Category Archives: News

I was thinking that I needed another few weeks of pictures to get started laying out the 3rd edition but when I did an inventory, I found that I’m already at my goal of twenty pictures. So it’s time to crank up the pace and get the 3rd edition out the door!

The first step is to get an edited version of the text finished so that I’m not editing while I’m laying out. The size of the files starts to get very large when all the pictures are added in and the whole thing becomes very difficult to edit.

It’s best for me to build each section of the book as it’s own file and then put them all together when I’m done.

I can probably squeeze out another picture or two in the time it will take me to put it all together. If I apply myself I think I could finish in a month!

This week’s been pretty busy so I didn’t get a picture done yet. I liked the last picture as a full page pic to introduce the Chezbah. I’m working on a full page to introduce the Kelrath. It’s about a 3rd done.

I recently posted a new adventure that I worked on for the RPG Geek Adventure Design Contest called Some Dreams Are Nightmares. It’s a simple adventure but it goes in a different direction than the existing adventures and introduces some bad guys that aren’t in any of the other books.

I’m working on an adventure now that explains some of the things the Chezbah do. We’ve been playing with the idea behind this one for a while. The main challenge to writing  this game is that I want it to be partially replayable. I’d like the main threat to be reusable in other games should the GM choose. The other difficulty is that the threat is very dangerous. Getting a balance between very dangerous and TPK is not easy.

The third edition of the player’s handbook is in the works too. This is mostly going to be rules updates and changing how some of the Comm Officer’s guide works. I might get a chance to do a new picture or two, we’ll see.

Tortuga is on hold until I can get 3rd edition done. Actually most of it is 3rd edition ready, I just have to re-write a new skill and I wanted to improve some of the artwork. When I started doing the art, I was really out of practice. Now that I’ve got new equipment and I’ve been practicing I’d like to do a better job.

Then there are the other sourcebooks. The Engineer’s sourcebook is going to be a challenge because I’m going to have to gut a lot of the equipment creation rules and update them to tech challenges. This may not be as hard as it sounds though. It was incredibly easy to do for the vehicle modification rules. If I follow the same logic, making equipment should work similarly.

I’d also love to rebuild the Fringe for 3rd ed and give it a cover. It usually falls by the wayside when it comes to projects.

In the past I didn’t like making adventures but I’ve come to see their value in telling very specific things about the world. Even if a GM never runs them, I can put some very specific details in them that would just get glossed over in the main book. Because of that, you’ll be seeing more adventures that go a lot more into plumbing the hidden depths of The Artifact.

Waiting for me to finish all this art for 3rd edition is a little tedious. It’ll be nice to finish it up and put it all together.

We’re very happy to have our rules editor back. Cody has been away for a bit but he’s back now. He’s got a bit of catching up to and we’re looking forward to his input on the 3rd edition.

For now, this picture’s for you Cody. They’ve missed you too.

I’ve been working on my painting skills lately. I need to get art for 3rd edition done and wanted to improve the quality of the art in the book. To do that I had to relearn how to make art. I have been primarily an illustrator, meaning I draw with lines and then maybe color the picture later. I had a problem figuring out how to paint because the process, the order things are done in a picture is quite different.

I thought I’d try helping out anyone that has been struggling like I was by making a how to for digital painting. You can read my Instructable on the subject by following the link below.

Digital Painting For Illustrators

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.