Once More, With Feeling

It’s been nearly nine years since Ze Frank posted that video and I still find myself drifting back to it when I need inspiration. Or consolation. Or moral support. It’s been years since I’ve kept up on this blog, though it’s always remained on my to-do list. I’ve even occasionally written some post proclaiming that I would return to it with similar results. Gods willing, this will not be one of them. 

I had almost given up on the blog. A big source of the traffic back in the day was shameless shilling on google plus. There had been a robust community there of people in the RPG space. With that gone, I’m not sure what is left. Facebook, maybe. Twitter. Reddit. All terrible, to one degree or another. I probably would have given up on the blog — after all, I have grandheresy, and now a patreon — but for the folks at Knock! messaging me out of the blue to ask about using a couple of my posts in their first issue. 

I was terribly flattered, particularly given that the articles they asked to use where two of my more whingy, philosophical ones rather than the fun game mechanics ones — precisely the sort of material that I assume no one reads. Naturally, I agreed. I even rewrote both articles to be more presentable and professional pieces, rather than stream-of-consciousness blog posts. I was even more flattered when one of those pieces ended up as the first article in the magazine, effectively the intro to the entire publication. What hit me, though, was when a couple of the people involved made it a point to tell me how much they loved my blog and that one of my articles was part of what inspired them to make the magazine in the first place. 

Well. Shucks.

I’ve never been good at taking a compliment. My natural inclination is to deflect with a joke or redirect the compliment to someone else. In truth, despite spending most of my life playing these games and fully half my life now dabbling in the writing of them, I still have some pretty major imposter syndrome. It never would have occurred to me that anyone even noticed my silly little blog, let alone that it made an impression on them. There definitely are big, popular names in the RPG blog space. Even in the OSR blog space. I am not and never have been one of them. 

But it made an impression on someone. 

Maybe that one impression is enough.

So I’m going to try to come back to this. Try to get back in the habit of writing and creating and getting inspired. I don’t yet know what I’m going to say. I don’t yet know how I’m even going to get the information out there, with G+ gone. But I know enough that I’m going to try, because if it reaches someone, someone is enough.

Thanks to everyone who has been paying attention to anything I’ve done over the years. A very special thanks to the Merry Mushmen, who are mostly responsible for my writing this. Check out Knock! It’s a quality product. 

Almost a Year to the Day

That's how long I've gone between posts. It's an impressive feat, really. Then again, that's how I've always dealt with this poor blog. I will go through active bursts of content and then get out of the habit for an age.

I won't bore you with the details of the last year. Personal stuff, health stuff. Some ups. Some down. Life goes on. Very little of it would be of interest to anyone who wasn't part of it, and none of it is relevant to this blog's stated purpose. Instead, I'll update you on the one thing that is:

What began as an attempt to make a streamlined "quick play" style rules set for NaGaDeMon last year turned into an overhaul of the system itself. Seventy-three thousand words later, Sword & Scoundrel is preparing for its most complete release to date. Higgins is off doing bigger and better things, but I've wrangled a couple volunteer editors to pour over prose on my behalf. With luck, they will have that back to me in relatively short order and  I can get the layout done.

This is the first version of the game that is "complete." All of the absolute core material is there. The core mechanic, character creation, combat, social stuff, gear and equipment. You can make characters and play the game. It's shocking that it's taken me years to have all of that together in a single document, but it's unbelievably relieving to have the bulk of it behind me.

The only parts of the game now missing from the original vision are the GM section and magic. Both of these are fairly massive things in their own right, but neither are absolute requirements for using the core material. The GM section is my next project, but anyone with significant GM experience can likely run the game as-is. This is doubly true if you've been a Burning Wheel, Riddle of Steel, or Apocalypse World GM in the past.

The magic system isn't strictly necessary at all (the very first version of the game in ye ancient Song of Steel days didn't intend to have one). It's useful for a lot of fantasy stuff, but you can play without it. Much of the Sword & Sorcery genre sort of works on the premise that sorcery is for the antagonists, not the heroes. I'll get to work on that after the core system and GM stuff is all settled. My ambitions for it are as such that it isn't something I would want to rush.

In the meantime, I'll keep you posted.

