Irons in the Fire

I am in the thick of putting the Never Going Home manuscript to rights. Almost all of the writing is in, but the wildly different styles of the authors have to be reconciled. This is a big job and I’m really not sure how I’m going to get it done by the date we’ve set for ourselves. I see I’ve got all this work to do, but I also see my inbox full of questions from other writers who are doing adventures for an adventure collection. There are all sort of skill levels represented in this group of 31 writers as well as different levels of experience with role playing games and with the First World War. I’ve found it hard to keep them all on track and explain the game mechanics over and over and still have the energy to sit down and work on my own word counts. It’s just another aspect of how NGH is bigger than we ever expected. My role as creative director is really stretching me when there are so many places my attention is being drawn. Learning. We are still learning how to do this.

Never Going Home is certainly the biggest iron in my fire pit, but I also have a few more in there. Since Wet Ink Games has created a new system for NGH, we feel we can use it to make more small to medium-sized games. We are developing a few at the same time, but the one off to the fastest start I will be called Project Equus. We have someone whom we have worked with before who had a really good handle on the +One system. We’ve basically given this person a free hand to create a game and they are off and running. My involvement should be slight, but it’s still something I have to keep an eye on.

We have also started to move forward on a large project I am going to call Project Nimbus. It will very likely be in development for several years and will take a lot of work – mostly in the world building and in hemming and hawing to get the tone absolutely right. Aiming from the start to make a “prestige” product is not something I have done before, but with the success of NGH and the working methods we are trying, I think we will be ready to make a great finished product by the time we have all the contents written.

Lots to do. Better get to it.

Strife Liberated!

You will know already if you were a backer of the project, but Wild Skies: Liberating Strife is done and set out to everybody. It’s available at fine retailers everywhere and has even been reviewed. It’s March and I feel like I have not come up for air since I started putting the Liberating Strife manuscript together in August of last year. Well, I am taking this moment to breathe. *three deep breaths*

When we chose to set the first Wild Skies book in Europe we always knew “The America Book” was going to be the next one we did. Being two “Yanks” ourselves, it only made sense. We took the same assumptions about the period and the technology level we want for the Wild Skies world and adjusted everything to an America context. What if everything Nikola Tesla said he could make actually got made? What if there was no “trust busting” and bigger and bigger companies unified into one mega-corporation? What if American politics of the period was stanch isolationism backed by the highest level of tech in the world – all leased to the army and air navy by said mega-corporation? Well, that’s the America we present in Liberating Strife.

That was what Brandon and I brought to the table. This was bigger than our previous project with two additional writers brought on. To over-simplify their contributions, John Kennedy was our “company and dissidents” specialist and Josh Sinsapaugh was our “culture and counter-culture” expert. The depth of research those two went to and the results they produced fill me with joy. Instead of just giving players a bunch of American tech and some American animals, this book paints an almost complete picture of the United States of American in this alternate reality diesel punk time line. Corporate structure of the United Dennington Trust; it’s there. Boardroom politics at the highest levels; covered. The popular and underground music scenes; explained. Traveling the roadways and airways; yes. All the countries of North America; have their own section. This is a 130 page book and it’s page 67 before you get to anything with game statistics; before that it’s all world information. Considering three of the four main writers grew up with Palladium’s Rifts* Wold Books, maybe it’s not a surprise.

The book also has a lot of great art in it. Showcasing art is another thing we get from the game books which are our roots. The cover by Chuck Walton and Eduardo Domínguez is another great one. Inside, in addition to another slate of great pieces from Mike Mumah of animal people doing all the things (shout out to my favorite, the Jazz Age party on page 87) and Aspen Aten doing another map for us and Brian Manning’s work on the weapons and vehicles, we have 30s-looking national parks posters from Steven Wu and action scenes by Steven Cummings. All together Wild Skies: Liberating Strife doesn’t just give you some stuff from America, it lets you play Wild Skies in America.

Case in point: In January I ran a game of Wild Skies using some adventure seeds we had sent to Kick Starter backers right after we funded and the pre-gen characters in the book. I was laying awake in bed the night before thinking about the game and trying to account for everything the players might want to do. I knew my game was full of people who had signed up specifically to play Wild Skies – I knew they would want to test the full potential of the game. As I lay there, I feel like I went through all the stages up to cosmic brain, because with all the material in the book flashing through my head and all the sessions I have run over the last few years I knew I could handle any situation which came up. If they wanted to go on a road trip, or try to take over a night club or ride the rails, or become air pirates, or stay in the work camp and investigate the original mystery, I could run that. When it came to it the next day, I could indeed run it and we had a great time. People like a game I helped create! It’s an amazing feeling.

