Channeling Byron John

I decided to try my hand at an iconic sort of John Byrne pose and built the cover around that. I cannot stop drawing like me (since I've been drawing like me for forty years now), but it at least has some JB vibes to it. Not bad for a first pass at a cover design, if I do say so myself...

 

This Alone Would Justify A Kickstarter

So I got the crazy idea this morning to reach out and see if John Byrne might be commissioned to draw Doc Stalwart for the cover of the new version of the RPG. I mean... to have an original Doc drawing done by John Byrne? That would be... I cannot even tell you. I'm tearing up just thinking about the idea of it.

I don't know if Mr. Byrne even does commissions anymore (most of the things I found are from several years ago), but I sent an email and crossed my fingers. 

The thought of sitting here with a scan of John Byrne's art trying to color it just is kind of overwhelming to me. That he would even know I and this project exist is kind of meta if I'm being honest. I would call it a full circle moment if it happens, but I don't think that would even explain it fully.

If I Was In Charge of the MCU

So this would be my pitch for FF/Doomsday/Secret Wars setup... I already own some baseball caps, so all I need is a few billion dollars...

Tony Stark in another reality (one we haven't seen yet), failed in saving the universe, stopping Thanos, and any of it. He lived, but almost everyone else died. He lost it, and learning of the TVA, created his own alternate timeline/universe where he had absolute power. This idealized universe is the 1960s version of the FF (because he wants to fix his own childhood trauma still), where he is a godlike ruler that everyone loves and adores. He creates the Fantastic Four, a perfect little family, to be like his 'lil perfect Avengers' that never were. It's the life he would want if he could dream it up. The problem is, that there's an innate corruption to the whole thing. He cannot quite figure out why, but there's a flaw, a malevolent force that wants to destroy it, that becomes Galactus. He gets his buddies the FF (who totally think he's the best) to join him on this big fight against Galactus, and they fail - their whole universe is destroyed, and Galactus is now free to go about devouring other universes as well.

Tony's horribly scarred in the process, feels betrayed by Reed (who realizes what the truth is partway through) and goes full on rage master. He's decided he needs to stop Galactus from eating universes, and he hides out in the Void for a bit to catch a breather and put a plan together. He sees that one universe was able to defeat Thanos, so he decides on a greatest hits, where he will be their 'new iron man' and lead them. Except, he's a deeply flawed one, and the heroes he gathers slowly turn against him. He finally decides to heck with them all - he's going to let Galactus wipe out the multiverse after all, and they can all just pound salt. He assumes the role of Doom at the end of Doomsday, promising to destroy everything.

In Secret Wars, the heroes have to work together to both stop Galactus' rampaging throughout the universe sniffing things out (Doom took out the TVA already, because they kept getting in his way), and has undone the mechanisms that allowed for time travel (that whole quantum zone thing was more trouble than it was worth. Good thing he tricked Galactus into eating it). 

At the end of it all, Doom and the remaining heroes have settled in what remains of Earth 616 (When Galactus ate the void, it destroyed him because it is a place of nothing, so it actually consumed him - or they sort of consumed each other). The multiverse is shut down for good, there is no more TVA, there is no more quantum realm, and we can go back to telling smaller stories set in one universe for a while. I'd even let the celestials take part in all of this (as they rise up and go to various universes to save them, only to die in the attempt against Galactus). I'd want to get that whole dangling plot thread of Celestials out of the way for good.

IRL

One of the things that the comics do well (when they do this well) is that they have the superhero's performance closely tied to their drama outside of super life. When Peter is fighting with MJ and forgot to stop and get bagels for Aunt May, he's suddenly struggling against the Green Goblin more, because things just sort of spiral out of control on him. Tony Stark's personal life is in shambles, and suddenly he cannot remember how the repulsors work. One of the great things about FASERIP was that it had Karma, which actually created mechanisms for this stuff to directly impact your super-heroing.

I've got an idea for a mechanic called In Real Life (IRL) that would have a direct bearing on your superhero life, and emulate Karma (after a fashion).

