Direct download: revolution39.mp3

My turn on the journal, as the trip draws near its close.

( Day 5 )

How We Came to Live Here is now available for pre-order on IPR! If you order today, you get the PDF for free immediately.

It's been a long road, but it is finally here.

More than halfway through the journey! Warning, this post includes bodily functions.

( Day 4 )

As I mentioned last year on the blog, I’ve decided to get back into game development and try to move Galileo Games production schedule up. The good news is that this is proceeding apace. I plan to release at least a PDF product every month this year, with two full print RPG releases as well. How We Came to Live Here will be going up for preorder next week, and I have two other projects deep in development. I expect to see one of these reach fruition by Fall at the latest.

 

When I was looking at my game design work, it had really languished. After I launched Indie Press Revolution, it rather quickly sucked up all of my time. I’ve got a very lucrative day job and, having a family, I certainly don’t want to jeopardize that. That commitment, along with the family commitments, leaves only a little time for other projects. I needed to get IPR to point where I could employ others to do the daily work in order to free up game design.

 

That point reached, I had another decision to make. I needed to decide whether I really wanted to have a go at making a game publishing company a real concern. I dithered on this one a while, really. It is a lot of work, but I also derive an inordinate amount of joy from seeing my ideas take form as a real product that people can buy and use. One of my absolute favorite things is to work with artists to bring something that was only in my head into a visual work that other people can actually see. This is my favorite hobby, and one that I don’t want to give up, it turns out.

 

Once that decision was made, I had to look at Galileo Games and see what was required to get things moving. One of the things I needed to do was determine what work I could do myself, and what I needed to farm out to other people to perform. I’ve figured that out, budgeted out my projects, and now it’s full steam ahead. I plan to discuss how well it all works out next year at this time, and see how feasible it is to keep going.

 

For now, Excelsior!

First, the good news: How We Came to Live Here is off to the printer, I should have a proof in about a week or so! The preorder will be going up on Indie Press Revolution next week. I plan to offer the PDF for free, immediately, upon preorder.

In anticipation, here is the last reading of a story from How We Came to Live Here that I will post here:

The Woman Who Would Not Marry [audio and narration by Russell Collins]

Art by Kurt Komoda.

Direct download: revolution38.mp3

Day 3 wasn't quite as rough as Day 2. We'd all gotten over our dismay, at least in part, and buckled down to some serious paddling. Mineral Bottom, where we took our lunch break, is a put-in point, and there was lots of human traffic there, as well as some latrines, a welcome break from the camp toilet.

This day saw some adverse weather. Starting Day 3, storms would blow in starting around 2:00 pm, with strong winds and some sprinkling rain. The strong winds were the main problem. The wind would push our canoes sideways, and on Day 3 David and I almost tipped over. It scared me quite badly since we weren't wearing our life vests. After that, we wore them every time we got on the river. My dad actually fell in while attempting a take-out on this day, also without a vest. He still had a grip on both his canoe and the shore, but went in over his head. We were a lot more careful after this.

( Day 3 )

Here is another reading of a story from How We Came to Live Here:

The Missing Sister [audio and narration by Russell Collins]

Art by Kurt Komoda.

Day 2 was the day that we all realized how hard this was going to be. The first part of the trip was relatively pleasant and not all that strenuous, but when we took a break on Day 2, each one of us was wondering if we were going to make it through all six days.

( Day 2 )

I'm combining the Day 0 entry with the Day 1 entry: Day 0 was too short to be it's own thing, really.

( Day 0 and Day 1 )

Direct download: revolution37.mp3

Another reading of a story from How We Came to Live Here:

Rivals [audio and narration by Russell Collins]

Art by Richard Luschek.

My son Crispin turned 13 last February. When I turned 13, my dad took me out on a camping weekend with several of his male friends for a sort of coming-of-age experience. We talked about what it meant to be a man, and a lot about dating and girls. It was definitely something I’ve remembered ever since.

When my own son passed that same milestone, I wanted to give him a similar experience. Around his birthday, I invited several of my friends along and we camped for a weekend in mid-Winter in the Adirondacks, in a pre-built yurt. That was pretty awesome and was very much like the camping trip I took at that age. We talked about manhood, dating, and taught Crispin how to play Texas Hold-Em, all essentials of growing up.

My dad didn’t make it out for that trip, but he had something else in mind. A six-day, 97 mile journey down the Green River in Utah. This was one of the most amazing and physically exhausting experiences of my life. Pop was 69 years old at the time (he’s now 70), and we went with my brother-in-law John and my cousin David, along with Crispin. We kept a journal on the river, each person writing in turns. After we got back, it was suggested that we have a permanent online record of our journey, which I agreed to do. Of course, it took me 6 months to get around to it. My next post will be the first entry, and I will post each entry one by one. I don’t have all the photos from the trip, so these will probably be updated after they are posted with additional pictorial evidence.

Keep watching for more! These posts will be tagged “Campy McRivertrip.” You’ll see why in the Day 1 entry.