Wild Skies: Liberating Strife is Wet Ink Games product number WIG-108, which means there are 9 Wild Skies products out there now. I haven’t talked about them all here so be sure to check them all out on DriveThruRPG.

Never Going Home Gets Going

It has been a very busy month here in “the museum”. The campaign for Never Going Home concluded on 3 December after a very successful run. This is by far the largest Kickstarter we have ever run and the results are actually a little scary. When we had under 200 backers for Liberating Strife back in April, I felt gently encouraged. With NGH getting over 800 backers I feel like we’ve suddenly catapulted to a new level of notoriety. I feel pressure to do everything right like I’ve never felt it before. Before it was just self-imposed perfectionism. Now, I have to impress a lot of strangers, many of whom have more experience with games and with Kickstarter than I do. This project isn’t on “easy mode” anymore. Not that I’m complaining. Everything I’m talking about is a good problem to have. I spent the next week after getting everything ready to actually run Never Going Home at a local nerd-centric event called Nerdlouvia. It’s put on my Nerd Louisville and this was probably the biggest of the three years I’ve been going. The photo below captures me down in the lower right corner waiting for my game to start.

When it did start, Never Going Home works as expected! Since it was was the first time all the pieces of the game were tested at once, there were a few hiccoughs, but for the most part it’s a working game. There are some improvements to make, which became obvious as soon as I had players asking questions and wanting to do things. Those ideas will have to be worked in and some other things tried. I’ll have to test it all out before too long. This book is slated to be done – at least with the writing – by the end of February. Wet Ink is in the middle of getting contracts with all our writers and planning who is writing what and what art we need. It’s going to be a big job. Our biggest yet. When will it feel like we’ve “arrived” as a company? I have no idea.

Armistice Day

Today marks 100 years since the end of fighting in the First World War. It is Armistice Day. For the last few years as each centenary of the events of the war has come, I have seeped myself in the history. It’s no surprise to me my creative life has in the last few years been dominated by echos of the Great War. While writing the Sovietski for Palladium Books I studied the October Revolution and the early days of the Soviet Union to get capture some cultural notes from that period. I was even more drawn into the Great War by working on Wild Skies, my first original game, which is set in an alternate timeline where the war didn’t come to the same relatively tidy end we know from history. Last year I summarized the events of the whole Russian Revolution and its place in the war as near-daily updates on FaceBook. My newest project, called Never Going Home is horror role playing set directly in the trenches. With so many of my creative output focused on this war and its aftermath, I have to acknowledge this day.

Especially this year, today is, for me, a solemn day for remembering the dead. I am staggered nearly to silence by the loss the war inflicted. The rough figure is 16 million people killed by the fighting; soldiers and civilians. With another 20 million soldiers wounded. That’s the war itself, not counting the Spanish Flu, the Russian Revolution, or the conflicts which simmered in the former Ottoman Empire into the 1920s. The numbers have a danger of becoming simply statistics. I find it more arresting to look at pictures of the graveyards which cover the former battlefields. Solemnly look with me.

What was the meaning of so much death? Famously, the war was supposed to “end all wars”, and that certainly hasn’t proven true in the last 100 years. How much more death have we seen then? Too much. Today, I am remembering all the dead. It’s very hard not to be cynical, but I want to celebrate the idea of peace the armistice of 1918 represents. We can stop fighting wars. We can move things to the negotiation table. We can agree not to kill anyone today. Peace is an idea worth working toward.

To be clear, I am not talking about shaking hands with people in my own country with different politics. That’s too easy. I am not saying there are not things like racial justice and clean water which are worth fighting for. There are! Voices must be raised, demonstrations staged, change demanded. I am talking today about questioning the need for weapons technology and political assumptions which lead to bombing villages from airplanes and building missiles capable of crossing oceans. I am affirming today, on Armistice Day, I want to live in a world without armed conflicts, proxy wars and national posturing in the form of military spending.

I know words matter. A call to memorialize all those killed by war is very different from a call to honor the sacrifice of soldiers. I will let others celebrate today as Veteran’s Day. Today I look beyond the need for military might to appreciate the possibilities of peace.

Am I Dieselpunk?

In support of Wild Skies: Liberating Strife, Brandon and I have been recording a few podcast appearances. Most recently we were on The RPG Brewery. Since we’ve called Wild Skies a dieselpunk game, we also appear on the newest episode of The Dieselpunk Podcast. They asked a question they ask of all their guests; “When did you know you were dieselpunk?” My honest answer to the question is: “Only when you told me I was”.

