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- 0:29 - Brennan welcomes Paul back after his month off and jumps right into what's new on the site.
- 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.
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/Marryi
[audio and narration by Russell Collins]
At that moment, a woman emerged from the scrub.
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."
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.
( View the Full Piece )
[audio and narration by Russell Collins]
It’s been a long time coming, but How We Came to Live Here is finally nearing completion. This is all part of my plan to step up Galileo Games’ production schedule. I released Mortal Coil Revised earlier this year, and I’m very pleased that I will have managed to get a second game out in the same calendar year.
For those of you not familiar with the game, How We Came to Live Here is a Native American fantasy inspired by the myths and archaeology of the American Southwest. Players take the role of heroes who must try to achieve their own ambitions as well as protect their villages from the many threats that loom outside. This is complicated by the temptation to sin against the traditions of their People. Two of the players take the role of the Inside and the Outside. Their duty is to create conflict and hardship for the hero players, either through family ties and rivalries on the part of the Inside player, or through monsters or natural forces on the part of the Outside player.
Keep watching this spot for new stuff as the time approaches!
I took a premise from an old online game I played (for one or two e-mail exchanges). This sets the game a bit farther back, in the late 19th century. The player characters are all part of Dr. Fu Manchu's organization cast as the heroes rather than villains, resisting Western encroachment into Asia. We had Karamaneh, an infiltrator/spy; Zatoichi the blind swordsman; Huo Yuanjia, a martial artist; Tremal-Naik, a mighty hunter; and Sandokan, a swashbuckling pirate. Sandokan was only present for one session, the middle one, but the rest were there from beginning to end.
The thing I love about Spirit of the Century is that things are always awesome. Several of the guys were new to Spirit, but everyone caught on how to use the system pretty quickly. One initial conflict ended with two characters getting captured, and the players were initially dismayed but then realized how much fun that can be. They immediately started making declarations about the poorly constructed stockade they were in, with it's inattentive guard.[1]
This was where I introduced the main antagonist, a stern and humorless British officer named Colonel Smith. I succeeded pretty well in making the players seriously loathe this guy, but also understand that he was a pretty dangerous opponent. They managed to take actions throughout the adventure that interfered with or wrecked the Colonel's plans without ever actually directly confronting him in a conflict that favored the Colonel's skills. I was pretty impressed with how they managed to do that, and they were all using the system very well to make that happen. Survival turned out to be a very useful skill for Tremal-Naik's player. He established that a key British camp lay on a dry riverbed, and found where they had dammed the river upstream. The final scene was, of course, the player character's pulling down the dam and flooding the British camp. Survival used to find and tame a wild elephant was essential to the scheme, and he also managed to use Survival to escape a better-constructed jail by identifying the wood used to build it, and knowing that the wood was preyed upon by a particular beetle making it weak and easy to break.
If there was any weak point, I think it was with the aspects. I had everyone fill in aspects at the beginning of play, but many were a bit convoluted and hard to tag. After playing a lot of Spirit, I think I have a better feel for what makes a good or bad aspect, and can give some advice, but it can be tough to help five people craft ten good aspects each all at once.
All in all, I still find Spirit to be one of my current go-to games. It delivers every time, and any time I want a high-action pulp adventure, whatever the setting, Spirit is my first choice.
1. If you are unfamiliar with Spirit of the Century, you can make a skill roll to declare a fact about some part of the scene. If you succeed, the fact is now true, and you can call on that fact (called an aspect) to add to a later roll, in this case, for escape.
The Voice of the Revolution #34: August 2009, Ganakagok Review and Emily Care Boss Interview August 2009 -- Ganakagok Review and Emily Care Boss Interview
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: revolution34.mp3- 0:29 - Almost-live from Gen Con 2009, Paul, Brennan & Ryan talk about what's new on the site, after a moment of banter.
- 4:49 - Ganakagok, by Consensus Games, is a mythopoetic game with a custom desk, where the players interpreting these cards while play a story about a world admist a great cataclysm.
- 11:53 - Emily Care Boss talks with Paul & Brennan about the Pirate Jenny Booth at Gen Con.
- 20:51 - Ryan talks with Brennan & Paul about demoing games at conventions.
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.
http://www.ennie-awards.com/voting/ball
The Voice of the Revolution is up for a best podcast award, so Paul, Ryan, and I would appreciate your support and vote!
A ton of other games and books that are carried by IPR or produced by friends of mine are also up for vote. If you're looking to support the indie game community in general, check out the picks over at the Summer Revolution: http://www.summer-revolution.com/
I will be voting today, and I plan on posting my choices later.
Also, there's this:
"I heard that magic no longer has a price in Mortal Coil Revised. Is that true?"
Both people were, rightfully, dismayed that this might be the case. The answer is, no, it is not true. The way magic works in Revised is unchanged. Price, as these two players mentioned, is one of their favorite parts of the system, and it is mine, too.
Since two different gamers asked me this same question on two different occasions, I was concerned. It seemed that a rumor about this change was starting to circulate, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. A short bit of investigation led me to the source of the rumor: a blog post by Rob Donoghue about the Revised edition. A careful read of this blog will show that Rob is not saying that magic has no price in Revised. He is, in fact, talking about a different rule, the threshold of credibility rule. A quick skim of the post, however, is leading people to draw an incorrect conclusion, and rereading the post I could see how a reader might interpret the post as saying that magic no longer has a price.
I hope this post helps clear the air on the issue!
- 0:29 - Brennan is joined this month by special guest co-host, Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games. They kick off the show with the new products list.
