Detailed, Yet Simple
  The world is a wondrous place. Every person is a story, every machine is ingenuity playing with the forces of nature and the discoveries of science. Every city is a beast of thousands of minds, or even millions. It's hard to truly grasp that sense of massive detail. Add magic, alien technologies, impossible superpowers and ancient horrors, and the possibilities of detail will blow your mind!

  GEARS is about experiencing stories in splendid details; combat, hacking, vehicles, animals, everything with the details needed to make them stand out as living, dynamic concepts, not just forgettable routine encounters. At the center of the game is an immersion into fictional worlds full of people, places, things and even energies, all of them with rich variation and depth. Not by slapping rule after rule onto a monstrous web of game law, but by putting detail at the center of simple, meaningful and endlessly versatile rules. Want to simulate the details of romance and seduction, or maybe add superpowers based in semi-plausible quantum biology? There are plenty of tools to do so, from the first book and onwards. Characters can be created in details rivaled only by the real world! And there are plenty of these details already mapped out for you to use, right out of the books.

  Of course, this all serves to create a better game. The drama and tension of balancing the forces of a magic ritual need no longer be reduced to a single roll of the dice, but can be made into choices and plans under the character's, and thus player's, control. Manipulating intricate game world elements and understanding how wonders work lets players do things no other system will let them, within the framework the chosen game world provides for them. And as they disassemble and recombine these elements, they reshape the experience of the game. The tools are delivered. The results are theirs for the making!

  And still, GEARS is easy to handle. The details are simply possibilities offered by the system. Everything is provided to just make a game, any game, work right out of the proverbial box; magic spells, fast cars, lethal weapons, it's all there for the taking, or for deconstructing and reshaping. Give the players every choice in the world and the use of every little bit of the game, or let them roll a few dice and have some simple fun.

  It's your game. It's your choice. Every time!

Beyond Combat
  Roleplaying is historically linked to combat, and closely so. It was born from war games, and these roots still show. But everything has to grow up some day, including roleplaying!

  Through detailed studies and versatile rules, GEARS provides nuanced and in-depth options for combat, but they exist as part of something bigger: From hacking to mental battles, from planetary warfare to fighting nanoplagues in a character's very blood, combat is just one form of conflict amongst many, and the rules take this into account. Any conflict, including combat, can be played out as a quick and insignificant routine, or be turned into an intense spectacle not for the faint of heart. The basic elements of a conflict need not be learned again and again, but the unique options of any confrontation will stand out to make swords, guns, poisons, spells, intimidation, legal disputes and many more stand out as unique clashes, each and every one.

  Making conflict more than just a few rolls for swinging a sharp piece of metal at a hairy monster is meant to broaden the opportunities for roleplaying. Letting players base their characters around skills for other confrontations allows games where combat can slip into the background, while other dramatic tensions take center stage. An entire lifetime of adventures can be filled with intricate conflicts, without a weapon or fist ever being raised! Or combat can be just one method amongst many for getting things done! There are many ways to fight for victory, justice, profit, or whatever drives the characters. Whether by sword, word, trickery, or any other means, GEARS provides the ways to fight those battles.

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Scale & Granularity
  The very simple rules at the heart of GEARS are built so that characters do not become impossible or predictable to play, just because those characters are not built around some silly idea of 'proper' power levels. It is easy for a set of rules to make weak characters nearly impossible to play in any detail, making them utterly uninteresting. But if players want to play people down on their luck, or simply think that children or frail old characters make good stories, they can do it with GEARS, and the characters will still be interesting, because the rules scale down very well.

  And it works the other way, too! Many games 'break' when characters become very powerful, which is why games revolving around superheroes are best when the rules are built specifically for superheroes. If they are not, such powerful characters tend to just be unimpressive people with one or two abnormal powers (sure, he can fly, but he's still just a cop... who flies), or their powers are made so extreme they become silly, just to make them stand out (so powerful wizards somehow turn into... dragons?). GEARS doesn't need poorly thought out patchwork solutions. The game just works, no matter how supercharged characters become. Abilities grow, opportunities appear, and challenges need never grow dull and routine. The feel of power will be there at every step!

  One of the points of the creation of GEARS has been to allow games that have characters start out as normal, or even less-than-normal. Nothing but frail survivors rising from the rubble of destroyed lives, and then marching on towards greatness. The rules are built with very long character careers in mind, and thus have to encompass continual growth. The rule mechanics were chosen to make this not just an option, but a logical way to play. They provide high 'granularity', smoothly increasing the detail that reflects character power, throughout the entire span of character development. From pathetic nobodies and into godhood, and everything in between, no matter what path in life they choose.

  No matter how the characters start out, not even the sky will be their limits, and the game will support them, all the way.