NaGaDeMon Update 1 - Scope

I came across this post from immersion studios which is perfectly topical for what I have in mind. Boiling a system down to a quick start guide is an interesting and slightly daunting process. Figuring out what to include and what to trim is tricky under the best of circumstances. This is even more tricky for a game like Sword & Scoundrel, where play can be focused in different arenas.

The two immediate attractors are drives and the combat system, so any introductory to the game will need to leave those two factors largely intact. The former will be simple enough. The latter will need some slight modification, I suspect.

A big concern I have at the moment is in the word count. The existing scoundrel material is over 50k words so far and we're have maybe half the total content I'd like to generate for the core book. Boiling the core of that down into a smaller package will be a tricky task all by itself. 

At this stage, I'm optimistic. We'll see how long that optimism holds out.

November Update and NaGaDeMon

Another month passes. I've been under the weather lately and nowhere near as productive as I'd like to be as a result. However, a new month is a new opportunity and November is a particularly exciting month. For those that aren't familiar, November is National Game Development Month — NaGaDeMon (how can you not love an abbreviation like that?) — which makes it the perfect time to start that project you've been kicking around in the back of an old notebook.

I had a mighty temptation to indulge in my ongoing affair with OSR, but I will stay true. Instead, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to tackle Sword & Scoundrel from a different angle. From the beginning, I'd talked with Higgins about making a kind of "Basic Edition" Scoundrel. It would be the same game built on the same rules, but with minor abridgements and all the optional clutter removed. The purpose of such a project would be to serve as a kind of entry-level version for people who were curious about the system but could be intimidated by the massive tome the full game will inevitably become. Alternatively, it should be able to stand-alone for people who like the angles the game plays but want something a little more lightweight and flexible.

The finished project should be more or less compatible with the full game so that players who learn on the basic edition won't have to re-learn much (if anything) if you transition to the full game.

I'll keep you posted on development.

Coming home to the OSR

A couple different things have happened in the last while to turn my attention back to the OSR world. First off, I've started playing in B/x game with the fine folks from OSR General. It started as a 4chan group and it's slowly migrated to discord as well. It's always weird to join a campaign in the middle of play, but I'm enjoying it so far. After spending so much time dealing with heavy character-driven narrative bullshit, it's incredibly refreshing to do some old-fashioned Gygaxian fantasy. Negotiating with kobolds and watching your compatriots get hopelessly murdered by obvious traps.

A more pressing concern is that at least for now, the design work for scoundrel is done. With the exception of the occasional tweak or adjustment, it has been done for a while now. Instead, I'm stuck with the writing.

The endless, endless writing.

I don't actually mind the writing, mind you. Sometimes it's more difficult than others — as you might expect, writing for a living and then trying to then also moonlight for Grand Heresy — but I don't mind doing it. The problem is that this does nothing for the part of my brain that enjoys game design, which is what started all this mess in the first place. Naturally, my thoughts begin to drift elsewhere.

I've already started having these conversations with a couple people. I figure I might as well refine and catalog them here and just maybe, by the time Scoundrel is off my plate, I'll have the beginnings of another game right on its tail.

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

or so I am going to pretend. 2017 has been a very busy year for me and Grand Heresy as a whole, but a sad year for this little blog. It got pushed off to a back burner and I haven't bothered with it much, which is a shame.

I think I need to get back in the habit of using the blog as a kind of sounding board for role-playing game thoughts and ideas. I've gotten into this bad habit of not wanting to show anyone anything until it is fully-formed and polished, which is idiotic. That's not what a blog is for.

So instead, the future of this blog is going to be a lot of notes and ideas as I sort through them, along with whatever else I wind up with. Blogging in this manner serves a dual purpose, both in helping me solidify ideas but also in letting the people who follow me doing this kind of nonsense know what it is that I'm doing. This latter function is particularly good for the people who keep an eye on the role-playing game that shares this blog's name.

Until next time,

Grand Heresy in 2017

Matt Easton posted a video recently entitled "Scholagladiatoria channel in 2017." It's a video of limited use to anyone who isn't already his subscriber (though, if you're at all interested in martial history, you should be) and chiefly details his plans for the coming year.