To step back a little bit: while Brandon and I were developing Wild Skies we always said we wanted it to be dieselpunk. The game was always set the 1930s and took inspiration from the ’20s and ’40s as well. To us, it was about staying in the technological brackets of “after airplanes” and “before jets”. The “punk” comes in with the idea “all problems can be solved by adding a bigger engine”. With these ideas set, I don’t feel we had to work that hard to make our game dieselpunk. We looked to the political, cultural and technological elements of those decades for our inspiration and naturally remixed them as we saw fit.

John and Eric of the Dieselpunk Podcast use the definition “retro futurism of the 1920s through the 1950s” when they talk about what dieselpunk is to them. I first encountered that definition last fall when John interviewed Brandon about the release of Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. By that definition, some of my favorite pop culture is dieselpunk even though I never called it that before: The Rocketeer, Batman: The Animated Series, Dark City and Nausicaä Princess of the Valley of the Wind. If I push the definition a little more to include what was actually produced in the ’20s-’50s, virtually all of my favorites are dieselpunk: Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, noir films like A Touch of Evil and the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda posters. I’m dieselpunk. Who knew?

Being on the show was great. I listen to a bunch of podcasts, but that was only the second time I have been on one. Brandon and I know what we like about our Wild Skies setting and about role playing while our hosts know about trends in dieselpunk, but almost nothing about role playing games. There was a lot of room for us all to learn from each other.

One idea mentioned in passing on the show which I want to weigh in on is the question: is dieselpunk about the particular technology or about the aesthetics of a setting? For me it’s all about the aesthetics and the attitude of remix culture. It’s what I call the blender. It what you put in the blender comes from the dieselpunk era, what you get out of the blender is dieselpunk. As with steampunk and cyberpunk “genres” before it, so much more fits under the umbrella of the name than just the technology of the time in question.

I have an important point about this. The remix is needed because the pop culture of so much of the past was so one dimensional; that is, white male heroes. For me, remixing the past in a “punk” way allows women, people of color, homosexuals and anyone else who tended not to be in focus, or allowed to be heroic of escape from stereotypes to become the center of action on their own terms. Again, steampunk led the way and it’s one of the things I appreciate about it.

I think dieselpunk – at least what I want it to be – should do the same thing. As a creator I need to open up the playing field so anyone can have adventures in the textures of this period. We’ve tried to make the right steps with Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. We present women in our NPC crew and in leadership positions. Our supplements include gender non-conforming and gay characters as well. As we assemble Liberating Strife, I realize there is still room to grow as my own awareness of the importance of representation grows. As a person who can so easily see myself in the pop culture I love, I feel an extra pressure to present my remix in a way where other people can see themselves as well.

“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife...”

Today is the start of the crowd funding period for the first source book for Wild Skies, the premier anthropomorphic diesel punk role playing game. This time we are turning our attention from post-war Europe to North America and the Roaring Twenties of the United States in particular. Taking a line from the song “America the Beautiful”, the title of this source book is Wild Skies: Liberating Strife. The project is live on KickStarter now, so please go there to support the book and help make it a reality.

From the beginning, my writing and business partner, Brandon, and I envisioned Wild Skies as a game to explore the many aspects of pulp-era adventure. This is the first of several planned source books. We wanted to begin with Europe because it is something less often seen, but we always knew an America book would follow. Almost as soon as the first book was announced, we were asked by fans, “So, when is the America book coming?” Knowing everyone considers a source book for America an obvious choice, we expect the project to generate a lot of interest. We will be delivering new animal types, new careers, new perks and quirks; all with an American theme. Keeping with the diesel punk feel we established in Europa Tempest, the America setting has flying battleships and dogfights and cities full of big machines. In contrast to Europe, we have asked for more Art Deco-inspired design in the aircraft and buildings. Inspired by the “current wars” and the early electrification of New York City, we have made electricity a central part of the story but ramped everything up to the point nearly limitless power is distributed wirelessly to everyone.

Beyond the technology, the other huge conceit of the setting is the “trust busting” efforts of Theodore Roosevelt didn’t really stick, nor did the stock market crash of 1929 happen. We posit a situation where all large corporations were instead consolidated into one mega-corporation owned by the Dennington family. Unlike the political tensions we explored in Europa Tempest, we aim to explore economic tensions with the story hooks of this book. What would it look like if a company really acted on the idea “a happy worker is a productive worker?” How do different people make lives for themselves in a ruthlessly capitalistic meritocracy? What other interpretations of “the American dream” are possible?” We also want to explore the international implications of the United States’ isolationist stance.

