Role-Playing Game Design and Publishing
I’m not sure how many people actually read this site. Probably fewer than see my posts on Bluesky—where I’ve already kind of discussed this—but I think more than zero. Good enough.
So what’s happening with SEP? Things seem pretty quiet.
And that’s because they are. That’s not to say I’m not working on projects, but it is to say that those projects aren’t being released and—honestly—may never be released.*
(more…)With Nefertiti Overdrive 2E out in the wild, my trifecta is down to a duology, and work is proceeding apace on both.
One note here is on print editions. The main cost for print editions—along with my time—is indexing. It is precise, painstaking work for which I am poorly engineered. If I would like someone else to do it, it comes at a cost—and SEP will only just start turning a profit this month. So, while print editions for Nefertiti Overdrive 2E and later Kiss My Axe may happen, they will be slow in coming.
Kiss My Axe is in the research phase, but this is also leading to some design decisions and evident changes in the mechanics and focus.
It’s been a while since I’ve had any news, any information on new products, and that will likely continue for a while, but I don’t feel right if I’m not working on something, and I’m a little too old to change that.
I have three projects at various stages that I’m working on, two of which will likely see a release.
1) Nefertiti Overdrive 2E: I’m updating Nefertiti Overdrive, both changing the structure of the book, and altering the mechanics. I’m removing the adventure and having the book focused on the game itself. The adventure that was included in the 1E book—Get Netiqret–will be released separately but at the same time as 2E.
(more…)When I consume media of any sort, I get inspired and think about how I could apply it to either my fiction or my gaming. Since my gaming is the creative endeavour on which I spend most of my time these days, it tends to default to gaming. This happened when I listened to the most recent episode of the Fall of Rome – and, as a side note, if you like history or just Rome, you need to be listening to this podcast.
Episode 20: “The Anglo-Saxon Migration, the North Sea World, and the Birth of England” got me thinking of Great Britain in the fifth century. Now, this period has been mined pretty extensively, but generally as it relates to King Arthur. Patrick Wyman, the host, had previously mentioned Riothamus, a possible candidate for the historical Arthur, but other than an offhand reference to this being the period of Arthur, he focuses on the much more interesting – for me – topic of the Anglo-Saxon culture and the history and process of migration.
What I really loved was the discussion of a hypothetical Saxon family, their first introduction to Britain through the father’s work as a mercenary in a Romano-British aristocrat’s armed retinue until his grandchild has carved out a “kingdom” for himself. This is something that could work with Kiss My Axe, which does discuss the Age of Migrations but doesn’t look at the Germanic migration into Great Britain. In Kiss My Axe, all Vikings are linked by the Quality of “Sailing” – the term Viking likely refers to seaborne raiders – and I think for an Anglo-Saxon migration game I’d change that to “Honour.” This would work as a pretty common modifier, mostly to the benefit of the characters – providing them with courage in battle and defence against deception – but also as a Weakness, as that honour can easily be used against them in many situations.
I’m thinking of a game in which the PCs arrive in post-Roman Britain around 420 or so, and follow this group of mercenaries as they rise to positions of power and prestige. This version of Britain would include the supernatural aspects that we now consider superstition, and I would be interested in referencing the religious friction of the heathen Saxons vs. the Christian Romano-British.
Right now, I have a fantasy and a modern spec ops campaigns happening, but there’s nothing stopping me from mapping this campaign out for possible later usage. Perhaps backburner until it comes Kiss My Axe’s turn for revision.
You can find the episode in question here.
You can find the excellent the Fall of Rome podcast here.
You can find Kiss My Axe here.
So much time with so little said, but that is because I have been working.
Honest.
With the start of a new course right around the corner, I haven’t wasted the two months I took off from my MA program. Starship Commandos is right around the corner and a few months after that will be an updated version of the Sword’s Edge System, now just titled Sword’s Edge RPG. I had started to update Sword Noir and then realized I really should update the core before I did the variants. Sword’s Edge is the core of both Sword Noir and Kiss My Axe, so they will be updated after Sword’s Edge is out. Since I will be studying at the time, that work will go slower, but it will get done.
For now, I have a cover for Sword’s Edge and soon will have a first draft version that will be shared around to a preview audience.
I have been quiet here, but busy elsewhere.
I’ve been running a D&D 5E game with my daughters, and they’ve been enjoying it, but when the dice are not kind, they can get frustrated – my youngest especially. I bought them their own dice at Gen Con, and my eldest really wanted to get into using them with D&D. We got back into our game and my youngest was once again getting frustrated. I was rolling really well and she wasn’t doing so well.
