Before I was fully a theater kid, I was playing table-top roleplaying games with my friends... and seeing the performances those kids invested in our games, and the work the storyteller did to empower that, was actually what made me want to direct.
At this stage in my career, on top of my theater and film work, I've written two TTRPG's. This third one, Jump Rangers, represents worldbuilding that I plan to take into mid-reader novels, comics, web cartoons, mobile gaming, and eventually serial cartoons, action figures and toys, and tentpole cinema. In the world of Jump Rangers, Earth has been overrun and stripmined by the motherships of the Saurian Horde - which is a race of giant alien tyrannosaurus rexes. Sneaking aboard their cavernous ships, humanity has colonized them like bed bugs and spread out into the stars. On the worlds of the Saurian Horde, we came into contact with a race of giant robots with whom they are at war... and so, like an infestation of insects, humanity has hitched a ride into the stars.
While the grown-ups are clinging to their ragged, colonial existence, an order of our smallest and most adaptable people - kids, ages 5-17, have lead the fight to discover new worlds to colonize, to keep people safe when stealing rides from these alien tyrants to travel between worlds, to steal alien tech, to sabotage and repel the alien efforts to exterminate us, and ultimately to claim our own place, our own foothold, among the stars. If you're a kid, and if you're willing to be brave, your heroism is needed in Jump Rangers.
Right now, I'm finishing the text of the core rules of this game and I'm offering it for free on the landing page of my Patreon, here: https://www.patreon.com/jumprangers
My goal is to serve the Patreon with supplementary gaming content and mid-reader content, and to use the revenue to start paying artists to develop the core book into a salable product with me. From there, I'll keep expanding the content and the community until I have development money from my film endeavors (which is not such a far-away notion as one might expect) to begin developing Jump Rangers in other media.
What I'm hoping to find here is an artist with whom I can develop the visual style of Jump Rangers, or maybe people who want to playtest the game and spread the word, or just people who want to read about this developing world and see it grow. If you're interested, and you think you have something to add to this project, please let me know! Everything here is in it's infancy, and while I do have some clear ideas about where this worldbuilding needs to go I am also a big believer in the value of "right people" over "right ideas."
Please, let me know what you think!
Two weeks ago, I published the first supplement to my tabletop roleplaying game - THE UNDERSAUR ALLIANCE- and I published an update regarding where things are headed right along with it! As a quick overview...
- Planet Battleground setting info!
- Underworld of Dragon City!
- Undersaur rebellion!
- Fighting in the gladiator pits of Sauros!
- Sneaking around behind colonial governors!
- Driving vehicles indoors!
- Spacefighter battles!
- Victory on Planet Battleground!
- Spacecraft carriers!
- Shiny new spaceship!
Here’s the full update on the expansion, if anyone is curious: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32866631
Should anyone want to get into the world I’m building - or if you just want to be a little kid space commando - the Jump Rangers COREBOOK is available for free on my Patreon:
http://patreon.com/jumprangers
Yet another supplement has been written for my Jump Rangers Tabletop RPG... and I feel very good about what's happening with this game, my friends! This is the gist of the new material:
Have you been wondering what happens to all the kids who head out there into the stars, sneaking aboard an alien starship in search of adventure and fame... and who never fall in with the Jump Rangers? Wonder no more! This is the expansion the Jump Rangers do not want you to see, dear readers!
Here, you will find:
- Punk Rangers!
- A life of larceny, working the streets for undersaur crimelords!
- Life in a caravan, picking through the Lume junkyard of Planet Clearance!
- The fight of your life, in the rexor pens of a Lume mothership!
- Literal continents of Saurian garbage, and rules for living there!
- How to survive on an alien world!
- New Character Creation rules for making your own runaway!
- Ready to go runaways for heroes and storytellers!
- How to tie runaways in to your Jump Rangers Opera!