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Anything & Everything
  Made as a flexible core of tools, GEARS is completely independent from the genre or genres of the game. From laser rifles to magical healing, from gritty espionage to royal Victorian drama, the rules just work. GEARS was made with adventure, characters and stories in mind, not a narrow view of a proper genre.

  This does not mean stacks of new rules whenever you wish to try out a new genre; deeds are deeds, adventures are adventure, and learning a few core rules will open the doors to any world to you. Helpful advice will show how this can be done, providing guidelines and ideas for traditional and untraditional genres, but the potential for fine-tuning is endless. This comes in very handy when you want to recreate a very unusual genre, or when a bizarre idea strikes without warning! Characters can literally be designed to do anything, and the worlds around them can be made to contain things that belong in the mind of a genius or lunatic equally. Want fights to the death with artificially intelligent spirits in the wreckage of living, organic spaceships? Or do you want the characters to be psionically sentient symbols using a world of animals as their vessels? Or is that too traditional for you? Whatever you want, it's right at your fingertips. The advice included in the game will show how to draw out the flavors unique to a genre and make the game drip with them. Or it will let you twist a genre to the point of madness, and let you see what will come from that!

  And yet, none of this puts any added burden on the game. Let the straightforward guides take you by the hand, putting together your own fictional worlds, or just pluck out one already created. Worlds are not just a bunch of rules and options, they are ideas, and GEARS exists only to bring these ideas to life. The process of ideas used are important pieces of the game, explained in plain English to show how everything came about. Have an idea of your own? Use the same guidelines to easily move from intangible concept to actual, splendid worlds easily. It's your game. It's your ideas. GEARS just makes it happen.

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Assisted Learning
  Learning a new game can be a daunting experience. The multitude of options and freedom in use that GEARS provides can be even more overwhelming! To avoid that, the line is made to cuddle new players every step of the way, while letting experienced or excited ones march through everything at whatever pace fits them better.

  The key to this is the way books are structured: There are hard rules and clear-cut lists of options within dozens of fields, from constructing your own personal rifle to designing schools of magic. There are plenty of such things designed in advance, too, created with all the depth that GEARS offers. But at the same time, there are plenty of short books with complete adventures and simplified rules, books that can be picked up and used for a complete game with nothing else added except dice, pens and paper. GEARS can be played with a single book from the GEARS Quick line, or with a range of elaborate tomes, detailing everything your heart could desire.

  Needless to say, the point is not to split players into different groups. Instead, GEARS allows every group to progress at their own pace, giving a quick and easy place to start and a wide expanse of directions to grow in. The tools are there to make every game a better one, with less burdens on everyone's shoulders and more fun and excitement in return for the time invested. New players will be given an easy way into the game; veteran gamers will be given the tools to conquer and expand the game in every way they want!

  And it is not just the new players that get a helping hand! Through special 'blueprint' supplements, experienced gamers get the tools to cut down on time spent in preparation, giving more time for what they truly want to add of their own. Worlds and adventures can be original creations by a labor of love, or they can be assembled through richly detailed but easily applied methods. Whole campaigns, complete with worlds, characters, mysteries and adventures can be created in a few hours; single adventures can be made in less!

  All this is meant to care for those who use GEARS, in the hopes that they will soon feel the confidence and allure to explore the system deeper, and produce more original stories for everyone to enjoy...

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Lots of Gear
  There are shopping lists of weapons and other toys for the characters, lists that players can pick from when equipping their characters before, during and between adventures. Every game has shopping lists. But GEARS only starts there...

  In a real world, where the brand of computer you pick or the model of car you drive can influence your experiences and challenges, why should a game just hand characters 'generic item #3'?? Tools are a major part of life, and GEARS makes that fact shine. Brands, models, conditions, modifications, and a multitude of other choices let players pick exactly what they want for their characters, or reconfigure what they have again and again, until they finally produce the sweet rig they want or just decide to get new gear that allows them to tamper even more with it! Anything that can logically be acquired is available with an easy purchase, but when players suddenly decide that they want it to be tailored for their vision of a character, the options are there, as well.

  And it extends to what the game world needs, too! Create a world of smoothly integrated systems, where your artificially intelligent biosuit is jacked into powerful networks scanning the globe with satellites and relaying information, upgrades, and even tool augmentations with speed and efficiency. The surgical precision of the systems and the power of world-spanning networks will be dripping from every choice the players make and every action their characters take. Want a world in ruins, where the true power lies in taking the junk heaps of a forgotten past and keeping broken gadgets alive with every improvised fix and trick in the book your character put together from scratch? You will be able to taste the rust and feel the cracks in the decomposing plastic with GEARS.