That's when I realized it was already February. How does that happen? Worse, I've written nothing on this blog this year. In an attempt to begin rectifying this mistake, I thought I'd post my own variant of the theme: Grand Heresy in 2017.

It's a very creative twist. 

GH2017

With luck, this will be the break-out year for Grand Heresy. 'Bastards (now bearing the more marketable title Sword & Scoundrel) is getting a major facelift and some key rewriting. As this draft gets close to completion, I'll be redoing the site to better show it off as well as redoing some of the marketing/fluff text. Plans are to launch the kickstarter in the very near future. I cannot tell you how excited I am for the thing to be in the wild and officially off my desk for a while.

We've kept track of the download counts of each edition of 'Bastards released. We've gotten anywhere from 400-1000 downloads on each. The last edition of the dueling kit alone has gotten about 1200 downloads. On the surface, this looks fairly promising but you never know what this will mean in terms of kickstarter support or sales down the line. On the other hand, we've also not gone out of our way to market the thing at all. We haven't reached out to rpg.net, storygames, or any of the other hub communities out there aside from a brief flirting with 4chan.

The level of interest we receive after launch will determine the next move. I have a number of things I'd love to develop out of the core rules as supplemental material for the game. Higgins and I have been wanting to develop the naval warfare rules since early in the project's development. A full pirate/age of sail book would let us treat the topic with the same kind of adoration we've spent on the HEMA nerd stuff in the book. I also have a number of setting-seed books I'd like to have the chance to develop for the game as well, all of which are basically toolkit modules for hacking the book to fit whatever you're trying to do with the main system. I've been keeping notes on this sort of stuff since just after the project began. If there were enough interest, I'd have material to write for this game for the next five years or more.

On the other hand, if it turns out to be an extremely niche interest with a limited following, I'm fine with that too. I have a half-dozen other projects I'd love to dev out. As anyone who reads this blog can attest, my gaming interests are eclectic as they are promiscuous.

All of that aside, I acquired a new mic today. It's a proper condenser mic I got relatively inexpensively. After some futzing around with Barbarossa on the audio we got it sounding pretty decent. Now properly equipped, we'll be doing a lot of youtube recording in the near future. Expect at least one actual play campaign of something. I'll probably record some AP material, explanations, and play aids for 'Bastards Sword & Scoundrel as well.

2017 is going to be a big year. Here's to it.

Art Woes

The 'Bastards draft is chugging along. I may or may not meet my year-end deadline, but progress is being made at least. As the days tick by and I get the systems bolted nicely into place, I start to worry about other issues. Writing a game, as it turns out, is only one part of making a game.

We're going to have to deal with the kickstarter thing, sooner rather than later. We've waited too long to wrap all this up as it is. We have a date in mind to begin once we've gotten feedback on this draft. The problem, of course, is that we need art. It was an inevitable issue, but one that presents me with sort of a catch-22. To really get off the ground with a kickstarter, you need good art to sell it -- but our primary reason for doing a kickstarter is to get an art budget.

If you've been around my blog long enough, you've no doubt seen some of my own artwork. I know I'm decent at it, but I also know I'm not good enough to meet the task at hand. Not in any substantial way, in any case.

Further complicating matters, I'm not entirely sure how to start the shopping-for-art process.  I sent out a couple notes on Deviantart, but that's about the depth of my experience with the subject.

This post was mostly just my musing on the subject, but if anyone wants to toss me any advice, offer their services and quote a price, (or ESPECIALLY if you want to contribute art) feel free to leave a comment, hit me up on G+ or otherwise get in touch.

'Bastards 0.2

If you lurk around our forums, you may have already heard: Band of Bastards is currently in the middle of a substantial overhaul. I thought it was appropriate to make some kind of a statement about what we're doing and why.

We've done this a few times before, though most were before we were ever under as much scrutiny. 'Bastards was (fittingly) the illegitimate child of the Trosfans forums, in their project to produce a new, unofficial, and revised edition of The Riddle of Steel after Driftwood went dark. This burst of creative impulse ultimately gave birth to Blade of the Iron Throne as well, which we still look at as a sibling for that reason. Like most siblings, though, we wound up going very separate directions.

