Category Archives: News

With a lot of the ideas generated on the blog here, there is a lot of material that would make a third edition more like the game I first intended to write sixteen years ago. I’d like to update some of the writing and maybe streamline the game a bit. If I do undertake the project, my goals would be.

1. Leave the system in place but tie the different elements of it together more tightly. For instance, integrating stress points with social conflict.
2. Improve on the writing, try to give the writing a specific atmosphere that makes it more interesting.
3. Streamline the Rules section so that it reads more the way we’ve come to play. There are some things that need help. ECMs and ECCMs may be modified into a protection value for the vehicles. I wanted stealth to play a big roll in vehicle combat but it seems that players haven’t really picked up on the idea as being useful.
4. Re-work the infantry rules. As they are, they require a totally different mindset to use even if functionally they are driven by the same rules. They need to be interchangeable with the main set of mechanics and easy to implement.
5. Get the infantry rules to take up less space.
6. Implement the Survival rules I’ve been working on.

Some optional goals.

1. Re-work character generation so that it has more options for generating stats.
2. It would also be nice to come up with something that would make writing the equipment and skills that a character gets faster during character generation. Then making characters would be really fast.
3. I’m going to be testing out my Technobabble Monster, if I can streamline the concept, I’d like to include it.
4. This was approved for a kickstarter a while back. Maybe I should pick that idea up again? It would let me pay for some new artwork and maybe a professional editor.
5. I’d like to push this past the printed page by making some audio recordings and maybe videos for the system. Imagine it, no more reading through the rules. All you have to do is have someone (probably me) explain it to you in plain English.

That’s what I have in mind. What’s my timeframe? I don’t have one yet.

I’ve been talking about the new setting for the Artifact, Tortuga for a while now but I was running short on time and energy to write it. That was the motivation for moving my posting schedule to Fridays only. The first two weeks made only a little progress but last week I got a good chunk of time to work and finished things up. Now the file is with the editor and she’s working through it and that’s a good thing too, because she’s already caught a lot of spelling and grammar errors.

Scale Problems

One of the things that was holding me up was that some of the equipment in the book breaks the scales that are established for humans in the main book and things stop working as well. I discussed a few ideas about how to handle that problem on the blog here but couldn’t come up with anything I liked. Then one day on a road trip I finally cracked it and so was able to give amended rules for this book. The nice thing is that they don’t conflict with anything in the main book but only extend the concepts.

Artwork

This book needed artwork and I had a hard time getting myself back to the drawing table. I have to focus on a drawing to do an acceptable job and I’ve been pulled in more than a few directions for a bit here. Oddly I’ve made a few breakthroughs that I’ve wanted to make for a long time in my artwork but I’m not very energized about them for some reason.

So I can’t proclaim that this book is packed with art but it’s enough to get the ideas across. I think the cover art is one of the better pieces I’ve done.

Publishing

I think I’ll be ready for putting the file out in two weeks if everything moves ahead as planned.

It’s been seven months and change since the site redesign and the blog came front and center. I made a goal to post on every weekday unless I wasn’t around and that went pretty well. In that time I’ve made 165 posts or a little over 23 per month which is good considering I took a good number of days off.

Ideas

One of the things I’d suggest to anyone working on a blog is write down your ideas for posts as soon as you have them. I cannot tell you the number of times where I was busy, had an idea for a posts and thought “Yeah, that’ll be great! I won’t forget this one, it’s so cool!” aaand then I can’t remember it when I sit down to write.

Another thing that comes up is ideas that want to pop up while you’re writing a post. You start on one thought and by the middle, you recognize you’re drifting into another. In my opinion, the best thing to do with that is split them and make two posts out of them. If the new subject is burning through your brain, re-write the post on that subject.

Writing

One of the nice things about having an audience (no matter how small) is it’s a good motivator to keep writing. I know that not a lot of people read my posts that are specifically about The Artifact but when I want to write about it I’m going to without apologies, that’s what this blog is here for. It’s the regularity of the writing that builds up skill in writing and I think that has benefited me.

One of the most useful things I’ve learned is how to write in a stream of consciousness. A lot of times all I have is a vague idea for a post. I’ve learned to let that vague thought guide my writing until I have defined it with words. It’s like a block of wood that you can kind of see a face in, then you whittle it down and bring that impression more to the forefront.

Time

There is one downside to this blog. I have more time than I used to for writing, I even used that time to go and write a new RPG Steampunkfitters. Unfortunately that means I’m trying to write for two games and this blog. The Artifact has both benefited from it and suffered for it. On the one hand, the blog has attracted new readers and I get about ninety plus downloads a month where I used to get forty. On the other hand I’m not done with Tortuga and I have two more sourcebooks to finish before The Artifact’s story arc is done (well the first one anyway). I’m not complaining, I’ve got to work on a lot of ideas I’ve had and that’s really cool but now I need to get back to work.