Your IRL starts at zero. Everyone is pretty chill. No drama. But then you get a call that your sister needs your help just as the alarm goes off at First National Bank. You don your mask and ghost your sister. You take a -1 hit to IRL. At the beginning of the adventure, your GM requires you to check mind (DT 4). You fail. It was your mom's birthday. Oh, shoot. I mean, you kind of got her world peace for her birthday, but that's not going to make up for missing the luncheon. -1 to IRL. As long as your IRL is at 0, things are okay. People might be a little annoyed or a little extra pleased with you, but it's not affecting your superhero life.

But... once you get into positives or negatives, things change.

At -1 (or +1) you receive a shift to your hero points, moving either up or down one die rating. At IRL -1, your hero points (normally worth D10) drop to D8.  At IRL +1, your D10 hero points are now rolled using D12.

At -4 (or +4), you receive a -2 or +2 shift to your hero points, moving either up or down two dice ratings. 

At +10 or better, you're on top of the world. You get the +2 dice shift, and +1 bonus hero point. Go you! But... you can also hit rock bottom. At -10 IRL, you've watched your life totally fall apart. You cannot use hero points at all, and you suffer -1 edge to all of your checks. EVERYTHING falls apart. You cannot focus, you keep dropping your weapon, you cannot get your powers to work. 

I think this would be a rare thing, but I also think it could be a cool way to build a character arc that is supported mechanically. I think of Daredevil's Born Again storyline here.

Your GM would have a lot of autonomy in deciding this, and could even deal bonus IRL damage for huge events. You forgot to get the medicine for your grandfather (-1 IRL), but he ended up having a heart attack and went to the hospital as a result (oof. That's another -3). And... while you were off saving Meridian again, he kind of died (yeah. That's another -5, so you're at -9 from this one series of awful things). You're living on the edge of everything falling totally apart on you. When Uncle Ben dies, Peter Parker hits -10... and realizes he can never let himself feel this way again. It's a character-building moment because the weight of his life choices ended up costing him dearly.

I like that this sytem:

1. Emulates comics (always good).
2. Can be plugged in easily or totally ignored (always good).
3. Is very easy to manage, track, and implement (more goodness).
4. Puts a heavy focus on roleplaying and character work without adding much. Character stat blocks don't need to add this (because everyone is assumed at zero). It's something you could choose to use for your character (Rogue TOTALLY has this), or ignore (Wolverine is Wolverine whether or not he's madly in love with Jean, and whether or not she loves him back). Some characters wouldn't worry about their personal lives, because being a super is all it's about. A player who wants to curate this gets a benefit from doing so (the bonus to hero points for success), knowing that the risk of messing up is always out there for the GM to tinker with. I almost think that a character like Captain America has this turned off entirely. He's going to always put his country first, and personal sacrifices are going to be necessary. He won't let the personal disappointments of his life interfere with his job performance. That's a character-based decision right there that has in-game consequences (because he cannot get the hero point bonuses either - no matter how much good he does, it never really makes much difference - he soldiers on anyway).
5. This 'replaces' XP in some measure. Your character can 'grow' and get 'better' over time in a meaningful way without the power creep of leveling. It's more organic, but also creates a sense of change in your character over time. It rewards ongoing play.

Cobbling The Book Together

After binging the rest of X-Men '97 (I couldn't help myself), I spent a few hours this afternoon and evening moving everything for Stalwart into a single document, and then started to work on formatting and organizing. I plunked in everyting that I think is necessary, and left a few spots for expansion/clarification where I have a few ideas... and the book is 83 pages and almost 40,000 words! Dang. The 'rules' are only about 24 pages, and then the rest is setting, characters, and background. Still, it's a bit of a beast. By comparison, Stalwart Age was 87 pages and 23,000 words overall. I increased the font one size (from 10 to 11), so the pages don't feel quite as jam-packed (and as my eyes get older, I need larger fonts - I am my target audience). That said, this is a much more complete package than anything I've done in a long time. 