The first iteration of the game was exactly what it set out to be - a TROS update, with all the bells and whistles. We had something like 60 maneuvers, 150+ weapons (most of which had more than one stat-line), and a whole mess of very exacting specifications for everything we touched. After the initial creative rush of cobbling together every optional rule from all of the TROS books and somehow making them more-or-less work together, we realized that this was a beast so ungainly that it would be a nightmare to run, let alone teach a new player.

Back to the drawing board.

The next iteration of the game would become what we promoted as Song of Steel. At the time, our focus was still on historical fiction -- a position we leaned into all the harder with Blade selling itself by contrast as a Swords and Sorcery game. It's a funny thing that siblings do. Bernard Cornwell had a prominent place on our bookshelf, along with a great deal of non-fiction that we picked up on swords and swordsmanship (including the book with a very similar title). This is about the time when we started pestering people like Nikolas Lloyd, Roland Warzecha, and Matt Easton for insights, which they all graciously provided.

This was the iteration when we really came into our own. Systems were scrapped, new bits invented, unnecessary bits stripped away. Our ranged combat and skirmish systems date back to this iteration (both of which were Higgin's contributions, amusingly enough. Thank him. He was very insistent on ranged combat being awesome).

Then came Song of Swords. What were the odds of another game being developed by another indie-dev team based on the same original game with a nearly identical  name? We discussed the thing with them - their hands were tied. The name was chosen by their fans. They were polite about the thing and even complimentary. At least one of them had been a fan of our work. It's always nice to be noticed.

Restriction breeds creativity. We were already competing for attention in the same sub-niche of a sub-niche of an already niche hobby, so we were left with the options of either sharing an initialism with who was arguably our closest competitor or redefine ourselves. We chose the latter.

One day, I'll shake Jimmy Rome's hand. Rebranding seemed like a setback at the time, but in the process, we had the license to re-evaluate everything we had chosen to do up to that point. Everything got cleaned up and polished, had the rough edges smoothed out. A lot of the stuff we had been so insistent in trying to replicate in exacting detail simply got dropped or abstracted. 'Bastards began to really hone in on what it wanted to be, which was a game about ambition and conflicts of the moral, physical, and bloody variety. In a strange way, despite being the furthest mechanically from its forebear, it may have been the closest in essence to what TROS wanted to be about.

This latest revision is a continuation of the iterative saga this game has undergone. The purpose of a beta test is to get feedback and have room to make adjustments. Between some of the cracks that have shown themselves at the fringes of our own play, and some of the feedback we've gotten on the forums, we're finding places where things could be better, tighter, or conversely need to be loosened up and made less rigid.

Higgins and I have both grown a lot as both players and designers since we started this project back in (dear God, really?) 2011. The last couple years, in particular, have been spent in a kind of ongoing game design boot camp. One of the driving forces in the revision is that certain areas of the game reflect designs that were either inherited from TROS once upon a time, or products of our early attempts to fix the products of those inherited parts. We can do better, and we're going to.

The end goal is to make a game that I will be inspired to play again. In slaughtering some of the sacred cows we've held on to in search of better design, of cleaning the clutter that we've amassed, we hope to create the kind of game that we're going to want to play and run for years to come. I want to be so again impassioned by this project that we have the energy and drive to see it through to the full vision we had for it. We hope that in making ourselves passionate about the thing, in cleaning up and overhauling the design of the thing, we'll make you passionate about it as well.

An update

Triage. It seems to be the theme of my life. There is always some fire that needs put out and too often it demands my attention be somewhere other than here. This, of course, is a shame as this is one of the things I really enjoy doing in life.

Rather than talk about why I'm not here (no one reads this blog to hear me whinge), I'll just update where I am with the various irons I have in the fire.

The Tyrant's Fear

The campaign is still going, though we've missed as many weeks as we've played. Session 2 is mostly written up, I just need to finish said writing. I've got three more sessions with notes on them that need to be written. We may actually be playing one tonight, depending on who shows up. In addition to the Actual Play stuff, I've got some other commentary and musings I want to ramble on involving the thing, so plenty of content there coming down the pipe. A lot of people seemed to enjoy the first write-up, so with luck they will be so happy about the future content that they will overlook my delay in publishing it.

