The Artifact RPG

I’ve been working on a quickstart for the new 3rd edition rules and now it’s available! There’s enough rules to get you started, an included adventure, five pregenerated characters and description of the skills and equipment they start with.

The adventure begins deep near the core of the planet, where ancient mechanisms have long ago warped space and time in a localized area. The adventurers are part of an expedition to place scientific instruments at a key point in the warp to learn it’s secrets. Will they do better than the doomed expeditions that went before them? Should they trust their guide Maximilian or trust their own judgment? What about the people that are already living in the warp? Will they be aggressive or friendly? How have they survived so long in this hazardous environment?

Download it now and enjoy!

After discussion, the last attempt didn’t have the right spirit to it. So take two.

A shadow moves in the distance and the huntress turns her attention to her next quarry. Each of her hunts yields a trophy tooth. One is enough to prove her worth to the tribe, but she has recently taken a Brouragh skull that she will trade with the tribe’s warriors. Their unusual mount only underscores that this duo has experienced many things in their adventures.

I did decide to stick with Starstruck for a font, it speaks of a interconnectedness that I like. Maybe it’s not perfect but I still like it.

I reinterpreted Nil’s suggestion for a picture of the planet itself and made it part of the logo.

I’m releasing the beta material for 3rd edition for general consumption. Over the last few weeks and a few playtests I’ve made small tweaks but the language and the mechanics have proved themselves stable enough to release for Beta.

The Artifact 3e Beta

Character Sheet 3e (a better looking character sheet is under development)

There’s still no art and no maps. I’m working on that now but it will take time. There’s not much reason to start laying out the maps until I have the artwork that comes before it. In the meantime the second edition maps can be used. For now the second edition book can also be referenced for pictures to give players a better idea of what their characters are looking at.

What’s significant about this edition?

So why should you bother with this edition of The Artifact? Nearly any game is going to give you rules for handling combat. Some games will handle social conflict. This edition obviously does that too but what else adds to the story you can tell? There are three tools included in the game to help you tell stories that might have been difficult without them and they’re there to tell the stories The Artifact is all about.

The Artifact is all about survival in an alien world.

In the past in every game I’ve played, telling a survival story felt like the GM was just beating on the PCs. They would roll to stave off failure, over and over again. It meant that the players hated these rolls. Skipping rolling and just telling the story didn’t really work either. The players would ignore the story as irrelevant if there was no mechanical impact on them and would again feel like penalties placed on them for the story’s sake was another punishment.

That’s why Survival Challenges were created as a GM tool for telling this kind of story. Players roll to defeat the challenge instead of rolling to stave off defeat. That has been a huge benefit to our games as the players are eager to get involved. The challenges also react to the player’s actions and have randomized responses to them which makes prep time shorter for the GM.

The Artifact is all about science.

I’m a big fan of science and sci-fi and I love throwing science mysteries into my games. Technology, sociology, physics, anything that I think would make a cool mystery. Unfortunately most of the time the problem is that most other players don’t know how to figure out the mysteries I present or I have to give it away and it’s no challenge. No fun in both cases.

That’s why Tech Challenges were created. Players only have to propose how their characters might try and solve the puzzle and their character’s knowledge provides the solution. This becomes very enjoyable for the players because they’re not just rolling dice, they’re telling the story of how the puzzle will be solved and then rolling to see how it worked. Then the tool provides input for the GM about how the problem reacts to the PC’s efforts making things more interesting because the puzzle is interactive.

The Artifact is about the teeming masses.

In most games, the PCs work alone. In The Artifact, most of the time the PCs are part of organizations that support them. The influence of these organizations can be just fudged by the GM and that’s how I’ve handled it in the past with reasonable results. The problem is the players still feel like they’re operating on their own. Advanced characters will often get assigned subordinates because of rank, handling these subordinates becomes cumbersome after getting to more than two or three of them.

That’s why Infantry Combat is included in the rules, so the players can be in charge of their subordinates and directly manage them easily. The GM can also more easily handle larger groups as easily as handling a single NPC.

Anything Else?

Of course there is! I’m really happy with the social conflict rules, they’re much more developed than other systems I’ve seen. There’s lots of tools and toys for the players to play with. Now many of them have in game mechanic benefits to them that they didn’t have before.

