Gareth – Page 123 – The Designer Monologues

August 2, 2011August 2, 2011

GenCon Bound

I realized today that in two years, I will have been going to GenCon for half of my life.

That took a bit of adjustment.

This followed closely on the heels of the realization that this year marks my twentieth anniversary of attending the show.

Photographic evidence, from the lobby of a Milwaukee hotel as the members of KU Gamers and Roleplayers (KUGAR) awaited transport back to the airport, is over there at the left. I’m sitting on the couch to the righthand side, waving my hand in front of my face. Next to me is Laura Hanson — a good friend at the time, and now, twenty years later, Laura Hanson Skarka. Lower lefthand corner of the picture is Aaron Rosenberg, a great writer and a great friend. I’m occasionally in touch with other folks in the shot, but mostly in a Facebook-comment sort of way.

Twenty years. Wow.

I attended GenCon a couple more times before making the leap to working GenCon as a game designer and publisher, which I’ve been doing since 1994. I don’t get to play nearly as much any more — for me, GenCon is now about 18 hour days seeing friends that I only see once or twice per year; selling games in the exhibit hall; signing books that people want signed; taking time to talk to fans that want to ask a question or share a cool experience they had with one of my games; attending awards presentations for the year’s best stuff; and — despite the fact that we work in a world of digital media, Skype, Twitter and email, packing every mealtime with face-to-face business meetings where the cool stuff coming a few years from now gets born.

If I’m lucky, I get a chance to pick up some stuff myself. My list of big interests this year:

The One Ring: The big release for us at the Cubicle 7 booth this year. I expect that I’ll need to hold off on getting this, since the limited number of copies we’ll have available need to be reserved for the gamers attending, but I will be getting a set eventually.
Fortune and Glory from Flying Fox Games: The latest boardgame from the folks who did Last Night on Earth, this time pulp-themed! Oh, HELL yes. However — looks to be pretty pricey, and would also pretty much require shipping back home, rather than bringing on the plane, due to gigantic boxed-set goodness. But OH SO TEMPTING.
Cosmic Patrol RPG by Catalyst. They say they’ll have GenCon editions of the rulebook for this 1950s-pulp-scifi game (which plumbs the same vein as my own Rocket Patrol concept from 10 years back). I’m a sucker for the genre, so I’ll strap on my ray gun and go looking.

I was also interested in Leviathans, the steampunk air combat wargame, also from Catalyst, but they’re not going have it for sale at the show due to printer trouble. A shame to be sure (I’ve been there — Hong Kong Action Theatre! missed its GenCon ’96 debut by a matter of days, for example, leaving us with a booth and promotional items for a game that wasn’t there).

Beyond that? I’m hoping to get a chance to walk through the exhibit hall once, to take a look at what I haven’t heard about — because that’s where the coolest stuff always can be found… and that’s also the source of meeting people who are just getting into the business, and seeing their enthusiasm, their energy, their ‘HOLY SHIT MY GAME IS AT GENCON‘ look… and remembering.

See you in Indianapolis, if you’re there. Most of the time I’ll be at booth 711 with Cubicle 7. If you’re not attending GenCon, feel free to follow @AdamantEnt on Twitter for updates from the floor, or @GMSkarka for more personal commentary.

July 19, 2011July 30, 2011

Inclusion in RPGs

First off, spreading the Kickstarter love: Heartbreak and Heroines, a fantasy RPG specifically designed (in the words of the author) to be much more inclusive:

Heartbreak & Heroines is first and foremost a fantasy adventure game. It’s not preachy and it isn’t a textbook about feminism, but it’s written from a feminist point of view. It challenges some of our assumptions about the role of gender in gaming but at the heart of H&H, it’s about being a heroine (or hero) and finding your way to happiness in a dangerous world.

I think that this is great, a laudable goal, and also pretty much exactly why Kickstarter exists. Come up with an artistic project concept, tell people about it, and get the project funded if enough people are interested.

So naturally, there is a 200+ message thread on RPGnet, bitching about it. Now, to be fair, most of those messages are in defense of the project (or at the very least “WTF”-ing the detractors) — but still. The “conserva-gamer-libertarian-anti-‘political-correctness’-warrior” stereotype is out in FULL BLOOM, kids. Because making an effort at inclusion? “Extreme.” “Silly.” “Insulting.” “Condescending.”

