but has all the (new, not original MR) mechanics for travel, combat, magic, and social interactions. Locations are partly filled in. I have ideas for the rest. Denizens will be converted on-the-fly from original Magic Realm material, although some will be totally new.

Hm, the gameplay sounds like an interesting experiment, but I'm not sure the setting is really something I'm interested in so I think I'll pass. I do hope you find people, though. If the game is public, I'd be curious to read along a bit.

Here is a link to the rules pdf.

Hi! I've never heard of Magic Realm before, but I read through your rules pdf and I'd like to help playtest once you have enough players to play.

Oh, thanks!

Technically it's possible to play test with 1 player, but I think that it would be more fun with competitive / cooperative play and intersecting paths between multiple players.

I have been thinking about how to implement and track each character's randomly generated path through the realm ... will need to do a custom character sheet for this, I think, with a "visited" checkbox and a blank list of adjacencies for each location.

Edit to add: I added a Potions trait for the Dwarf.

Yeah, that sounds good! I agree it will be more fun with more people.
I was wondering how you were going to approach the map. I think this makes sense, but whatever you think will work is fine with me.