1 person likes this
Hey, folks! Last week, I posted the third expansion book to my kids adventure sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game... and this week, I finally generated some activity on the Patreon! We’re off to a good start! This is the book I just released for Jump Rangers: the Roleplaying Game: Native to the Planet Mist, scattered across the stars by the Saurian invasion of their world, a race of intelligent space-faring aliens has been living right under our noses! MICE! MICE ARE FROM SPACE! What happened to Planet Mist? How did it become overrun by spore bugs? HOW CAN I PLAY SPACE MICE IN MY JUMP RANGERS GAME? All these questions and more will be answered in... INTEL FILE: OF MICE AND MANDIBLES! Here’s what I expect will be coming next to the Rangers: In my own inner community, I've had a lot of people asking for a quick one-shot they can play in an evening... so that's got to be my next book. MISSION FILE: THE LIGHTNING JOB is going to be a "smash and grab" job with a fun, cinematic structure and feel in which Jump Rangers are brought into a remote, underwater colony to capture a Lume intelligence. Once that's done, the next project I foresee is a quality-of-life project. I want a full index - DATADECK: THE JUMP RANGERS DATABASE - across all the materials, that tells people where to find story and rules information on all the different concepts, characters, places and technology of Jump Rangers. In addition, it'll have a short definition for each concept. Once that's done, I think I'm ready to get into MISSION FILE 2: CONQUEST OF EARTH. Obviously, that's a book that will change things for the Jump Rangers... but I can promise you, the outcome of that game will not be lowering the stakes for all the missions to come. After that... I think it'll be time for a little more whimsy. INTEL FILE: VOID WHALES sounds pretty self-explanatory, but there's a few colonies that are literally parked inside the bellies of space whales as they travel from system to system. Let's talk about THAT! Lastly, here’s something I said on Twitter that bears repeating anywhere and everywhere: "One of the coolest things about Jump Rangers, and about TTRPG's in general, is that this isn't a story about this or that hero. This is about YOU. This is about US. YOU are the hero. We all are, for ourselves and for each other. That's not something I ever want to lose." Good things are happening with this... and with other things I can’t talk about!... but Jump Rangers at least you can check out for yourself! Our Patreon is at http://patreon.com/jumprangers, if you want to be a kid space commando, or just come and see what’s cooking! More to come!
1 person likes this
So...
One of the core issues with any tabletop roleplaying game is that as the game expands, very few people actually know what's out there in all that reading material. When games were sold over the retail counter, finding new supplements for a favorite game that you didn't know you wanted was always a huge treat, and a process of discovery......but this is the future, and Jump Rangers is a Patreon. Patrons already have access to all the expansions, and should be able to find any material they might be looking for without having to dig through a pile of books. Newcomers should be able to at least peek at what's on the other side of that paywall.
Ergo, DATADECK: THE JUMP RANGERS DATABASE: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1awK-JX7FE0o2i0R0LEflNTx4qtUoy7f3
As we expand, we'll look to invest in more elegant solutions - but as of now, every idea, rule, mechanic, character and item in the Jump Rangers books is in the datadeck. Lee and I will keep this information updated as more expansions are released, making the datadeck a definitive guide to the Jump Rangers canon.
If anyone's interested in checking it out, please do! As ever, anyone who wants to find out more can check out the Jump Rangers Corebook for FREE, on our Patreon: http://patreon.com/jumprangers
I have created a links "launchpad" for anyone who's new to the game, so you can find everything you're looking for. Becoming a kid space commando was never this easy! Here's the page: https://www.patreon.com/posts/click-here-for-34534795
Hey, folks! There's another book out there for Jump Rangers! Quite a few people have asked me for a one-shot that can be played in one evening, so THE LIGHTNING JOB is an extremely fact-paced underwater smash-and-grab on the clock... with a fun, cinematic heist movie structure. Basically, it gives the players every excuse to take the game off the rails, while at the same time giving them every reason to stay on track - and the clock is ticking! With fun roleplaying "briefing flashbacks" in between the timed mission scenes, the heroes will even get a second to cool down and compose themselves between the action.
Full of animals, gear, and Lume robots, this book is loaded with information on PLANET ZERO, which is a cool new frozen oceanic setting, a massive Lume base of operations, and the homeworld to the VOID WHALES - which are coming in the very next supplement!
Even more importantly... Well-known within our small community of content creators, TTRPG and comic artist P.Mal has committed to join our team as the artistic director of Jump Rangers, to lead the visual design of our game, and to establish the look that will guide and inform all the work to come!
Right now, P.Mal and I are working together to compile a design bible to guide the future development of our game and of the Jump Rangers universe. As we make that document, or portions of it, available to the community, P.Mal will start a handful of sketches to suggest the visual direction of the work ahead. Once we reach $550 in monthly revenues with this Patreon, P.Mal will be able to produce 3-5 pieces of art, depending on the level of detail involved, until we have the resources to hire additional artists and direct P.Mal's efforts towards the development of new media. Comics will be our first step outside the format of TTRPGs, and those comics will be available through this Patreon!
In addition to the balanced sense of fun and thoughtful depth that makes P.Mal's art so vital to our community, she brings an extensive scientific education and a previously untapped passion for science fiction to her work on Jump Rangers. Everyone with whom we've shared this news tells us that she's an obvious and necessary choice for the project. Moreover, we all believe this collaboration can create a body of work that is greater than the sum of its parts. Personally, I feel very proud and more than a little lucky that Jump Rangers has earned the support, respect and enthusiasm of an artist of P.Mal's unique and extraordinary caliber.
If anyone wants to see her work, we've got a few samples up in the forum: https://www.patreon.com/posts/35068728