I find myself thinking a lot about Frontier these days. (It’s probably because I have some self-imposed deadlines for ‘Illusion’ and ‘6’.) Over the last couple of years I’ve harvested some twenty names from the freelancer forums of RPG.net as I try to get a feel for the art that I want for my games….
Category: Industry
COPS – Japan Stylee
Eamon, a technologist in the area of Cybernetics I know[1], posted this: “If you peruse Japanese foreign-resident forums you’ll read a depressing amount of stories about foreigners being told to sign kanji-laden papers ‘so you can go’, only to find they’ve signed a confession – which the courts accept as totally truthful. That acceptance of…
D&D 4th Edition – A lazy blog post
I decided to just post verbatim an IM conversation between the two of us about D&D 4th Edition. I make no apologies for my laziness.
Paper, PoD, PDF
All of the books we’ve published (whether as Crucible Design or LateGaming) have been less than 100 pages. In general, this has felt big enough for the game that was being written, and every time we start out with a new game, one of the earliest questions is “how big is the book?” With the…
Game book layout: the four parts
In trying to layout some of our recent game projects, I’ve noticed some common components in every book, which has led me to the conclusion that every game book really consists of four parts: Character Generation/Creation (Chargen) Game Rules Setting GM Section Different games put these sections in different orders or interweave one or more…
Ransom
The idea of ransoming game material is definitely new and innovative. It’s being done rather successfully by Greg Stolze for his Reign supplements and there’s a Delta Green book ‘Targets of Opportunity’ which is being funded this way as well. Shane Ivey wrote: “If we collect enough “pledges” through Fundable.com to cover the various and…
WotW: Earth – 21 Days of Invasion
The Narrator of the book was close to one of the arrival sites but this was not necessarily the most active site. He also spent more than two weeks (or a three week invasion) hiding in a collapsed house. He was not the first to discover the dead Martians at the end of the invasion…
Subversion for Writers.
TUAW has a link about Subversion for Writers. Subversion is a popular open source version control system. “It allows you to work collaboratively with folks on the same files (in most cases code) without fear of overwriting the work of others. Subversion tracks all the changes made to those files, and who did them, and…
What’s He Building In There?
Title taken from the Tom Waits track. This blossomed into a scenario where the PCs were sent to investigate a murder. A newcomer to a quiet US suburb was found beaten to death in his home. The house is trashed. And no-one else in the suburb heard or saw anything… Anyone else have done something…
Starship Concept Art
Picked up this link to amazing starship concept art over on theRPGSite forums.
Archaeology
I spent a couple of hours in the attic of my parent’s house excavating some old books. I have a notion to sell some of them considering that I’ve not looked at them in a decade but as I continued to browse I don’t think I could find one that I would seriously get rid…
WotW: Earth – Art
Last night I commissioned two art pieces from Storn Cook for the upcoming War of the Worlds book. I really like Storn’s art (massive thread on RPG.net here) and he was very nice when I enquired about the commission and explained what I wanted, even going so far as to suggest additional things. The ‘look’…
23rd Letter: Projects Campaigns
A Project-based campaign is as flexible as the players want. The G.M. may choose themes as he or she wants. PCs working for a Project are relieved of many of the worries of Network members or other independent espers. Usually they are not on the run, living out of safehouses or mobile homes, lack of…
The 23rd Letter
Balbinus on RPG.net responds to someone asking for sourcebooks about running a campaign about the whole concept of PSI powers: “IMO the best is a game called 23rd Letter, it’s basically Firestarter (the Stephen King book/movie) the rpg. Probably OOP but available I would have thought on ebay.” Thanks, Balbinus! It’s not out of print!…
Raising the bar
I’m arrogant to believe that I can write and, to be honest, most of the time the feedback has been pretty good. I like writing, it’d be nice to do it for a living (and not the stressful but boring job at $BIG_COMPANY) but them’s the breaks. In my spare time I write a lot…
Spiralling Down
I don’t blame anyone really. Sometimes I get angry or depressed and curse my friends, my family, the company, the system, the church and anyone else I can name. But it’s a short madness and like all things, it will pass. I haven’t slept very well in the last few days. Bouts of lethargy and…
New Downloads
Some people were looking for them so I’ve put some downloads on the books page: Wildtalents fanzine 1 60K PDF Wildtalents 3 fanzine 1.5MB PDF Wildtalents 5 fanzine 373K PDF 23rd letter character sheet 22K PDF zombi character sheet 86K PDF If there’s anything else in particular that people are looking for, please mention it…
Man vs…
The topic of conversation this morning in the car was the substance of plots. Traditionally, we have plots which are Man versus Man (and yes, I intend to keep the male pronoun because anyone who would be sensitive to it likely has stopped reading a long time ago). Man versus Man This describes the quintessential…
The State of the RPG Industry
An article on MSNBC writes about the woes in the RPG market: “Wizards does not reveal sales figures, but Pramas estimates the overall market for traditional role-playing games at $30 million annually.” When I first read this, my immediate thought was ‘piffle!’ and that it was a vast underestimate of the market. Okay. Let’s take…