- Kobold Quartery Magazines #4, #7, #9
- Zobeck Gazetteer
- Kobold Guide to Game Design, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
- Esoterror Fact Book
- It's Complicated: Online Play Edition
- A Penny For My Thoughts
- Poisoncraft for D&D 4E: The Codex Venenorum
- Ninja-To Go: A Ninja Burger Bored Game
- 5:30 - The Shadow of Yesterday, by CRN Games, is a fantasy game focusing on people and individuals, and the sorts of stories they produce.
- 14:34 - Wolfgang Baur talks with Brennan about his work with Open Design and Kobold Quarterly.
- 23:38 - Jason & Brennan talk about what's going on At Our Tables, discussing emotionally-intense play.
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.
- 0:29 - What's new on IPR this month?
- Tales of the Seven Dogs Society (for Alethea)
- API Demon Codex: Lochs (for Apocalypse Prevention, Inc.)
- This Favored Land (for Wild Talents)
- 3:39 - 3:16: Carnage Among the Stars, from Box Ninja Games, is more than a little Starship Troopers-esque.
- 13:54 - John Harper, designer of Agon, talks about some short design experiments (GHOST/ECHO, The Mustang, Lady Blackbird) he's released recently.
- 21:32 - In At Our Tables, Paul and Brennan talk about character advancement and changes to the world, inspired by Brennan's current Spirit of the Century game. Other games they're playing include:
- 30:09 - And in the shameless plug portion of the program, Paul is excited that A Penny For My Thoughts will finally be released this summer.
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.
http://www.galileogames.com/mortal-coil/
The file is in the Download section. This contains all the changes. I didn't include sections that exist in first edition that were rewritten for clarity in the Revised edition, only the new info. Where there is a conflict in the rules, use the information in the supplement.
- 0:29 - As usual, Brennan shares with us what's new on IPR.
- 5:31 - Suitors, by Firestorm Ink, is a trick-taking card game about romance.
- 9:32 - Chad Underkoffler talks about his newest game from Evil Hat Productions, Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies
- 18:03 - Finally, Paul & Brennan talk about what's going on At Our Tables, discussing the desire for long-term campaign play.
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.
In the first story, none of the characters had a name. The main character is just "a man." As soon as I stopped trying to give the characters names, the stories suddenly became much easier to write and I've already knocked out two and got a good start on the third.
I just find it interesting that this little detail was the difference between me being able to write these easily and having a massive writing block.
- 0:29 - Thanks to some accidential omissions at the Dreamation show, this month Brennan gives us a downpour of news.
- Adventures Into Darkness, available for HERO System, M&M Superlink, Truth & Justice
- Under My Skin
- Thousand Suns: Transmissions from Piper
- Shadows Over Filmland (preorder)
- The Witch Doctor Player Class for D&D 4E
- Shrouded Agendas 4E: The Purifiers
- Dragon
- My Monster
- Tombstones n' Tumbleweeds
- New Gods of Mankind
- Dirty Deutsch
- Bounty Head Bebop
- Bounty Head Bebop: Ghost in the Machine
- Montsegur 1244
- Mortal Coil Revised (preorder)
- Mist-Robed Gate
- Jaws of the Six Serpents
- 7:11 - Mist-Robed Gate, by Two Scooters Press, is a wuxia-themed game involving a knife that's about emotional violence.
- 16:06 - Mark Reed, from Heroic Journey Publising talks about their new game, Bounty Head Bebop
- 22:34 - Lastly, Paul and Brennan combine Pravda and At Our Tables into one segment, talking about playing games with kids
- Dunegons & Dragons Fourth Edition
- Mouse Guard
- Spirit of the Century
- Primetime Adventures
- Montsegur 1244
- Annalise: Eternal Tears PDF Edition
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.
( Art below the cut... )
The post in question was very critical of a newish game on IPR: Summerland. Summerland is a freshman effort from a new game designer, Greg Saunders. It's a cool game with a very interesting theme. Post-apocalyptic, but in this case the apocalypse is the natural world overgrowing cities and human works, and transforming most humans into an animal-like feral state. Players take the role of survivors, but a particular kind of survivor. Only some people are able to travel into this wildness and not be overcome and transform. These select individuals serve an invaluable purpose, traveling between the remaining communities and delivering trade supplies and messages.
Overall, a cool concept. I personally think it is well-executed and the system is worth looking at. Obviously, I thought it was good enough to be included in IPR's lineup, and I still think so.
All that said, sure, the game is far from perfect. As I mentioned, this is Greg's first game. Like a lot of first-time game designers, Greg had feedback from his peers, but did most of the work himself. I'd personally quibble with his body text font choice, it's a bit hard to read. Greg probably laid out the book himself and has no formal training in layout design.
He also has no formal training in game design. Pretty much no one in the tabletop game industry has formal game design training because there really isn't any to be had. We are all self-taught. That means that any game designer's first effort is going to be far from perfect. It may even have some serious flaws. I know I've been accused of picking people's pockets by selling an unfinished game, and that was my third published game. I learn more each time, and I think I've got some good game design chops now. Mortal Coil Revised is far superior to Mortal Coil, and How We Came to Live Here is my best design yet. The more I practice, the better I get, just like any endeavor.
What I'm calling for in this post is a certain understanding of this process. As a consumer, you don't want to buy a flawed or inferior product, and you are justified in being angry when you do. Just keep in mind that if you buying the first game from a new designer, you are not likely getting a fully polished, slick and professional work. You are getting a game designer's first effort. It could be brilliant, but the designer will always be improving. Pay attention when you make a purchase to the designer's previous record, and give the designer a bit of a break on the first game (or couple of games) out of the gate.
http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcar
