Eternal Soldier
Eternal Soldier is a universal role-playing
system, suitable for playing scenarios of any type from any time
period. Help yourself to the rules, try them out, have fun. Click
"Rules" on the left to go straight to the rules, exactly
as they were first written and printed almost two decades ago.
Only the html has been added, to protect the innocent.
Let me tell you how
it all come to be...
We first started work on Eternal Soldier in
1981 at Indiana University when we got tired of having to buy a
different set of rules to play in different time periods. It just
seemed that a set of rules that realistically reflects the way the
world and characters operate would function equally well in any
time period. Since such a set of rules didn't exist, we decided to
create it.
Over the next 5 years the rules were revised
and re-tested and revised and re-tested and, well, let's just say
that after 5 completely new combat systems and several bloody
noses and black eyes we finally came up with a system that was consistent,
realistic, fast, flexible and enjoyable. Eternal Soldier came into
publication in 1986 and by that time featured everything needed to
handle an insulting big ugly guy in any time period.
After a period of selling the game
regionally and at a couple of Gen-Cons the rest of life (like work
and a lack of money) interfered and we put the game on hiatus.
We've continued gaming however, and to this day haven't found
another system that allows the flexibility of Eternal Soldier
while still giving realistic results.
So what's with
the website?
We were discussing this a few years ago when
the question came up, "Why not re-release the rules?"
The reflexive answer was, "Nah, that would mean typing in all
the rules, etc. Too much work."
Well as it turns out, we still had the
original disks with the rules, as one of us demonstrated by
literally pulling out the nine year old floppies and blowing the
dust off them. (By the way, I'm sold on 3M floppy disks forever,
now.)
We put up a website, and to our surprise
starting getting messages from people who encountered the game a
GenCon years before and were still playing it. New people also got
interested in the rules. We found once again a community of people
who like the rules and wanted to use them and expand on them.
The website got trashed by a data accident,
and then the domain name expired, and for a while life once again
got in the way of supporting the rules. But we occasionally get
requests from people to bring the website back, and hell, why not?
So here we are, and here are the rules.
What's it all
about, really, when you get right down to it?
What interests us most is seeing people play
the game, and the ability to spread the game via the internet
gives us the chance to give you the rules
so you can form your own opinion. These are in the fact the rules
included in the original book, changed only in having been
reformatted for the web. Download them and try them yourselves. We
think you'll be glad you did.
Who are you guys, anyway?
Tai-Gear Simulations is Rob Arnold, Chris
Arnold, Joe Mays, and Don Mellen.
All Content © 1986-2001 Tai-Gear Simulations |