We had some growing pains over the course of our first project (Customs form? What is that?), but we also learned more about how to do the kinds of projects we want to do in this industry. We are experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect, for sure; realizing now how little we knew before. Though we expect Liberating Strife to be a smaller book then Europa Tempest, we have more help lined up this time. There are four primary writers instead of just two and we have a whole team of people in place to write the stretch goals when, if and as we reach them. We are expecting a quick turn-around on this project and delivery by this year’s GenCon in August. I’m never sure what it should feel like when I’ve “arrived” in the industry, but I think once this project gets funded and we have two full books out in the world as Wet Ink Games, I will feel more like I have made it.

Come fly the Wild Skies with us. This time over America!

Five Stages of a First Draft

I am currently working on a new project for Wet Ink Games. Its early days so I don’t want to say much about it, but this process has given me reason to think about the creative process and specifically about the many stages of work a creator has to go through to make any particular idea a reality. There are lots of creators who have covered this before, but I want to put my own little spin on it. I think of my process from an idea to a first draft as happening over five broad stages.

Stage One - Filling the Blank Page: The the first step of any new piece of writing is to start with a blank page. I have heard many people say the blank page is the most intimidating because there is nothing to work from; the page is blank. I don’t see it that way, because when starting a new project I first set down a lot of ideas about what I want to do. There is often no method or reason to this step, it’s just a way to get all the possibly relevant ideas if not on the actual page, then at least up to the front of your mind so you can work with them. I will sketch scenes, propose characters or even just names, write down bits of dreams I’ve had, list possible plot events and make a list of scenes is movies or comics which I want to use as inspiration. This step is like brainstorming, but it seems more directed than that to me. I am usually not trying to find an idea at this stage, but looking for what will help me build up an idea I already have. This is the most free stage because there is nothing else set down yet so there can be no conflicts or missteps at this stage. All competing details are still possible and exist together in limbo. Once you have put everything you think might be helpful in front of you, you are ready to begin the work in earnest.

Stage Two - Finding the Edges: Once you have your working central ideas you need to know the full extent of the project. You need to know how big this particular project is and where it ends. All the threads of history and inspiration you’ve pulled into this particular project need to break off somewhere. This roughing out of the whole shape of the work sometimes leads you see it as possibly part of the larger series of works, but at some point you have to decide this is the part I am working on now and set that off as a individual project in your mind and on your page. This is the stage of outlining a whole project or maybe writing a one or two line description of each chapter for a novel. I have done a list of what needs to happen in each chapter for several of the NaNoWriMos I have worked on over the years. In the case of writing a RPG book, a list of all the things you want in the game and how many of each is part of what you make at this stage. For example, we need 20 new animal types and five or six new airplanes for the next Wild Skies book. We know that going in. This stage is not limited to outlining. Sometimes you have to start the writing to find out what you need to know about characters and backgrounds. There are still no wrong answers in this stage. You are filling out the shape of how big and how long you think the work is going to be. It may still change in the making. This stage generally doesn’t take that long, but it is my favorite part of the creative process. I love the combination of direction set in this first stage with this stage’s freedom.

Stage Three - Painting in the Floor: I may be mixing architectural metaphors here, but I like to think of this step as filling the work out to the edges set in the previous step. It could also be called “painting in the canvas.” This is the longest step in the process. After the direction is set and you know about where you want to go, you have to actually go there. In stage two you can simply write, “the characters discuss their emotional history,” but in stage three you have to figure out want that history is and how you are going to reveal it to best effect and what words your characters are actually going to say. If you set yourself the task of creating a dozen character profiles or six new airplanes which all need statistics to make them unique then you have to write up all those details. It can be a slog to get through this stage as it’s not a time for a lot of new ideas. It’s slow and steady crafting. It’s the “cruising altitude” portion of the flight, to mix in yet another metaphor. About 80 to 90 percent of a project gets written in this stage.

Stage Four – Finishing the Corners: This is the stage where you have to go back and deal with whatever you skipped in the previous step. This has been less common in the novels I’ve written because I’ve only finished longer fiction like that all in one go during November. It is a more common problem for me in RPG writing where there is often many different types of writing within one project. Maybe you left a detailed time line for last because the alternate history section wasn’t written yet. Or maybe you skipped the details of a weapon’s game numbers because you wanted to get on to describing the attributes of your fantasy creatures. This stage also includes all the details you didn’t plan for from the start. You may not know you need a chapter exploring the motivations of the queen mother until you get to the climax of the story and she’s there when her son is murdered. Whatever the reason you skipped something or left it out, in stage four you have to go back and get those things done. This is the hardest step for me, usually. There is often a reason I left the tricky bits for the end and they are still tricky to get right. I find the work of this stage is motivated not by what I am interested in writing or thinking about, but by the needs of the story. It is often work I just have to push myself to get through.