I’ve included a special thanks to all those that supported the Kickstarter on the title page. If you want your name attributed differently or if I spelled it wrong let me know. This will remain in the book, so it’s not just going to be in this file version.

We’re also working on a quickstart for The Artifact. It’s about 40 pages which includes everything you need to play but can probably be paired down a bit. I has a detailed example adventure, pregenerated characters, enough rules to get you going and a simple introduction. It also needs artwork but probably will only have a few new pieces so shouldn’t take too long to get done.

Enough moping around! Let’s make some progress with making third edition happen. Here are two versions of cover art that I’ve been working on.

This first one is the standard Georgia font that I’ve always used. Let’s call this the “classic” version.

This second one is thanks to Gladen Blackshield who introduced me to the Starstruck font. The art is the same, just a new take on lettering.

By way of a story to go with the art. . .

They’ve been in worse positions, an ASO research group investigates a relic believed to hold clues to the legend of the War Engines. Corporal Franklin spots movement in the darkness, her keen eye spots a Chezbah Hound a hundred meters out and drops to a prone position to get a better shot. She yells out to her team, warning of danger.

The hounds have circled them in the darkness and emerge in an ambush. Private Jorge Martian is the first to notice the ambush as a Hound leaps out at him he runs for a better firing position. More Hounds are on their way. Things are only getting worse, through his binoculars Scott just noticed something moving in on their position fast.

What do you think of each? Is there something they need? Anything that needs strengthening?

The vast majority of us in the blogosphere have one view to what is happening on the interwebs. We see the traffic that comes to our blog and we see where it goes. The rest is pure speculation. When I see a large quantity of traffic come from The Free RPG Blog, I can only guess what the total readership of the site is.

Rob Lang was kind enough to peal back the curtain a bit and give me a view from the other side of his post that did a lot to promote the Kickstarter. At this point moving into the second tier of data so at first it may seem that this has less to do with the Kickstarter itself but there are a few lessons to glean here. I can’t say if this interaction is totally typical but it’s one more piece of the puzzle.

Blog Reviews Are Your Friend

Review blogs are really important to drawing in new eyeballs to a project. When most people hear about an RPG, they want to know if it’s any good before they download it and have to spend the time reading it themselves. Because of this reviews have a very wide appeal and therefore their blogs will have a wider general readership.

Rob said it was okay to share the data he forwarded to me. There’s a lot of it but I’m going to focus on some specific figures.

theartifact.net got 154 hits from The Free RPG Blog in the last month according to my data.

Rob’s post announcing the Kickstarter got 161 unique page views.

This means that 95% of the people that viewed Rob’s post took a look at the web page here. Rob’s a pretty good salesman. Actually, it is possible that some people clicked through more than once and it’s also likely that Rob tested out the links himself when he was writing the post so let’s say there was a 90% click through rate. If we imagine that this is typical of a positive review or endorsement then it looks very good for the reviewed game.

But that’s not the whole story. Rob gets more traffic a month than the 161 that looked at the endorsement. He has a lot of how to posts that people read. If I’m reading this right, The Free RPG Blog sees 6400 unique page views a month. The Artifact got a whopping 2.51% of those. Now that’s a really interesting metric to think about. I’ve heard of some reasonably large names in the RPG blogosphere saying that they get 1000+ page views a day. If somehow you were to get a good review, even on a blog that size, you might only get 750 page views for that month from that post. Obviously that’s nothing to sneeze at, I’d take it any day. The point is, it revises my earlier estimate of 10% of hits much lower.

I don’t think these numbers are unique to this particular Kickstarter and any lack of salesmanship on my part. I can say that because the data we looked at earlier said that 90% of the people that looked at the endorsement clicked through. The rest of the visitors were reading The Free RPG Blog simply for different reasons. This is really important for trying to gauge how much exposure is enough.

Rob also gave me his feedburner stats, which if I’m reading right paint an interesting picture. Rob has roughly a thousand subscribers to his RSS feed. The day that the endorsement post went up, 400 of the subscribers clicked on the post but only 96 viewed the web page post from the feed. That means that roughly 10% of the RSS readers saw the post and did something with it. Did the other 300 convert into views some other way, say by clicking on a link directly in their google feed? It doesn’t seem that way I got 23 page views from Google reader last month. There are a few other aggregator sites but they’re one or two hits apiece.

