In the latest episode of our eponymous podcast, Ken and I talk character agency, palimpsest recovery, Hillfolk Kickstarter logistics, and saving Vinland. Featuring special Pelgrane guests Simon Rogers and Cat Tobin!
As a result of the Hillfolk Kickstarter, Pelgrane Press and I proudly make the DramaSystem rules engine available under two open licenses; the Open Gaming License and the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported License. If you backed the campaign, take a moment to congratulate yourself for making this possible.
Download the CC version here.
Download the OGL version here.
If it’s mid-April it must be time for another Hillfolk progress report. Here’s where the project stands.
I am still awaiting submissions from three Series Pitch writers. Once those are in I’ll be know how the actual word count compares to the goal. This will allow me to edit two other pitches that came in over the requested length, because I’ll then know how much of these I have to cut.
That’s the work of a few days. Once everything’s in and proofed, layout will take about three weeks. We can’t assume that Christian can immediately clear his schedule of other projects when I drop the manuscripts on him, so there’s an indeterminate amount of time there. Once he’s able to start work, we can estimate a hard release date. Turnaround from layout to print is eight weeks. Then the shipping starts.
So our current timeframe looks like [waiting for final submissions] + approximately 1 week final editing + [deck-clearing for Christian] + 3 weeks layout + 8 weeks printing.
Absent a hard release date, let me see what else I have up my sleeve…? How about the long-teased identity of Hillfolk’s mystery contributor?
That would be Ed Greenwood, whose pitch “For Queen or Country” mixes espionage and faery folk in Elizabethan England. Ed surprised me with this over-the-transom submission of piracy, subversion and the Horned Man. This will appear in the main Hillfolk book. The illustration is by Aaron Acevedo. Looks like the original inspiration for Tinkerbell preferred Tudor-era court dress to a miniskirt made of leaves.
After a brief break to complete another commitment, I am once again at work assembling Hillfolk. Here’s an update for backers and future buyers.
All of the key art for Hillfolk and its companion volume, Blood on the Snow, is now in. We’ll need a few spot illos for the LARP and Master Class sections of the latter, but I have an ingenious plan for that and it shouldn’t impact the schedule. This project not only allows for, but requires, a range of illustration styles as great as the range of settings you can bring to life in DramaSystem. So you’ll see a much greater visual variety in these books than any one RPG project would normally accommodate, from line drawing to digital manipulation to painted work to photo collage. At right appears Aaron Acevedo’s evocative illustration for Lester Smith’s ghostly series pitch, “The Spirit Is Willing.”
As of this writing, I have 96% of the text for the core book in hand, and 93% of Blood on the Snow. Almost all of this has already been copy-edited. Two pitches from each book have yet to come in. These include pieces from key names I greedily wish to keep in the books, rather than shifting them to the Pitch of the Month Club. Two of the submitted pitches exceed the standard length; I can run them in extended form if outstanding submissions remain in the wind too long. A fun pitch from an aforementioned and unannounced gaming guru also grants me flexibility to shift the line-up if need be.
I’ve been discussing with graphic designer Christian Knutsson how to handle the presentation of the two books. He’ll be creating two layout styles for us: the Hillfolk theme previewed during the Kickstarter, and a more generic DramaSystem look for the series pitches in the main book. The latter will also appear throughout Blood on the Snow. Christian has valiantly agreed to go above and beyond his original commitment to complete both books for us and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
When we launched the Kickstarter, for a 128-page book from a team of five people, I estimated an April delivery date. I had hoped, against all logic, that we could stick to that after stretch goals expanded the project to two books of twice that size, and a team of approximately eighty contributors. (Eighty? Good grief!) Reality has now set in, and I’ll get a revised publication date out to you when we have one nailed completely down. I don’t want to issue a series of guess dates and then keep having to revise them, so please bear with us as we finalize our duck alignment.
