In any event, you can download the game here: The Legend of You.

Humans are short-lived creatures of passion and destiny. They may be weak and petty from the perspectives of most other species, but they feel more deeply, love more strongly, and recklessly attempt the most dangerous and impossible things, for their timelines are measured in years, not centuries. And, for that, the gods and demons favor them above nearly all others. Want to get things done or shake things up? Throw some humans at a situation.

Monster Moves

• make someone fascinated by you
• escape from restraint, bondage, or captivity
• earn the attention of one or more powerful forces
• persevere
• any other monster move that doesn’t require special powers or abilities (reflecting the incredible diversity of human ethnicity and culture)

• Yes, for I have been defrocked for the crime of ________ and sent into exile, though the god ________ still heeds my prayers and must have some plan for me.
• Yes, for I am the last surviving keeper of the ancient and noble faith of ________, now lost to (violence, time, cataclysm, fissure, or conversion).
• Yes, for I am a dark templar of my faith, charged to seek out lost secrets, sources of power, and ________, all for the greater glory of ________.

Fighter! You have fallen in with a band of planejumping apostates, cut-purses, and diabolists!

• Yes, for I was born and raised among the wretched and outcast in ________, living hand to mouth, dreaming of future riches and ________.
• Yes, for I am the black sheep (or exiled scion) of the noble house of ________, and this is the ignoble company I keep, obscuring and protecting me from ________, who has “great plans” for me.
• Yes, for I am through with the wars and battles of ________, and will live out the rest of my days as a servant to my own interests, seeking ________.

Rogue! You have fallen in with a band of planejumping sell-swords, apostates, and diabolists!

• Yes, and what else is new? I used to ________ with ________, and they were no better than this lot, that’s for certain.
• Yes, but it’s only a temporary situation. You see, I have grand plans for ________, if only ________ would stop blocking my path to true greatness.
• Yes, but how else would these idiots know where to find big piles of loot? They’re the unfortunate cost of doing business and I have this great job in mind where we can get ________ from ________.

Wizard! You have fallen in with a band of planejumping sell-swords, apostates, and cut-purses!

• Yes, and such is the lot of a wizard, to be shunned and feared by pleasant society. Luckily these unsavory types don’t ask too many questions about my strange and unsavory practices, such as ________ and ________.
• Yes, but once the wizards of ________ acknowledge the true earth-shattering potential of my new line of research into ________, they will beg me to teach them my methods.
• Yes, but I’m not your average hide-behind-the-armored-dude hedge-mage who crawls head-first into a hole in the ground wearing fancy robes. I like to get my hands dirty. How else do you learn the real stuff like ________ and ________?

“Wait,” said the Buddha. “Tell me: what is the source of all harm?”

“Me,” Lafferty chuckled. “Well, me and Charlene here,” he gestured to his signature shotgun (3-harm close loud).

“Alas, but it is not so,” the Buddha replied. “The seething masses may claim that harm is caused by weapons, but the first noble truth is that life is suffering. For us, that means that harm is always caused — in the end — by the fiction.”

“Goodbye,” said Lafferty, pulling the trigger. But there was just a dull click; Charlene had jammed. Or else the bullets had gotten soaked through when he crossed that river of sewage a couple days back.

“An excellent example!” the Buddha exclaimed. “Where’s your 3-harm now, Laffer-”

Then the operator was on him, wrapping his cold hands around the Buddha’s throat and squeezing.

But when it was over, Lafferty knelt next to the Buddha’s lifeless body, starring down at his own calloused, trembling fingers (1-harm hand), and he knew that the Buddha was correct.

You Carry the Burden of the Future

Apocalypse World is no place to raise children. Sometimes, though, a hardholder or scavenger brood makes a pact—with the blasted heath, with the poisoned ground, with the Psychic Maelstrom itself—and the pact is this: OBEY THE LAW AND YOU WILL SURVIVE.

And so a haven is created amidst all the want and suffering, a hardhold of sorts but something more, something almost civilized. Children are born and raised within its limits, taught to fear the world beyond and to obey the law, taught the means of survival. Generations go by, and yet the people remain.

But humanity is curious and heedless; they do not obey the law but break it—in part or in full—every day. And thus every day the broken world chips away at this mote of security and stability, awaiting the day when it will be consumed in desperation and darkness.

The ones known as the Angel, the Battlebabe, and so on… maybe they were born and raised in a place such as this, a place long ago and far away, a place without the constant fear of death and want, a place long since consumed. If so, these are the stories they tell no one, the stories of what they used to be before the broken world made them hard, cool, hot, and weird, the stories of growing up.

