Have you ever had Alexander Hamilton wind up your clockwork power armor, jump out of Thomas Paine’s ornithopter, and land in the middle of the Battle of Yorktown to punch General Cornwallis in the face?

No?

Well… would you like to?

The Sons of Liberty Preorder is now open. Take on the role of the Founding Fathers to kick ass and take names for truth, justice, and the American way in the only Roleplaying Game of Freedom and Badassery.

The game’s fast-paced card mechanics ensure high-action madness and revolutionary heroics. If you are playing Benjamin Franklin and you aren’t swinging an electrified kite over your head to clear the streets of redcoats, then you are playing it wrong.

View the game’s Patriot Sheet, Tory Play Aid, and Objectives Sheet.

Play Sons of Liberty in three different modes: Battle Mode, Campaign Mode, and Versus Mode.

In Battle Mode, you and three or more friends play
through one secret “battle” of the Sons of Liberty. One player takes on the role of the Tories, while everyone else picks a Patriot figure to portray. A single battle takes between two and three hours to play.

In Campaign Mode, you and your friends string together a series of battles to tell the whole, secret story of the American Revolution. Each battle features different Patriot figures, and the role of Tory player is traded to a new player each time. Scheduling is simple since the group of players need not be the same for each battle – if Jim can’t make it one evening, there’s just one less Patriot and more badassery for everybody else.

In Versus Mode, you and one other player can each take on the role of one of the Sons of Liberty after the Revolution has been won. Once comrades in arms who founded a nation, the task of actually building that nation often set these men and women at odds. It was their impassioned struggles with each other that formed the nation we know today.

Read the Sons of Liberty Design Blog at Ludanta Retero.

Sons of Liberty will be released on President’s Day, February 15th, Election Year 2008 at OrcCon. Preorder and receive the Full PDF Preview in January in addition to the softcover in February!

The Sons of Liberty preorder is $25 and is available through Kallisti Press website.

At Gamex, I got interviewed for Have Games, Will Travel by the inestimable Paul Tevis. I would say that I sound funny and that I don’t normally sound like that, but I think it’s mostly just how you never sound like you think you do. So apparently I sound like a nebbish. Good thing to know.

Paul and I talk about Full Light, Full Steam, the Sons of Liberty playtest, NerdSoCal.com, and… a whole lot of other stuff.

Perhaps you should put a pointer from here to NerdSoCal, so people know that you’ve picked a new home on the net.
– ScottM

Hey there, folks. The above was left as a comment in the last post, which is, I’ll admit, rather a long time ago. But I am not dead!

The holidays and the winter months with their meager sunlight devastate me and my freetime. But I am not dead!

I released Full Light, Full Steam at GenCon SoCal (my after-action report), which fell a little short of my expectations. But I am not dead!

I mailed out the 50 or so orders of the book, had all the international shipments returned to me, and shipped them out again correctly — in the middle of Christmas post office lines. But I am not dead!

My new job has gone from “help out with our science curriculum” to “oh, did we mention, we’ve never done science before and could you handle, well, all of it?” But I am not dead!

In the few bits of freetime that I’ve had, I’ve been revamping kallistipress.com (new forums, all my microgames, and other stuff!) with the awesome code suite drupal, which I also used to build nerdsocal.com, both of which are giant time sinks. But I am not dead!

I have been playing mad amounts of RPGs, from the weekly playtests to Primetime Adventures to Nobilis. But I am not dead!

I have a half-baked essay on gaming and politics brewing. I’m going to do a “the whole process of publishing FLFS” post. I’m going to tell you about all the awesome that is piling up for Sons of Liberty. Really, I am. Any time, now. When I have half a second to breathe.

But I am not dead!

It’s finally time to run up the flag and see who salutes.

Full Light, Full Steam, a 192-page digest (6″x9″) hardbound, is now available for preorder. When you preorder, you get both the book when it’s released at GenCon SoCal in November as well as the PDF immediately (”immediately” being defined as “when I check my mail and send it to you”). If you’re coming to GenCon SoCal, you can pick up your copy at the con.

If, for reasons beyond understanding, you’ve been reading this blog and you don’t know what Full Light, Full Steam is, you can take a look at the webpage or click on the Full Light, Full Steam category to the right for design notes.

I’m kind of dizzy.

This was the day when it all became real. Everything went from theoretical and well-intentioned plans and turned into actions.

• Kallisti Press is now a legal entity, as of this morning.
• Kallisti Press has a bank account, as of this afternoon.
• I have finalized the last week of my production schedule.
• As of this evening, I have a final draft of the book, laid out, with art, to do a final proofread on.
• I’ve chosen a printer, and as of tomorrow, I’ll have a place on their calendar.

Today was that part of the roller coaster when you just crest the top of the first hill, your stomach floats up into your throat, and you realize exactly how high up you are. Which also means, I suspect, that the ride is just starting.

Holy shit.

Just started the bid process for FLFS. There’s really nothing like sending out a batch of emails which make tons of people all over the world start running around crunching numbers so they can get back to you. Kind of cool.

Also, somebody’s started leaving spam comments where they quote a bit of the article, then say, “I disagree. My response is here.” Clever. And annoying. Especially since the website is supposedly for apartments in Warsaw.

Overnight we seemed to have picked up fifty new users on the Kallisti Press forum, all of whom are very interested in talking about viagra and hot russian girls looking for american husbands. For the nonce, I’m disabling user registration; I’ll figure out something more elaborate (like just nuking the forum) later.

Update: after an initial influx of activate-this-account emails, these requests seem to have trailed off. So the forums will stay, with new accounts needing to be activated by a real live human being — that being me.

Alright, it took me forever to post this up, but it was a messy file that needed a lot of cleaning up to make it readable. Now it’s pretty!

Read the Agora IRC Playtest from April 15, 2006, in all its htmlified glory.

Shreyas, DevP, and Vaxalon gave Agora a whirl a couple weekends ago. We uncovered a lot of textual concerns and clarified some rules questions, so it was good stuff.

More in-depth discussion at The Forge and Story Games.

Ludanta Retero. loo DAWN ta ree TIER oh. It’s Esperanto!

Lud- is “play” or “game.”
-ant- makes it a present participle.
-a makes it an adjective.

Ret- is “net” and is colloquially used for the internet.
-er- makes it a smaller piece of a larger thing.
-o makes it a noun.

This is my little corner of the net about playing games.

I realized that I had links to the design blogs of a number of game designers, but not a link to their website where you can get their games. Sometimes the link between the blog and the “main site” was obvious from the blog — and in other cases there wasn’t even a mention (tsk tsk). So I added a link category for “Get Games From” and now it’s got all sorts of links to where you can actually pick up the games from these new voices in game design.