I decided to shift gears. I got down Kiss My Axe from the bookshelf and started porting the characters over, asking my daughters what they wanted their characters to do, what was important about the characters they had been playing. Kiss My Axe was already every much like Nefertiti Overdrive when it came to action scenes, and the system is loose and easy, but I did hack it a bit to make it even easier.
Man, they took to it like martial artists to a bar fight. My eldest, especially, got into describing crazy scenes and the silly things that happened to the villains they were beating the heck out of. Failures abounded in D&D. There were only three failures after I took on KMA.
I made a few changes to how we played, because KMA uses Sword Noir‘s basic fight system in which initiative is gained and lost, and if you lose initiative you’re in big trouble. I went with Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart style of fights – the villains can’t really hurt the heroes, just annoy them with problems. The girls got penalty dice for failures, which they could shrug off by rallying themselves in the fight (another success in combat in which they didn’t actually attack the badguy).
We had an absolute blast. I’m in the middle of jotting down the hacks I made as we played. We’re playing again tomorrow (I wanted a couple of days post-Gen Con do be with my family, so I have time off), and the system will be slightly tweaked to make failures a little more possible (though not much – I want them to succeed about 80% of the time). It’s simpler than even Nefertiti Overdrive and forces them to do some math and be creative.
I’m a very happy daddy right now.
You can find Kiss My Axe here.
You can find Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart here.
So, there’s been some discussion about an article entitled “Five Destructive Myths Perpetuated by Roleplaying Games,” and I decided to see how my games stack up against these myths. To be clear: I don’t consider any of these to be destructive per se. I think that many of these are viable topics or facets for an RPG. The exercise here is to look at something identified as ‘destructive’ and then see how my games conform or subvert and why.
1. RPGs are about the “great men of history” and not the little people: Sword Noir, Kiss My Axe, and Centurion are all specifically about the little people, not the great men. Nefertiti Overdrive, however, is about iconic heroes that change history, and that’s kind of its point. So on this, I think I score pretty good. 75%?
2. Social ties don’t matter: Kiss My Axe includes a discussion about Viking honour and Viking society. There are very specific points about social ties, although the game is not about them. Sword Noir is based on hardboiled detective fiction, in which social ties – even those recently minted – tend to matter to a large degree. Centurion is set in historical Rome and explicitly states how important social ties, especially patronage, matters. Nefertiti Overdrive is all about the social ties – ties between team mates and ties to a nation and its population.
3. Idolization of explorers when most explorers haven’t ‘discovered’ anything . . . unless you count the Moon: None of my games are about exploration. While Kiss My Axe refers to the far-travels of the Vikings, but in the context of trade, which – by its nature – is not exploration, except perhaps exploring for people one has not yet exploited.
4. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Yes, as we age and mature, we do not always get better. Life and events take a physical and psychological toll. My games are guilty of this, however – as the article itself states – creating a game that dispels this myth would be incredibly niche. Even when I’m not playing an iconic, legendary hero of mythic ability – as one would in Nefertiti Overdrive – I want to play a character with above-average competence. So this is kind of like saying RPGs perpetuate power fantasies. Yes, many do, but generally in a healthy and cathartic manner.
But what about ongoing suffering due to violence, or permanent damage to characters? Both Sword Noir and Kiss My Axe specifically have a Flaw system that can be triggered by massive damage. Centurion and Nefertiti Overdrive, on the other hand, only have temporary and removable damage, so let’s say I’m 50/50 on this one.
5. Violence Is the Ultimate Solution: Epic violence is kind of the point of Nefertiti Overdrive, however there is a lot in the characters and the mechanics of the game that stress other avenues of addressing opposition. While the Monk’s “Kind Philosopher” or the Spartan’s “Political Exile” could be twisted into application in a fight, these and other Qualities are indicators of those other avenues of conflict resolution. Centurion is about the legions, . . . so, yeah, violence. However, Centurion‘s mechanics work just as well for social or mental conflict resolution, and this is very clear in the rules. Kiss My Axe is about as straight up ‘fix with violence’ as any of my games, but this is a game about Vikings, so there’s that. Even in Kiss My Axe, the Vikings as traders and far-travellers in implicit in the text, but I don’t think I can let myself off that one.