I like the smaller format of the 6x9 book, but I think that a traditional 8 1/2 x 11 book (saddle stitched) is the best for gaming; I'm constantly bending pages in my trade paperbacks, but the big books lay nice and flat and are easier to manage. The bigger book also leads to more variety in page layouts, so that the whole thing ends up a little more interesting and varied throughout. The layout of the Stalwart books has been very easy, since it's a single column in a smaller space; this takes more management of the space, and I've already got a few pages I really like (and a few that bother me and will need work).

All-in-all, off to a good start.

I still don't know what to DO with this (like, is a Kickstarter even a viable option), but I figure I can probably have it done in a few weeks.

X-Men 97 and In Medias Res

So I have had a little time this week - summer school is done, and the girls are at a diving camp on the other side of the country... so I've had some time. I went for the longest bike ride of my life (somewhere around 40 miles), spent a few hours with my friend Bob making characters for a game of Swords and Wizardry that he's starting (and which I am incredibly excited to play in), and watched the first five episodes of X-Men 97.

I've told you about my first comic book character - the Renegade (from like 1984), but I've never told you about the follow-up book. It was called "Phoenix Force", and it was entirely and completely inspired by Byrne's run on Fantastic Four, but it was all X-Men character swipes. The team was led by "Pulsar" (Cyclops with Reed Richards' brains), with a girlfriend called "Mind Girl", and two other characters named "Frostbite" (who happened to be able to make his ice into huge slip and slides, of course) and "Borg" (who looked like Colossus but who had the Thing's "I'm such a monster boo hoo" persona). They lived in the Phoenix Tower and battled a scientist/sorcerer called the Overlord, who was ruling a different Eastern Eurpean nation from a different castle, so therefore a completely original character. 

Yesterday, I'm watching X-Men 97 and halfway hoping the Overlord just made an appearance. Just for a second.

I could write a full review, but I'll just say this - it's everything I could want it to be. The pacing is fantastic, the characters are compelling, the conflicts have high stakes, and the emotional connections I'm building to the story are legit. It's just really, really well done.

But I stopped watching at episode 5 and I'm just going to let it marinade for a bit (maybe until tomorrow if I can help myself)... because I know now that this is the sweet spot. I haven't read an X-Men comic since about 1988, so I know of half the characters just from their images and other things, but know next to nothing about their stories; the characters I do know have grown up a bit since I last saw them. So, it's all new to me. As a result, I was genuinely surprised by the events of episode 5. I thought the show was going one direction, and it zagged on me. Now, I'm sitting here with the world in ruins, the bad guys seemingly too big to overcome, and with no clue what happens next.

It's awesome.

This is how I felt the whole time between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It is how I felt between Infinity War and Endgame. It is how I really, really hope I feel between Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. There's a big difference between feeling as though I'd like to see what happens next and knowing that I NEED to see what happens next. After Jedi, I wanted to see more, but I also understood that if I never saw anything else, that was enough. I was going to be okay. I was not okay after Empire. If Jedi never came out, I would have had significantly more childhood trauma to work through.

And from a gaming perspective, this is where I would want to be as a player. You've set up this rich world with great characters, and then blew the whole thing up. Now, you hand it off to the players and let them figure it out.

I want to move Doc's story forward. Kind of. But there's a part of me (maybe a bigger part) that just wants to sit here (here being 1985), and let things sit where they are. Skye Stalwart has just been rescued from the Null Zone. Meridian is rebuilding. The world has been shaken by the Null Incursion and now the (impending) discovery that there may be aliens among us.

And I've realized what Doc would do next. He would want to destroy Null the Devourer and close all access to the Null Zone forever. It has taken his wife, it took his daughter's childhood, and it took the peace and security in Meridian that he had fought for years to maintain. I could see him being somewhat obsessed with this, and I could see this taking him away from earth for a 12-issue run in his own book. Earth has just awakened to the presence of aliens, the Hall of Victory is closed, and the Victory Legion is scattered to the four winds.