Bibliography: Thanks for These Dark Dreams

- The White Mountains (1967) by John Christopher
- Clay’s Ark (1984) by Octavia E. Butler
- Invitation to the Game (1990) by Monica Hughes
- The Giver (1993) by Lowis Lowry
- Reign of Fire (2002), directed by Rob Bowman
- City of Ember (2003) by Jeanne DuPrau
- The Village (2004), directed by M. Night Shyamalan
- The Hunger Games (2008) by Suzanne Collins
- The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009) by Carrie Ryan
- The Passage (2010), parts III-VI, by Justin Cronin
- After the Apocalypse (2011) by Maureen McHugh
– “The Villager” for Dungeon World (2012) by Jason Morningstar

You can download it here. I haven’t playtested it yet (so take it for what it is) but I plan to do so at Gamestorm later this month, assuming I don’t get a chance earlier. It’ll definitely always be a hack that’s 2-4 playbooks long, at most, and will never turn into a big commercial hack (I just don’t see the need for it, honestly).

• every game designer should strive to get their games published (how else can you call yourself a game designer?) and to sell a whole bunch of copies (validating their abilities)
• any game that’s fun should be somewhere in the process of getting published (preferably in print and preferably launched at one of the big conventions)
• indie game publishing should be run like a small business (minimizing costs and maximizing profits), not like a “vanity” project (the horror!)
• nobody expects to quit their day job, but wouldn’t that be nice?

To which, I would like to say, very clearly: fuck that.

Publishing is a means to an end, and that end is delivering an experience of play. Anything that you do in publishing that does not focus on delivering a solid play experience to other folks is a distraction from the task at hand. Sometimes you might weight your options and decide, sure, I guess I have to do that in order to achieve the goals I want, but remember why you are publishing a game, which isn’t necessarily to sell more copies if that doesn’t end up creating solid play experiences. Sales != play. Sales != success (financial success maybe, but not a successful game; Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made a lot of money, remember). Sales are just sales.

To rant a little bit:

• you and your game do not need to be formally published or sell any copies to be validated as being awesome; you just have to be awesome in the first place, which is hard enough; most games — even most decent games — are not particularly viable as commercial products: enjoy them for what they are; as Elizabeth said so eloquently just recently, you become a game designer by making games, whether you formally publish them or not, no matter how many you sell
• rushing your game to publication (because you want to be a “published designer” or to launch at a big convention) does harm to your game; as folks like to say: it’s only late once, but it’s bad forever (and as an indie designer you get to set the deadlines, so it’s only late in your own mind); sure, you can release a “revised” version in a year or two, but you can’t update the copies and experiences of the early adopters who picked up your game when it wasn’t finished
• small business publishing is a minefield and includes lot of un-fun tasks and responsibilities (tracking expenses, filing taxes, registering business licenses); you should not feel required to run a small business just because you wrote a game that’s kinda cool (do you feel required to run a small business because you wrote a couple songs and started a band? hell no!)
• the amount of money that you can make publishing a game as a small business can be substantial, but — in the vast majority of cases, for the vast majority of games — may not be worth the amount of time and effort you’re going to have to put into your small business; most games aren’t going to sell as many copies as Fiasco or Burning Wheel, even if you’re aiming for a large audience (which you might not be! maybe you’re nailing a niche interest, like a game that builds awareness about human trafficking)
• the vast majority of indie games are essentially “vanity” projects, even if their publisher is attempting to act like a small business, because the money made is not super significant and the main purpose of publishing is to disseminate the material, not to run a profitable enterprise; this actually opens your options substantially, because you don’t have to worry about maximizing profits, just getting your game out there without losing too much (or any) money
• if you don’t like your job, that sucks; but game design and publishing is not really a viable employment alternative for most people, so maintaining the pipe dream of eventually becoming a full-time game designer and publisher can actually be counterproductive, getting in the way of developing more rational and achievable goals or figuring out what you really want to get out of this
• additionally, game design (in my experience) is much less fun and much more limited when it’s your job rather than something you do on the side; as a professional, you are significantly less free to pursue any project you might want, because you’re limited to just the projects that have strong commercial potential and are forced to work around relatively strict deadlines in order to maintain cash flow, releasing products that may or may not be ready or working ridiculous hours to make sure the game is finished in time for you to pay rent

In fact, everything gets turned on its head (or, really, turned right-way-up, rather than the default upside-down viewpoint) when you decide that making money is not necessarily one of the core goals of indie game publishing. I have a blog category that’s called Anti-Publishing for specifically this reason, because publishing practices that aren’t wealth-maximizing sometimes look a bit strange from the perspective of a commercial endeavor. But, coming from the other direction, trying to maximize the meager profits of indie publishing often seems downright ludicrous to me, especially because I’m lucky enough to really like my job and can’t really imagine trying to make a living in tabletop games. Why run a small business if it’s not necessarily the most efficient or enjoyable way to disseminate your game? It’s super restrictive and not much fun besides.

