There is no doubt right now that I am going to Gen Con. I’m running four Nefertiti Overdrive games through the Independent Game Developers Network, and they are all sold out. However, I am also part of two seminars: Indie RPG Matchmaker and Historical Gaming. Indie RPG Matchmaker is a panel run by Jason Pitre of Genesis of Legend Publishing, while Historical Gaming is my brainchild, considering I published a game on historical Rome (Centurion: Legionaries of Rome) and am about to publish one set in legendary Egypt (Nefertiti Overdrive), it seemed apt. I roped in Ben Woerner who has published World of Dew to join me.
The Nefertiti Overdrive games are sold out, but I’m running them on Thurs at 2 PM (link), Fri at 6 PM (link), Sat at 6 PM (link), and Sun at 10 AM (and link).
I’m lacking my usual Gen Con crew, which kind of saddens me, but will allow me to focus on running games, being a good panel member, and selling my books.
Things are quiet because I am working really hard to have all the text for Nefertiti Overdrive completed by the end of this month. I have a chance to really get ahead of this project, so it’s nose to the grindstone.
But I’m here to talk about my earlier Kickstarter success, Centurion: Legionaries of Rome. It is now available as part of the IGDN Bundle of Holding. If you haven’t picked it up previously, here’s a chance to get it along with a bunch of other awesome games.
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%?
“Camp” by Kieron O’Gorman from Centurion
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.
by Ed Northcott from Sword Noir
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.
by Ed Northcott from Sword Noir
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?
I honestly thought I had already posted this, but when I went to look for it, I found it in my drafts. Now that the legendary Jason Pitre has posted about the money involved in his Posthuman Pathways Kickstarter, I really need to get this out there.
First, the raw numbers. Budgeted was what I was expecting when the Kickstarter campaign started. Projected was what I expected to take in and pay out when the Kickstarter campaign ended. Paid is what I ended up actually receiving and paying.
Extras are the costs for the non-book rewards, such as dice and the Centurion’s helmet. Fixes were the costs to fix some of the international shipping problems. There were a couple of other outlays that I actually didn’t record because I am a terrible businessperson.
Sorry for the formating – I can’t get it to do what I want, but the information is all there.
The cost increase from Projected to Paid in the Art was due to a mistake regarding sales tax. The artist forgot to include that in his quote. He was ready to swallow the difference, but the whole point of the Kickstarter was for me to be able to pay people a fair wage for their work, and since the Kickstarter did so well, I was happy to cover that.
The other very minor increases are due to costs of paying using email transfers, which were the fastest way to get the money to the people who needed it.
Now, it looks like this netted me a bunch of money. You’ll notice, however, that I didn’t get paid for my work. Centurion ended up being 55,747 words. If I paid myself 3 cents per word, that would end up being around $ 1675, which makes the take look not so pretty. If I paid myself 5 cents per word, which I feel is a fair wage, we would be more than $900 in the hole.
In the end, this was a huge success, because I am really, really proud of the book we produced. I also got a deal with Alliance for distribution, and the book is also available on Amazon. If I add in the profits from that and the sales through One Book Shelf (RPG Now and Drive Thru RPG), I could pay myself 5 cents per word and still be in the black.
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 Noirhere and Centurionhere. SEP’s PDFs are all available here.
You can find the UGS here and talk of Starship Commandos and A Team of Losershere.
The Warden is one smart dude, and since he has decided to discuss his process creating the uber-secret Project Pheonix, I thought I’d do something similar.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Anyone following this blog has already had access to the Untitled Game System v1 document. UGS is the backbone and basis for the games that I’m going to be developing for my gaming group – Starship Commandos and A Team of Losers. Starship Commandos v1 Playtest document is done. I’m turning to A Team of Losers now, but as both games focus on military characters (present-day and future) much of what I have done for Starship Commandos will work well with A Team of Losers, as will a lot of the modern military stuff I did for the Spec Ops line of SEP.
But what am I trying to do? Having that target, that idea for what the rules are supposed to do, really helps in the design process. I will be frank with you – the very first games I designed, way back in university during the days of D&D 2E, had no real design philosophies but were built to work in a genre other than fantasy, so I had an SF game and a modern magic game. Following that, I had a long fallow period until coming home from Korea.
At the outset of SEP, I was publishing support material for d20, though I was still privately toying with design. These were mostly “fixes” of d20. It wasn’t until the desire to run games similar to the stories that I was writing led to Sword Noir: A Role-Playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery.
