tremorworks

I'll be honest, I'm a huge fan of Appleseed (by Masamune Shirow). The second CG movie recently came out, but otherwise I don't know if many people have ever heard of it. But it does share some similar thematic elements to Perfect Horizon.

The HDL system actually started back when I first picked up the Appleseed manga. The system's first incarnation was literally an Appleseed RPG called “ESWAT.” I ran a campaign, tweaking the rules along the way, for almost a year, but realized that the setting, while highly developed, wasn't quite enough for a whole game world. So, I went back to the drawing board, borrowing more general elements from manga and anime at large and incorporating them into my own vision of the future.

One thing that always bothered me about every role-playing system out there was it was so hard to build a concept. D&D uses “classes” so unless your concept is one of those classes, you can't make the character the way you want. That's how I always felt about cyborgs. Even in games like Shadowrun, you can't really make an anime-style cyborg. So, that was one of my first orders of business in PH and HDL; make it so you can start with a concept, and actually make that concept! And, of course, one of my first concepts was Briareos (from Appleseed).

Every time one of my friends, who made the first HDL character ever (he actually created Jason Davin, one of the example characters in the PH book), sees Appleseed, he says “wow, this makes me want to play PH again.”

So, sometimes we do.