Ideas are Like Butts

Not everything I think of is gold. For example, I started with a quick mockup of a spaceship (it's small in the image), and then was thinking that the owners of this would be insectoid - and then I basically drew an army ant if the army wants were somewhat realistic in their basic design. I mean, it's creepy, but not really good creepy. It's just sort of not right creepy. And then, I was thinking it would be cool to call them the 'Chi'it', which I got from chitin, but which I know people would just call 'sh*t'. So, these would be the 'sh*t' aliens, which kind of becomes its own meme, but (again) not in a good way.

Don't think this one is making the cut.

However, I wanted to expand on some of the thinking from last time. One of the things that I am finally starting to understand about this hobby is that visibility is EVERYTHING. You might create decent stuff (I think I do), but if nobody sees it, it doesn't really matter. To whit (I have used that phrase a lot lately), I think that the material I was creating to support Stalwart Age was really good. However, I was posting it on my own blog and to a small patreon behind a firewall, sharing everything with the same small group of people. So, nobody new ever really had any chance to see it. It would be easy for things to go by in your feed and for it to be gone, even if you are someone who likes my stuff sometimes. 

With Stalwart Age, I made the mistake of trying to move the game away from DriveThruRPG rather than towards it. So, for this game, the idea is that the core rules are available on DriveThru, but so are regular (as in every month at the very least) supplements. If I am not constantly reminding people that I have a game and that I keep making stuff for it, then they are going to forget about me and my little game. It's not anyone's fault. There is a TON of shiny new stuff on DriveThru every minute. 

The idea here is that there will be a regular (again, at least monthly) resource of maybe 4 pages or so. My working title is "Transmissions from the Pale", and it would profile a game location (maybe a city, or a small moon, or a space station, or a lost temple... or...) including at least one new species, a few new creatures, vehicles, weapons, and maybe some optional rules. 

I also see the potential benefit of a Kickstarter in terms of building recognition. It's a high-profile place to do a launch. I don't know if I can justify running a KS for a 32-page rulebook (even if it IS full color). I think that IF I was to do a KS, I'd have to learn from the ones I've done before, and find some way to up the game for myself. One possibility would be a built-in one-year subscription to the regular update. You back the game for $25, and you get the core rules in print and PDF, and one year of the monthly 4-page updates. I can almost see a high-level tier where you get a hardcover copy of the four games I've done in this format: Tales of the Splintered Realm, Shards of Tomorrow, Army Ants Twilight, and Stalwart Age in one hardcover volume. I could also go back and remaster the art for Tales, making that book full color. The art is done, and coloring it would be a relatively workable task. Adding some color accents throughout would be pretty easy to do. I mean, this book would probably be around $60, but it might be worth having available. I don't know if a 32-page hardover makes sense, but a 128-pager in full color does.

More Big Picture Thinking: Dudes with Guns

In thinking about how to approach the design of the game, I didn't know how to go about building the scale of the setting. I don't think I have it in me to create a hundred planets, and the thousands of creatures that inhabit those planets. At least, not for the core rules... so, I decided that the core rules provide a thin slice of the larger system. You are going to get a starter moon, notes about the nearby planet and other moons, a brief description of that star system, and that's about it. For that moon, you are going to get detail: the specific creatures that inhabit it, the political and economic forces that shape it, and the various factions that can pull the characters in. As Obi Wan would say, this is your chance to see "part of a larger world". 

To whit, this guy is the Mirdan Rimewatcher. These are the sentient species that is native to the moon called Banquo's Tooth. These guys are decent fighters, and would be good entry-level bounty hunters that might be after the heroes. This guy carries a modified Sivir Blast Rifle. As you can see, I gave the evolution from line drawing through final art.