So the majority of the click throughs are from the site’s regular RSS feed but only 10% of the regular readers were interested. Sixty five of the other unique page views were from other sources. This is another way of gauging the impact that an endorsement will give. If we said that as a rule of thumb, a site might deliver 10% of it’s RSS feed plus another 60% of that number (96+65=161) we get a reasonable value of 16%. This isn’t 16% of the RSS feed that are viewing the page, it would be 10% of them viewing the page and 60% of that number from other sources. Anyway just remember 16% of RSS is the likely delivery rate of a blog.

Now it’s unlikely that a game looking for a review is going to be in a position to demand this kind of data from a reviewer. If there was some way of reliably gauging that in a potential reviewer it would be very handy but unfortunately that might take some guesswork.

The effort to launch via crowdfunding The Artifact 3e has failed. But that was not the only reason why I wanted to run the fund drive and in that I think I can grasp a smaller success. I wanted to know what it would take to run a successful campaign and then share that with you the reader.

To start talking about how to run a successful crowdfunding effort, lets talk about numbers that you can look at before you ever run a campaign. The idea is to give someone who is wondering “Could I get funded this way?” a reasonably accurate gauge to look at before jumping in. Some of this I learned from others and some of it, as you will see is my own data, the rest is impressions that I got. I’ll try and clearly delineate them so you can know how much value to assign to each.

How Many Backers?

You can figure out how much money you need to produce a book but what you need to worry about for crowdfunding is how many backers you can get. Let’s look at some raw numbers for the period of the Kickstarter.

109,231 hits to theartifact.net

676 referrals to theartifact.net

1653 page views according to word press

414 second edition downloads

214 third edition downloads

285 video plays 42 (15%) of plays completed

27 backers

Average pledge $40

What can be divined from this information? For one, this is roughly double what I normally get as far as traffic. I can’t say that would happen to anyone that runs a crowdfunding effort but the idea that this is a special event does seem to make a difference. At an average of $40 a backer I needed to get 125 backers. Now that average might have dropped because the big backers jumped in early and most of the backers at the end were between $10 and $40.

So the first thing you need to do is look at your regular traffic. Just looking at raw traffic, I would have needed 8,265 page views in the month of the kickstarter to draw in enough backers (or 5x the number I got). So if you already get that kind of traffic, you might be able to run a Kickstarter at the $5000 level.

Now interestingly, there were roughly the same number of third edition downloads as video plays, I’m not sure there’s a real correlation there but it’s interesting. Unfortunately Kickstarter doesn’t tell me how far into the video people watched. I don’t know if they started and immediately killed it or watched most of the way through. What we can tell is that 64% of those that watched the video all the way through backed the project. If that’s a real benchmark, in theory you could put the video on YouTube for a few weeks and get the viewer data and then try to gauge interest before ever having to set a funding goal.

It’s been mentioned in the past, that a good measure of how many backers you will have can be measured by your Facebook followers. I don’t have a Facebook account but from the projects I’ve looked at, it’s not a bad gauge. I’m not sure how Twitter followers or Google+ circles stack up but if you already have a link to people that follow you, especially if it’s specifically an account for the game, there’s a good chance they’ll back it.

What went wrong? What could have been done?

The first thing I probably did wrong is overshared. There’s a point where a person’s interest is piqued. Anything past that and all you’re doing is giving them something to not like. Going into the project, I knew my video was long but I wasn’t sure if that would be perceived as a good thing or a bad thing. The fact that only 15% of viewers watched the whole thing means it was just giving people something to object to. Most Kickstarter videos I’ve seen are a minute and a half, unless they’re something really really amazing to watch.

My second bit of oversharing is I should have kept the art I have already, out of the whole thing. People with a few graphic headers running across the page seem to do better than I did. So if you don’t have world class art, leave it out. Giving people more, is just giving them more to complain about.

If I did have any money, I could have paid some of the artist to do some work and then post that. That wasn’t an option for me and my situation. A few people asked why I didn’t already have the artwork already. That’s a bit silly since getting the artwork was the point of the whole thing. I stated it multiple times in multiple places and people still asked. Sometimes people are silly and miss obvious information, I’ve done it so I can’t really fault them. It’s just something to be aware of, state plainly what the reason for the Kickstarter is and repeat it over and over. Make it part of every announcement and post.

