In the light of getting my new price-adjusted iPhone, I have a request for the podcasters out there:

Get some art on your podcasts! My podcast line-up is a long row of black squares because only the Sons of Kryos have got themselves some art. It’s very sad.

Thanks!

Download the file here or subscribe to the podcast.

We took Paul Czege’s Acts of Evil for a spin. This is… uh… its My Life With Master grown up, except the GM plays the minions and the players play the Masters.

But this is what we talk about:

00:00 Introduction — What the Hell is this Game?
02:10 Strategies of Play — First first: how do you win?
08:04 Terrenes and Character Generation
16:04 Mechanics
30:01 Game Play
39:41 GMing Acts of Evil

That’s right; we blather on for almost a full hour. Even Paul might not make it to the end!

Music by Doctor Steel and the Scissor Sisters.

So we playtest’d Vincent Baker’s Poison’d on Wednesday. After the game, as we were just beginning our post-play feedback-n-bitch session, we popped open the ol’ MacBook, launched GarageBand and hit record. Later, I mixed in some silly music and stuff, which was dead-easy, and what do we get? An entertaining 20 minutes for Vincent, and anybody else who cares to listen.

What we talk about:
00:00 Introductory Nattering
01:30 Long Form Game?
07:05 Character Generation
09:00 The X Economy
12:30 Fights, Escalation, and NPC Stats
18:41 Bargains
19:48 For Adults Only?
20:47 Page Design

You can download the file here.

We’ve now got first drafts for the play aids for Sons of Liberty in preparation for the beta playtest starting soon. Available in letter-sized 8.5×11 format, these play aids are freely downloadable.

Patriot Sheets

Break the rules Patriot style on this simple mad-libs style character sheet. List off your patriot’s favored circumstances, slot in specialty suits, and you are all set to kick ass and take names.

Then, when you’re shouting about how you smack General Thomas Gauge in the face with a giant gear, the sheet also lists the four suits of the game and their corresponding flavors of narration — is that a Patriotic action, or is it a Clever action?.

Available in letter-sized 8.5×11, two to a page.

Tory Sheets

When you play Tory, you’re not playing one villain, you’re playing five. What’s Howe’s Abuse? What’s Bloody Mary’s Usurpation? What’s the difference between playing a 3 and a 4? It’s all laid out here for quick reference, along with a slot for the Secret Objective of Campaign Mode.

Available in letter-sized 8.5×11.

Objectives Sheet

Start the game off right at the Grand Lodge of the Americas, plotting the ascendancy of the American Dream. Use this Objectives Sheet to decipher the Whist Code and identify the key priorities that will help the Sons of Liberty carry the day against the dastardly Tories.

Available in letter-sized 8.5×11.

I realized a couple days ago that I had hit the point in developing Sons of Liberty that I needed to see it in layout to keep developing the manuscript effectively. So last night I sat down and put together a ’starter’ layout, and flowed a little over 80 pages of the book. Since all of the art in the book is square (for eventual potential as art on a custom deck of cards), I just dropped 4×4, 2×2, and 1×1 frames into the pages to adjust flow.

Then I placed actual art into the frames, cause, hey, why not? They were on my hard drive anyway.

I was surprised by how quickly and easily all the disparate pieces came together to make a very good design draft. It’s always encouraging to find out you’re farther along than you thought you were.

I’m going to fiddle a bit, and then I may have some sample spreads to show off.

The following is a souped-up version of a comment I made on Story Games which a lot of folks have said a lot of nice things about. I’m reproducing it here (and embellishing it a bit) in the hopes that other folks can get some use out of it.

The following will sound like 9th grade English advice on constructing an essay; it’s only marginally related. This is planning and constructing a book, which is way the hell more complicated. This isn’t about designing a roleplaying game. This assumes that you’ve already designed the game. This is about writing the game, taking the design and presenting it in a way that’s comprehensible to people who are not inside your head like you are.

You probably have your setting and rules written down somewhere. That is not your manuscript. Those are notes. Now that you have completed notes, you need to write the manuscript. Before you write the manuscript, you need to plan the manuscript.

(Doing the following on index cards is really helpful; you can also do it on a word processor, or even in a plain old notebook — but you’ll use a lot, a lot of pages and get hand cramps.)

