Category Archives: News

I need to get artwork done for the Tortuga sourcebook so to motivate me I’m going to try and do a piece a day for the week here. Here’s my first piece. I’m cheating here because I already started this one and just finished it up today.

This one is for the sections on Champions, people considered loyal enough to be given technology that comes from technology left by the Old Ones. This guy would be a Chezbah champion.

It’s time I let you in on that project I’ve been working on. Steampunkfitters.com is the website for the new game.

The basic book is about as rules light as I could manage without skimping on setting the basic mechanic of the game down. The idea is to have a basic version of the game available to start things off. Then, in time, develop an advanced book with more skills, animals vehicles, etc.

The game’s tagline is “Steampunk your way” and we mean it. The game is designed for you and a group to create a game based on story seeds that the players choose. The wiki is there to add elements to the game that you want to see there. If you ever wanted to have your artwork in a gamebook, now’s your chance! We’re openly taking submissions. I feel that artwork is vital to a game and so far we don’t have any yet. All contributors will get full credit for their work.

Why The Name Steampunkfitters?

From the game book.

A tradesman that works with steam pipes is called a steamfitter. In this game the players are putting together a story about the steam age with an emphasis on technology breaking through the culture of the day, thus the “punk”. Put it all together and you have Steampunkfitters.

So take a look Steampunkfitters is here!

We had a playtest session last night. We were testing an entirely new system that works very differently from what we’re used to so the action was halting. I wrote it but I didn’t know if I was doing it right, mainly because I don’t yet know what “right” is for this system. That’s one of the unique things about playtesting. It’s not like GMing where you are enforcing rules and interpreting them. With playtests there are a lot of times when you don’t know what the rules should even be.

Playtesting is also a weird mix of GM fiat and paying attention to what the players want, even subconsciously. One of the first things to look for is frustration. If you spot it in a playtest session, you have to quickly go from GM to product development and ask them what makes the situation frustrating. Unfortunately in most situations the player won’t know how to answer that. A second line of questioning can go along the lines of what they would want to happen in that situation.

As the game writer, playtesting is also an odd experience because players are used to me knowing how the game is supposed to work. One of the players that was there for the initial development of The Artifact remembered this stage and how you’re not really sure how any of it is supposed to work. Keeping up the illusion of system mastery is tricky because I don’t have a mastery of it, there may barely be a system to master. Letting the illusion drop is problematic because then the players want to change everything. When that happens, the game grinds to a screeching halt because no one has the confidence to proceed.

For the whole session, as a designer and as a GM, I may realize that something is just not working. If I change it mid game, it will break the illusion of mastery of the game’s vision. There’s the temptation to change it right away but sticking with a bad rule can be very informative. It tells me not only that the rule is bad but can also show why the rule (or concept) doesn’t work. With that information it’s far easier to come up with a rule that does work well.

Playtesting can be deeply frustrating but it is also frequently rewarding. Some of the simplest solutions to problems come up when you’re under the gun to explain to a player how they can do what they want to do.

Actually I have worked on Tortuga but not as much as I was expecting to. The nice thing is that I usually burn out on a project and have to let it lay dormant for a while as my thoughts on problems crystalize. In this case I was getting to that point but I didn’t completely burn out. I’m hoping that as I ease back into it, I’ll have a burst of energy again.

I’m hoping to get some time to draw in these next few weeks and I’ve been working myself up to it. That’s my one big obstacle right now. The second obstacle is the last two posts here. I know how to do what I want to do, explaining it is a different matter.

As for now I’m still working on my Steampunk project. It’s getting to be pretty exciting. The players had a blast making characters and I think I’m ready to run a scenario.

That’s all for now.

Several times I have seen the call to stop making RPGs by different bloggers. Usually the reason for the call is market saturation. There are simply thousands of available RPGs out there and it makes it hard for a company to gain enough market share to make a profit. Many game companies work for “beer money” and that’s the successful ones.

So what would a halt on game creation do? Would it clear out the backlog of old poorly written games? No. Would it make people like the big name games that are already out there? Not if they don’t like them already. It would do one thing, it would kill the hobby. Seriously.

Why can I say this? Because I know a few game designers and most of the time they write games because they’re not satisfied by what is out there. They want something more or less or just different. That’s why I write games. I wasn’t satisfied with what was out there. The systems were too chaotic thematically or didn’t have enough teeth to model the concepts I wanted.

