Santicor-ing

I'm a wrangler again for Secret Santicore this year, which means that yesterday I fired out a bunch of requests to people that have come through to the Santicore. There are some really, really interesting requests, and as I was sending them off all I was thinking was "Ooh, well, you could do this if you want that" and "...you know, that's something I've not seen in a game before, I wonder if..." I'm sure there are going to be some very happy faces when the anthology comes together.

I got my request from the Santicore via another wrangler (or Hellve, as we call ourselves), and so now have two weeks to work on a piece of writing. I enjoyed creating my two pieces for Santicore 2014, but they were huge - way bigger than they needed to be really. They suffered from feature creep and bloat to a big degree. I'm trying to be more concise this year, and am putting a 1000 word limit on things. I have a concept in mind to meet the request that has been given me, and I'll start collecting ideas around that for the next few days. I've got a return trip to Edinburgh to make later this week, so that will hopefully give me time and space to bash out some ideas.

Will think on and find time before I go to write a quick post about one or both of last year's Santicore offerings!

Suddenly, November

Don't ask, I don't know. Where did the last month go? I SAID DON'T ASK! Sorry... ...I didn't mean it, I've been busy and stretched with work and life stuff... Still no need to shout... Yeah I know. Still friends? ...OK...

Notes on micro-publishing, part 4

I had three goals with making Oddpool:

1. To have fun making something and sharing it.
2. To learn a little about the behind the scenes logistics of this kind of enterprise.
3. To raise some money towards artwork for future releases.

In the last three posts I've talked about how I went about making Oddpool and sharing it, what it cost to do things and how I set them up, and then I shared details of what has happened in terms of sales - and did a breakdown of where £1.99 for a print edition goes.

In total I've generated £15.41 towards future artwork (and with thinning out my RPG collection this number has been added to), so I've done something towards my third goal. What about the other two? Did I have fun? And what did I learn from doing this?

Rough, unused/non-final art of some "Spidercrew" cultists - may appear in a future Oddpool campaign...

Notes on micro-publishing, part 3

This is my third post reflecting back a bit on making Oddpool and the experience of selling a little RPG product. On Thursday I shared a post about the practical side - how I made the pdf files and got things printed and assembled - and yesterday I looked at how I have been sharing and selling it. Today I want to look at the numbers a little bit, and then tomorrow I'll reflect on what I've learned from this small project, some questions or thoughts that I've had, and what this means for the future.

Unused piece of Oddpool artwork. Maybe next time...

Notes on micro-publishing, part 2

Oddpool has been out for a month - there are only a few print copies left - and because I want to make self-publishing RPG things a part of what I do, for fun and for profit, it seemed like a good time to look at the numbers and process involved thus far.

This not a "how-to": I'm just going to say what I did, what I think went well and what I think I could do differently, and some little things I've learned along the way. Like I said yesterday, I had three goals with making Oddpool:

1. To have fun making something and sharing it.
2. To learn a little about the behind the scenes logistics of this kind of enterprise.
3. To raise some money towards artwork for future releases.

Yesterday, I shared some of the practical details of how I made Oddpool. Today, I'll look at what I did to set up a payment process, and how I went about sharing Oddpool. Tomorrow I'll look at the numbers of all this, and what I learned by doing this small project.

Notes on micro-publishing, part 1

As Oddpool has been out for just over a month now - and there are still a few print copies left for around the price of a Starbucks coffee! - and because I want to make self-publishing RPG things a part of what I do, for fun and for profit, it seemed like a good time to look at the numbers and process involved thus far.

This is by no means a "how-to": I'm just going to say what I did, what I think went well and what I think I could do differently, and some little things I've learned along the way. I had three goals with making Oddpool:

1. To have fun making something and sharing it.
2. To learn a little about the behind the scenes logistics of this kind of enterprise.
3. To raise some money towards artwork for future releases.

In this post, I want to share some of the practicals on how I made Oddpool, both my process for creating the files involved and what I did to make the printed editions. In a second post I'll look at what I did to set up a payment process, and how I went about sharing Oddpool. Depending on how long I waffle in that post, it might be a third post before I get on to reflecting on what I've personally learned, and the numbers side of things, but I will get to them.

What are those d8 Naythun Riders doing?

At the end of July, Chris McDowall wrote a post about his patrons, creating a load of people inspired by them. I've met Chris a couple of times, and I thought we got along, so was expecting that the people inspired by me would be cool ninjas, awesome dudes of noble birth, or at the very least a bunch of amazing bandits. Instead:

17: d8 Naythun Riders - Bearded Men riding Naked Men Twisted into Emu-Shape
3hp, Riding Crop (d6) OR Naythun Kick (d6)

- Offer you a chance to feed or pet their steed. 

- Muzzle their Naythun if it tries to scream out in repressed sapience.

- Defend their steeds to the death and nuzzle it uncomfortably.

