RSW

Some of you may or may not have heard of Quest for the Great Jewels play by mail game. It was a very fun PBM game similar to Star Web which is what RSW is based on and ran for a long time until the mid 90's. I has been a long journey to get the game restarted to run on a normal PC, Mike Shefler ran the game for years on a pre-DOS based machine.

Recently I got in contact with Mike and he is almost done reprogramming the game to run on VB. He should be done with it in the next month and I will be starting to run games. I will not charge for the game, I am just excited to play it again. I would like to invite everyone to playtest it and if you like it then continue to play games that I run.

We will not have a nice engine like RSW to work with, it will be pen and paper, much like Star Web is today.
Send me your email address to zarhunter@yahoo.com
I will let you know the rules and start date of the play test.
Thank you all,
Jeffrey "Zar" McKee

We are ready to play test Quest for the Great Jewels....

anyone interested?

Bring it on!

Are there any rules of the game online?

Cheers,

P.

The rules are available for download

www.stampsbythemes.com/qj/qjrules3.pdf

Thank you very much for the rules. Great that you have taken up the work to bring back such an old game to life!

Please correct me if I am mistaken: It seems to me that QFTGJ is pretty much a StarWeb variant. It looks to me that the biggest difference is the combat system and the map design. I tried to understand it in a first read, and although I have a rough understanding of it, the section with the combat system is too complicated. It seems to me that it is heavily oriented on StarWeb, too.

Regards,

P.

Thank you for reading the rules. Yes QJ is loosely based off Starweb experience with a LOTR flavor. The main differences are as you wrote, combat and the map. The other difference are the talismans, while similar to artifacts, they each have a power to them that can alter how the game is played. Some talisman effect movement, combat etc. There are only 4 races each with different combat skills, also the combat system is more attrition, when a leader dies, it dies and is reborn elsewhere so not all spoils go to the winner. The production system is decentralized, each province generates troops and money not a Industrial center so conquering and expanding will greatly increase a players power.
Summary of the two, Starweb is about negotiation, resource management while QJ is about warfare and diplomacy. You may ask what is the difference between negotiation and diplomacy, well you may have to play both and see. I invite you to join our next playtest which will start soon.
We have turn manager client being developed and working out the kinks with playtest 1.
Let me know if you are interested.
Jeffrey "Zar" McKee

I wanted to comment on the combat system.

The rule book tries to explain to much, just imagine the combat runs the same as Starweb, you can transfer troops before combat, running gives you a defense boost, some troops shoot better than others. The only difference is you can ASSAULT or ATTACK.
ASSAULT gives you more attack factors and reduces you defense, this is used if you are way outnumbered and expect to die....take more of them with you.
ATTACK is normal
Leaders have experience ratings that make the stronger as they age, each experience point is like having that many more troops, I love this part because you get attached to leaders with better ratings and makes it more personal. No way are you going to sacrifice a high level leader, screw the troops...RUN to fight another day.

Playtest Game 1 is on Turn 10 and we have started playtest game 2 which is on turn 3. We will be setting up a third game soon, so we are again recruiting new players. We have 5 players from RSW who are involved, so we would like some more. Download the rulebook and ask any questions. Jim has made a turn manager to help process your orders to make the game easier.