No one truly “goes it” alone.

We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, steadied by those who join us on the journey.

Given that I rolled up my first character for Dungeons & Dragons in the late 1970's, it would be impossible for me to list every possible inspiration that led to Chronology except, perhaps, for some key few.

My initial inspiration would be my uncle and mother who got me started in wargames and role-playing games in the 1970's inspired, of course, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson who showed us all the way.

Moving to Star Frontiers and BattleTech in the 1980's, then Paranoia, Cyberpunk, Living Steel, and Aliens in the late 1980's and early 1990's along with the OGL release of D20 in the 2000's all left their marks as well.

Five encounters gave me the final push to start from a clean page and write my own RPG engine.

Through their amazing Living Steel game, Barry Nakazono and David McKenzie inspired me to see deeply into how rules and mechanics affect game play, and how to use them to support truly epic scale adventure campaigns with entire worlds, civilizations, and species at stake while Ray Solomon showed me how those can be woven into a story where the people matter most.

When the OGL core of D20 3.x became unusable for a software project in SecondLife, I met Jeffrey Schwartz also abandoning a similar D20 project of his own.

Jeff shared his deep insight into applied storytelling while we collaborated on replacement rules and props in SecondLife for his House Tardis Combat System loosely inspired by MegaTraveller but customized for direct first-person perspective role-playing in a 3D virtual world.

Meanwhile, I continued the search for a truly free-to-use and unencumbered rules engine I could build my own tabletop games with.

I found the Myriad RPG System by Ashok Desai:
Core Edition (Free PDF) and Extended Edition (Print on Demand)

Myriad appears to be inspired by or based on Dream Pod 9's Silhouette or Last Unicorn Games' Icon System, but with changes and additions that set it apart from either and made it a fantastic base for a software RPG engine in SecondLife and OpenSimulator including OSgrid.

However, Myriad's Stat-based D6 dice pool + skill mechanic was not quite exactly what I wanted, so again I cast around.

Not finding what I truly wanted, I finally gave in to the “just write your own” insanity and set out “from scratch.”

I quickly ran into John Kim's fantastic site, Darkshire.Net, and Bloody Stupid Johnson's Design Alternatives Analysis Archive there: Design Alternatives Analysis Archive

If you would like to design your own role-playing game as a bucket list item, Myriad and the Design Alternatives Analysis Archive will help you start doing just that.

Recently, I've also been fantastically lucky to run into Johnn Four and Jochen Linneman, the wizards behindRoleplayingTips.com, Campaign-Community.com, the fantastic GM aid they built called Campaign Logger, and the amazing community of GMs helping GMs they have fostered.

I've learned a lot from everyone mentioned, and especially have learned how much more there is to learn and share.

▲ Chronology