This is where the game just sits. April, 1985: The Mighty Doc Stalwart #265 ("Turning the Page", where Doc sets off on a solo mission into the Null Zone to destroy it forever), Skye Stalwart: The Girl Who Fell From Earth #1, and Stalwart Team Up #8 (which was a bi-monthly series at the time). I know that this is what I have room to 'backfill' to. I keep thinking of the 'back issue bin' of expansions where I do for Doc's older stories what I have started to do with Team Up - tell the story and then stat it out in game terms. I've already written a pretty cool Doc Stalwart invading Simian City story that goes somewhere in the continuity, but I haven't figured it out yet - but it's a chance to flesh out the city in more detail, outline some of Simian Prime's tech, and add to that facet of the world a little bit. 

Just for reference, these actual books came out in April 1985: Secret Wars #12, Crisis on Infinite Earths #1. So, it's a good place to sit for a while. Amazing Spider-Man 260 (with one of my favorite covers of all time), had just come out in January. This is my 'golden age' of comics collecting - I'm getting back issues as much as I'm getting the new issues, absorbing all of this story at once. I remember I was reading the reprint series of the original Amazing Spider-Man books (Marvel Tales) while also collecting the ongoing Amazing SM and Peter Parker books, and loving how long and rich the history of this character was. It was later into Byrne's run on FF, Spidey was still dealing with the drama of the alien symbiote costume, and all was right (and by that I mean wrong) with the world.

When I launched Stalwart only a few months ago (but what in some ways feels a lifetime), I did so under the belief that I'd start to roll the clock forward in this world. But I want the game to feel like I did collecting both the Amazing Spider-Man and his reprint book at the same time. 

   

ALL of this got me thinking that it might be time to start putting EVERYTHING together in one big book. It would be all of the Stalwart game stuff I've released, some notes I've got going for GM advice and expanding/clarifying how to use Hero Points (Cyclops using his consussive blasts to fall safetly in Episode 1 was a great example of how I want hero points to work - you use your power in some very stunt-like way that you cannot just do all the time - you create a cool storytelling moment for your character without suddenly amping up their powers exponentially). I've got SO much stuff at this point that getting it all under one set of covers, unifying and simplifying it, and putting all of the miscellaneous references (and a lot of stuff from the Stalwart Age blog that nobody has ever seen but which fleshes out the game world in so many ways) into this one book seems like it might be worth the effort. 

And this time, Doc Stalwart finally ends up on the cover. For a game centered on him, I'm kind of surprised that he's never been the cover character for any of the game releases... and I think it's called Stalwart '85. Just 'cause. 

Transparency Report: Some Numbers and Business Model Talky Talk

The last two months have been, far and away, the best two months of RPG sales I have had in a decade, and have generated more enthusiasm than I have ever had for anything I've done in comics or RPGs. You can see the sales at the bottom (because I just cut and pasted the reports right out of DriveThru for your reference).

Why am I sharing this?

I suppose because this is the reality of being a self-publisher. I talk to a LOT of friends, family, and students about this, and their shared belief is that you go through a three-step process: A) Create something that's pretty good, B) Put it up for sale, C) Buy a yacht and set sail around the world, because you can do that now. You're a 'published author' = 'you must be rich' (or, you'd be rich if you were working for one of the big companies rather than doing this stupid independent thing you are so fixated on, but that's a whole other discussion - I have no numbers but do have a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests I am probably better off where I am right now).

This begs the question - why don't I just come out with another game like Stalwart? Except do that every two weeks? Forever? Wouldn't I then increase these sales all the time? Like... duh. The only problem is that ... A) Stalwart somehow finds one of the remaining sweet spots in the industry where the supply has not quite caught up to the demand (supers systems of low/medium crunch), and B) Stalwrt took me forty years to finally get right. I've been trying to write this game since I was eleven. I don't think I can do that again next week. If I start now and live to 90, I might squeeze out another one of these. Everyone has their go-to fantasy game, and most people don't need another one. For some reason, many people are still looking for that holy grail of supers games.

Okay, Let's Crunch Some Numbers

1. First of all, I also launched the itch.io page, and have 27 core rules downloads (I put it up PWYW there because I had no idea how the model worked there really) and have had 10-20 downloads of the other books, and zero total sales. I'm not loving itch. It's got a different set of people (that's good) but they don't seem to really be as invested or care as much (that's bad). I'm competing with a wider and not-necessarily-compatible set of products for space. I'm meh about it so far. I'll keep it up (because why not) but I don't see much value in it right now. Maybe that will change.

