Kickstart the Continuum

I am the Warden and holy crap am I involved in a lot of Kickstarter this year.

I have a little confession to make, dear readers. I've been keeping a secret from you, but before you start throwing emoticons of disappointment, there is a valid reason. It's a professional secret, one I could not talk about because it wasn't my secret to keep.

Last month, I was approached by Senior Aaron Huss from Mystical Throne Entertainment, publisher of Savage Insider (and my latest article set to release in April of this year) and webmaster for Roleplayers Chronicle (and home to my pride and joy, Under the Hood). He was putting together an adventure path for Savage Worlds called Perilous Journeys and wanted to know if I would be open and available as a campaign/adventure writer for two of the six-part series. Attached was an amazingly detailed plan of attack to get this project kickstarted and launched for release in the middle to late months of this year.

You know what, let's get you a link to check it out first. Behold the Kickstarter that is Twilight Continuum!! 

The initial goal is to raise funds to complete the first adventure in the series, Vanguard. Once it passes the initial $11,000 goal, every additional stretch goal brings the next step closer to reality. To make the entire series a reality, we're looking at $66,000 for the complete 6-part series in PDF and print with additional goals to produce sweet features, including a hardcover compilation of Twilight Continuum.

Should everything work out and this project becomes a reality, I'll be handling Book Two: Enemy At The Gates and Book 5: Final Destination. What are they all about? Uh-uh, that's what the link is for. As time goes on and this project climbs higher and higher up the ladder, I'll be sure to tease up what's in store for our intrepid band of future warriors. Until then, check out Twilight Continuum and offer up your support for independent game publishers. 

American Gangster

I am the Warden!!

It may not come across in these posts, but I'm a huge true crime buff. Have been for close to twenty years and I still have close to two dozen VHS tapes filled with old episodes of American Justice from A&E's old days. With the recent addition of Identification Discovery (ID) and new additions of true crime shows and documentaries on Netflix and the perfect mixture of my fiancee becoming fascinated with true crime, it's running nearly non-stop on our TVs. It's not uncommon for us to fall asleep watching programs discussing horrific murders and bodies found in rivers.

One of the shows we're hooked on is American Gangster, narrated by Ving Rhames and originally aired on BET. Our usual interpretation of inner city gangsters invoke gang bangers and punks pointing their guns sideways in drive-by shootings. This series demonstrates the truth is often crazier than fiction.

If you're at all interesting in the genre, gangs, or American history in the 1960s and 1970s, highly recommend catching this one. Available now on Netflix. 

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?)

Building the Playtest [Optional Core]

I am the Warden!!

On top of everything else going on this past week, there were two playtests for two different games in development: Optional Core and TPK. Today, we're going to talk about Optional Core because this one's actually on my to-do list and TPK is on my why-dude-there's-already-so-much-you-have-to-do list.

The Development Team showed up for their monthly game Friday night and it was the first time we sat down to specifically test out Optional Core. Unlike Killshot, which has a specific setting/timeline/genre, Optional Core is intended for use in nearly anything you can devise for your personal RPG. Up until the day before, I had intended to use an old setting of mine (if anyone happens to have read Combat Advantage #16 from my Emerald Press days, you may recognize Cassia) and adapt it accordingly to suit the characters everyone rolls up. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed counterintuitive to the purpose of testing Optional Core. I'm not trying to make a game that works within an existing genre or setting, I'm trying to create a game that can handle any genre or setting. Therefore, we should devise the setting at the same time as the characters.

There were, however, certain conditions this setting had to include for playtesting reasons.

What I Learned From A Writing Marathon

I am the Warden!!

The first draft of Fires Across the Plains is nearly complete and by nearly, I mean the gamebook itself has a complete first draft. All that remains is touching up the appendix (there will be rules for creating half-breed characters, such as half-orcs, half-elves, half-goblins, and half-giants) and provide an prologue detailing a rough layout of the landscape.

Capping off the gamebook's draft, however, required a shitload of catching up. When I originally signed up for this project, I figured there was enough time on my plate to get it done in roughly three months and this past weekend was pretty much the end of that third month. I needed to fire off a massive amount of text and get this sucker done or else it was going to require an extension and while an extension shouldn't have been a problem, I still need this project off my plate for the moment to clear room for my incredibly busy schedule. (After this, it's time to wrap up layout and final output for Killshot Files #1: Blaze of Glory and I'm getting started on an article for Savage Insider on a new Savage Worlds race build. These lead into next month when I'll be at Game Summit in Ottawa and work continues on both Killshot: Reloaded and Optional Core.)

