A Boy and His Dog

Status: play-testing final draft?

Masters of the Pentacle

Status: transcribing notes for magic system

The Moons of Saturn

Status: developing map board
A Boy and His Dog Cover
The Blurb:
The year is 2024. 17 years ago, World War IV, which lasted all of 5 days, laid nuclear waste to the world.
You are a Solo: a wandering survivor eking out a solitary existence in what was once Arizona. But you've heard tales of Solos that are not lonely, who have a companion, a dog, a telepathic dog, with whom they share their lives and who helps them find food and shelter in the radioactive wasteland that Arizona has become.
Your goal is to survive in the radioactive environment and unpredictable weather, defend yourself against all manner of threats, find water and food, and find such a dog and convince him or her to be your companion.
The Game:

You play one of 12 Solos (or an as yet unplayed Solo if your Solo should die):

Solo Cards
Move the mouse off the image to scroll the column.
Use your mouse's scroll-wheel to zoom in/out on a particular point.
Click and drag, release, and move mouse to reposition the image. Click again to stop.
Double-click to return the image to its original size and position.

You wander the radioactive wasteland World War 4 made of Arizona:

Map Board
Move the mouse off the image to scroll the column.
Use your mouse's scroll-wheel to zoom in/out on a particular point.

Searching for Items:

Item Cards
Move the mouse off the image to scroll the column.
Use your mouse's scroll-wheel to zoom in/out on a particular point.
Click and drag, release, and move mouse to reposition the image. Click again to stop.
Double-click to return the image to its original size and position.

that will allow to you to survive your quest to find one of 5 telepathic dogs whom you can charm into being your companion (the Telepathic Dog cards a shuffled into the Encounter decks; 1 in the Clear Deck, 2 in the Green Deck, 3 in the Yellow Deck, 4 in the Orange Deck, and 5 in the Red Deck):

Dogs Cards
Move the mouse off the image to scroll the column.
Use your mouse's scroll-wheel to zoom in/out on a particular point.
Click and drag, release, and move mouse to reposition the image. Click again to stop.
Double-click to return the image to its original size and position.

Unless you're playing Quilla June, in which case you are searching for a Solo with 5 or more hit points to charm into returning with you Downunder:

While searching for such a dog or Solo, you encounter:

Encounter Cards
Move the mouse off the image to scroll the column.
Use your mouse's scroll-wheel to zoom in/out on a particular point.
Click and drag, release, and move mouse to reposition the image. Click again to stop.
Double-click to return the image to its original size and position.

playing by the rules:

with the aid of:

This game is based on Harlan Ellison's
®
writings:
"A Boy and His Dog" (short story - New Worlds - 1969)
"A Boy and His Dog" (novella - The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World - 1969)
"Eggsucker" (short story - The Ariel Book of Fantasy Volume Two - 1977)
"Run, Spot, Run" (short story - Amazing Stories - 1980)
"Blood's a Rover" (teleplay - 2018)
All of which can be found in Blood's a Rover".
And, of course, the 1975 movie, A Boy and His Dog.

Harlan Ellison's
®
works can be found at:
www.amazon.com/-/e/B000APZU8C
If you think you'd be interested in playing/buying A Boy and His Dog, please tell me about yourself:



I'd appreciate it if you'd give me general idea where you live just so I have some idea where people interested in the game live.
I don't intend to translate the rules into any foreign languages, so I've put the predominately English-speaking countries at the top of the "Please Choose Nation of Residence" drop-down menu.
(I've included the Holy See (Vatican City State), not because English is commonly spoken there, but just because it amuses me that the Holy See is considered a country unto itself.)

I'd prefer not to supply information about my place of residence.
And, now, for the $64,000 question:
Would you be willing to help fund a KickStarter campaign so I can get this game produced?
Yes!
smiley face 		No
frowny face
This game will be based, in part, on my "Powers of the Pentacle" published in the Fall 1987 issue of Different Worlds magazine:
and on the magic system I had been developing way back in the 1980's based on "The Powers of the Pentacle" because I loathed AD&D's magic system but that I never finished. I recently discovered an outline I had printed out decades ago using a dot-matrix printer, have scanned, OCR'd using Adobe Acrobat Pro--good Murphy, all things Adobe are worthless!--and am now fixing all of Adobe's OCR errors. When I'm done fixing the outline, I'll decide how much of it needs to be fleshed out for Masters of the Pentacle and get to serious work on the game.
Who knows? Maybe I'll write up the entire magic system and publish it as well.

They have a beautiful map like what I was looking for, about halfway down the page. They present the orbits to one side of Saturn, and I've taken it and mirrored it about Saturn:

Saturn Moon Distances Mirrored about Saturn - from https://skymarvels.com/infopages/saturninfo.htm
Saturn Moon Distances Mirrored about Saturn - from https://skymarvels.com/infopages/saturninfo.htm

The thing I hadn't realized is how dispersed Saturn's major moons are.
The following table summarizes the moons' (and major rings') orbital radii:

Moon/Ring Orbital
Radius (km)		 Orbital Radius
(Saturn Diameters)
Inner Rings 69.27 0.6
Outer Rings 142.27 1.1
Mimas 185,520 1.5
Enceladus 238,020 1.9
Tethys 294,660 1.9
Dione 377,400 3.0
Rhea 527,400 4.2
Titan 1,221,830 9.8
Hyperion 1,481,100 11.9
Iapetus 3,561,300 28.6

What this means is, if I were to include Iapetus on the game board, 82.7% of the board, the area between Hyperion's and Iapetus's orbits, would be empty space.
I could have random minor moons in this otherwise empty space, but the map board I'm envisioning would make this next to impossible, so either Iapetus will have to be inaccessible to players or I'll have to figure out how to have a separate board for this outer-most major moon and some specialized way to reach it.