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 )

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.

In anticipation of the release, I’ll be posting some cool How We Came to Live Here related materials, including some of the final art for the game along with a special surprise. I anticipate everything being ready to go to print in the next couple of weeks, and as soon as files are sent off to the printer I’ll be setting up a preorder on IPR. The printed book should be available by November.

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!

This shouldn't be news to anyone reading this journal, but Spirit of the Century is a very good game. I ran it for our Wednesday group at Dark Tower Games. We had four or five players depending on the session, and ran a three-session story arc. Since we can only get in about 2-3 hours of play each time thanks to work schedules and store closing time, a typical one-day game takes us at least two sessions, sometimes three.

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.

Direct download: revolution34.mp3

The Ennie Awards polls are open! Here's where you go to vote:

http://www.ennie-awards.com/voting/ballot.asp

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:

At DexCon last week, I had two people approach me on two separate occasions and ask me the same question about Mortal Coil Revised.

June 2009 -- The Shadow of Yesterday Review and Wolfgang Baur Interview

• 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.
  • Grey Ranks
  • Mortal Coil
  • Primetime Adventures
  • The Shadow of Yesterday
  • Three Sixteen: Carnage Among the Stars
  • Legend of the Five Rings

Runtime: 36:45 / File size: 33.6M

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.

May 2009 -- 3:16 review and John Harper interview

• 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:
  • Dirty Secrets
  • Annalise
• 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.

Runtime: 32:59 / File size: 30.2M

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.

For owners of first edition Mortal Coil who don't want to buy a whole new book, you can now get all the additional information in Revised from the Galileo Games web site:

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.