I needed to pull a writing marathon.

Organizing the Chaos [Fires Across the Plains]

I am the Warden!!

This week is committed to the completion of Fires Across the Plains first complete draft. I have to admit that this project was not underestimated so much as my plot was underestimated. It's typical of me to overshoot my expectations and find myself adapting to the complexity (if anything, it's very inspirational and gives me a real swift kick in the butt to get going) and, in its own way, has made me more confident for another one. Down the road, after getting some other major projects out of the way (Reloaded and Optional Core).

As I've written about before, learning the best approach to handle the chaos that is a gamebook required some early research and has since been adjusted. There have been some hiccups along the way and corrections have been made, which is predominantly why this draft has taken a couple extra weeks to complete. As promised, I thought I'd take some time to go over that very process.

Stating the inevitable here, but writing a gamebook carries one major distinction to writing a regular game or short story: the chronology is out of whack. Keeping it organized is the key to not screwing it up and organization is still a significant aspect of this work I'm struggling with. (Just this past weekend, I lost my playtest character for Fraser Ronald's Centurion RPG and had to start over, despite the fact that I'm playing from home at the same desk using Skype and the character sheet shouldn't be anywhere else but my desk.) For many, the entire plot is laid out in great detail using post-it notes and flowcharts, leaving the bulk of the writing centring on filling in the details and descriptions. As previously discussed in the above link, it's a process I have difficulty with because it feels stifling. When I write, I love to experience the story unfolding as I write it. In a way, it's how I verify the errors in my plot before making a second pass to fill in any gaps, beef up the details, and flesh it into something real. I needed a way to accomplish both the organization and freedom without sacrificing either.

Championship Match & Unbelievable Odds [TPK]

I have to admit, no idea why I'm using this infamous D&D pic.
Until I can draft up a TPK logo, it's a good visual for the game
whenever I post updates or related material. 

I am the Warden!!

Fun time last night. We had a couple of friends over, including one of my fiancee's cousins, for a bunch of games and beverages that would make it unwise to drive. For Chris and I, it was a chance to finish up our initial match of TPK.

On Thursday, I talked about this work-in-progress skirmish game and provided a download to the first draft PDF. The day before, Chris and I ran a match in the Arena for 60 minutes before he had to go running back to school. Unfortunately, we weren't finished because of something I expected to be a rare event in the game: we had a tie.

To refresh, the goal of TPK is to end a 60-minute match with a single combatant holding the highest number of Damage points declared the Victor. In the event of a tie between two or more combatants, a special match is declared with both combatants entering a new Arena and fighting to the death. These matches differ in that every combatant starts with an amount of Health equal to their previous Damage score, thereby putting everyone off on a stronger and equal footing.

If a combatant is still alive at the end of a regular match and has the highest number of Damage points, that character is instead declared the Champion and is permanently added to the deck of combatants. The concept behind Champions is to reward such a rare occurrence, seeing as the theme behind the game is death (hence the name TPK).

In the case of our first match, when the timer sounded the end of the match, we had two standing combatants with a tie for the highest Damage (9 points). That's right, our first time ever playing this game and we have to go to a tie-breaking match to determine who would be declared the Champion and be added to the deck.

I'm not one for probability calculation, but I know my expectation of this happening was incredibly rare. We'll have to see if that's the case and as excited as I am for it to have happened out first time out, if it's actually a frequent event, I'm torn. On one hand, the original concept of the game was for everyone to die... a lot. That was part of the fun. If it's regularly possible for multiple Champion candidates in a single game, do I still want to call it TPK? Or do I want to play around with the gears and make it less frequent?

We shall see. As I've said before, this game is very much a side project run on my spare time (I know, that actually sounds ludicrous as I'm technically not employed and freelancers aren't supposed to have spare time) and I'm not sure when I'll be able to run another test or get to any of the revisions noted so far. I will say this... it was a lot of fucking fun. My hopes are high on this one.


You can download the first draft of TPK here. No charge, it's on me.