Red Bat is coming.

I was bat crazy before it was fashionable.

Well it's been getting worked on for multiple years but now I am happy enough with it to get it out there. My actual impetus to get it done, Monk, of course, has written an adventure for _my_ rules system that should be published around St Patrick's Day. Now the guy is the best friend that I have but he has written four steampunk scenarios for me to date, and never once noticed that I didn't have steampunk rules nor even that much familiarity with the audience. Believe it or not TAG's Wildly Heroic Action Pulp (WHAP!) was typed up out of nowhere because I had sixteen handwritten pages of the first one needing a T&T six-sided dice-friendly format.

A bit of history, TAG, itself, was around since my Spacer(TM) campaigns, long before the first official publications. You know the rules that you print out and mail to yourself, way back in yester-years of the 60s-90s. It was called LAG for "Laggy's Adventure Gaming" but some kids beat me to that acronym with Live Action Gaming. Spacer's worked just fine for me, but after trying out the rules with pulp/steampunk and modern horror, I wasn't happy with them. So since about 2009, I've been revising the rules into something a bit more manageable, and it would need a need different handle.

The roughs have been labeled "TROTT" notes, which stands for "Tom's Really Awesome Table-Topping." At the same time, I started working heavily with playing cards and developed "Tom's Action Card Kit" (TACK) for the new takes on Crawlspace. So after about three years of folks, mostly Peryton and JerryTel, teasing me about developing rules just because I think of an acronym, I felt I needed a different name. Since I like acid jazz, Angelo Badalamenti's "Red Bats with Teeth" came to mind, and it fit better than "Release" (by Melt Yourself Down) which what I was actually listening to at the time. As bats happen to be 20% of mammals around, there are plenty of "red" bats on our planet having nothing to do with music. I hope this name reflects a common trait among the line's releases, but also shows the flexibility of real bats.

So now the Red Bat "generic" system is all-but finished. My other complete TAG games can now fold into mere settings, with special rules written in as needed for that supplement. Hopefully other systems' fans will pick them up to see what they can use for GMing their own niche-minded games. And maybe one day, Monk will send me a scenario written using these rules.