Let’s be honest, Sword Noir was a hack on PDQ, more specifically, on Jaws of the Six Serpents. I really like Jaws, but it needed to be tweaked to do what I wanted to do. That tweaking led to wholesale revisions that led to Sword Noir.
Centurion: Legionaries of Rome was really the first game I designed from the ground up, purpose built for specific goals. Nefertiti Overdrive is a synthesis of the design goal approach of Centurion and the genre emulation of my earlier games.
UGS is closer to Centurion in its birth than Nefertiti Overdrive.
But that’s another story.
You can find the Warden talking about Project Phoenix here.
You find PDQ here and Jaws of the Six Serpentshere.
You can find print versions of Sword Noir here and Centurionhere. SEP’s PDFs are all available here.
You can find the UGS here and talk of Starship Commandos and A Team of Losershere.
The print version of Centurion: Legionaries of Rome is now available from Drive Thru RPG and RPG Now.
I tried to provide a discount coupon for the print edition to everyone who already purchased the PDF, but many of those individuals do not allow emails. If you previously purchased the PDF of Centurion from Drive Thru RPG or RPG Now and did not receive your coupon, email me at fraser@swordsedge.ca along with your name and customer number, and I’ll send you the discount coupon.
And don’t forget, the Kickstarter for Nefertiti Overdrive is underway until 21 April. Don’t wait, support it today.
The Kickstarter for Centurion: Legionaries of Rome has all but reached its conclusion. US and Canadian backers reported receiving their print copies before Christmas. Hopefully, even our international backers will have books in their hands over the next month or two. One can never tell with international mail.
I figured this was a good enough time to release the PDF of Centurion. The print version will be available on 1 Mar 2014, as that should give ample time for all the backers to get their copies.
Thanks to everyone who supported Centurion. If you missed the Kickstarter, here’s your chance to get a piece of the Imperial action.
I’ve made the decision to definitely Kickstart Nefertiti Overdrive. I’m still going to Kickstart Farewell, Something Lovely first, and based on some delays with Centurion: Legionaries of Rome, I’m not going to start that campaign until January. I don’t want to succeed at a Kickstarter in November, because the income then won’t be offset by costs until the next year, which means more tax on that income.
So in January, you can expect a Kickstarter for Farewell, Something Lovely. That’s going to run for 30 days. Since that is pretty much ready to go, I will be starting the Kickstarter for Nefertiti Overdrive in March – the same as I did for Centurion. Let’s hope some of Centurion‘s success rubs off on Nefertiti Overdrive.
Nefertiti Overdrive is going to include the system – which was designed for historical, mythic wuxia, specifically in a Hollywood-ized version of Third Intermediate Period Egypt. There will be an intro adventure as well, which includes six pre-generated characters. I’m also going to include a scenario generation system in which players actually drive the creation of the campaign or adventure in which they will play. They even get to design the character framework the adventure will use.
The test-drive of the scenario design mechanics turned out pretty well, but that’s another story!
I have returned from Gen Con, though I was there mostly as an Accidental Survivor and the dude behind Sword’s Edge rather than as the dude behind Sword’s Edge Publishing.
Of import for Sword’s Edge Publishing, another game of Centurion: Legionaries of Rome went by without a hitch. I am confident now that the rules are robust – in the sense of being durable rather than complex – and that they will do what I want them to do.
Secondly, Nefertiti Overdrive: Mythic Egyptian Wuxia also worked well. It has kinks that need to be ironed out, but I think this is something I want to Kickstart at some point. The question becomes: do I release as a package with Head Crushers and Direct Action, or do I find a way to get it out there into the world on its own. Josh Jordan’s Heroine is 60 pages, and I think that is a great book. Maybe I’m focusing too much on page count rather than just putting out the right product.
Correction, I amfocusing too much on page count rather than just putting out the right product.
I still believe I will Kickstart a short story collection first rather than another RPG, but I might get cold feet as the date approaches. My success with an RPG Kickstarter would certainly help propel another RPG, though I’m not so certain about a short story collection.
There is no doubt right now that I am going to Gen Con. I’m running four Nefertiti Overdrive games through the Independent Game Developers Network, and they are all sold out. However, I am also part of two seminars: Indie RPG Matchmaker and Historical Gaming. Indie RPG Matchmaker is a panel run by Jason Pitre of Genesis of Legend Publishing, while Historical Gaming is my brainchild, considering I published a game on historical Rome (Centurion: Legionaries of Rome) and am about to publish one set in legendary Egypt (Nefertiti Overdrive), it seemed apt. I roped in Ben Woerner who has published World of Dew to join me.
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 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.