The same thing goes for the game. Why back if you can get it anyway? My hope was that by giving people a look at the game, they might get interested. Remember Technoir? It was going to be amazing, revolutionary. Now a lot of the backers are saying that they’re not really fond of the system. They can’t pull out now, it’s too late.

The moral here is, try and figure out at what point you’ve piqued the reader’s interest and then stop. I have a feeling that cognitive dissonance will encourage them to like the game at least a little even if they wouldn’t have as a free game.

The last thing that I might have done wrong is listen to Kickstarter as to the length of the campaign. Thirty days sounds like a good chunk of time but in the middle of the campaign, when things simmered down, There wasn’t enough time for me to turn the boat around. A lot of RPG Kickstarters are going for longer periods, 45 days, 60 days. I can’t say another fifteen days would have done the trick, but it could have helped. To temper that thought though, a campaign normally gets a chunk of funding early on (you want about 30%) and then the rest at the very end. If you don’t get up to 30% in the first week to week and a half, you’re not likely to succeed.

What went right?

I think Rob Lang and the free RPG blog went right for me, Rouge Games went right, Nils at Enderra went right and Fitz at Game Knight Reviews went right. The point is, before you start a Kickstarter, talk to blogs, get reviews, but have them wait until just after the launch to post the reviews. You don’t want the posts going up early because you don’t want a barrier to the blog reader going and pledging. A lot of times people intend to pledge but if they have to wait, they forget. Maybe they’ll remember later, maybe not.

Look at the number of followers the blog has, figure that about 10% will check out the Kickstarter. As close as I can figure it, that’s about what I got as far as eyeballs looking at the project. Selling them once there is another thing.

One thing that I played around with is to be controversial. I don’t have a stomach for raising a ruckus anymore so the bit I did cause left a bad taste in my mouth. I do have to admit that it was effective. Each time I made a provocative statement in a message board or on the blog here, I got a few backers. I don’t know if that’s an alpha male thing, but I tried it a few times and it happened each time. That’s a tough recommendation to make. Maybe it would be better to simply say to act like an alpha and you’ll get more people willing to follow.

It would seem that we’re not going to make the Kickstarter funding goal unless something miraculous happens. So what does that mean for The Artifact moving forward? For one, I will not be re-kicking this project. I will have to find new ways to get to the kind of product I would like to turn out. That means this will take more time. That’s disappointing but not the end of the world.

This has been an interesting ride. Some have been very enthusiastic about The Artifact and backed it accordingly. Others have been deriding, mocking even. That’s not surprising even bigger and very successful projects have had their share of mockery. It just means that the RPG community has a variety of values that differ greatly from person to person. Many who have no problem deriding others.

I’ve learned a bit about Kickstarter and what it takes to succeed in getting funded. The sad truth is, Kickstarter is mainly going to be useful only to established names in the RPG community. There are some ways around this. One is to get an RPG maven to trumpet a product. I have trouble with that. To me the problem with that is that a small group are elevated to the status of choosing what the rest of the community will see come to life. We might like and enjoy the input from the prominent names in our community but do you want them dictating all your RPG choices? I wouldn’t.

I had a small group of people say “Of course you’re not getting funding, look at ‘X’, that writer barely made their funding goal and he’s a big name.” That’s kind of a sad attitude to have. Think about it. If we relegated ourselves to only the products and writers already out there, we would be reduced to a stagnating hobby retreading the same old stories for years.

You build the hobby, your choices will either build in new voices or cement it in place to what already exists. If you’re afraid of the hobby being interesting, go ahead and cement away. If you want new and interesting choices, support the guys you’ve never heard of.

If you’re looking at the Kickstarter, we’ve just picked up a few more backers, so that’s great! We still need a lot more obviously. So can we make the goal? At first look you might say, look, you’ve just burned through 20 days and only got to 13%.

However! Keep in mind that our funding goal is not unreachable. Other projects have reached our funding goals in a day or two. It is not impossible, although I do admit our chances are dwindling. So what does that mean? It means that if you haven’t backed yet, we need you to head over to the Kickstarter and put in a pledge.

Why be a backer? Well, you’ll get a great feeling that you helped the artists pay their bills. That’s the main thrust for this Kickstarter. You’ll also be able to say you helped make an RPG a success and be able to prove it because your name will be on the back of the book. In addition you’ll get a new and shiny game, maybe a PDF, maybe a hardcopy book depending on you pledge level.

So the answer is. . . YES! Let’s make this happen!