  From enchanted swords to spy-gadgets to cybernetically controlled space freighters, GEARS is built to convey the feel of what the tools chosen by characters truly are. Characters can be carefree consumers, picking up trinkets at bazaars and funny little shops whenever they find a need, or they can dive head-first into technologies, magics and raw innovations of their own desires, turning anything they possess into seamless extensions of their idea of their characters. They can modify and combine, repair and sabotage, devote themselves to the power of a brand or jury-rig everything to do what nobody had in mind for it.

  Or they can just buy that cool piece of armor with protection against spirit weapons. Your choice, and theirs.

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Organizations
  Game worlds, like the real world, have people in them that organize themselves. Some do so for protection, some to rule others, some to pursue demanding interests, and some just to socialize. From guilds to secret societies, magical schools to corporations, interplanetary militias to religious orders, they are a potential source of great adventures!

  In GEARS, these organizations get the attention they truly deserve. More than just a bunch of people dictating the actions of others, they are fascinating groups with their own agendas, cultures and norms, resources and dependencies, and their own legends. Characters can be a part of them, have insiders and allies in them, investigate them, cross their paths, fight them head on, or create their own. The possibilities are endless.

  Following the mantra of GEARS, organizations can be defined down to minuscule details, making them as living and dynamic as any heroic or villainous character. And like such characters, they can react and be handled in many ways, from direct confrontations to picking away at resources or befriending key members. Infiltration, organizational clashes, vital recruitment, and many more parts of organized life become easily inserted parts of any game world! And the players can design their own from the very start, as part of their characters; want an agent from a secret department in a major company? An Elvish defender of a conspiracy of dragons living among humans? Or the resentful rebel, building his strength to reveal or take down the cabal that destroyed his life? It's all there, for characters that can call for orbital strikes or a secret hideout, or just check in with the boss about that last big deal. And whether the cops busted it or were successfully bribed.

  The attention given to organizations in GEARS allows the game world to become a far more integral part of the characters' lives, making it easy to turn a hastely conceived villain cabal into a fully fledged, deeply nuanced conspiracy, or even just a clearly defined law enforcement agency on their heels!

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Digital Toys
  In this day and age, the role of computers cannot be ignored even in pen & paper roleplaying games. The number of opportunities that computers offer are simply too many, and not making use of them is a disservice to any game.

  The many choices possible in GEARS are also available in digital form, in easy programs or even simple webpages that allow the creation of characters, worlds, adventures and more on a computer screen. Catalogs of abilities, items, places and people can be bought or made, even traded for free amongst fans! Creating a breathtaking character sheet or professional-looking adventure supplement becomes easy, and any number of copies can be printed or swapped online. In fact, swapping creations is encouraged, to further the GEARS community and provide game material of a width and breadth that cannot be matched by published books alone!

  And other than creating content for the game, there are digital assistants that ease the work of maintaining complex campaigns or planning tricky adventures. Tasks that would otherwise take years to learn become easy with software support full of advice, suggestions, ideas and detailed overviews of material spanning multiple books.

  All software developed for GEARS will be based on the books, and is available on all major platforms.

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Realistic & Supernatural
  There has always been great debate in the roleplaying community of the virtues of realism. How realistic a game tries to be will always end up defining it, and there are about as many preferences as there are roleplayers.

  On this matter, the views behind GEARS are fairly calm. Realism is a good thing, but only insofar as it promotes a good game. GEARS is made to allow players to suspend disbelief; anything done in the game can be done in a way that will seem realistic, without getting into scientific measurements and debates on physics and neuropsychology.

  It's a game. It's all just a game.

  Where GEARS does go for brutal realism is in portraying the myriad details that exist in the world. A hunt for vampires through the streets of Tokyo is never going to be a realistic experience, but there will be enough detail concerning skidding tires, slick roads, using weapons at high speeds, and many other details. They serve to promote realism just enough to make the experience as deeply immersive as possible!

  And this philosophy of making things feel real rather than forcing them to correctly simulate every aspect of reality extents into the supernatural, and the futuristic. Magic, star-travel, cybernetics, aliens, ghosts and many more things cannot possibly be made realistic, because there is nothing real to compare them against. But they can be made in the kind of detail that makes them believable! Even larger-than-life superheroes can be recreated in a way that makes them and their interactions with the world seem like what would happen if superpowers were real.

  So go for real, or go for fantastic. Realism is what you have around you every day. GEARS is what you have around to make the impossible (or just highly unlikely) feel real enough to suspend disbelief and enjoy the game.

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More Than Rules
  A typical view of roleplaying games is that they are little more than a set of rules; skills, gear, math and more to simulate fictional events. GEARS, however, is far more. The 'Game Engine' part of the name refers to the large portion of the books that is set aside for helping anyone run a game, write adventures, understand players, and more. Knowing how players often act, the issues that can surface during play, how to find and keep players, and much more, all makes up a body of knowledge that often has to be earned by experience. In GEARS, it is as important and as plentiful as rules and equipment lists!

