Games - Flying Mice LLC

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	Games - Flying Mice LLC

Flying Mice LLC is a company owned and operated by Clash Bowley based in Boston in the business of creating roleplaying games. Its flagship product is Starcluster, a hard space opera science-fiction setting in a cluster of 117 systems after the Earth's sun had gone supernova.

Products

Flying Mice's first product was Starcluster. Starcluster was released at RPGNow on June 19, 2002. Excluding alternate settings, Starcluster has had over a dozen supplements, which regularly placed Flying Mice in the top 50 publishers and for years held a spot among the top 100 products of all time, and was released in a print edition in 2005. Starcluster is so popular that the name is sometimes used to refer to the company.

The Starcluster system (which is used in most of its other products) was heavily influenced by BRP, and uses 'lifepath'-based character generation and percentile skill resolution, with combat being based on trading points between Damage, Skill, and Initiative.

Interestingly, Starcluster is quite popular in France, even though no French translation exists.

Sweet Chariot was released on March 4, 2003. It details a Starcluster world with a thick, high-pressure atmosphere with a large amount of argon in it; in fact, below 2000 meters in altitude, the air is toxic. Human settlements are on mountaintops and plateaus, and travel between them is made with steam-powered zepplins, sailing between nations like old sailing ships above poisonous 'seas' of argon. Although released to critical acclaim, and the author has described it as his favorite game, the game has met little commercial success.

Blood Games was added almost a year later, on April 3, 2004. It is a horror roleplaying game, set in the real world; however, unlike most recent horror roleplaying games, which seek to humanize or justify the monsters, the supernatural beings in Blood Games are just that: monsters. Blood Games is also unusual in that it makes religion a prime role, which is almost a taboo subject for other companies. Blood Games is the company's best-selling product, behind Starcluster.

F20 was added to the Flying Mice lineup on March 7, 2004. It is the company's first foray into OGL games, with the proceeds of the core rulebook going to the American Cancer Society.

On October 19, 2004, Tribes Of Mother Night was added to the catalog of games. Tribes Of Mother Night (or just "Tribes") is a dark fantasy game revolving around the presence of shapeshifter blood in normal characters. Tribes was somewhat inspired by the juxtaposition of heroic fantasy and paranoid fear seen in Ravenloft. Tribes uses the F20 system.

The current Book Of Jalan game was released on December 24, 2004, although it is not the first game to have this name. Jalan is a standalone Starcluster setting that is also Clash Bowley's take on 'traditional' fantasy roleplaying games, in that in a system designed for hard sci-fi, one also finds 'magic'.

Just days later (December 30, 2004, Flying Mice LLC released Aquavita. Aquavita is game set on an aquatic Dyson sphere 1 AU in diameter, inspired by movies set in the 1980s and pulp fiction written in the 1930s. The original tagline for Aquavita was "One Billion Earths", a reference to the sphere's surface area (rounded off). Aquavita uses the F20 system.

Cold Space, was released on September 13, 2005 and is a space opera game set in an alternate cold war-era after antigravity and FTL spacetravel change the world. Several supplements are planned including a sourcebook.

Upcoming roleplaying games by Flying Mice LLC include FTL Now (describing the world after the events of Cold Space), Glorianna (an ultra-tech neo-Elizabethan planet), Hearts & Souls (gothic superheroes), and Shoot (modern-day military action). However, Clash has expressed that he wants to shift the focus of his company from producing new games to improving and providing support for old ones.

Flying Mice Writers

Clash Bowley (owner, artist; Aquavita, Starcluster, Sweet Chariot)
Klaxon Bowley (Sweet Chariot. Book of Jalan)
Albert Bailey (StarCluster, Sweet Chariot, Book Of Jalan)
Wesley Fornero (Blood Games)
Tim Kirk (Hearts & Souls, Tribes Of Mother Night)
Jason Ludwig (Blood Games)
Ryan A. Span (Book Of Jalan, Cold Space)
El Zambo (Blood Games)
Shanya Almafeta (Aquavita, F20)

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