People have been asking how they might support the project now that the Kickstarter has closed. We’ve suspended orders for the moment, in order to concentrate on making the books. When we draw nearer to the final release date, we’ll open a new round of pre-orders for those who missed the crowdfund. Watch this space for further announcements.
In this week’s episode of our humble podcast, Ken and I talk game design economics, why we game, and silver-shirted Hollywood Nazi occultist William Dudley Pelley. Long-awaitedly, we re-enter the historical cage match to once again take on the legacy of and Woodrow Wilson. Was he, as Ken asserts, America’s worst president?
Hillfolk backers, hackers and gawkers take heed—it’s time for me to pop up from a pile of virtual manuscripts and illustration submissions with a progress report. A shockingly high percentage of series pitch writers have gotten their pieces in ahead of this Thursday’s deadline, making my job easier and giving me a big head start on the gargantuan task of assembling the core book and its companion, Blood on the Snow. As of this writing I have over half of the submissions for Hillfolk and over a third for the sourcebook.
Since my last update I’ve edited Emily Care Boss space colonists, Josh Roby Machiavellian Florentines, Dave Gross Shakespearean festival noir, Pedro Ziviani feuding Icelanders, Jesse Bullington backcountry bootleggers, Rob Wieland multi-generational mafioso, T. S. Luikart’s regal rabbits, Gareth Hanrahan high-fantasy heroes and Ian “Lizard” Harac’s 1960s nuke survivors.
Waiting patiently on my hard drive are contributions from Jason Pitre, Will Hindmarch, Eddy Webb, Wade Rockett, Steve Darlington, Ryan Macklin, Chris Lackey, Steve Long and Angus Abranson.
Emily has also submitted her DramaSystem LARP rules, which will constitute a prime reason to grab Blood on the Snow.
I’ve written my own series pitches for Blood, adapting Mutant City Blues and my short story “The Dog” to the DramaSystem platform.
My main contributions to that book’s DramaSystem Master Class are also done. The biggest piece provides players with 14 different approaches to scene-calling. No matter how your creative brain works, there’s a step-by-step for unstumping yourself when the GM calls your name.
If you’ve been planning to submit to this section, by all means do so. We’ve got some great pieces so far but there’s still room to squeeze in a few more.
Our stable of artists has also been hard at work. At right is the subtly compelling illustration for Wade Rockett’s “The Secret of Warlock Mountain” pitch, by the stellar Jonathan Wyke.
With the holidays in the rearview mirror, it’s time for another Hillfolk progress report. I continue to receive great contributions from stretch goal writers ahead of the Jan 31st deadline. This grants me a useful head start, one I’m sure I’ll need when February 1st rolls around and the task of assembling the full books begins in earnest.
Jason L. Blair’s “Inhuman Desires” delivers the promised paranormal romance in sterling fashion. It doesn’t let death get in the way of a tortured love story.
Meguey Baker’s “Under Hollow Hills” pours on the faerie atmosphere, bringing an evocative prose voice to her series of intrigue among the fae, and the humans caught on the thorny boundary between their realm and ours.
Jennifer Brozek’s “Transcend” brings the post-human condition to the dinner table, letting you explore the consequences of radical transformation either on a future Earth or in the social hothouse of an orbiting space station.
Graeme Davis has swashed his buckles with “Pyrates”, bringing the time-honored crime gang drama to the blue waters of the piratical Caribbean.
If you prefer your epic drama under the waves, Richard Iorio has turned in “Dolphins.” Just like he said, it bridges the moods of Finding Nemo and Lord of the Rings.
Compelling human storytelling occupies a smoldering center stage in Greg Stolze’s “Fire in the Heartland.” What is it like to serve as first responder in a community so small you know everyone you’re ever called on to rescue?
Also, I received an early Christmas present in theContributions from Ash Law, Emily Care Boss and Pedro Ziviani have arrived and will be reviewed over the next few days.