Green River in Utah, from Ruby Ranch to the Confluence with the Colorado River.

Intrepid canoeists: Jonathan Taylor, Brennan Taylor, Crispin Taylor, John Hall, David Terry.

15 – 20 June, 2009.

October 2009 -- Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies Review and Kevin Allen Jr. Interview

• 0:29 - Brennan welcomes Paul back after his month off and jumps right into what's new on the site.
  • Empire of Dust
  • Mars: Savage Worlds Edition
  • Cthulhu Britannica
  • Tome of Secrets
  • Alpha Omega: The Encountered
  • eCollapse
  • Bulletin #3: Marine Talent Operations
  • The Shotgun Diaries
  • Kobold Quarterly #11
• 7:19 - Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies by Chad Underkoffler is a game of fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles, and sky pirates.
• 18:08 - Kevin Allen Jr. talks with Brennan about his approaches to and experiences with indie publishing.
• 27:04 - In At Our Tables, Paul and Brennan talk about ending games (and other things), and why Chewbacca is the best supporting character in sci-fi.

Runtime: 38:35 / File size: 26.5M

Find out more about these fine games and others at Indie Press Revolution. To comment on this podcast, visit The Voice of the Revolution forum or send us an email.
Direct download: revolution36.mp3

Each chapter in How We Came to Live Here has an accompanying piece of fiction. This art by Kurt Komoda I posted a few weeks back goes with one of these. Here's the story:

http://www.galileogames.com/audio/Marrying_Outside.mp3
[audio and narration by Russell Collins]


At that moment, a woman emerged from the scrub.

Rob Donoghue brought up the idea of "things I want to see more of" vs. "things my character is good at" in this post. Both Josh Roby and Daniel Solis elaborated a bit.

I think this is a really interesting idea. One of my groups is starting a game of Chronica Feudalis soon and we were doing character creation. One part of character creation in Chronica involves assigning Aspects and Backgrounds to the character. Aspects and Backgrounds directly address this dichotomy of "things I want to see more of" vs. "things my character is good at" in a way that I don't think I've seen before.

In Chronica, you get three Aspects. These describe your character, and like good aspects in FATE, they can have both positive and negative results for the character. One of my players has the Aspect "Sole Heir to the Throne." She gets to call on this to help her when she wants to assert any authority or privilege that goes along with being the sole heir, but I also get to play with it when someone wants to call that into question or challenge her authority. By choosing this Aspect, my player is creating a flag for the character, stating that "Sole Heir to the Throne" is something she's interested seeing come up often in play and being important to the plot of the game.

So far, so good. You see this in a lot of games that have free-form traits or aspects, right? Here's where Chronica does something interesting. You can also assign a Background to your character. Again, this is a free-form trait that you decide describes your character, isome fact about the character that is true within the game world. The interesting thing here is that a Background is then some trait your character possesses that is not incorporated as a plot point or used against your character in any way. You can put in unremarkable talents that just aren't important to the plot, such as "Reads Latin" for our same character above. But you can also put in something fairly remarkable, thereby marking it off-limits as a disadvantage for your character. Our sole heir to the throne also has a background of "Woman Warrior," pretty unusual and potentially problematic for 8th century England. By marking this as a Background instead of an Aspect, it is now a trait that is unusual, sure, but not one that will cause problems for the character.

Chronica uses Aspects for "things I want to see more of" and Backgrounds for "things my character is good at."

As most everyone reading this will know, I run Indie Press Revolution, the online indie game store. I started it way, way back in 2005 as a way to promote my own games and the games of other folks in my situation, the independent publisher. It turns out this was a great idea, and IPR ended up being extremely successful. So successful, in fact, that it sucked up absolutely all of my time and slowed my game production down to a crawl.

I had the first edition of Mortal Coil done in early 2006 and I launched it through IPR. After that, I didn't release a single product until I published Mortal Coil Revised earlier this year. This is almost completely due to the fact that I was working on IPR for that entire time.

Well, there is now some good news. I'm putting the finishing touches on How We Came to Live Here, a new game about mythic heroes in a stone age society. I'm also starting on a revised version of Bulldogs!, my ass-kicking sci fi game, updated for the FATE system. I have about half a dozen other smaller projects in the works as well, little supplements for the other games or new stand-alone projects that will run a few pages.

Where did this burst of creativity come from, you ask? IPR is finally at a place where I can employ staff to do a lot of the work I was doing all these years. I'm no longer doing all of the accounting, all of the marketing, all of the convention planning, and all of the day-to-day tasks required to keep a company like IPR humming along. This is a massive relief to me, and I am super happy to be getting back into more game design, which is what I wanted to be doing in the first place.

It's a strange thing to have something succeed beyond your expectations. I'm glad it's now succeeded to the point where I can step back a bit.

A while back I posted some concept sketches for artwork in How We Came to Live Here. This piece is by Kurt Komoda and is the final version from those sketches.

( View the Full Piece )