2. I am a pretty active blogger, and I talk about my game a LOT (I think). Even when I don't have new releases, I'm trying to continually keep people aware that I'm working on the game, and I produce a lot of tertiary stuff that ties into or adds to the game in some way. I have been blogging for 14 years and this is post 1,290 ... and an average of about 25 people read any post I put up (posts with images end up in the 30s, posts with no images end up in the teens). I have NO idea how people make any money blogging (maybe they're a little more broad than 'niche game I produce in the darkest corner of the internet'), but still. You'd think I'd be able to get more traffic after 14 years and 1200 posts :) I added an image to this post just because I hope it gets some traffic (and full disclosure - this post is part of my business model, too. People might not know or care much about my game, but people are interested in reading about publishing if they want to do it, and more eyeballs is more eyeballs).

3. I ran a banner for Stalwart, thinking this would be a home run, and it was BY FAR the weakest banner I have ever run (20,000 impressions with 8 clicks - so .04% - that is very, very bad). I don't know why, but I suspect part of it was the high number of people who visited the Stalwart RPG page to begin with. They didn't click the banner because they had already seen the game's main page. That's the best I can figure.

4. My core 'business model' - a few foundational books in my back catalog along with frequent smaller releases as PWYW to keep new eyeballs on my stuff, is the winning formula. Over these two months, my sales break down into these three categories (broken down by sales, not by my earnings, which are 2/3 of this, so out of 400.62 on the two months my earnings are 260.40):

• Stalwart Core Rules (the thing I am trying to sell): 119.00 (29.7%)
• The PWYW releases for Stalwart (the things that support the thing I am trying to sell): 102.15 (25.5%)
• The back catalog (just other stuff I've done that I'm not actively promoting at all): 179.47 (44.8%) 

In the broadest strokes, it's the three-headed monster with roughly a quarter the core book, a quarter the PWYW supplements, and almost half the back catalog (the back catalog is the strongest overall performer)... Here's why this model works (I think):

First, I have produced some good content (that's kind of the most important thing). The back catalog accounted for a significant chunk of my sales (44.8%). If people like my new game they got for $1, they are far more likely to throw another ten or fifteen my way to get the other stuff I've done. That's HUGE.

Second, I set very modest price points. I think my games give good value for the money I ask. I could double my prices across the board and nobody would be too angry at me for trying to gouge people, but how far down would sales go? I understand that raw economics says as long as I sold 51% or more, I'd be ahead. However, two things work against this: 

A) Getting more eyeballs on my games is always better. The more people who get it, the more people might like it, and the more they might talk about it. Another reason to keep the itch.io page up - maybe the 'right' youtuber or blogger gets it there, says nice things about it, and suddenly I'm looking up yachts for sale on Google.

B) You guys are pretty awesome. For real. The reality is that each of you sets a value in your mind of what the game is worth to you, and you make sure to pay accordingly. Some of you felt that the World of Stalwart was worth $3 (and some of you more than that), but then decided that the Guide to Meridian was going to be the 'free one' you had already helped pay for. You felt like you'd made a pretty good investment in the game, and this supplement was a 'bonus' you should get for your support. I have no issues with that at all. I trust that at some point, I'll release something else you feel strongly about paying for, and you will. The model trusts you to set the value, and you collectively respond appropriately. Some people (who I very much doubt would happen upon this blog) have decided to fill several external hard drives with every free RPG they can ever get. I don't think those peeps are ever going to be a dedicated base, and that's fine. I am not going to change what I do so that someone doesn't have file 3752 on Drive F in a drawer someplace. It's why I like Patreon as a model (people pay you what they decide things are worth), but it's sort of a closed space (a lot behind the wall), so I think it ends up limiting itself. Setting up a Patreon at this point would be double-dipping on people - if you want to support me more, there are lots of ways to do it already.

Anyway, here are the sales charts:

Edit: By the way, here are the sales reports for March and April, so you can see what 'typical' months look like. I figure that context matters, and without the context of my regular sales, it's hard to see what I see in the numbers above...