Meanwhile, I’ve completed work on the reference document for the DramaSystem open license. This will allow us to release it concurrently with the book.
Art contributions are beginning to roll in. I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen so far and am confident that you will be, too. As a teaser, at right is Rachel Kahn’s illustration for TS Luikart’s “Malice Tarn.”
Although the stellar roster of writers and designers drafted to create Series Pitches for Hillfolk and Blood on the Snow have until the end of January to get their drafts in, an early bird brigade has already begun to submit their pieces. I’m happy to report that they all live up to the promise of their loglines—the only frustration being that, perhaps like me, you’ll want to play them all.
Jason Morningstar does the brilliant job you would expect from him with “Hollywoodland”, infusing his saga of Tinseltown’s silent-cinema infancy with glitz, corruption, and a battle between money old and new.
Cédric Ferrand splendidly evokes 1866 New York in “Grave New World,” finding a fresh angle on vampire intrigue by making it a metaphor for the immigrant experience.
Andrew Peregrine’s “Vice and Virtue” gives Jane Austen fans all they need to launch a whirlwind of lunches, balls, and passion within the tightest of social constraints.
With expertise honed in the creation of actual TV series, John Rogers zeroes in on the many clashing societies and factions of “Shanghai 1930.” This is one of history’s richest settings, and John shows you how to cut to the meat of it.
James L. Sutter’s “The Throne” draws on Milton, Blake, and Vertigo comics with his war in heaven, triggered by the sudden disappearance of the big boss. Come for the angelpunk, stay for the chance to remake the cosmos.
Allen Varney’s “Bots” delightfully realizes its hardscrabble, post-organic premise in a piece that could only be described as Fox Animation’s Robots as rewritten by Upton Sinclair. It’s been a long time since anyone lured Allen back to straight-up RPG writing, and I can report that he hasn’t lost a bit of his satirical edge.
Both of our revisionist superhero pieces are in, as well.
Michelle Nephew’s “Mad Scientists Anonymous” lets you choose between Dr. Horrible-style humor or a darker spin on pulp mythology as its titular characters struggle together to stay sane and institutionalized—but what about the strange machinery humming away down in the basement?
Gene Ha and Art Lyon (concept by Lowell Francis) tackle matters from the opposite end of the genre food chain in “Henchmen,” in which no-powered criminals crewing for a costumed madwoman try to survive in her absence, in a city swarming with masks who hopelessly outmatch them. They wound up taking a straighter, crime-drama inspired approach than originally envisioned. This loses the wonderful original title, “Witless Minions”, but will result in a much richer game experience.
Gene has also turned in his illustration for the piece, the awesomeness of which speaks for itself:
Meg Baker has finished “Under Hollow Hills”; likewise Jason L. Blair with “Inhuman Desires.” I look forward to reading them.
Art assignments for all of the Series Pitches have been made already, and we’re starting to get sketches and preliminaries in. So all is on schedule on that front as well.
The on-time delivery of these pieces represents the main scheduling question mark, so I’m taking these early arrivals as a positive omen. I’ll continue to update Kickstarter backers and punterdom at large as the books continue to take shape.
If you get your Robin Laws information only from this blog, you may wish to be reminded that the Hillfolk Kickstarter is counting down to its astounding conclusion. This offer will not be repeated, so if you haven’t grabbed your tons of electronic content for $10 or two full-color 240 page hardcovers for $41, lurch on over there before 8 pm Eastern tonight.
With the Hillfolk Kickstarter having funded both open licenses for DramaSystem and now GUMSHOE as well, it’s time to consult the stakeholders on just what the configuration of those licenses ought to be. Ultimately the decision will be mine (DramaSystem) and Simon’s (GUMSHOE), but we’re both on the same basic page in wanting low-hassle licenses that encourage uptake by gamers and commercial users alike.