Stage Five – Polishing all the Details: Fifth and lastly the work as a whole must be harmonized in terms of format and details. Did you change a character’s name in chapter three? You have to make sure it’s corrected in the first chapters. Did you create place-holder information while someone else was working on the real details? That has to be swapped out. Were you inconsistent in story details like descriptions of a place or in format elements like use of quotation marks? You have to bring all that into line. You should also fix spelling errors you missed in your initial haste. This is the final pass through whatever you’ve written to get everything “right” as much as you can before the first draft is done and other people get to look at it. It is a clean up stage and doesn't usually involve too much mental power so while it can be tedious, it is not hard.

There you have it, my breakdown of work. I’m off to paint in some more floors. Expect more news in the new year!

Culminations which are but Preludes

The first downloadable supplements for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest are now available! These were paid for by stretch goals and certain backer levels during the our Kickstarter campaign two years ago. Right now we have an adventure called Lucky Rabbits Afoot, featuring raiding rabbits from the Saar Warren and a closer look at the small nation of Luxembourg. We are also offering a mercenary crew profile of the Rock Roost Renegades which includes four full characters from Corsica and a few of their unique technical innovations. These are just the first of several small releases we have in the works.

I have been working to fulfill my part of these extras for a while. It’s been a real learning experience, as cliched as that is to say. The “Luxembourg adventure” I wrote was inspired by a campaign I ran during the very early days of Wild Skies when when it was a setting grafted onto a different set of rules. As part of the process I got to (and had to) pick an artist, correspond with that artist, send art reference, have my work reviewed and all the rest. I have only written one previous adventure, so I’m still not sure exactly what I need to do. To make things worse, this is the first adventure for the Compass System so there are no models to follow. Again, I get to (and have to) make all the decisions about format and length and how to boil down the NPC combat stats for GMs without leaving anything out. Maybe it just feels trickier than it is because I am my own worst critic. Now that it is out, it can see what a lot of other people have to say and make changes for next time.

The mercenary faction was a special personal project for me. Not only did all the same “learning curve” stuff about art and setting format precedents apply, but I got to work with my father to create the faction. As a backer at a certain level, he got to create this faction and all the characters. My father is not a roleplayer at all so he didn’t really have a desire to pick skills and assign attributes. He is a story teller and the depth he went to in creating back stories for his team of ex-military freedom fighting bats from Corsica is inspiring. He started with the facts of the Corsican biota and chose his characters and the nature of their fighting techniques from there. He wrote character bios and a short story about the origins of the team which I then turned into the game’s numbers and skills list. This was not what I expected when we offered “we will work with you to create a mercenary crew” as the Commodore backer level, but it ended up being very nice to collaborate with my father on this project.

Wet Ink Games has more products to release and more games in the works, so keep watching the skies for more!

Wild Skies is Flying High

This past weekend we celebrated the official launch of Wild Skies: Europa Tempest with two gaming events. First was open gaming day at The Louisville Game Shop where we played Wild Skies with backers and gamers new to the game. Then at Nerd Louisville’s Slur Your Role XXXVII we ran two games and introduced even more of the local gamer crowd to our game. It was a great weekend. All the games went smoothly and everyone seemed to have fun. It is great encouragement to see people new to the game and the system jump right in and get how everything works. It is very satisfying to have the printed book in hand to show off art, call for random rolls from our tables and read out the bonuses listed for all the skills. We got to answer additional questions about the game from a good number of people who came to check it out. All this bodes well for the future of the game.

Brandon and I are working to put our book out there in as many places as possible. It’s time for some shameless self-promotion!

You can take a narrated tour of the printed proof for yourself. We will be making some more videos in time, so watch that space.

Wild Skies got a nice introduction from Geek Watch.

We appeared on the weekly #RPGnet creator live chat and our conversation with the folks there has been archived. It was a two hour chat and we got into all aspects of Wild Skies including inspirations, game mechanics, the setting and what comes next. RPGnet is a registered trademark of Skotos Tech, used with their permission.

Brandon appeared on a podcast by the fine folk of Creative Play.

We have also been featured on the blog of the Indie Game Developers Network. We are members of IGDN and Wild Skies: Europa Tempest will be for sale at GenCon at the IGDN booth (#2437). You can get your copy there. IGDN’s blog will be featuring member’s products throughout the run up to GenCon so check back to see what other exciting things are happening in the world of small-scale games production.

That’s everything I know about so far, but Wet Ink Games has more events and podcast recordings scheduled so there will be more to report in time.