Big Picture Thinking - and a Picture

When I was in Middle School, my friends Matt and Mark had this deck of cards filled with silhouettes of military vehicles. I loved these cards - the simple, clean black and white images communicated so much to me about each vehicle. When I designed my first RPG (which was a military mission simulator where you could basically play GI Joes), I used the cards as the visual references for each vehicle as I statted them out. I still love these iconic designs, so I continue to use them for vehicles. Above is the design for the ship I shared a few days ago... which is now called the Madrygal Escort Ship.

Also, as I write, I have found a sweet spot for myself with technology. All of the really good technology is thousands of years old. In the game world, you're coming out of a dark age, and are re-discovering the starships and bots that belonged to the Naru, who are long-since dead. This keeps some of the vibe of 'finding old stuff' that sort of makes fantasy my favorite genre. It also makes it easy to include starships and bots into the game for new players. I always struggled with the idea that you are level 1, but you also have a few million credits to buy a starship. However, ancient starships are just sitting around in junkyards, buried in the wastes, and secreted away in old cave systems. You happen to find one, and bingo, instant ship. Bots work under a similar idea - they are all thousands of years old, and are programmed to find and attach to sentients. If you roll well at level 1, a bot found you and bonded. Congrats, you have your own R2-D2 or C-3PO. However, I also left an opening for bots to get total independence and go all Ultron, so that opens up some possibilites as well. You cannot buy a bot - it has to find you.

He's Not Bossk

I know that Boba Fett is everyone's boi, but my favorite bounty hunter was always Bossk (Greedo would be number one, but his death was so inglorious...) I like the design of Greedo better, but Bossk just struck me as the bounty hunter you would NOT want on your tail. I mean, nobody is afraid of Dengar, but Bossk has 'boss' as the root word. Dengar is an anagram for Er Dang. It's no contest.

That said, this is not Bossk, just a bounty hunter who will be appearing in the core rules as an NPC. I don't know what his name is yet, but it's not Bossk. I don't know why you keep saying that.

Third Time's The... Oh, You Know

I just kept drawing to drown my sorrows from Notre Dame's epic (but entirely Notre Damey) collapse in the Fiesta Bowl. I decided to give a starship a try, and I am very pleased with the results. As far as starship designs go, it is quite vanilla in basic design, but in terms of execution, I will take it. I'm thinking this is some sort of standard escort ship or light transport that would be ideal for junking and using for a group of heroes. It's got room for maybe eight, and opportunities for all sorts of upgrades. It's no Millennium Falcon, but then again, not many ships are... 

TP-35 Servo Bot

His name is TP-35 because Notre Dame played like toilet paper in the second half, and his head looks like a roll of toilet paper. And, Notre Dame scored 35 points, which was not enough. So, boo. As per this series (which it has suddenly become) I'm showing the progress from sketch (or in this case line drawing with base color selection) through the image that will appear somewhere in the book. Rather than trying to change my style for this game, I'm just leaning hard into what I already do. I felt like I made some significant (for me) changes in my approach to drawing for Stalwart Age... for this game, I'm just grooving on what I did there but with the space theme. I guess it's still giving the game a distinctive look from a sci-fantasy perspective, even if it isn't much different from what I've been doing for the last year or so...

Happy New Year - Here's a Bazzak Warbeast

Happy New Year!

I'm enjoying watching Notre Dame play well in the Fiesta Bowl as I do some drawing... I made some vague references to several creatures in the rulebook as I write (mostly just for flavor), and one of the first is a Bazzak. So, I thought I'd draw one. I figure that the rules might only have 10 or 15 exemplar beasts with a system to randomly generate your own beasts. Since there are thousands of creatures in the Cluster, I'd rather have the toolkit in place to make them and a few examples to get you started. The bazzak would be common pack and war beasts: easy to breed, easily trained, adaptable to a variety of environments, and foundational as a 'big lizard' archetype.

Right away, I can see these in some introductory adventures, too. Smuggle some Bazzak eggs to an outpost; steal some eggs from a nest; recover a bazzak that has gone missing; there are several decent starting options here.