In one game, they stabbed and killed a monkey. In the other, Bigfoot caught on fire. When you do it right, a Spirit of 77 game is never boring. In the aftermath of this past weekend’s two game installments (Jukebox Villains and BEAST: Bound and Down), we received a lot of great feedback from our two playtest groups that have influenced how we’re writing DJ Adventures.

Probably the best change is the inclusion of what we’re calling Fuel Injections –  Opening questions that start the game action immediately in the here and now for the Adventure. B:BaD really proved it was the best way to start games with the question, “Who’s idea was it to steal the beer truck?” After that, it was pretty much off to the races and the response was exactly what we needed – immediate character involvement and player direction. The best analogy is like a Bond movie – we never know for sure what the first ten minutes are all about when the movie starts, except they’re an introduction to Bond in the most explosive way before the opening credits even roll. Now we’re going to be doing that for Spirit of 77.

Friday’s game was unique for me, in that it was both my first online GM experience as well as our first use of Roll20.net. Roll20.net is a great online resource once you have it figured out, but I won’t lie – it took us a couple of tries to get a handle on everything (and we’re still working on providing a better overall experience, don’t you worry.) But thankfully we managed to get everyone online and involved within the first twenty minutes of actual gameplay. That’s actually relatively quick in the grand scheme of things. We also broadcast our game session via Twitch.tv and even had a few viewers (which is really cool.) Our next online game session has been scheduled for next Friday, April 4 at 8pm Pacific. Should be a blast, our Jukebox Villain players are great.

Another recent development has a been a new set of core rules for playtest – Bob and I did another overall pass to clean up the text as well as revise certain concepts that just weren’t working. Among the changes – the Kung-Fu moves have been updated based on feedback from our Something Awful online session, Groove has been removed as the power source for Glam moves and character creation (particularly Attribute selection) has now been streamlined.

Thank you again for your continued support as we work on making this happen, it’s been quite the journey so far and we still have a way to go but the overall enthusiasm we’ve received from friends, family and everyone else has been both inspiring.