Sword Noir, however, is kind of violence averse. Well, it’s “fair-fight” averse, since the rules can be very punishing if you start to lose a fight. This is again part of its hardboiled roots. There are plenty of people in the world that can put you in the ground, and those that can’t might know someone who can, so walk carefully. Violence exists, because this is a dark, gritty, and unwelcoming world, but it is not the ultimate solution.
Can I give myself 75% on this one? I’m going to.
So I might score 4 out of 5, and I think that’s pretty good. What’s interesting is that Sword Noir, my very first game, scores the highest. It subverts all these myths. Not so bad. Maybe after Nefertiti Overdrive is done I can go back and give Sword Noir some more love. It’s coming up on four years since its release.
New edition? Would anyone commit violence on me were I to do so?
You can read the referenced article here.
You can find all of my games – except for Nefertiti Overdrive – here.
You can find the free Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart rules here.
Last post, I told you a lot about my history as a designer, now let’s talk about my specific design goals for the Untitled Game System (UGS). It is slightly different than for Starship Commandos or A Team of Losers, so I’ll get into those later.
The continuing thread that runs through all my game designs starting with Sword Noir: A Role-Playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery has been simplicity. None of my games from Sword Noir on have had more than 20 pages of rules. Examples expanded Sword Noir and Centurion: Legionaries of Rome slightly out of the 20 page milestone, but the mechanics have been pretty compact.
I wanted UGS to be the simplest system yet. For me, simplicity itself is a worthy goal, but there was a further goal beyond this: speed of play. Simple games seem to move faster than complex ones, and that is only logical. However, some simple systems can still lead to complex interactions. The strategy involved in building a hand with your dice pool in Centurion was part of the design goal, but it complicated the actual Tests. Not a problem, they still move quickly, but I wanted something pared down even further.
So, simple and fast. What else?
I wanted to get back to a system in which the GM does very little mechanical adjudication. In Sword Noir and Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death, both built with the Sword’s Edge System, the GM does no dice-rolling. Everything is a target number which the GM decides beforehand. In a sandbox game, these numbers need to be assigned during the game, so there is some mechanical adjudication, but not as much as with Centurion or Nefertiti Overdrive, in which the GM is rolling dice along with the players. I want to be able to focus on the game and the story rather than the mechanics or how many dice I am using.
So there you go. UGS is intended to be simple, fast, and with little to no GM mechanical adjudication during the game session.
Starship Commandos and A Team of Losers had other requirements, but those would be built on top of the chassis provided by UGS.
You can find print versions of Sword Noir here and Centurion here. SEP’s PDFs are all available here.
You can find the UGS here and talk of Starship Commandos and A Team of Losers here.
This is a long post. It’s a section from out of the “How I Play” portion of Nefertiti Overdrive. I’m including the entire section because I think it helps to encapsulate the philosophy I am bringing to this system. If you disagree with this, it is likely Nefertiti Overdrive won’t work for you. If at the end of this, you raise your fist and say “hells yeah!” I think you will dig the system.
I debuted Nefertiti Overdrive at Gen Con 2013 to a very select group of people. While they might be industry luminaries of one stripe or another, I asked them to join me because they were all fun, they were all talented, and they were all awesome. One such awesome player was Becca. Becca was the very first person to ever play the Princess, and I think she did it wonderfully. Becca also taught me a very important lesson, though its full impact didn’t hit me until I was home from Gen Con.
One of the Princess’ Elements is Inspired. Becca wanted to use that to have the Princess touched by the Gods, maybe even get a little pyrotechnics going on to put the fear of Them into the attacking Assyrians.
I said “no.” I said, “that’s not how it works.”
I really, really, really . . . really needed to shut up right then. I honestly can’t tell you what I was thinking. I was reacting rather than considering, and I was reacting as 1990 Fraser rather than 2013 Fraser. 1990 Fraser only knew D&D. That’s what he knew. And for 1990 Fraser, the GM was the boss. He was God. He built the world and he controlled the world. The world worked as the GM decided.
That’s not how Nefertiti Overdrive is meant to be played. I honestly thought I had buried 1990 Fraser with Kiss My Axe. The motto of Kiss My Axe had become my motto. “Don’t ask me. Tell me.” Don’t ask me if there is a barrel in the room. If you want a barrel to be in the room so your character can do something awesome, just tell me there’s a barrel in the room. Don’t ask me if your character knows one of the mercenaries, tell me the character does and then show everyone how that is going to make the game more fun.