Write down a list of all the things that you’d need to explain to your intended audience*. This is not a list of rules, although the different rules will probably be items on the list. Then start shifting around the items on the list so they’re in the order that you’d present them in. After you think you’re done, go down the list and for each item think about what other things need to be explained before that item. Make sure they’re already on the list, above that item. When you’re done, you’ve got a procedure to teach the game.

Now chunk the list into sections. Some of the items will look like they sort of ‘belong’ to a previous item: make the belonger a subitem of the belongee. Some of the items will look like they sort of belong together as a group. Create a new item for the group, give it a temporary name, and make all the others subitems of the group name. You’ll need to go through the list a few times. You’ll get groups of groups, and subitems of subitems, and at some point, they’ll all clump up into a reasonable number of supergroups. Eventually, these groupings will become chapters, but don’t think of them as such yet, because you’ll end up making assumptions. You have a rough sketch of what the book will look like.

Now go through the list and use indents to indicate main topics and supporting topics. Any good word processor can do this. If you can use ‘Harvard’ outlining, with roman numerals and then a/b/c and then 1/2/3, you’ll be golden. Eventually, those become part/chapter/section/segment distinctions (with roman numerals being chapters, lowercase alpha being sections, arabic numbers being segments, and so on). Right now, just sort of get them organized. Now you have an outline.

Extra bonus: go through the whole list and write down, in one short paragraph, what gets explained in that section. This may very well make you realize that you need to add an item or two somewhere.

Payoff: You have a nice, fleshed out outline. Now you can write any section, in any order, whichever section appeals to you when you sit down at your desk. Tick them off as you go. Write all the sections separately and in different word processing files. You’ll thread them together later. Do that only after you’ve written the vast majority of the sections (at least 90%). Then read it through yourself; you’ll notice a couple bits that you left out. Write those as sections and insert them somewhere appropriate in the outline and the compiled manuscript. Then you will have a first draft, which you can hand to somebody else who can read it and tell you which bits don’t make sense.

Super Awesome Payoff: Using a word processor or layout program that actually uses styles, you can define styles for different levels of headers. There are chapter headers, section headers, segment headers, and so on. How do you know what level header you should use? Refer to your outline and what level of indent that bit is at. You should be able to do this uniformly down the whole outline. Not only do you have regular styling, you also have a table of contents!

For an example of this in action, see John Wick’s Livejournal, where he is posting the sections of Houses of the Blooded as he writes them. Each of those sections, and what is covered in each section, is coming off of an outline like the one I described above.

This is a lot of work, but the trick is to plan it and chunk it out so that it never feels like a lot of work. Whenever you sit down, you should be sitting down to write just one section — a page or three. You will be astounded at how quickly you tick off the items on your outline.

Then it’s time for somebody else to look at it and tell you where it doesn’t make sense, and then you can start playtesting!

* You have an intented audience, even if you haven’t identified it yet. What kind of person do you want to get your game to? Who do you want to play it? That’s your intended audience. Write for them.

(Clicky for Larger)

The British are Coming! Help spread the news of the upcoming Sons of Liberty roleplaying game with this rugged teeshirt with art by the fantastic Jake Richmond. The tee sports one of the game’s teaser images: Paul Revere on a “midnight ride” ahead of a lumbering British war machine. It’s a great image for inspiring double-takes, which is always what I look for in a teeshirt. These tees are from the same folks that made us the Nerdly Beach Party tees, and are high quality shirts with some rock-solid screenprinting. Revenue from these shirt sales will go directly into the production of Sons of Liberty. Price: $20.00 Order your shirt here.

In short form, folks, this is a very cool looking tee-shirt that I’m shilling to defray overhead for the game. I figure, if I’ve got this excellent art, I might as well use it. So if you’re looking forward to Sons of Liberty and if you’d like a neat shirt, I’ve got a neat shirt for you. If you’re looking forward to the game but don’t need this fantastic shirt, well then, I’ll have a game for you in Election Year 2008!

Okay, so look. This is how publishing works:

1. You spend a lot of time, effort, and occasionally money on a project. You work your ass off getting it done, and then you work your ass off again polishing it and getting it really done.
2. Then you release it into the wilds of the world. You make it available as best you can, and offer it up for consumption.
3. Maybe some people will be impressed with it, buy it, use it. Maybe they’ll say nice things about it. Maybe they won’t.