The Launch of Something

Wild Skies: Europa Tempest is for sale! It has been almost two years since the KickStarter, over three since I started work on my parts of the rules system and something like seven years since Brandon and I first cooked up the setting. We have PDF copies for download right now. We are getting the proofs of the hardcopy version and there will be both hardcover and softcover copies available soon.

There are a lot of reasons to be happy about reaching this point. First off, I have to say, the book looks great! I keep saying it looks like a “real” game book. We made a role playing game! I give a lot of credit to Knox, who did all the layout work. He took it upon himself to make the flavor texts I wrote look like the type of document they are supposed to look like. He played with fonts and layouts to make advertisements, medical reports and letters look like pieces of ephemera from the world and not just descriptions of this fictional world. The art is another big part of the success of this product. To work with so many talented artists and get such good pieces to illustrate the concepts and rules adds more than I can tell to the overall impression we have managed to put together a real product.

This first product for Wet Ink Games has been a non-stop education process for myself and Brandon. I’ve written manuscripts before, and seen my words published by game companies in the past. This is, in fact, the third book-length project I have written with Brandon. All the editing work was stuff we were used to, even if there was more to do this time around. Beyond that it was all unknown paths for me. Before now, my part was only to get the words on the page. I’ve never had to (maybe I should say “gotten to”) work with artists before. I didn’t have to think about layout. There was no process of back and forth about column length and where information appeared on a page. I didn’t have to pay attention to details like whether a title was underlined or bold. That was always someone else’s job. Putting the Europa Tempest book out there means we have overcome all the challenges we didn’t know we would have when we decided to do this book. I know it’s an achievement.

I hesitate to add a “but” to this post, but there is a “but.” Firstly, this Wild Skies project has been a big effort and has taken up so much of the background (and sometimes the foreground) of my life for years. I know getting this far is not the end; it’s just one step in the process. We aren’t finished with this first book until the hard copies are out. The KickStarter isn’t fulfilled until be do a couple more supplements, which are already in process. Then there’s the promotion events we have lined up. Provided all this goes well, we have plans for the next book in the Wild Skies game line and plenty of ideas for more books after that. This no time to stop and celebrate. There is no end, nothing ever ends. Secondly, and I want to be brief about this one, there is something very melancholy for me about seeing all the work of the last three years boiled down to a link and a price tag. I’m not sure I understand my own feelings on this, but there it is.

To bring the mood back up, let me once again say, Wild Skies: Europa Tempest is for sale now! Pick it up from DriveThruRPG.
Follow the project on KickStarter.

A Writer Levels Up

Things are moving along nicely with Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. The manuscript is closing in on 200 pages. There are some parts which remain unfinished, but I have been doing some of the fill-in work on the smaller sections. I wrote a “What is role-playing?” bit yesterday for the very few people who would be interesting in an RPG book but who don't know how to play one. After all, new gamers born every day. I also spent some time researching historic prices on gold and silver. In an alternate history setting, we could say the prices are whatever we want, but I wanted to base my made up numbers on something.

I have also been accepted into the Indie Game Developers Network. It's something of a little tiny trade organization for independent game developers. My mug is up on the members page, so I seems like it's for real. I look forward to working with all these fine people to promote the games industry.

Wild Skies Character Primer Updated

As I discussed previously, Wild Skies: Europa Tempest has been my major on-going project for almost a year now. Brandon and I are happy to show off some of the progress we have made on the project. The Character Primer 1.2 is now available! The document contains everything needed to create a Wild Skies character; information about the nine attributes, all forty animal types and dozens of animal abilities, twenty career choices, rules for the Moral Compass and ten different party affiliations. This is not the complete game. Histories of various nations, vehicles, equipment, combat mechanics and full skill descriptions are not included. Still, the Primer should provide a taste of the theme and the kind of game we are making. Do have a look if you are at all interested in an alternate history, anthropomorphic, diesel-punk, pulp adventure role-playing game. If you still want to get in on the creation of this game, contact us. Keep watching the horizon, because more is on the way. Thanks.

Crafting Alternate History

Since our Kickstarter for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest was successful back in October last year, Brandon and I have been working on the book. Most of the rules have been at last ironed out (more on that in time) and it is time to turn back to our setting and get it all fleshed out. That is what I have been mainly working on for the last two weeks. It has been great! I love crafting alternate history. From the beginning our jumping-off point was always, “What if the First World War never ended?” With that as the basis it's been my job to turn that core idea into a description of the dozen or so years since the 11 November 1918 date we are familiar with from real history.