Stopping all the indie games and free games and games that can’t be played because they just weren’t written intelligibly, all the games that have poor production values would kill the industry. How? Because it’s some of those half baked ideas that are usually the craziest. It might not work entirely and maybe it’s half baked but someone else reads it, likes it and does it better. The game they come up with gets a bit of praise, a little acclaim and some beer money.

But guess what, it changes every RPG to come after it. Maybe not overtly, maybe not completely but every RPG that someone thinks up after that has the thought in the back of their head “I need to do what that RPG did or why write.”

Don’t believe me? List off the popular RPGs and I’ll tell you what they changed. There are too many to get into here but you know them, you played them and they changed your expectations for RPGs.

So how do we make it all better? We do need to make some changes. All the designers out there are running around like minstrels playing their own tune. No one wants to or can even figure out how to work together. I think the desperation of having one designer work on a game and the frustration with getting something done makes us skimp on quality. Burn out is another problem with the solo designer.

There are some rumblings of change out there. Bands are starting to form. Not all of them will stick together, not all of them will be able to play in harmony but the idea is out there. Maybe we need to think of game design in a more segmented fashion and learn to riff off each other. You need a lead designer, someone who can say yes or no to ideas. You need someone who comes up with brilliant mechanics. There has to be a Writer (proper), someone who can turn clever phrases and make dry text that the mechanic came up with into prose. Then you need artists, at least one finish artist and at least one bulk artist. The finish artist works on cover art and a few eye catching pictures. The bulk artist gives life to different ideas and possibilities in the game by filling in the pages.

Writing and producing The Artifact was a collaboration. I had several artists that not only did great work, they added in their own ideas about how things should look. They went in directions I wouldn’t have thought of. Sure I did the writing but I had help with a lot of the ideas. To this day a good number of the ideas I come up with are a result of playtesting and talking about ideas with Tarnoc (we call it “breaking The Artifact”). I’m a mechanic kind of guy but I’m not much for prose. I do my own art but I’m more of a bulk artist. I don’t have the time anymore to do big impressive pictures.

How do you think designers can form these “Bands” and riff off each other?

I wrote a while ago that I’ve been working on a new project. I didn’t want to say a lot because I wasn’t sure if the project would actually work. Now that the text is almost done and I’d like to begin playtesting soon, I’m more confident that this will see the light of day.

Why was I afraid? Because I’m a pretty traditional RPG guy. I like the GM to control the world and the players to control their characters. I like dice and the power of randomness. This game messes with both and I’m way out of my element. That’s right I’m making a narrative diceless game. Why? because the ideas struck me as fun. At first I just mentioned them to a few people to try and get them off my chest but they stayed there and wouldn’t leave. I had to start writing.

So what is it?

I’m working on a game that the players have some influence over the overall story and events in the story. It’s loose when it comes to down details and it’s intended to be. It also doesn’t use dice or any kind of randomizer, the players get options and decide what order to put them in and try to surprise their opponent or guess what the difficulties of a task is.

Looking at the parts of the story that I had, I wondered what kind of a genre I should set it to. For some reason it felt like steampunk to me. I’m not a steampunk expert but its a genre that has intrigued me for a while now and this seemed to fit. The thing is, there is no one world for steampunk and I don’t want there to be only one. Because of that, at character creation, the players pick story seeds that they want for those characters. The world can be the same each time or it can change. The story is about technology and invention and the players choose that too so the players make their characters but they also hand the GM the outline of the world those characters live in. The GM then fills in the details keeping it fun for the players.

The game also has some features to help it run humorously if desired which is a departure from my normal fare. It doesn’t have to be played that way but it’s there if you want it.

When will it be available?

The rough draft of the game is nearly done. Playtesting will undoubtably show changes that need to be made. I also do not have any artwork for the game yet but I’m working on it. I’m hoping to have a first draft ready by the spring. Anyone interested in playtesting or doing some art?

They said it could never happen. They said that if you tried to do it you would just end up disappointed. In true heroic style Christopher Wilson ignored them!

Wilson has succeeded in producing Zero Point Energy. He made energy out of nothing. He probably used more energy to make the energy out of nothing but hey, he did what he shouldn’t have been able to do. At Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, Wilson used a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID for short. No, really) to make a mirror that could vibrate at nearly a quarter the speed of light. This allowed them to observe for the first time the “dynamical Casimir effect”. Confused yet?

