2 Role-Playing Game Projects

Just a quick update to tell you about 2 gaming projects that have been on the writing back-burner for longer than I can remember.

They are both role-playing games
1) Dune - a role-playing game based on Frank Herbert's wonderful books.
2) Lords of Midnight -a role-playing game based on Mike Singleton's epic computer wargame, role-playing game series that was released on the 8bit computers in the 1980's.

Why?
Well Dune because I feel the internet efforts to date have been poor, and not deserving of the awesome majesty of the epic series, and the Last Unicorn Games' version appeared literally minutes before D20 in the guise of DND3.0 arrived. It showed promise. It also has the honour of probably the most consistently sought after RPG book on Ebay. Ive even seen incorrectly bound copies of the book (the first 16 pages bound in unside down) selling for over £100.

And Lords of Midnight simply because it has never been attempted before, and ranks, I believe, with the epic J R R Tolkien and Terry Brooks' Sword of Shanara series. It was an incredibly involving game set in an Ice Wasteland, where elves, dwarves and trolls fought each other for the control of the landscape. Lords with armies at their fingertips hid behind old ancient castles. While armies of Midnight fought on the ice wastes, 4 lone heroes set out to defeat Doomdark and his army.

So Far?
Dune has been fleshed out using a simple variant of the Guardians of Order system, MIND, BODY, SOUL, but before this and all the way through the design concept, I have introduced a unique character bidding concept, which I am loathe to talk about to anyone at the moment but has wide-reaching implications for metagaming for Dune. It fits the genre perfectly and enables epic political games to be run by a group of players jointly with a series of Judges/Games Masters. I am a huge fan of the Dune boardgame, and I wanted to incorporate as many elements of that game too, and as such my idea, I think, works. All I need is someone to help me write it and develop it.

Lords of Midnight originally started out as a Rolemaster campaign, but I felt that the game would be lost under the complexity of Rolemaster's rules. The reason I went for RM was a) it was my system of choice when I first started writing LOM, and b) it had a fairly comprehensive spell list of Fire and Ice magics. So having said no to RM, I stripped the game back down and turned it almost into a Fighting Fantasy game, but instead of STRENGTH and STAMINA, I chose ICE FEAR and STAMINA. These are ideas I want to resurrect, but in the meantime I have used the D20 SRD as my basis for the system, while writing more on the background and setting. If you are interested in co-writing either or both projects, or taking one or both of the projects over or just want to discuss it, then please let me know. I would hate to have what I have written so far go to waste. Both projects I am excited about.