Community Building: More on Reviews

One of my goals as I move into the next phase of all things Army Ants is to become a larger part of this community – both in comics and games. While maintaining a greater presence on the forums and engaging more in discussions on blogs will help, I’ve also decided that I need to make some sort of contribution to the community. To that end, I am going to start posting reviews once a week. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be reviewing yet over the long term, but I figure that I have a perfectly good library card, and my daughter loves going there at least once a week, so I may as well see what I can take out and review for all y’all. If you have a game or comic you’d like for me to look at, feel free to send it my way, and I’ll try to put together a schedule of some kind. Maybe I'll try to alternate, doing a comic one week and a game or accessory the following week...

The ancillary benefit of this is that I get to focus on the work of other writers and artists, and it can only hone my own craft by examining the work of others in a critical way. If it generates a little more traffic into my corner of the Internet, all the better. It’s your classic win-win-win scenario, my friends.

Tomorrow, I will lead off with a review of Mouse Guard: Fall 1152.

Doing Your Own Thing - and About Reviews

I have to tell you, I’m truly enjoying where things are at right now, and I think I’ve made an important self-discovery about doing my own thing.

Last summer, I went through a process that I’ve repeated many, many times. I worked for months on a game system, carefully composing it, worrying over each detail, testing various elements of it, hemming and hawing over minutiae. Then I release it to the wild. (FYI, I’m talking about Mythweaver: Legacy). I post to forums. I send copies for review. I cross my fingers. Then I sit back and watch other, similar games garner attention, reviews and sales. Last fall, it was Barebones Fantasy. The cover art was comparable (to my eye - maybe you'll disagree). The game philosophy was comparable. The total page count was comparable. My game was $1, and that game was $10. Barebones Fantasy easily hit the #1 ranking on RPGNow, and my game made it into the top 25 for a day or two and then moved into obscurity. That game immediately received a number of positive reviews and was talked up on the forums; my game has received one rating (and no reviews) to date. I couldn’t figure out why (I still don’t know for sure – maybe it’s just a superior game with a better marketing plan. That’s likely!). All I know is that I worked pretty hard on something for a good amount of time, and few people seemed to notice. All I know is that I spent my time after it came out looking at how ‘I was doing’ compared to another game that was, for all intents and purposes, quite a bit like it (only much more expensive).

I’ve done the same with my supers game. The second edition of Resolute came out within weeks of Icons. Icons gathered tons of acclaim and positive press, and Resolute got a small bump. Is Icons a superior game? Maybe. Probably. But Resolute is a great little supers game. It’s rock solid. It’s dirt cheap. It should be a big seller and have a ton of reviews. It’s not and it doesn’t. No idea why. All I know is, spending my time comparing it to Icons only made me feel bad about myself, for no good reason.

Enter the Army Ants, stage left. I tried to compare it to sales of other anthropomorphic military insect cross-genre games based on indy comic books, but I had trouble finding them. Thank goodness! It’s its own thing. I don’t have anything to compare it to, and for that I am exceptionally grateful. Now I can just get to work responding to the people who have been so generous in their kind words about it and working on the comic pages and game supplements that I want to keep producing. I can put all of my focus here, and not worry about what other people are doing in their own corners of the community.

I’ll tell you, though, I still don’t know why no one posts reviews of my game or comics. I’ve asked several times and have sent large numbers of review copies, and maybe I just have a readership that is not comfortable posting reviews. If that’s the case, then that’s the case. Maybe, however, my readers and players don’t know why reviews are important. Maybe I should at least explain it.

When people see no reviews, they often assume that no one likes the game, and that no one is playing it. When they see reviews, they often assume that the game must be up to something, because a lot of people have bought it. No reviews = no interest in this community.

So, I’ll ask one more time. If you have five minutes, please write a few sentences about the game and put it up somewhere – and put the review on RPG Now, or maybe do the same for the comics on Drivethrucomics. It will make a HUGE difference in how the larger community views the game and the comic series. By the way, a review doesn’t have to be thorough or insightful or powerful – it just has to be there. A few sentences go a long way.

Thanks!

MTDAA Print Editions Now All Live

All of the print editions (MTDAA the RPG Legacy; Comics Volume 1; Comics Volume 2) are now in print in the Createspace storefront! If you are a Kickstarter backer, your copies are already en route, so sit back and relax - and start checking your mailbox.

If you missed out on the Kickstarter and wanted to get some Army Ants print goodness, your time has come!