Band of Bastards

The Wounds and Healing chapter is written up and just needs to be formatted, along with incorporating the edits I have from our last release. It's moving along and with the release of this chapter we technically have everything you need to actually play the game properly. Well, maybe prices. We have those written up somewhere. It'll be fine.

To Henri's horror, I've been contemplating some major revisions to the system. I'm not satisfied with the shape of the present incarnation. I have a whole spiel I'll be writing on that before long, so that when/if that happens people will at least know why. However, I'm going to make sure that the necessary bits get put out to play the current game before I launch into another revision project. Our fans have been incredibly patient with my bullshit, a fact for which I am grateful. I have a play-by-post campaign I need to start up as well. 

Other Blog Shit

Troll Gods has some articles sitting on it. I've got some stuff to add. I'll eventually sit down and get it ironed out. In the meantime, if anyone still has stuff to submit by all means do so. I have a couple things I'm going to be writing reviews on, including a couple indie OSR bits from other amateur creators.

Going forward, I'm going to try to keep up at least a post per week, and hopefully get caught up on some of this nonsense.

Until then, 

Waxing on Gaming Autobiographica

I first started playing RPGs by hacking together a functional game out of just what I could glean from the AD&D1e DMG. I later moved into Alternity, Cyberpunk, and then I was all over the place. Back then, I played games the way most people did—or maybe still do—without a hell of a lot of thought about design, "creative agendas" or any of that.

My big shift came when I discovered The Riddle of Steel. It was in many ways, unlike anything I'd ever seen. It completely challenged my ideas of what role-playing was or could be, how games should be run. The combat system was like nothing I'd ever seen. I had already been a major history nerd, but it was through TROS that I'd developed a love of HEMA and all that was entailed. I was too late to the party to be around when The Forge was kicking hornet's nests, but damned if I didn't pursue The Riddle.

The next big shift came for me in discovering Burning Wheel. This was nowhere near the paradigm shift that TROS was, but it was perhaps the clearest demonstration I've ever had of the idea that "system matters." In both my own Burning Wheel experiments and those I've watched/listened to (I have a weird fascination with actual play recordings) I've gained a huge appreciation for how the system influences and informs play.

At that point in my life, I don't think you would've been able to convince me to play D&D if you paid me. My few attempts to experiment with it again were... painful. My experiences with 3.x and pathfinder were abysmal. When 4th edition came out, I couldn't even finish my read of the player's handbook. Striker? Defender? Controller? Ugh. I couldn't get past the terminology. In my mind, it immediately left me thinking about MMOs. Would we be drawing aggro and baiting spawn points next? This is without touching that the game designated which classes were "leaders" of the party (we'll decide who leads our party among ourselves, thank you). Making this impression even worse, I watched Chris Perkins DM a 4e game on youtube. It was a four-hour session which took place entirely on a battle map. It started with the party in the dungeon with some exposition to put them there, followed by three or four combats interspersed with a couple skill challenges. Read: someone had to throw some dice at something. It took them four hours to run four fights. I wouldn't be playing 4th edition. (Later, I did actually come to appreciate it as a kind of combat-based dungeon crawling board game, I just wouldn't want to run it as a D&D game.)

The next weird step in my gaming evolution was encountering the practically unheard of Chronica Feudalis. This was a system I found so interesting and hackable that it actually prompted me to start blogging about it. The original blog those took place on has long-since been abandoned, though I've migrated several of the most interesting posts here. Oddly enough, one of which is in my "Popular nonsense" stuff on the sidebar, making it my number 2 most all-time viewed post. I guess someone out there has heard of this stuff after all.

What struck me most about CF was just how flexible it actually was. The structure of the wounds and maneuvers system gave me nearly as cinematic and bloody combat as I was getting from TROS (or, by this time, Song of Steel -- the game that would eventually be rebranded as Band of Bastards). Was it meant to be used in such a bloody faction? I have no idea, but some of the most bloody and cinematic combats I've ever played were in a hacked version of Chronica Feudalis.