Lets back up. Zero Point Energy refers to a odd phenomenon of quantum physics. Pairs of particles (like photons) and their anti-particles are constantly popping into existence out of nothing, colliding with each other and annihilating themselves. This happens so fast that you can’t normally detect them. The main way to prove this is happening is to place two plates very close together at a distance smaller than the wavelength of the particles. The plates are forced together by what is called the Casimir effect.

Photons are energy though, and if you were able to prevent them from annihilating each other you would suddenly have energy. In effect, that’s what Wilson has done. From nothing, something. Even if you made a perfect vacuum in a jar, these particles would still pop into and out of existence in that jar. The jar is never really empty no matter what you do. Manipulating this field of particles called quantum foam is also called vacuum engineering. ZPE refers to a point where you should have zero, but you find this energy coming in and out of existence, thus zero point energy.

Now that doesn’t mean we’ll be whipping up perpetual motion machines anytime soon but then we weren’t supposed to be vacuum engineering anytime soon either. What will be interesting is to see if some of the ideas about this quantum foam are true. For example, some have theorized that gravity and inertia are results of matter interfering with the vacuum energy. If you manipulate the zero point field of particles, can you generate or even negate gravity? What about inertia? I’d put that as a long shot, but it would be really cool to finally be able to say to my kids “You know when I was a kid, we used to watch all those sci-fi movies and ask ‘How are they making gravity on their ships? No one knows how to do that!’ Well, we were wrong!”

If you want to read more. . .
Chalmers scientists create light from vacuum

Casmimir effect

I’m working on something new. It’s a different game with a very different feel. It won’t be featured here, I’ll set up a different site for that. I’m not abandoning The Artifact by any means, it’s just that I’ve been getting excited about the new project and things have been busy. Hopefully next week will return to semi-normal.

Here and there I’ve mentioned to people that eInk readers just are not well suited for RPGs because the page turn time does not suit looking up information in a rule book. Then it hit me, I had just set up almost all the reference material I would need on three pages of a GM Screen. Turning back and forth on that few pages would not be time consuming at all.

I knew an ePub with the same information would take more pages but it would still be relatively little (it turns out to be 8 pages).

So here it is, a GM reference with nearly anything you’d need to look up during the game.

(Right click or option-click the link and choose “Save As…” to download this file.)

The Artifact ePub GM Reference

I had to hand code a bulk of the HTML for this, which is why I’m posting this so late in the day. Wrestling with the ePub format is not easy it’s essentially raw HTML and CSS. I tried exporting it from Pages a few different ways and eventually had to strip all the formatting out to make it behave itself. Layout and tables are time consuming to hand write and that’s mostly what this is.

I’ve tried it on my Kobo, if you’ve got a different eReader and want to take a look, let me know how it works for you.

Whoh! Double digits! Anyway, today I’m going to talk about Gecko tape. Scientists over at the university of Kiel have made some tape that mimics the foot of a Gecko. This is something that I wrote about for The Artifact directly in The Fringe but hint at the technology being used by the Kerdi.

So why a gecko’s foot? Are they interested in low rates for car insurance? No, they’re interested in the gecko’s other super power. They can walk on walls and even hang upside down on flat surfaces. They can do this on smooth surfaces like glass even when wet. For decades this puzzled scientists. How could the gecko do this with no sticky substance on their toes? How was no glue left behind? Their feet were sticky without having anything that would make them sticky. The gecko can walk over dirt and dust and not have it affect their ability to walk on walls. Something funny was going on.

Studying the foot pads under an electron microscope revealed tiny hairs that split into even smaller hairs called setae. The number of these setae and the increase in surface area allows the electromechanical Van der Waals force, which is normally very weak at large scales exert a much stronger attraction. It also allows the pads to be pulled away and then re-attached many times. Geckos probably grow more setae as theirs wear out.

I seriously thought this “gecko tape” had already been made. Maybe it was in very small quantities before now. There have been some robots that used “gecko pads” to climb walls so I’m not sure why this is big news. The Kiel group seem to be the first to produce a patch of tape big enough to hang the weight of a human from 400 square cm of tape. If you wanted to make a Spiderman suit, a patch of tape 10 cm x 13 cm on all four limbs (allowing one limb to be moved) would keep you up. That’s a workable proposition.

I’m waiting for my gecko suit.