To illustrate how pervasive wealth-maximizing behavior is in indie publishing, let me offer a specific example. Lately I’ve been really into this all-organic, all-recycled print shop in Portland called Pinball Publishing. They run both Scoutbooks.com, which prints little booklets with chipboard covers, and a new service called Print Pinball which produces a variety of chipboard cards that are full-color only on one side. Because Pinball is a small print shop that uses super-high quality materials (organic and recycled stuff isn’t cheap) and prints the old fashioned way, rather than on a photocopier, their prices are obviously higher than the POD and short-run print services commonly used by the post-Forge indie games crowd. In my mind, higher print costs are not a problem at all; they just mean you have to target an audience that is willing to pay for a better or more involved product (say one with a bunch of components). Especially with Kickstarter and other crowdfunding options nowadays, people have shown that they will pay whatever it costs to get something that they desire, and you don’t even have to pay the cost upfront and hope to recoup (like you used to).

But when I talk to other indie games folks about how excited I am about the cool new product formats that Pinball makes possible, I get responses like:

• Jason Morningstar: “…250 business cards cost $85?”
• Joe Mcdaldno: “I’ve really wanted to figure out a way to work with them on printing a book… But after visiting and revisiting the idea, it just seems so unfeasible. I’d need to print 500-1000 copies of the game in order to have it come even reasonably close to being as cheap as other POD options.”

Which, fair enough, they’re certainly entitled to their own opinions, but come on, guys; you’re not publishing games to feed and clothe your children, are you? (if so, that’s nuts; publishing is no way to make steady, predictable income). Sometimes you have to pay more to get more. Just price the game higher, if it really bothers you. Or deal with making slimmer profits. Or Kickstart the whole thing and don’t worry about the extra cost at all. I mean, is this indie publishing or what? Deciding that we have to stick with super-cheap POD products produced on a photocopier is just as nuts as thinking that indie games have to all be full-color hardcovers or hand-stitched booklets. Wealth-maximizing seems logical but it is ultimately just as much of a trap as any other unquestioned behavior, placing strict artificial limits on what you can do. After all, the money and the commercial endeavor is not the point, right? It’s just the means.

Another Way

Indie publishing looks really different when you start from the assumption that you’re not in this to make money, but to product a quality game and get it in the hands of your target audience.

First off, you can take all the time you need, weeks, months, years, decades, however long it takes for the game to do what you want it to do. What’s the rush? Whoever dies having written the most games still dies. Ideally you want to leave this planet having created games that delivered memorable play experiences, which doesn’t necessarily happen if you try to publish one game a year or stick to some other artificial schedule. Sometimes you can write a great game in 2 hours. Sometimes it takes 2 decades. Besides, there are so many great games out there to play; it’s not like you or anyone else is deprived because they don’t have your game to play. You shouldn’t feel the need to commercially publish a game just because you can, but because you’ve crafted a worthwhile experience (or range of experiences) and want to share them with others. My approach (shared by a few other designers) is to publish informally early and often, never promising that there will necessarily be a future version, but hoping that—out of that iterative design process—a “finished” game may eventually emerge. In the meantime, though, people can enjoy the games for what they are, while I still have all the time in the world to finish them.

Second, you don’t have to think about publishing in terms of a small business, though legally you might have to register yourself as a small business or publish through someone else who is running a small business, so you can pay taxes and keep expenses straight. This allows you to focus more on delivering the experience to your audience and less on profit-maximizing or logistics. For example, I can create a product that costs $34 to put together and sell it for $35. Sure, I don’t want to loose a whole ton of money unnecessarily, but I don’t need to make money either. Heck, I could decide that instead of buying a new Playstation, or whatever else, I’m going to put that $250 into making a few copies of a game that I give away to my friends. That’s not publishing in any traditional sense, but it’s creating a game and disseminating it to an audience. And there’s no reason to think it necessarily has to cost money, either; it can just cost time and energy. How many people has John reached with Ghost/Echo, Lady Blackbird, and Danger Patrol (all free)? That’s a huge example of the power of “anti-publishing,” and also of the same iterative “release early and often” design process that I mentioned above.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly at all, you can make games that would be lousy commercial products, without feeling like you have to justify them somehow. I talked about this a bit earlier in a post on limited-edition games. If you don’t have to sell N copies of your game in order to feel successful or make back your investment, you’re really free to design anything that you can conceive of, sharing it with whatever audience you feel you can reach, even if it’s just a few other people. A lot of game designers seem to be torn between what they want to design and what some imaginary audience wants. This way, there’s no need to compromise if you aren’t inclined to. Make whatever game you want to make, regardless of whether you imagine it has broad appeal. (Honestly, I would be shocked if a well-designed game, no matter how strange, didn’t find some audience, but that’s neither here nor there.) However, this also means that you can’t have strong expectations or a sense of entitlement about how large the audience will be, since your audience is whatever it is, based on the choices you’ve made for your game.

