Paul Tevis is using Full Light, Full Steam to run Spelljammer. And they look like they’re having fun.

Alrighty. After surprisingly little headache, I have proofs coming from Lulu for Full Light, Full Steam in hardcover and in softcover. Hardcovers will be going for $30 and come with the Full PDF Preview. Softcovers will be going for $20 — a steal, I tell you!

With copies in stock in a couple weeks, I’ve set up preorders and all that jazz:

Preorder Full Light, Full Steam!

As of today, I am sold out of Full Light, Full Steam hardbacks.

We’ve blown through the last of my stock after the Have Games, Will Travel podcast. I figured the stock would hold out for another week or so, but I didn’t count on folks buying multiple copies! I am rather happy, despite having zero on hand.

This weekend I’ll be doing up a new pdf for Lulu (with a few typos fixed and errors repaired) and getting a proof ordered. With any luck, we’ll have new Lulu hardbacks within a couple weeks!

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.

I love getting art for games in development. Nothing makes me want to write more than seeing awesome illustrations by talented people with fun spins on “my” material. Sons of Liberty is going to have a whole ton of art, and it’s streaming into my inbox every week, now. It’s to the point where I can’t help but share:

Anna Krieder is doing the Connected (Diamonds) illustrations, involving networking, connections, and social-fu:

Jake Richmond is doing the Patriotic (Hearts) illustrations, involving courage, martial prowess, and sacrifices:

I am so looking forward to laying this book out, since I am going to be drowning in art assets to throw into pages!

Back in the day, dramatists used to write plays that had three “unities:” unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action. That is, the entire play took place within a single day, the stage represented one place throughout the play, and there was only one plotline with no subplots. This was, ultimately, a misinterpretation of Aristotle that got elaborated on for a few centuries until it was the unquestioned standard of The Way Things Are. You’ve gotta love European thought sometimes.

Now, there’s this thing that can happen in Full Light, Full Steam that can totally bog down the game and paralyze the scrip system’s scene pacing. In short form, the players get most or all of the characters into one scene and then each character goes off in a different direction to do a different thing. In response to this, the scrips scream in horror, shrivel up, and die on the table.

Fixing the Problem

Much as the classical unities were a reductive idea overzealously imitated, they can be useful tools in fixing this problem. To put it simply, a ’scene’ in Full Light, Full Steam should possess at least two of the three unities, and should probably start off with all three.

So when you frame up a new scene, it’s the three officers in the cockpit of the escort ship, flying out to the derelict frigate to see what’s up. You’ve got time, place, and action right there. Now, if the scene continues on and they get to the airlock and proceed to the frigate, that’s fine: they’ve only violated unity of place. Alternately, if some pirates attack on the way over, that’s fine, too: it’s just unity of action that’s broken. What you should not do, however, is stretch the one scene across fighting off the pirates as well as boarding the derelict ship. That’s too much stuff for one scene, and you lose the common thread that makes the scene a scene.

Basically, it’s fine to have everybody united in one thing and do that thing in more than one place or over a period of time (a chase scene, for instance). It’s also fine to have lots of characters doing different things in the same time and place (shore leave at the Arcturus Arms!). When you cram more into the scene, though, and have different characters doing different things in different places and over a space of time, you are trying to shoehorn the entire adventure into one scene. At which point the scene pops from overpressure and spills the game all over the table.

Which is not to say that you shouldn’t have all that stuff happening in your game. You should! All those things, though, should be in different scenes. A scene is just a display box for the cool stuff in your game. If you put too much cool stuff into one box, none of it is displayed well. Luckily, scenes are free, and you can have as many display boxes as you like.

Enough Abstraction! What Do I Do?

When framing a scene, lay out when it is, where it is, and what is happening. That way it’s clear what the unity of time, place and action is. This is easier than it may sound: “Okay, a half-hour later, we’re in the fighter flying away from HMS Imperial, heading down to the colony. Lt. Hastings, Captain Montrose, and Sally are in the cockpit.” Boom: everybody should be on the same page.

Then, when you’re in a scene, your character can leave the area only if he’s going to do something in coordination with the other players — you preserve time and action while breaking place. If you want to leave and do something else, that’s great: it’s just another scene. Get yourself a full scrip and pass it so you can set a new scene, or pass a not-full scrip and jumpcut to somebody who’s where you want to be.

Similarily, when you are in a scene, your character can only start doing something new as long as the scene has stayed and will stay in one place — you are preserving time and place while breaking action. If you’re in a travelling scene and you want to do something new, grab a scrip and jumpcut to somebody else. Then the scene after that may allow you to do your thing.

Lastly, when you are in a scene and you want to do something that takes some time — fix a complicated assembly in the faraday drive, for instance — you can ‘montage’ your way through time to being finished only if nobody else is doing other things at the same time and you stay put with the problem. You can break unity of time only if you preserve unity of place and action.

If you are not in a scene and want to break into it, make sure your entry doesn’t break a second unity. If you want to burst in and shift the focus onto doing something new, make sure that the scene has unified time and place. Also make sure that the ‘doing something new’ will not require breaking time or place. “Hey guys, let’s stop doing this and go do that” breaks two unities and will require a new scene before you “go do that.”

Unfortunately, this problem has only really come into clear focus now, so it isn’t in the first edition, first printing. It will certainly be in the next edition; it may get added to the second printing. I doubt I can add it in without causing some serious shifts in page flow. First significant change to go on the reprint list!

Full Light, Full Steam is a niche game with a lot of good writing and interesting mechanics. The Engineering the Situation chapter is, as I’ve said, one of the best advice sections I’ve ever seen. While there are other games (such as Space: 1889 and Forgotten Futures) that cover this same sort of genre, FLFS does it with more… well, more character.

Colin Fredericks of Valent Games has “swapped reviews” with me. While I’m reviewing his game Super Console, he’s reviewed Full Light, Full Steam and posted it to RPGnet. He says some nice things, and I can’t argue too much with that.

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!

Hey, folks.

It has come to my attention that some folks who preordered have not got their Full PDF Preview. If you didn’t specify another email address, the download link was sent to your paypal email account, which, it turns out, is usually an old address that people don’t check any more. Go fig.

So if you’re missing your PDF Preview, shoot me a mail at sales atta kallistipress dotter com and we’ll try and get things straightened out.

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.