Perhaps the most radical departure for me in this was just how simple it actually was, by comparison. How quickly it played and how little effort as a GM it took to run. I can safely blame Higgins for introducing the game to me. I had previously been playing a great deal of Savage Worlds specifically because it was relatively simple for players to wrap their head around. When I'd argued for SW to be a relatively rules-light game (how naive I was!) Higgins scoffed and rightly put me in my place. He may have been nicer than that, but I certainly remember there was scoffing.

This is when I bumped into the OSR movement for the first time. I had already had a lot of fond memories of AD&D as a kid. For whatever reason, I never really mentally categorized those experience into the same box as my encounters with 3.5 or 4e D&D. They seemed like completely different kinds of games. It wasn't until I started getting into the OSR scene that I understood why.  They were  fundamentally different types of games. Whatever one might say about indie games and The Forge, the whole culture will get you thinking about how games are designed and played, even if you disagree with their conclusions.

I was hooked pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it was my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, or that the games so openly embraced a lot of things that I'd sort of lost sight of from in
Somewhere between my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, and an open embrace of a lot of things I'd lost sight of somewhere along the way. Likely, all of the above.

I have to really credit the OSR scene for bringing a lot of balance back to my gaming tastes. There's a lot of people out there who like to try to pit indie/nar/forge types as being in one camp and OSR as being two opposite and non-overlapping things, each vying to be the One True Way and the other being badwrongfun. I've gained a lot from both communities and I greatly enjoy both kinds of games. They provide radically different experiences, and in a lot of ways follow the same "system matters" ethos. In a curious way, they even both seem to be a response to the same thing - dissatisfaction with "Adventure path" (read: railroad) style of GMing and systems that are bad at what they are supposed to be doing.

I actually had a reason for going into all of this besides my own nostalgia. I have a handful of topics that have been digging at me for a while now, but I thought they could use some context before I began. Unfortunately, this post is far too long already. So those will wait until next time.

Time Flies

Has it been a month already? Man. Right. Updates:

Grand Heresy now has two youtube channels. Barbarossa has outdone himself with setting things up and getting our whole AV situation sorted. Grand Heresy Press is going to be our core channel, and we'll be uploading things on there as we get them recorded. We'll be throwing some updates on as we get closer to 'bastards release, but it for now primarily be the home of the Grand Heresy AP Podcast. More on that in a moment. Our secondary channel is Grand Heresy Presents, which will be a place we upload stuff that isn't directly related to role-playing games, but involves us or our interests. Barbarossa already has some footage about grilling, of all things. Neither channel has proper content up yet, but Barbarossa did an excellent job on the intros. 

The Grand Heresy AP Podcast recorded some test footage. We just started a Lamentations of the Flame Princess one-shot and are basically recording our normal game footage. When we get it all situated, we'll be uploading the footage to youtube and ripping the audio as a downloadable podcast. Links to everything will eventually be up on our website.

If you didn't already know, because the group is so spread out, we're using Tabletop Simulator for our gaming. It is a huge improvement over Roll20. The mood and atmosphere are a lot better with TTS. It feels a lot more personal than the more clinical interface of Roll20, and having physical space with moving cameras lets you do a lot of things that are hard to do otherwise - using tokens to keep track of gameplay, having multiple maps or sheets out at the same time, etc. Most of all though, the dice. Roll20 has a terrible random number generator system. I have vivid memories of using it for Mordheim and deciding that it actually didn't matter what the stats of the characters were. Most d6 results were either 1 or 6, auto-fail or auto-succeed. TTS treats them as objects with a physics engine, so they roll as they should and produce the results you would expect. Even better? They make extremely satisfying noise when you shake them or clatter them across the table. I've been doing so much online gaming that I forgot how great that noise was, even through simulation.

If I had any criticisms of TTS, it's not particularly well-optimized for complex operations. It will start to tank when you have a high number of objects on the table, but for the most part it hasn't bothered me. It's also relatively early in its life-cycle, so future updates may improve this.

I've also started trying to force myself to piddle with art again. I make no claims towards professional talent, but I like to play with it. It's decent enough to render a character portrait now and then (like the above, from our LotFP group). If you're interested, I keep a tumblr for that purpose. Fair warning: I'm studying anatomy. There are naked people.

I've got some more stuff to post shortly, but that's enough for now.