To me, this approach to indie game publishing is not strange or weird, but the way things should be. There’s no reason for indie games to follow the bizarre and not-especially-viable practices that commercial games “industry” does. Why do we have to print hundreds of copies, loose a bunch of money trying to get ourselves into distribution and game stores, have booths at conventions, and the like? We can choose to do those things, no doubt, and probably do them more effectively than larger game companies, but there’s no need to necessary play by the same rules, when we didn’t choose these practices in the first place. We can choose to do whatever we want, and choosing to act as non-commercial entities, as hobby endeavors rather than small businesses, gives us a lot more flexibility and freedom, in my mind.

At PAX Dev last year, Vincent described indie game publishing as being able to decide, at any moment, that you’re going to stop selling your game. Instead, I’d describe indie publishing as being able to decide, from the very beginning, that you’re not necessarily going to sell your game at all. And hopefully we’ll see more exploration of non-commercial “anti-publishing” means of dissemination in the coming years.

Fingers on the Firmament

• Emily’s game Caravan Solitaire is amazing and does many of the things I want this game to do.
• I should finish the short game based on Journey first, since it’ll get me part of the way there.
• The game should probably be 1-on-1 as default, with the GM playing the landscape of space and the ruins. When you meet other people, the game stops and you have to invite other people into the game to play them. They can decide to hang around for later stuff or not. I’m not sure the GM ever plays NPCs, though they might play ghosts or memories. Every person you meet is a distinct PC and that person can then take that character with them, find another GM, and continue their story.
• Convention or meetup play would involve a bunch of characters gathering together to attempt a major feat, like exploring an unfamiliar region or deciphering a complex ancient mystery.
• Play creates a record of new places and ruins and creations that you put up on the internet, creating a “living campaign” that others can participate in.
• I’ve been worried about the moves for traveling between the stars, but that should be one of the fruitful voids, perhaps, with moves that — when taken together — allow you to do that, but without a single travel move that’s too on-the-nose. Players should be encouraged to seek out the fictional positioning that makes traveling possible or safer.
• Playing out certain portions of the games “unlocks” moves for both the PC who does it and later folks who play through that same series of locations in the “living campaign.” In order to be able to do certain things, then, you may have to play with characters of a certain type/level or find someone who’s unlocked certain achievements and get them to send you their campaign notes.

Geiger Counter

• In the new version, there are cards for specific characters (“Choi”), setting types (“Deep Freeze,” “The Facility”), menace types (“Hunter,” “Horde”), and locations (“Generator Room,” “Alien Ruins”). All of these have conditions that the menace player can choose to apply when they are in play in a given scene.
• Location cards give a brief description of how to draw the location on the map and, on the back, have scene framing suggestions for what you might do in that space, in the event that you don’t have strong feelings about what you want to do. They may even involve other locations, such as “someone shows up in a different room with news from this location.”
• There’s some way to encourage folks to frame really short scenes? Or vary the length of scenes instead of having them all roughly the same length?

]]> http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/18/notes-from-the-pub/feed/ 1 thouandone http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/15/limited-edition-games/ http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/15/limited-edition-games/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:01:55 +0000 Jonathan Walton http://corvidsun.com/?p=2441 ]]> Archived here from a discussion on SG.

I’ve been thinking a lot about limited edition games because some of my most interesting game concepts probably have a rather limited audience, due to both interest and the necessity of certain physical components.

Examples!

I bought a copy of Cunningham & Venezky’s Diaspora playing cards a few years back, which describe humans abandoning civilization and animals slowly taking over the cities. There are only 300 decks in existence and maybe only a few owned by members of the indie games community (because a link to it was posted on SG a while back). So if I design a game that uses the deck, it would be a very limited-edition thing, only playable with people who owned a copy of the deck. Could be a big hit at conventions, since it might be your only chance to play it! But not very effective as a commercial product for the masses.