Moving Forward

At the start, I wanted to post every day. I usually would try to post an article of at least 400 words but often ended up 600-1200. Now I’m going to set a new goal. I’m still going to spend the time that I have been on writing but a bulk of it is going to be on getting Sourcebooks done. I’m going to try and use what I’ve learned blogging and use it in writing for sourcebooks. I also need to get back into drawing because I’ve been slacking majorly.

So from here on in I’m going to set the goal for a general interest post on Friday. The rest of the time I’m going back to the word processor or GIMP to get things done around here. I might throw an update out once in a while that’s not on Friday, but it should be about the game and probably will end up being artwork (I hope). If on the off chance anyone wants to guest post or even join the team over here and claim a day that’s fine too.

Over and over again I’m hearing that RPGs are dying. Here and there you get a report of a game store shutting down and it’s the end of RPGs. The Hasbro designers of D&D are ready to give up.

Whatever. If a game store struggling or shutting down was an indicator of industry health, then that must mean that the food industry is failing because I’ve seen dozens and dozens of restaurants shut down in my town. In fact, the booze industry must be failing because I’ve seen some bars shut down!

No, that’s not why they shut down. Small businesses fail all the time because they have limited resources and the owner, no matter how talented does not have the business experience of a major chain store. If someone in the family gets sick right when there’s a lull in business, it can wipe them out financially.

There’s this fear that RPGs will become a model train hobby where only the older, financially able hobbyists will be able to stick with it. For the record, if you wanted to have an awesome RPG experience you can do it for free. Right now. The only way I’d give any credence to the model train idea is if RPGs were continually getting more complicated. If anything they’re getting simpler.

There’s fear that only older players are sticking with the hobby. In our group of players only my wife and myself are over thirty. Most are in their twenties and a few are in their teens. My kids are just starting to sit through a game (they usually wander off in the middle).

I’m going to cap this off with this thought. Where are the numbers? When anyone says RPGs are dying, they don’t have any numbers to show. I want a graph that shows how many gamers there were in the 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s and now in the 2010’s. Now I’m going to turn that burden of proof back on myself. There are 66,000 members over at rpg.net. Some of those may be bots, some of them may be inactive, but that’s enough people to populate a small city and that’s one forum, one venue. GenCon Indy had a record breaking attendance of 36,000 people. I was there and they weren’t all a bunch of 30+ guys. Yes some of them were there for board games but I’d have to imagine most board gamers that were there crossed over to the RPGs a few times in their lives.

Now remember, a good number of the people that attend Gen Con are the people that are highly dedicated to their hobby. That means for every one attendee there is some multiplier of hobbyists that don’t attend. Is that figure at least one in ten? It has to be at least that. Could it be one in one hundred? Possibly and I’d put that number even higher. Three million plus gamers? Absolutely, and that’s my low end estimate.

Now you tell me you can’t carry on a business with three million customers.

This is one of those technologies that looked impossible. In Star Trek, Bones would wave a tricorder over the patient and be able to tell what was wrong with them. Then there was the salt shaker prop that he would either scan over the patient or occasionally hold it still over a problem site.

The disbelief comes from trying to imagine how to make such a tiny device that could penetrate the body and “scan” it. X-rays are far too energetic to be generated by such a small device. And where was the receiver to make a picture from the x-rays? MRI machines are enormous and bulky. Ultrasound may not be a bad option but even that’s far fetched to have it function the way it is used in the shows.

That hasn’t stopped people from trying. One company Scanadu is developing an internet based device that uses a search engine to check images of symptoms and a database of connected systems to help diagnose medical problems. It’s even supposed to handle urine samples.  In theory the tricorders on Star Trek could have functioned by being connected to the ships computers and sensors than independent scanning devices.

Another possibility, if the technology advances from it’s current state is artificial smell receptors. Imagine that little salt shaker, sucking in air and reading all the molecules that pass through it. If a dog can smell cancer then a sufficiently sensitive artificial nose should be able to detect the same. What if it could smell bacteria and viruses? It’s not an impossible concept. What about smelling a build up of proteins around a wound site? That could also be possible as long as the sensors are sensitive enough.

So in seventy years, could the tricorder exist? Where I used to think no, now I might have to say yes.

One of the big ideas in the upcoming Tortuga Sourcebook is giving more ideas for corporate characters. One of the ideas is to have a character that the PCs would come to know and rely on for finding their next job. This character could be a PC or an NPC but they’re a little closer to the classic corporate man, so we figured they’d be running around in expensive suits. This is the art for that section.

It’s late. I had a busy day. Yadda yadda but here’s some art. I have a section on minions in Tortuga so I needed some art for that section.