As a publisher, you have control over steps 1 and 2. You have no control whatsoever over step 3. Ever.
Hopefully, by the time you’re done with step 1, you’ve got a project that you’re proud of. By the time you’re done with step 2, you’ve presented it in such a way that you’re proud of that. But because you have no control over step 3, you cannot take pride in the reception of your product. You didn’t do that. Your pride in your work comes from making a good product and presenting it well. The feel-good that you get from the good reception isn’t pride; it’s fame. Fame is never earned; it is not something to be proud of.
“But!” you might say, “surely the quality of the product has something to do with its reception! Surely a good book sells well!” To which the answer is, in all seriousness, “No.”
There is no correlation between any standard of quality and actual sales. Let me repeat that: there is no correlation between quality and sales. Sales are not derived from quality, they’re derived from utility. Utility is, roughly, how useful a given product is for a given customer. It comprises how well it fulfills that need, and at what cost — not only in terms of its price tag but also the time and energy it takes to find out about the product and purchase the product. As a publisher, you have feeble control over a lot of these factors, and seeing to them falls under step 2. You have absolutely no control over the needs of the consumer. You cannot control how well your product is received.
You can attempt to predict what the consumer wants. This is called market research. It’s very difficult; there are few reliable tools for this process, and the market can shift and slide much, much faster than your development and production schedules can compensate for. To put it another way, even if you figure out what a lot of customers want right now, it still takes you a couple months to make a product to fit that need, and by that time they may all want something else, or somebody else may have come out with a product to fill their needs before you got done. And just to clarify, talking to your friends on an internet forum is not market research. That’s talking to your friends on an internet forum.

So what is a publisher to do?

Isn’t the entire affair built around the idea that, at step 3, people will give you money and compliments for a job well done? If you can’t control that, what’s the point, anyway? Here’s how to cope:

• Take pride in the steps you have control over. Make a fantastic product. Present it magnificently. Don’t hitch your wagon to customer response.
• Don’t invest anything into the project that you’re not okay losing to the project. That goes for money, certainly — find ways to develop and produce your product without a lot of capital — but it also goes for time, effort, and emotional involvement. Consider any investment in the project the same way you’d think about investing into a vacation: is the investment worth the enjoyment you’ll get from it? If no, don’t do it. (The solution of the corporate world is a neat solution, here: use other people’s money to finance your project; use employees’ time and effort to develop and produce; pay the employees with the other people’s money; repeat.)
• Stop publishing like a consumer. If everybody’s ga-ga over new product X and you want to join in, get a copy of product X. Don’t publish a clone of product X. Publish what you can’t get elsewhere (and make it good). What you publish should not be the same thing as what you get elsewhere.
• Implement step 4, and don’t confuse it with step 3. This, with a smattering of the first three, is my preferred solution. What’s step 4, you might ask. It is:

4. Interact with the consumers who do use your product. Get to understand their needs and fulfill them: either with immediate, ‘free’ materials or in a supplement or the next edition.

The beauty of step 4 is that it is again under your control, and it is something that you can take pride in. Getting to know your customers as people, and not as wallets with human beings attached, means you get to make a real connection with people who share your interests. That’s awesome.
Now, one might be tempted to add in, “also, good customer service leads to more sales” but this is a trap. This is mistaking step 4 for step 3. Providing customer service is not making sales. If you think of it in terms of making more sales, or building a market, or whatever else, you’re going to kill it dead. Step 4 is about interacting with people, not drawing more wallets-with-people-attached closer to your bank account. Step 4 is only worthwhile as long as it’s genuine, and once it’s not, it’s just another chore — for both you and your consumers.
Step 4 is just as important as Steps 1, 2, and 3. For my money, if you’re not doing step 4, you’re not really publishing. If you can’t bring yourself to do step 4, you might reconsider publishing. These are the people that you’re publishing the product for — if you didn’t have any interest in these people, you can just develop the product and let it sit on your hard drive, or publish your very own copy through Lulu.
And that is, really, my end goal here in this article: publishing may not be a good idea for you. Publishing is a pretense for applying yourself to something you think is worthwhile and a means for allowing others to share in that thing. If you want to make and share what you like, publish. If you want people to tell you you’re clever, go somewhere else. Publishing is a terrible way to get people to notice you.