(With GUMSHOE there’s a wrinkle concerning foreign languages. The games have been licensed to various territories, and Simon will respect the wishes of those publishers if they don’t want third-party GUMSHOE material published in their languages. That’s why the text on the Kickstarter site refers to the English language. At least some of our translation partners seem stoked about the open license, so we may be able to widen this out.)
Parentheticals aside….
Hillfolk backers made this happen, so I want to take your preferences into account.
Those of you who aren’t going to use the licenses or play the games, but are here purely out of abstract interest in open culture, will have only the steely rigor of your intellectual argument to fall back on.
The question at hand is whether to adopt an OGL, or OGL-like, approach, or to go the Creative Commons route—or a hybrid of both.
A Creative Commons attribution license that allows for mash-ups would be simplest for me. But that doesn’t require give-back the way the OGL does. Do you as Hillfolk funders want a give-back provision that requires anyone adding or modifying to the DramaSystem structure to also make their design work available on the same open basis as the core license itself? Or do you not care if someone designs a great new sub-system and then treats it as proprietary?
A CC attribution license with Share Alike doesn’t allow third-party publishers to cordon off the story elements of their products from the rules stuff, keeping their intellectual properties proprietary while letting the rules stuff enter the general use pool. When George Lucas wants to do his dramatic game of marital strife between Darth Vader and Natalie Portman, he can’t use DramaSystem under a Share Alike without backdooring Star Wars into the public domain. I’d love to see DramaSystem games based on existing properties, which requires the kind of carve-out the OGL allows for, where certain chunks are designated open content and others product identity.
Stalwart Wolf Clan member and open content maven Bryant Durrell has proposed a CC/OGL mash-up, the details of which I hope he’ll provide in a comment below.
Have at it, people, and don’t let the eternal enmity between Wolf and Lion deter you from speaking out in the name of all the badlands…
Over on the Twitter, Jack Of Spades asked why DramaSystem uses cards instead of dice.
The answer is that as soon as you have dice in your resolution system, you have numbers on your character sheet. Since DramaSystem presents a new play style revolving around the way emotional interactions occur in fiction, I wanted to help gamers jump into it by pulling them out of familiar territory.
In the game (for those of you who have yet to sign onto the Hillfolk Kickstarter and get their playable draft copy), cards come into play only in the type of scene the game de-emphasizes. That’s the procedural, in which characters exert skills to complete external, practical tasks. In other words, the kind of scene we’re used to going to in roleplaying games. As they acclimate themselves to DramaSystem, most groups find themselves going to procedural less and less, invoking it only when it really matters.
As seen on its character sheet, DramaSystem is about the aesthetic of the word and not of the number. In fact, arithmetic plays essentially no role in game play itself. You may compare numbers but you’re never doing even simple math.
(An exception occurs in the post-play bookkeeping phase, when the GM takes a vote and tallies the results, to see which two players get bennies they can use in subsequent sessions.)
While we seasoned gamers feel comfortable seeing numbers on our character sheets—maybe even adrift without them—it’s my hope that the simplicity of the system will allow you to draw in people who are interested in story but never put the words math and fun in the same sentence. (For example, the current stretch pitch for the game, Andrew Peregrine’s Jane Austen tribute Vice and Virtue, might be the perfect vehicle to suck in your book club.)
That’s also why I simplified the already not-crunchy procedural system further after playtest groups found the initial version out of keeping with the game’s overall feel.
I’ll be typing a storm at you on #RPG.NET chat at 8 PM Eastern tonight (Tuesday Oct 23rd.) I’m sure that Hillfolk and its ongoing Kickstarter will be the topic du jour. But feel free to ask me anything within my remit, from GUMSHOE to HeroQuest, from GM advice to podcasting.
To join #rpgnet chat: go to http://www.magicstar.net/chat2/, select your nick, log in, and type "/join #rpgnet".
Thanks to Dan Davenport for the invitation.
