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.

Final art for Full Light, Full Steam is in, thanks to Lemuel Pew (of Lethal Doses) and Kirk Mitchell. It’s a perfectly awesome experience to see what has until now been only text and talk turn into such incredible images.

Here’s three of the eight big illustrations in the book:

Figure 1.1 Lieutenant Hargrave occupies the attention of the pirate “Admiral” Black while HMS Chesterfield sees to his “fleet.”

Figure 1.2 A saboteur wreaks havoc in the motor room of HMS Puncher.

Figure 4.1 Crewmen aboard HMS Aetherstone take a moment for tea.

Preorders begin later this week! Madness!

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.

GenCon SoCal event registration is now up and running.

In addition to as many booth demos as I humanly can pull off, I’ll be running four scheduled games of Full Light, Full Steam, one on each day at various times. I’ll be using a set of six pregenerated characters and firing up the Situation Engineering rules to create four scenarios in different locations in the solar system — Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. Consider them episodes in a non-continuous series.

To my utter surprise, the Sunday game (Venus) is already full. Thursday and Friday (Mercury and Mars) are half-full. The first day of registration. Insanity.

More gears is good. And a few more couples on the light tube so it looks less like a neon light.

Judd started an excellent thread about summer gaming over on story-games. In writing mine out, I was pretty surprised at how many games I’ve played this summer alone. I don’t know if I remembered all the shit I played this summer. Seriously, the LAGames playtest circle has been the best gaming experience I have ever had. Weekly play of something without getting bogged down in interminable campaigns that go stale. Beautiful stuff.

So I’ve played:

Repertoire, three playtests of a design that gets tightened up and developed each time, and is shaping up into a fantastic game. Our troupes of actors roving from enclave to enclave have been huge on color, strong on conflict, ceaseless in backbiting. The post-apocalyptic worlds have been beautiful, quirky things created from madcap fevered creativity. Love this game.

Joy Division, Mark’s entry for that two-page game design thing. Folks, seriously, go download it from 1km1kt or whatever it’s called cause this game is smokin awesome. Lets you play Men In Black trying to forestall the singularity of technology and social development that will destroy the human race, with a die system that will not quit. Super fucking awesome.

The Shadow of Yesterday, played in the outskirts of Near, with a pair of very different goblins and a couple of humans who, it was my impression, really didn’t know what to do with the goblins. I really didn’t ‘get’ the game in the first session, but I’m looking forward to giving it a crack next time with a little more understanding of how things are supposed to go.

Dogs, me running and Judson and Jeff playing. Playing through a town that I’d run before and watching it turn out totally different, complete with a meddling ex-Dog and an entire game where guns didn’t even come out, let alone get fired. Also played Dogs earlier at Gamex, and this game is just simply a joy to introduce new folks to the indie catalog of games. Running it again this weekend.

Heads of State: 9 short games about tyrants, which we finally finished playtesting the last couple games this summer. Being that it’s Mark’s design, it’s a big quirky machine that churns out quirky situations and characters, but despite all that it produced some pretty interesting results, especially in terms of the dictator that we ended up playing around the most. Cubism + PoliSci + RPGs… who would have thought that equation equaled Awesome?

Full Light, Full Steam playtests of many stripes, watching the final bits and pieces of the system fall into place, seeing where the text needs some smoothing over and where entire sections should just be cut out and left behind. The total glee in watching players take my baby and run off in new directions that I would have never thought of — playing naval intelligence spies! Doing an upstairs/downstairs with the officers and enlisted men! Great stuff!

Cage of Reason in a hotel room with Jason and Mark and Judson, ‘just cause’ Jason was in town. Philosophers throwing down in cage-match wrestling style. Bizzare and funny.

Nine Worlds at Gamex, wonderful, beatiful game that I desperately want to play again, but there’s so many other games piling up in the hopper. The same basic situation, played by two different groups, came out in one as a soap opera and in ours as a paranoia-filled crucible as everyone was spying on everyone else.

Roach at Gamex, a little claustrophobic with only four players, but enough of a taste that I am so there when it runs this weekend. Our Regina Sutton actually survived, relatively unmarred, much as Jesse tried to kill her.

Primetime Adventures, also at Gamex. I was a little skeptical of the groupmindshare stories that I’d heard about the game, but in the end they’re all true. Our series, set in a mental institution where something is threading the patients’ delusions together, was fantastic, and in the space of four or five hours we managed to squeeze off a pitch, a pilot, and an episode in the middle of the series. I am so running this game again this weekend.

Man, now I’m all stoked for this weekend.

Full Light, Full Steam is all laid out, sans art. So all I’m doing now is waiting for the art to come in… and fiddling with the design.

Fiddle fiddle fiddle.

Seriously, I should go do dishes or something.

Fiddle.

Also, new title treatment:

It’s been one of those surprisingly productive days today. I’ve been a Full Light, Full Steam Illustrator-ing madman, doing up some little bits and pieces of layout art and then moving in on some play aids that I’ve been meaning to add to the game.

Situation Engineering Sheet Having run Dogs at con many times over, I’ve been struck by how indispensable the Town Creation sheet is. It’s like a character sheet for the Game Master, with all the important bits right there and handy. So handy, in fact, I doubt I will ever put out a game that doesn’t have a situation sheet. For FLFS, it’s sort of like a worksheet to guide players through Situation Engineering. You write in the inspirations you’ve gathered, create three conflicts off of the inspirations, build the individual conflicts with cogs, complicate the cogs together, and then write up the situation abstract that puts everything in an almost sensible order. Click on the thumbnail to download a significantly more legible pdf version.

Cog Cards

FLFS uses some heavy delegation of running NPCs, and the situation’s sets and props are more communal property than GM toys. This means that the details of characters, sets, and props — called cogs in Situation Engineering — need to be easily passed from player to player. I love me some 3×5 cards, so I set up individual cogs on separate cards — easy to flip around the table as needed. Folks who might not share my love with the 3×5 card can just print up sheets of them. Cowards.

And needless to say, click on the picture to download the pdf document.

All the copyedits and playtest edits have been added to the FLFS manuscript. The text of the first edition is, more or less, done.

Art, Layout, and Manufacture to go.