Another thought: my game Metrofinal is really crazy and weird, but the components are really difficult to produce in a way that makes them reusable. Players have to be able to draw on the game board and write on the components, but — unlike Risk Legacy or something — it’s a single session game, not a campaign-length experience. So either I produce components as pads of sheets in a boxed set — sorta like Luke and Jared did with Freemarket — or I produce the game in packets of printed products that you dispose of afterwards: you’d effectively purchase the material for playing the game once and would have to buy a new set to play again. Maybe you destroy the components in a ritual fashion afterwards? Still pondering that. Maybe it just shouldn’t be turned into a commercial product at all.

Lastly, I own two copies of Hodge & Wright’s landmark photographs of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which are 11×11″ cardboard prints in a box of 200+ sheets. These will eventually be crucial components for playing Fingers on the Firmament, where players will draw on the star photos to make maps of space. There’s probably a limit to how many copies of the game I can hand-assemble from used copies of Hodge & Wright’s prints. Plus, the 11×11″ dimensions are going to make them really hard to ship or do much else with. So maybe I’ll make 20-50 copies and that’s all the copies that will ever exist.

I realize that many designers feel a natural desire for their games to be played by as many people as possible, but sometimes an experience can be more special, intimate, and valuable if it is extremely limited and special. And, as indie designers, we’re not dependent on selling a bunch of games for our livelihood, like the folks at WOTC or even Green Ronin. Nobody’s going to lose their job if you just sell 10 copies to the folks who really believe in and desire your game.


]]> http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/15/limited-edition-games/feed/ 2 thouandone http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/13/explicit-procedures-and-the-permission-to-decide/ http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/13/explicit-procedures-and-the-permission-to-decide/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:43:54 +0000 Jonathan Walton http://corvidsun.com/?p=2436 ]]> One of the projects that I’ve been doing volunteer consulting on lately, as part of the new plan for Corvid Sun, is actually a previously planned collaboration with two old friends: They Became Flesh with Elizabeth and Shreyas. These thoughts came out of our discussion today—pretty basic and I’m surely not the first to say this kind of thing, but it’s still important.

If there are sections of your game that can be effectively captured with really explicit procedures, then, by all means, write them out that way. There are enough emergent properties inherent in play — from the other players, the fictional situation, etc. — that you don’t need folks to have to make up large swaths of “how to play your game.” Tell them WHEN to do WHAT and HOW, step by step, with just the contextual info they need to make it happen.

However, there are plenty of really important and meaningful aspects of play that can’t be effectively captured that way, especially if your game is intended to have a meaningful emotional impact on those playing. And sometimes the mechanical feel of the game demands more judgment calls than strict procedures.

But even in those cases, I think it works best if the text explicitly empowers the players to make those judgment calls instead of abandoning them to decide things for themselves, if that makes sense. When texts disclaim responsibility or say “just wing it!”, they feel incomplete, like the designers have copped-out or doesn’t really have any clue what the players should do. But when texts say, “examine the situation from this perspective and make a reasonable decision,” they feel empowering and liberating. Then the players know that they have some leeway in this area and can safely decide things to the best of their ability without being too worried about making the wrong decision.

Practically, from the perspective of what the players do at the table, it can be nearly the same thing, but games in the latter mode feel more supportive, like they’re on the side of the players (and thus, in my experience, get played more often).

These two styles work really well when combined together. When the things that need to be done in an exact way are explained very explicitly, the players can do them (surprise!) and know that it’s more or less what the designer intended. And then they feel more confident when the designer says, “there’s some leeway here, make a judgment call,” because they’re operating within a bounded space between explicit procedures.

But if everything is somewhat muddy, if it’s not clear when you should follow procedures exactly (or if there even are standard procedures) and when you should decide for yourself (and how to do that), then you’ve left the players to assemble their own game out of content you’ve haphazardly thrown at them. Some of them will still have a ton of fun, probably, since I’m sure many of your ideas are cool and they’re smart, creative people. But that’s really more to their credit than to yours, as a designer, since there’s no way for their fun experience to be consistently replicated by other folks.


]]> http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/13/explicit-procedures-and-the-permission-to-decide/feed/ 0 thouandone http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/02/metrofinal-new-cover-sketch/ http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/02/metrofinal-new-cover-sketch/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:28:11 +0000 Jonathan Walton http://corvidsun.com/?p=2425 ]]>

]]> http://corvidsun.com/2012/01/02/metrofinal-new-cover-sketch/feed/ 2 thouandone metrofinal_cover_120212