[Realms of Pugmire] New Doesn’t Replace Old

Wow, here I am writing up blog posts talking about this great new game called “Pugmire” and how excited I am for it. It feels like 2015 all over again! All I need now are a few comments telling me how this is all an April Fool’s joke. (Please don’t do that.) Granted, I’m a little older now – in fact, I’ll be 48 in just a couple of days – and I’ve learned a lot about myself, about Pugmire as a world, and what works in Pugmire as an RPG… and what doesn’t.

In case you missed it, I posted a press release last week announcing a new edition for Pugmire, which I’m calling Realms of Pugmire. Yes, I know many of us will call it “Pugmire 2e” or variations, and that might be necessary for a while, but the title change is important to me. Because to me, this has all been “the Realms of Pugmire” for quite a few years now – hell, even the website is realmsofpugmire.com – so to me this is an opportunity to tweak something that hasn’t felt quite right for a while now. And that’s really the thrust of this whole edition: an opportunity for me to adjust things a bit.

I’ll go into more detail about what’s changing and why in later weeks, but there’s a more pressing concern I want to address right away. If you’re here reading this blog, odds are you’re someone who identifies as a Pugmire fan on some level. Maybe you just like the game and have played it a couple of times, or maybe you own every book and product I’ve put out – even the interactive audio drama. Hello, you. I know what you’re thinking. You’re worried that everything you have, everything you’ve picked up, you’ll need to just chunk into the bin and start over.

Let me be very clear: You can use your original Pugmire material with the new edition if you want.

This new edition isn’t starting over from scratch. It’s not me deciding to switch the whole thing over to Storypath or FATE or Powered by the Apocalypse or anything like that. It’s the same D&D-inspired mechanics you know from the first edition. Lots of people like that system. I do too, and so does Onyx Path – so much so that I’ve made some adjustments so that it might be used to power other tabletop RPGs in the future unrelated to Pugmire. Or maybe related to Pugmire. We’ll see how it goes.

Further, the book will have an appendix that walks you through how to update first edition material to second edition. Looking for a particular masterwork artifact that isn’t in the book? The appendix will tell you what it’s called now. Want to make a Companion Artisan who can’t cast spells? Those options are all still available, and a few more besides. There’s a little work to update characters and adventures to the new edition, but I did what I could to make that as easy as possible.

So what kinds of changes are we talking about? I’ll cover that next week!