Becca was playing the game right. The Princess summoning the power of the very Gods to darken the skies and pour down lightning (and maybe frogs) would have definitely made the game more awesome. It doesn’t matter if that’s what I was expecting. As GM, I am not the sole arbiter of this game world. I am one player with as much input as the others. Yes, they do rely on me – in Nefertiti Overdrive and in all of the games I’ve designed – to act as a kind of director and set scenes, portray extras, do all sorts of things that drive the story forward, but that doesn’t mean it is solely my world or my game.
Here’s a secret – I love doing running games. I enjoy GMing more than I do playing. I enjoy creating the story. And I enjoy watching my players dig it. When they are having fun, when they are doing awesome stuff, I love it. I win.
So I should absolutely, positively not have said no. It was a snap decision, a moment when 1990 Fraser rose from the dungeon to which I had rightly sentenced him and lessened a player’s fun. Even if I only decreased her fun by the slightest modicum, it was the wrong call.
In Nefertiti Overdrive, it doesn’t matter how someone does something. Call it magic. Call it might. Call it laser eyes and radioactive breath. It’s all narrative. It doesn’t change the Success or the Effect. If Becca wants to play the Princess as the literal God’s Hand, what the heck is wrong with that?
Nothing. In fact, it is awesome. And I was a dick for saying no.
Don’t be a dick. When you are GMing Nefertiti Overdrive, it is extremely important to allow the players to achieve the awesome in the way that is the most fun for them. Take everything as a welcome challenge. Sure you didn’t plan it this way, but if you can take in the spanner they have thrown at your works and include it in the ongoing game, it proves you are a fantastic GM.
Say yes. You can say “yes but . . .” or “yes and . . .” but say yes.
Because your players having fun is fun for you. Let’s be honest, we love to GM. We love to succeed as GMs. The whole idea of Nefertiti Overdrive is to allow the characters to be amazing. So let them be amazing. And let them do it in the way they choose.
You can expect the Nefertiti Overdrive Kickstarter to begin on Monday, 17 March 2014. Mark your calendars and start saving your pennies.
You can learn more about Nefertiti Overdrive here and here.
You can learn more about Becca through her Twitter feed here
The concept of Nefertiti Overdrive is, in many ways, a continuation of the concept for Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death. Kiss My Axe took the historical Viking era and culture, and threw in cinematic action. What I quickly learned is that for me and many others, cinematic action includes many of the mainstays of wuxia cinema – physics defying spectacle and feats of derring-do that could only be explained through magic or some other supernatural phenomenon.
In reading about Sudan, I learned of the Merowe Dynasty, a kingdom that is generally called Kush. For a time, the princes of Merowe ruled Egypt. This is not the only foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt, but it interested me enough to read a few articles about it.
The fall of the Kushite dynasty got me thinking of a scenario that began as an idea for a story and quickly morphed into something more cinematic. I’ve written elsewhere about my ideas for a screenplay based on the evacuation of the Kushite dynasty, centering on a princess, her loyal bodyguard, and a unit of mercenaries caught in the evacuation and threatened by the oncoming Assyrian horde. It became more cinematic when I envisioned the fight scenes, and the specific roles each of the characters could play.
I’m a big fan of niches in both role-playing and fiction. That may be due to the formative nature of D&D in my own maturation as a story-teller, and is reflected in my love of movies like the 13th Warrior or Predator which have teams of specialists rather than an amorphous horde of tough guys. In my imagination, those specialists became distinct through both their specialties and their cultures. The hunter-archer became the Amazon and the hand-to-hand specialist became an eastern monk in the Shaolin Warrior tradition.
That’s when it dawned on me what a lot of fun it would be to play in a pretty a-historical setting (I really know nothing about Egyptian history except in very broad strokes) with crazy cinematic action (which defaults to wuxia in my head). And thus the initial plan for Nefertiti Overdrive came into my head.
And since a lot of people have asked, the title is a nod to William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive using the name of the most famous female Egyptian that came into my head. Yes, Cleopatra ruled Egypt, but I never really think of the Ptolemys as Egyptian. They’re all Greek to me.
The Kickstarter for Nefertiti Overdrive will be happening in late March, 2014. Start stuffing your piggybank in preparation.
You can learn more about Nefertiti Overdrive here and here.
For my game, most of my research came from the 25th Dynasty and Kingdom of Kush write-ups on Wikipedia. I did say shallow knowledge, did I not?
You can learn more about Kiss My Axe here. You can purchase it here.
If you dig on cyberpunk or just spec fiction and have not read Mona Lisa Overdrive, do so now. I recommend all of Gibson’s Sprawl novels.