  A lot of these non-rule parts of the game are focused around making the work of designing good adventures a lot easier to handle, and a lot quicker to get done. Methods, components, and more are described for use, and are a central part of the game material. How worlds and other parts of the game can be used to enhance adventures, making them stand out better, is a skill that GEARS helps to develop in both novice and veteran adventure writers. But the material also looks hard at ways to use abstract concepts like themes and complex plot arcs to create adventures for experienced players, allowing them to enjoy the game from other and more challenging angles.

  None of this dictates a style of adventuring. Like characters are assembled from bits and pieces to match a vision, so too can the campaigns they become a part of. The material provided will describe how to draw out the unique feelings of various genres, how to handle player confidence, how to stray-proof adventures and so forth, but it all consists of such tiny tools that the results will always be a unique combination of choices. Choices that can be set aside in favor of a completely original angle, if so desired! GEARS provides a helping hand and a lot of inspiration, but as stated, none of it is rules. It is just a game trying its best to support those who play it.

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Diversity Supported
  The traditional RPG line of books follows a pattern. Every specific line has its own variant of that pattern, but the pattern is still recognizable in all but a few. At the core, there is one set of books with core rules. Then comes a few core books for the game world. After that, each game line has its own set of book types it supports. An example is a long line of books that endlessly define character classes, bloodlines, breeds, or other such affiliations. Another is book after book detailing a new place, such as a city or planet, or even a completely new world. A third example is the unending line of new items, often weapons, to expand the shopping experience for players when equipping their characters. Every now and then, a new core book will break the pattern, and then the pattern returns again. Sometimes, the book that breaks the pattern simply resets it, allowing many new books of the type that serves the game best.

  This is the typical way of publishing a game line because it works. Every game builds an identity early on, and those who publish it figure out what type of books are worth most to publish. And then they publish that or those few types in quantity. Most games thus end up with dozens of books in two or three categories, and a small handful of core books. The books that people buy most are the ones that get published in bulk. It makes perfect financial sense.

  With GEARS, the idea of a sensible, predictable pattern goes directly against the whole point of the line. GEARS is made to be the most varied and detailed system imaginable, which means a range of possibilities rarely seen. To lock it into two, three or even four standardized types of books would defeat the purpose of all that work. No, GEARS is diversity. GEARS is about exploring every odd option for the enjoyment of the game. GEARS is about books that break out of categories and establish new paths. Preferably a new path for every third book!

  But more than that, GEARS is about opening ways to publish the kinds of books that get less attention, but benefit the game so much. Adventures and campaign books are nearly extinct as publications, because they sell less than heavy rulebooks. Introspective books, viewing the game from new angles, are rare, except when they allow the resetting of a line and republishing of the categories of books that fit its pattern. Weird ideas are sidelined in favor of tested patterns.

  GEARS offers a chance to go down those strange paths. That is not an accident, that is by design. GEARS was made to go there, and it does!

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Affordable
  GEARS is published primarily through Print On Demand technologies or via digital media. These cutting-edge publication methods take a lot of risk out of the work, and make publishing a safer, easier industry. With GEARS, this means two things for the consumer: Cheaper books, and more niche content!

  Making books cheaper is a logical step; rather than trying to push expensive books through hype marketing, the publishing technologies can cut prices dramatically, letting anyone and everyone afford books that might otherwise have been reserved for diehard fans. Of course, those fans instead get more books for their hard-earned cash. In some cases, books can be published at half the price of other RPG books of equal size! And they are still indistinguishable from the average book on the market, thanks to the progress of publishing science and technology!

  Niche content takes this to the extreme, allowing books that will be only for the most enthusiastically obsessed fans. We want to make those books, because, well, they're cool! Even if they only sell to those cadres of obsessive enthusiasts, the way GEARS is published makes them possible.

  And this extends to books that are typically considered 'bad business', like good adventures or non-essential support for game worlds. These books are avoided by big publishers due to low sales numbers, but GEARS can afford to include them, and plenty of them! The average fan thus has access to a range of works that would be a rarity in other games, all thanks to the way GEARS is published.

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GEARS Third Draft is freely available for download, in the following three formats:

      Raw: Single-coloumn pure text (except the content list), for optimal viewing on screen!

      Nice: Double-coloumn pure text, for easy (and cheap!) printing and better paper reading!

      Color: Double-coloumn and with the first full layout tests; it's colorful and creatively set up, but please remember that it is still a layout test, and the bits of art used is only for technical checking, and will be swapped for real art over the next few draft versions!