Response to the Hillfolk Kickstarter has been so overwhelming I haven’t had time to tell you how overwhelming it’s been. Things are moving faster than I can type this update. As of this writing, we’re at the 16 hour mark and are already 201% funded. The first two—no, make that three—stretch goals have been surpassed before I could even hype them. I thought I had a good store of stretches in my back pocket, but, no, you’re going to send me out on an immediate game guru harvest, aren’t you? Good thing I have a fat contacts list.
In the meantime, funding levels have surpassed the thresholds needed to commission Jason Morningstar’s Hollywoodland series pitch, Michelle Nephew’s Mad Scientists Anonymous, and Kenneth Hite’s Moscow Station. And we’re a tad more than less than $500 from Matt Forbeck’s World War 2.1.
Now that you’ve shown me that you’ve come to throw down, I’m going to make it a little tougher on you (and buy myself a little recruiting time) by widening the distance between stretches a little.
$8500 gets us another Series Pitch: TS Luikart’s Malice Tarn, which he describes as King Lear meets Watership Down.
Then comes the $12,500 stretch goal: open licensing. If we reach this goal, I’ll release DramaSystem under a permissive open license. I’m open to input on the exact parameters of the license but want to err on the side of availability. The reference document will be a stripped-down affair, without the Hillfolk setting, examples, or Series Pitches, so those of you purchasing the PDF of the finished book will still be getting excellent value for your ten smackeroos.
Finally, there’s the all-important battle between the clans. When last our judges calculated the tallies, the Wolves pushed past a late night Lion offensive to once again grab the high badlands ground, howling in the glee of their victory.
Are the clans, in addition to being a thinly veiled contention between cat and dog people, a proxy for a certain political struggle? Maybe so—the lions are fewer, but are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of high-ranking pledgers: your Chieftains and your Nabobs of the Northlands.
Fight the power, or be the power, by pledging to the Hillfolk Kickstarter today, and declaring your allegiance to Clan Lion or Clan Wolf.
After much preparation and furrowing of brows on the badlands, the clan council has decreed it: the Kickstarter campaign for Hillfolk has now gone live! Throw in with the Lion clan or the Wolf clan and help bring this labor of love from the manuscript stage to finished product. Backers of the project receive a complete draft text of the game, so you can get started right away. For much more on the game, the book, and the goodies, hop on over to the freshly activated Kickstarter page.
A powerful quality of social media is its ability to break down barriers between creators and audience, and indeed between colleagues working in the same field. With that, however, come new interactional pitfalls. Here are some tips to keep in mind if you’re contacting a creator you admire—for the sake of example, let’s call him Robin Laws—to ask for help on your cool new project.
The creator you admire gets lots of requests for help. With the sudden uptake of Kickstarter, they’ve multiplied by what feels like tenfold.
When you ask creators for input on your project, and you’re not clearly offering to pay their consulting rates to do so, you’re asking them to work for free. Chances are that they will be unable to do so, even if they want to. Which they don’t, because you’re popping up out of the blue to ask them to do something for free. Any freelancer has to maximize the creative time spend doing work that will help pay that pesky rent. This is as true for fiction projects as game designs. Looking at both of these things is, to be blunt, a task I perform in exchange for money.
When you ask creators to look at your project and promote it, you are asking them to expend a limited resource, the attention of their social media audiences. Is your thing so awesome and different that the creator is doing himself a favor by pointing to it, enhancing his stature as a linker to awesomeness? Unless what you’re doing is genuinely category-busting, well, probably not. If what you’re doing is just the regular cool labor of love, you’re simply asking a favor. And in a favor economy, you’ve got to give in order to receive.
I have so many great folks in my immediate circle of collaborators that pointing to their work, which I’m already to some degree aware of and can confidently tout, already uses up my finite pool of promotional mojo. If we have no prior relationship and I don’t feel that tug of mutual loyalty, I’m going to beg off.