Red Squad Rising Actual Play

I've been running a squad (it started as a platoon, but these things happen) through the boot camp character builder at the back of the core rules, with expected results; the first mission had a 20% survival rate. I'm to the point now where the boys have finished boot camp, and they're ready to go on their first true mission as Army Ants. I will probably run them through the two adventures at the back of the core rules, and then use them as I start to develop expansion materials for the game...

I've put the thread up in two places:

rpg.net
the rpgsite

And while I was tooling around with the Interwebz anyway, I decided to put up a downloadable Character Card. The kids love their character sheets.

MTDAA RPG Legacy Edition Core Rules Now Live

The core rules for Michael T. Desing's Army Ants: Legacy Edition are now live on rpgnow. It's 160 pages of gaming goodness. Kickstarter backers should have the download links in your e-mail. If you don't get a link and should have, please let me know!

I've decided to have this book included in a bundle with the two comic collections, meaning that you can get pdfs of all three books, the entire MTDAA collection, for under $10!

I'm sending the print orders for this book and Year of the Ant to the printer's in the next day or so... and I expect to ship those books by the end of next week.

Player's Guide Now Live on RPG Now - and it's FREE!

The free download of the Player's Guide (the first 72 pages of the RPG) is now available at RPGNow. This should keep you busy for a few days. I will have the full rules finished and up by the end of the week (and probably sooner - I have about 80 pages still to do final edits of).

Thanks to the Kickstarter backers who achieved the stretch goal that allowed this to happen. Now a LOT of people are going to be exposed to the game who might otherwise have missed it.

Enjoy!

It's still July!

As I start this post, it is 11:59 on July 31, and I have JUST finished the last sentence on the last page of MTDAA: Legacy Edition. The game is DONE. FINIS. COMPLETE.

Seriously, I would do a backflip, but that would really, really hurt. I mean, nothing good can come from that.

The game is 100% written and layout is finished. The entire book has been through my second-final edit. It needs one more edit, and I still have to go through to create the table of contents, the index, and add all page # citations (right now, I have dozens of places where is reads 'see page xx' because I wasn't sure what page the citation would end up on!)

I'm so excited that I want to share a page from the game... here's the Appendix for a Soldiers of Fortune Campaign:

***

So you find the military life too stifling, do you? Want to venture out from the hill and cut your mandibles in the real world? It sounds like you are ready to ditch the army and embark upon a life as a hired gun; a merc; a soldier of fortune. Good luck, tough guy… you’re going to need it!

In a Soldiers of Fortune campaign, the insect mercenaries (and you can play pretty much any insect you want) don’t serve a hill or Queen; they are not motivated by loyalty or honor; they want to get rich, and they’re good at doing dirty jobs.

Clout has no value as a soldier of fortune; the Wasp Mark (the official currency of Seven Fields) is everything. When converting the cost of an item or object from Clout to Wasp Marks, multiply its Clout value x10. A rifle that costs 50 Clout points will set you back 500 Wasp Marks (on the black market). That airplane that goes for 750 Clout is now going to run 7,500 Wasp Marks (if you can find it – and the ladybugs tend to make sure that things like 7,500 Mark-value military-grade aircraft don’t fall into the hands of mercenaries. Sorry about that). Oh, and when you trade things that you don’t want any more… you only get half credit on your investment… if your source is still in business and the Ant Republic hasn’t cleared him out of his hole in the ground.

The Benefits of being a Soldier of Fortune                                               

- You get to keep what you find! If you discover a box of fragmentation grenades, you get to take them home and put them in your basement! Nobody is going to tell you to turn them in; and if someone does, you can pop a cap in him!

- Nobody tells you what to do!

- You don’t have to worry about all of that political maneuvering and anterior-kissing that allows you to move up in rank and privilege. Might makes right in your world. Rank? Who needs THAT?

The Drawbacks of Being a Soldier of Fortune                               

- Three hots and a cot – you don’t have ‘em. You have to earn ‘em. Every. Single. Day.

- You don’t have a quartermaster to shine your boots, repair your rifle, re-stock your satchel and replace the batteries in your flashlight. You’re it, bub.

- You break it, you bought it. You crashed your new helicopter? Oh, sorry ‘bout that… guess you have to start saving up for another one.

- Remember that military organization that you gleefully left behind? Yeah. Those guys. They remember you, too… and they are none too happy that you’ve gone from ally to loose end. They don’t like loose ends. And they have bigger guns than you do.

So, What Am I Worth?

As a soldier of fortune, expect to earn about 10x your XP value in Wasp Marks for completing a mission; however, if you fail – don’t expect a cent.

***

I'm off to bed... see you on the flip side.