Until next time,

Still Alive

Hello internet. It's been a while.

I'm still alive, fortunately. Our orc-based campaign got sidelines when the GM had his work-schedule change, and my own writing time has been compromised by my day-job, the sad reality of adulthood.

So what's new:

• Bastards is hopping along. We got out another couple teasers on the GH site, and discussions on our forums. Progress is being made on the core book for beta, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.
• Our site admin decided to start designing a game of his own, which will be later revealed under the GH brand. I won't get into details here, but it looks to be very cool. I've been consulting, but I won't be sitting down and putting words to paper until 'Bastards has gotten to publish.
• OrcQuest picked back up last week, hopefully to be a regular occurrence again.  I'll have an AP report again before long. 
• We're considering an AP podcast with our next campaign, in case you have a dire urge to listen to us ramble for hours. We'll need to figure out how we want to do it, but it sounds like a good idea on the face of it. 

That's where we're at for now. I'll have the next OrcQuest installment before long.

Carry on.

Band of Bastards: Intro Teaser

I've always hated writing self-promotion. I always feel compelled to seek out that (what seems to me) incredibly narrow space between "HYPE: The HYPENING" and "So dry that the author seems to have forgotten the purpose of an introduction."

I know what I'm supposed to do. The job of an introductory text is to hook players and answer some questions up front: What is this game? Why should I care? What makes it special? Why should I waste my time reading the next 300 pages?

The obvious desire then is to answer those questions in the best light possible - preferably filled with as much energy and passion as you can muster. The problem is doing so in a fashion that won't cause your audience to groan and roll their eyes. Indie games can be quite bad about this in general, so I feel the need to be twice as careful about the image I present.

As it stands, the teaser is now available here, and I would really welcome any feedback on it.

On other fronts: We have a new logo! Well. modified logo.

 

Following entirely reasonable feedback from our forums, I wound up redoing the sword image to be specific to the period we're talking about. Once I found some sample images to work with that weren't basket-hilt swords, we were in business. I actually really like basket-hilts, but they are very hard to "read" in an image of this type.

'Bastards is now in InDesign, being formatted as a 6"x9" (trade hardback) style pdf for the Beta. We're taking some risks on the format, but it will at the very least be mobile-friendly, which is important given that I don't expect anyone to print off a 300 page pdf to beta test. I can see the light on the horizon, and I am unbelievably excited to have this project out in the open air for a while.

Stay tuned, 

Now Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

The last couple months have been rather crazy. November lead to a much-needed break, and as is often the case, December found me busy with familial obligations. The beginning of January saw me with a 103 degree fever and a Nyquil-induced-coma, but once again I am here and doing what I do.

Future plans of the blog are to put out a post per week, with several more or less worked out and waiting in the wings at the moment. Lately, my attention has been diverted heavily into Grand Heresy business, with very exciting things going on. My fever-addled delirium brought about a handful of new ideas and solutions to some long-standing bugs for Band of Bastards. Writing, re-writing and editing continues to be an all-consuming task, but we are making our way through. This is the hour when discipline for the subject becomes of utmost importance. Meanwhile, my list of "one day" projects sits a mile long, tempting me with their puppy-eyed promises of fun and creativity. I must resist. I will resist.

We will see this book finished.

In other news, the first drafts of some cover ideas have been floating around recently including one mock-up that I'm rather proud of. Whether it is the direction we will go in is yet to be scene, but I rather like it regardless. More on that later.

For now, we are back to our regularly scheduled programming of rambling insights and RPG related dev commentary and development.

Until next time,

Happy Turkey Day!

At Grand Heresy, the birds have been eaten, our stomachs are full. Except for Higgins. They don't appear to have Thanksgiving in Estonia, which is a shame because it's delicious. It's been an extremely busy month, and we're extremely proud of the amount of work we've gotten done. Today, however, we are taking a well-earned break. We hope you are too.

Happy Turkey Day!

Home Stretch

November has been rough, but I can safely say that we're almost there. Almost. Editing is nearly done, I've got a side-business launched, blog maintained, and I'm 10k words away from finishing NaNoWriMo. I may simply hibernate through December.

A wise man once said, never half-ass two things, whole ass one thing. Remind me in the future to take on just one major project at a time.

