Revealing the Mysteries of Asylum

I am the Warden!!

What a great weekend. After a little thing called my wedding - and thanks to everyone's congratulations over the weekend - there was some gaming to run at this season's LUG Con. While I was only able to run one game in particular, I'm very happy it was Asylum solely because it was finally getting a run at the table.

For those who may have missed it, Asylum is the game conceived and drafted during a single week for EN World's 7 Day RPG Creation contest thingy back in May of this year. While it didn't win any beauty pageants, the mechanics really stuck in my head and I've tweaked them since that time and gave it a run for its money on Sunday afternoon with the help of Brian and Jeff. They play convicts freshly delivered to the island known only as Asylum. Their neighbours? 198 other convicts who have started up the Contest in an effort to become the last living resident and win a ticket home. In other words, it's a bloody massacre in a can and I'm the can opener.

Have a peak for yourself and let it play in the background while you work. The mechanics are fairly simple (especially in contrast to my earlier work) and I'm very pleased with how this game turned out. If you want to skip the video and learn more about it, just check out this earlier post about Asylum.

Analyzing Last Week - Game Summit and the Big Sale

I am the Warden!!

It was a busy week that finally came to an eventual end as a big online sale through OneBookShelf and my first convention as an exhibitor/publisher were rolled into a big week of sales (pointing out Killshot is now six months old). When it's all said and done, I pulled in $100 after commissions and expenses for all of the above with the majority of it coming from online sales. At the moment, I'm still in the red at close to $240. Helpful as the sale was, it's not something that's wise to repeat over and over again or else I might as well just drop the price down permanently (and it's a bit early and offensive to those first customers who purchased anything at full price).

What I need to focus on is getting the word out about the awesomeness of Killshot and that means conventions and videos. I know I've talked a lot about posting how-to-play videos and posted some rough footage of a new trailer, but that needs to move into a higher position as a weekend project. That leaves us to talk about conventions.

This past weekend's Game Summit was an interesting and educational experience, one that I enjoyed going through. Not just because it was my first con as a publisher/designer working an actual table (shared with the OTGD), but because I learned the table approach is not going to work for Killshot or the Optional System as a whole.

One of the most educational parts of the weekend was watching Corey Reid, creator of Dino-Pirates of Ninja Island, connect with fans and potential customers. It was either his personality, enthusiasm for his product, or that incredibly catchy title that brought them in and the remaining two closed the deal. He also had the benefit of association to help RPG fans connect to the mechanics (Dino-Pirates is influenced by True20 and 3rd edition D&D), something Killshot does have. At most, I can state it borrows elements from Savage Worlds (exploding dice), but everything was intended as original material from the ground up. (This really sounds like bragging when I read it, so I want to make sure that's not my intention at all. It's not an insult or snotty remark to Corey's work. I played a game of Dino-Pirates on Saturday night and all I can say is "undead steampunk-mechanized Tyrannosaurus Rex... on fire." How is that not awesome?)