We are well aware we are not the first to offer an answer to the question, “What if the First World War never ended?” Harry Turtledove, Michael Moorcock and the makers of Tannhäuser, among many others, have all been over this terrain before. Throughout these last two weeks, I have been thinking a lot about one of my literary heroes; Lawrence Watt-Evans. He once wrote he's never been into writing historical fiction because he's always troubled by the why. Why that particular divergence point in human history? Why that particular version of events from the infinitely many possible versions? My answer can only be; we wanted to create something broadly familiar, but unlike other story worlds we have seen before. We started with a few assumptions about our setting. The first being the on-going war led to revolutions in all the major participants. From there, we assume Bolsheviks would not win the revolution in Russia (at least not outright) and fascists would win a revolution in France. We didn't want Germany to be the Third Reich ten years ahead of time. We did want Britain to lean Orwellian. The United States never entered the Great War.

Excepting those basic assumptions I have been digging through histories of the era and looking at events which followed the Armistice to find little incidents and factoids both to justify and to inform our setting. In our previous projects Brandon and I have both taken echoes of real cultural fragments and recast them in new ways within our fictional settings. Working backward through the list above we take the pro-Wilson 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” and just say he did. Not even the sinking of Lusitania brought American troops to Europe, thus everything which follows is different. We have a lot of ideas for America, but they will not be the focus of Europa Tempest.

The countries of Europe have been our biggest focus. As I said, I'm very happy with the way things have come together. Churchill, famous for his role in WWII, was also in the government during WWI. He fell from power over how the war had been fought. Now take that to the extreme. If the whole government of 1918 is replaced because no one in the country is happy about how the war has turned out you become able to posit the kind of drastic changes Orwell envisioned thirty years early. With Germany we have focused more on a return to pre-war war fever than moving forward to the Nazi bugbear. Kaiser Wilhelm II left at the end of the War. In our setting he has returned to power as an bit of an older and wiser figure. He's not as eager for war in our 1930s setting as he was in 1914. He's the voice of reason now trying to keep in line the newer generation eager for war. It's this reuse in a different form of all the part of history you may have heard of that really gets us excited as creators.

Our inspiration for our other main countries comes less from inversions of specific people and more from ideologies. The basic inspiration for a fascist France comes right out of the Second World War period. I read a few books looking at the tensions within the Third Republic and the origins of the Vichy regime. To make the story very short, the same kind of militant nationalism which became fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany existed in France as well. It is not hard to imagine a cadre of young fascists forming in France during the war and not much harder to imagine an opportunity for them to seize power in the aftermath of the war. Speaking of cadres seizing power, in Russia we have declared the civil war following the October Revolution is still on-going even into the 1930s. Reds and Whites and many other factions are still trying to work out who will win. Our vision of Russia is perhaps the least possible because we haven't pushed anything which helped the Whites or which hurt the Reds. We just want it this way.

I haven't explained much about the setting, I know. This was only supposed to be the briefest mention of some of the bits of the story I've been working on recently. If anything mentioned here does interest you, please have a look at the Kickstarter page. This project is funded and moving along and you can still jump on by contacting us there. Until next time.

Off to a Good Start

First of all, I want to point out the Kickstarter we've been running has ended with great success! We ended with 139% of our goal raised. Thank you to all our backers! This is a great showing for a first-time company. We'll have the comic, custom dice, two bonus adventures and forty different animals because of the stretch goals we reached. I'll be posting about this project here throughout the year as Brandon and I get everything written and tested and ready to go, but you can follow along on the updates page as well.

The timing has worked out great. Just as the Kickstarted ended on 31 October, NaNoWriMo began on 1 November. I am very happy with the progress so far. Having a good idea has been a great help. I've chugged along to a little over the minimum word count each day so far. I'm not over my count for the day yet today, but the day is far from over. I say I had a plan, but that isn't really true. I had no idea what the plot of the story was going to be beyond the vaguest rise and fall of the action. The only think I was clear on was the journal format. That has been going well. I've always loved the books where part of the story was in the “extra” information on the page. Information hidden in the footnotes or encoded in the dates of diary entries has always appealed to me. I am getting to do that here. Somehow it's great fun to skip three days in the dates and come back in with my protagonist making an oblique reference to what else he has been up to. That is where my plot is slowly building up. It's like Shakespeare, a little, where all the action happens off stage and you just have the characters talking about how they feel about the action in soliloquy.

Not that I'm writing Shakespeare, but I am tying to affect an “old-timey” style. My story is supposed to take place in 1648. I don't know if I have an accurate “old-timey” vocabulary for that year. In fact, I would say I don't. My word choice is much more Nineteenth Century, I'm sure. I can't actually think of anything I have read from the Seventeenth Century other than the King James Version of the Bible. The great thing about NaNoWriMo, though, is that getting it “right” doesn't much matter on the first pass. If it sounds old, it'll read as “old.” I can always go back and fix it to the right kind of old if I develop the novel beyond the writing of it this month!