I pledged just because they pissed me off. I want to see this game funded because it will stick in their craw like the ashes of defeat.

When the thread started, I saw that the designer had only raised $300 or so. She’s asking for $3K. I’m pleased to report that it’s almost to $1K now, less than a day later — and the Kickstarter runs for another 29 days. So please, consider chucking a pledge their way.

Couple of things:

1st, it seems that the original poster also has a problem with what he calls “the Kickstarter Gold-Rush” — I’ve seen him bitch elsewhere, terming it “the money-grab”, etc. The less-socialized corners of the geek community has always had a problem with people obviously enjoying something that they don’t, and therefore railing against it with as much vitriol as they can muster. Kickstarter must really push that button even harder, because the enjoyment of others now has a visible dollar-value tagged to it, making it more of an incitement to rage to these folks.

To which I say: Fuck you, grow up.

People like things you don’t, and sometimes they ‘like’ with money. Nothing to bitch about here (without waving the “I have problems with mature interactions in public” flag wildly, at least).

Second: Inclusion? Important. Just as important to those of us who have chosen not to make it an explicitly-stated mission statement of a project, in fact. I draw your attention to the artwork that we’ve presented from Far West:

We didn’t come right out and say it. We were sneaky. But everything we’ve done, we’ve done for a reason.

(So I guess now the Usual Suspects will grouse about our ‘political correctness’ and give us an upward spike in pledges, too!)

July 18, 2011July 30, 2011

What’s Up, Gareth?

Seriously need to kick myself into regular updates of this thing. Easier, I think, once I finish the redesign.

So what’s been going on in my world recently? First of all, The Far West Kickstarter proceeds apace. We’re about 30 minutes shy of our first full week, and we’re over 200% funded. $10.3K, with another 5 weeks to go. We’ve passed our second goal (10K), which means that all backers are now getting the LEGENDS OF THE FAR WEST supplement (which will be exclusive to the Kickstarter — never to appear for sale in any other venue).

We’ve also set the next goal ($13.5K), and if we hit that, all backers will receive the first in the FAR WEST fiction line as an ebook, Kindle edition, or PDF. The line will launch in December with TALES OF THE FAR WEST, an anthology featuring folks like Tessa Gratton, Aaron Rosenberg, Chuck Wendig, Will Hindmarch, Dave Gross, and more. If you’re a writer, and I know you or your work, feel free to drop me a line — we’re always looking for a good penslinger.

Made the big announcement over at the Adamant site just now: We’re doing the Buckaroo Banzai Adventure Game, coming in Spring of 2012. Another one of my dream projects, crossed off the list. 15-year-old me is ecstatic. If I can eventually work on JAMES BOND or STAR WARS, I’ll have no worlds left to conquer.

We’ve got a gorgeous cover by the massively brilliant sci-fi/fantasy illustrator Dave Dorman, which you can see in its mock-up form over there at the right.

Semi-related (at least in the sense of late-period pulp), I stumbled across a gem during a visit to Half Price books this weekend. Dovetails with last year’s post that I did on ePulp — my idea that the adventure “trash paperback” could make a comeback in ebooks — something I plan to move towards once Adamant gets its Kindle legs under it a bit more firmly. Sure enough, I found one of the books whose image appeared as an example in that story (reproduced at left): BLACK SAMURAI #6: THE WARLOCK!

Seriously, folks — this thing is like a Greatest Hits package of early-to-mid-70s pop cultural crazes: Blaxploitaton, Martial Arts and Satanic Horror. Listen to the back-cover copy:

EXORCISM: SAMURAI STYLE
The Warlock ruled an occult empire that stretched around the world. This evil genius giant of a man with his slavelike army of hideous killer dwarfs, gorgeous women, sadistic perverts, and all the other devotees of his devil-worshipping religion now reached out to grasp ultimate power over all the nations of the earth. Satan was in the saddle and was riding mankind to doom — and only Robert Sand, Black Samurai, could hope to exorcise this monstrous threat, or else himself be thrown screaming into the bottomless put of soul-destroying pain and body-mangling death….

The Black Samurai tangles with a human Satan in a hellish den of torrid sex and deadly violence!

HOLY CRAP. How could I not get it?

Plus, it’s got that disintegrating-pulp-paper smell, which is like crack to me. Sweet, sweet crack.

So that’s what’s going on my world. I live an interesting life.