On that note, I've got work to do.

Until next time,

Lazy Sunday Post

Feeling a bit crappy, honestly. I think I may be catching a bit of something, but no matter. There is work to be done.

I've got some stuff lined up to talk about later in the week, so hopefully I can get all of that cranked out before Thanksgiving. My NaNoWriMo bid is falling a bit behind, so that's a thing I'm going to have to rectify shortly. My NaGaDeMon efforts (read: finishing the game I've been working on for significantly longer than a month) are also falling a bit behind, but we've come up with some interesting developments there as well. I'll have to mark that down as an additional topic of discussion, either here or on the Grand Heresy blog. On the plus side, at least NaBloPoMo is working out just fine, so overall National Masochist Project Month is going well.

Once this settles out, I'll probably turn down the article frequency to one or two pieces a week, with additional posts coming out whenever I feel inspired. Interestingly, it is not for want of topics. I have another dozen or so partially finished posts sitting in my drafts folder. The rub is that each of those takes some hours to sit down, research, and give the effort they are due. Hours that I presently don't have, for all of my other masochistic projects and deadlines.

Amusingly, a video showed up in my "recommended" section on youtube, so I thought I would share it here. Luke Crane is a really interesting guy, even outside of his work on Burning Wheel. Given my current situation, the topic seemed extremely relevant. I'll leave you with this, it's worth the watch if you have the time to do so.

Pretentiousness in Indie-Games

I was actually responding to something on the Grand Heresy forums, when I realized my response was going to turn into an unrelated rant. Instead, I moved it here.

Higgins made a comment about what we would call our GM, poking fun at TROS' terminology "Seneschal." I replied the following:

You know. That's a good conversation point. We originally started the game trying to decide what we were calling the GM. We had "narrator" for a long time, but ultimately wound up going with ...GM. Yes, we could carve ourselves out a neat title for the role of game master - Seneschal, Narrator, Story Teller, Scribe, Referee Arbiter, Adjudicator, Justicar, Grand Moff, Naib - but these are all cases of using a five dollar word where fifty cents will do. It's already pretty well established what a GM is and does, and ultimately people are going to call it GM anyway when they can't be bothered to remember what our particular variant is called.

I thought that itself was worth posting, simply because I just wrote a bit on the issue of naming things. The following is what was taken out, but something I want to get into anyway:

One of the things I've tried to do in writing / editing the Band of Bastards beta is be conscious of how we might come off in the writing itself. I'm speaking for myself alone here, but one of the things that makes me cringe when reading a lot of independently published RPGs is the way in which they talk about themselves, either in advertising or internally in the book itself. The rules may or may not be awesome, the game may be awesome, but there is so much author/creator commentary on how awesome it is that it's hard not to just roll your eyes. I'm a big fan of the "under sell, over-deliver" mantra. If our game is awesome, you won't need us to remind you of that within the book itself.

This really bothers me when the hype-machine for a game is fueled by negative comparisons to other games or types of games. Most often, this is a stab at dungeons and dragons and the people who play it. I feel like a lot of this comes out of Forge culture, but it isn't exclusive to it.

I get it, I really do. That someone has bothered to create something in the first place is generally evidence that they think it will do something better than some other system, otherwise they wouldn't have made it. I don't have a problem with someone explaining how their system is better for X or Y kind of game, or offers Z kind of experience. The rub is when the primary way they explain this is by crapping on some other kind of game or experience, as though it was less valid. Badwrongfun is not a way to sell your game, or at least it shouldn't be.

At least for 'Bastards, I want the game to speak for itself. Part of that is in managing the way we pitch ourselves, but that also carries through to more mundane topics.. like naming things.

My two cents.

Until next time,

A Stressful Day

It's been an extraordinarily taxing day. One of our GHP team went to the hospital, though he's now fine. On top of that, I had a family emergency, and completely missed our weekly D&D game, in addition to all of the actual work I didn't get done.

I started the day with a joke about being productive today. If I ever do that again, shoot me. For now, It's an early bed. Before I do, however I thought I'd leave you with this.



November is a month a lot of people dedicate to their projects. If you're having a tough time with yours, maybe that will help.

Until next time,