Here's a taste:

I have re-read again the passage from Goloksh. So convenient to have it written out so near at had. Again, I am drawn to de Chapallon's straight-forward amateur's method of simply asking the crystal whence its power derives. The practiced magus often shies away from direct confrontations with power because he has come to know their hazards. I suspect the first small text I transcribed under its influence is the same text he records. With Goloksh I pine for the proof of this theory by the actual page itself! On what misapplied hearth did that great artifact go up in the halls of Savoy? Alas. As I say, I believe I have begun as he did and this text we both produced is the answer to the question he posed. In short it is the proper appellation of the power to which the medium of this black stone opens the way.

Right now my word count is 6700 words.
By now I should have 6668 words.

Fully Funded

Big, big news! The Kickstarter for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest has reached its initial goal of $8,000! As of now the project is go. Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far! From this point on, everything else pledged in going toward the stretch goals. That's the cool extra stuff we want to add. Let me be clear, when Brandon and I planned this out beforehand we decided the initial funding level would allow us to the make the game we want to make, with all the art and world information needed to understand the game. The stretch goals are just that; stretches, extras, icing on the already delicious cake.

The first stretch goal is a bonus adventure written by Brandon, and the second is a short comic set in the Wild Skies world by accomplished industry artist Mike Mumah. Mumah played in the sessions where Wild Skies was first developed so he knows the setting. I would be surprised if his character does not feature prominently. Ever seen a giant sheep leap out of a flaming airship falling into the sea? You won't unless we reach that stretch goal. Then more factions, more adventures, even custom diesel punk-themed dice. My point is these are not “make the book complete” stretch goals, these are truly bonuses which will only increase the fun and awesome factors of this project. If you haven't put your two cents toward the project yet, there's never been a better time.

If you want to read more about the game, there is a growing list of updates on the Kickstarter page where we have dished out a lot of information about the setting and the game mechanics. If you want to read even more after that, you can read the chat log from last week when Brandon and I were guests of #rpgnet for an old school IRC Q+A. Really!

Wild Skies: Europa Tempest Raising Funds Now

It's been a while. I haven't been idle, though. This has been a very busy year for writing so far. I have been working on a lot of projects at once in rather piecemeal fashion. I've had a couple writing projects on at any one time and I've also been doing a lot of research for ongoing and future projects. I aim to work through discussing all the things I've been up to over the next couple weeks.

The biggest thing in my writer's life right now is my long-time writing partner and I have decided to launch our own role-playing game company, write our own game system and start our own game line! This is huge news for me. We don't exactly aim to become market leaders, and we know it's a crowded market, but I think we have something no one else it offering. If you want all the details, quit reading this and head over to Kickstarter right now and check out Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. If you are like me and you want to know what you are going to find before you follow a link, I'll describe the project.

This has been a project long in development. Brandon, my friend, writing buddy, brother-in-law and all-around fellow nerd, cooked the basics of the setting up a few years ago. We wanted to play a certain anthropomorphic animals game, but the setting didn't quite suit us. We developed a new setting for that game's rules. We imaged a world where the First World War didn't end in an armistice, but in civil wars in all the combatants. The 1920s were complete chaos across Europe. Our game is set in the 1930s when things are more stable, but borders and governments are very different. I started with a map of every division line Europe has experienced in the Twentieth Century and starting filling in new country names. Brandon wanted “diesel punk” so big engines and well-muscled mechanics feature prominently. We've put in flying airships as well for a hyper-reality one of our friends called “historical steroids.” The fact that everyone is an animal allowed for so many animal jokes. One of our mantras for playing the game was never let the opportunity for a good animal joke pass. I don't know about other people but we love pirates who are rats, elephant security guards who never forget and a rhino and a tick bird who work together as an assassin team.

After playing several adventures in this setting, we moved on to other games, but we began to develop a set of our own rules to use with our new setting. Unlike some other rpg-systems, our game isn't focused on “winning” by dealing the most damage or earning the most XP. We've put the storytelling first and foremost. Our experience system rewards players for advancing the story lines they choose for their characters. We call this mechanic the Moral Compass. Character creation is point-buy for stats, two careers are chosen which determine the character's skills. The rolls in the game are percentile (D100) but skills are buffed by additional six-sided dice called Skill Dice. The more training, the more dice, the better chance a character can ensure a favorable result on the role. There are 30 animal types to choose from each with a unique mix of animal abilities. So, now that you know more about it, follow the link to get all the details and see some of the art we've already commissioned from the game. Help make Wild Skies: Europa Tempest a reality. You have our thanks.