To that end, you will likely get my new boilerplate reply, which goes like this:
Thanks for letting me know about your Kickstarter project. As crowdfunding has taken off, I’ve been getting an increasing number of requests for help in promoting various projects and have been struggling with the best way to handle this.
If I choose to promote a large number of projects, the value of that promotion dilutes. Also, I’m crazy-busy these days and can’t always spare the time to check out every project I’m asked to post about. For these reasons, the approach that feels right to me is to confine my plugs to projects within my immediate circle of colleagues and collaborators. With the ubiquity of crowdfunding at the moment, and the size of that circle, that’s already a lot of plugging.
This is in no way a judgment on the promise of your project, and I wish you every success with it.
Just another nugget of new etiquette for the disintermediation age.
Yesterday morning the Kickstarter clock ticked its final tick, leaving the Stone Skin Press fiction launch funded at 250% of its goal. Thanks to all of you who pledged. I’m very proud of the fiction anthologies we’ve assembled and look forward to seeing them reach this all-important first wave of readers. And I can stop compulsively refreshing the Kickstarter page to see if the total has ticked up.
Congratulations to Managing Director Simon Rogers and Managing Editor Beth K. Lewis for managing a fun campaign, full of personality and blatant cupcake solicitation. Now it’s time for us to buckle down to work on those stretch goals, from audio performances to the limited edition chapbook.
We’ve learned lessons along the way, which we’ll be applying to Pelgrane’s next crowdfunding campaign, for Hillfolk. That will kick off in late September, just as I’m recovering from my annual jaunt to the Toronto Film Festival. The hiatus also gives us the chance to gather more art to feature in the campaign. Visuals are now appearing in my inbox and I’m confident you’ll be as knocked out by them as I am.
While I have my thanking hat on, I’m also grateful for the immediate enthusiasm expressed for the inaugural edition of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast. Many of you have asked if there will be an RSS feed and/or iTunes availability, and the answer is yes to both. Setting up the RSS feed so that it talks nicely to iTunes takes a bit of messing about, which is now underway.
If you missed the grand unveiling on Friday afternoon, you can in the meantime head over to the episode page to listen through your browser or download for manual transfer to your listening device of choice.
As is his wily, silver-coiffed wont, Simon Rogers has introduced considerable distraction to the final days of my vacation by launching the Kickstarter campaign for Stone Skin Press. Avenge me by heading over and making a pledge. The four ebook deal in particular is a steal. Bibliomanes among you may wish to snap up the various limited edition options.
As of this writing, we’re at the 57% mark after three days. But as the snake said of the scorpion, it’s the back half that’s the tricky part. Please join us in making this ambitious exercise in fictional boundary-hopping a reality.
When I return to work tomorrow I’ll have more to reveal about the Stone Skin line and the process that led us to it.
In the meantime, we’re highlighting the stories and iconic protagonists of The New Hero anthology. If you haven’t been glued to the Stone Skin site, here’s what you’ve missed so far:
Jonny Nexus’ character Pete Stone conjoins two streams of British heroism, nodding with equal affection toward both Dan Dare and James Bond.
Ed Greenwood’s Midnight Knight, a contemporary adventuress attended by an able crew of Ren-faire sidekicks, is a departure for Ed, yet also quintessentially Greenwoodian.
Kenneth Hite makes his fiction debut as you figure he might, with Ray Cazador, a hero who prowls the mean streets between historical probabilities. Ken seizes the joy of the alternate history genre with a conceit allowing him to elegantly set aside its overused devices.
When the intrepid adventuring party behind Tabletop Forge, the app that turns Google+ Hangouts into a gaming table, announced their Kickstarter on the weekend, I figured I’d wait until weekday prime time to give their campaign a shout-out. Now I am late to the party, as they blew through their funding goal at jaw-dropping speed. Now they’re near to their stretch goal. Since further development will make this promising tool for online play an indispensable one, I say let’s test their ingenuity and see what other key inducements they come up with when they the top off that, too.