Thanks Chris.

What Chris doesn't know is that the Naythun Riders have a strange and complicated society, and there are lots of subgroups and clans that one could meet on the road. In fact, researchers who have observed them - even lived with them for a time - have identified a score of situations in which they are met. When you meet Naythun Riders on the road they are...

1. Arguing over who has the most magnificent beard.
2. In the middle of racing their Naythuns.
3. Mourning the death of a Naythun.
4. Singing loudly and tunelessly.
5. Debating the merits of various beard care regimens.
6. Sitting drinking, halfway to a drunken stupor.
7. Shaming one of their number by shaving his beard off.
8. Planning a feast.
9. Forming a raiding party.
10. Looking for somewhere to camp for the night.
11. Trying to find something to drink.
12. Trying to find treasure that they hid when they were drunk.
13. Celebrating a young rider's first facial hairs.
14. Looking for new potential Naythuns to train.
15. Writing bad haiku / That's exploring life and death / And, like, things. Yeah.
16. Grooming their Naythuns.
17. Playing a game of pretend and make believe.
18. Washing their beards in blood and water.
19. Plotting murder.
20. Committing murder.

If they're plotting murder or committing murder you can be sure that their target is one of the Creesmac D'Walls - undead sommeliers from an underverse vineyard, 3hp, Glass Bottle (d6) or Boneblade (d6)...

OSRewind: September 16th

Yesterday I shared the idea of a daily digest that looks back at the posts made in the OSR (or maybe games blogs in general?) in previous years. There's lots and lots and lots of ideas out there, with more being shared every day. A look back could highlight ideas that have been forgotten or showcase the origins of concepts that are part of the language of the OSR now.

I'm quite taken with the idea but not sure if it's something I can commit to exploring along with the other projects that I have underway. But for today at least, and because the term "OSRewind" popped into my head as I was thinking about this, here's a quick jaunt through the last few years...

• 2014: [Tuesday Map] Hubert's Tower/The Butcher's Tower - Dyson's Dodecahedron - I really like the step-by-step approach and the details of how this was done. I'm quite keen on the how-to of maps at the moment so seeing this was serendipitous!
• 2013: Demogorgon implies.... - Playing D&D With Porn Stars - A really cool method for world building and inspiring interesting ideas for sandboxes. If I get around to running Oddpool on G+ some time soon I think I'll be using this method to set the city up.
• 2012: The Verbs of Madness - False Machine - My nephew and his friends were players in a campaign that Patrick ran and which I turned up to sometimes. Being teenagers their minds quickly turned to evil, and they ended up allied with a genuine Dark Lord. In this post Patrick describes how the Dark Lord comes up with his orders.
• 2011: Faking It; or, you'd better be Al Pacino; or, stop rolling the fucking dice - Monsters and Manuals - a short rant about player agency, DM fiat and Quantum Ogres goes on to generate 121 comments! Hoo-ha!

Something visual, a couple of solid tools and a bit of a theory: nice things to find and start thinking about...

On This Day

I've grown to love exactly one aspect of Facebook over the last few months. I hate the interface, I hate the notifications I get when I logon, I hate that I see things that people have liked, I hate to see that a friend-of-a-friend has posted something and a friend has liked it. There's a lot to hate.

But one thing I love is the "On This Day" feature, letting me look back and see what happened in years gone by. For post-fatherhood this is quite nice, it lets me see my daughter a year ago (and soon, two years ago) and I can do that whole "Awwww, she's grown so much!" thing that some people find sickening. It also lets me peer back to the early days of married life, and even further to my PhD days - in fact, exactly seven years ago today I said goodbye to that and started my business!

Time flies.

In the last few days I recorded an episode of A Gaming Podcast About Nothing, and Dave and I got on to talking about terminology and blogging and "has everything been said already?" - things of that nature. This conversation is on my mind, as is "On This Day"...

People have said in the past that it might be difficult to do a regular "OSR Digest" as a site or a newsletter, but I wonder if there is some value in a site that looks through the back catalogue of the OSR and does a regular link share about posts from days gone by - with or without commentary.

For example, on this day:

• in 2008, Dave shared a post of random spellbook appearances on Monsters & Manuals, which is a neat way to spice up your fantasy game;
• in 2011, Patrick was asking whether or not he had invented drawing a dungeon on a polyhedron, and a couple of related questions;
• also in 2011, Zak S shared the Caves of Chaos as a really neat one-page dungeon;
• and also in 2011, Chris shared six random jerks you annoy in town! 

It's interesting to see people riffing on ideas as they come up, but I wonder what ideas might be re-discovered or re-examined - even appreciated more - by looking back?

Not appearing in Oddpool

Honestly, this is the last post about it for a while, I swear...

In making a Pocketmod-sized supplement you have to make really hard choices. What stays, what goes; how much detail can you afford; what sized font can someone read or not - I was tweaking and tweaking for a while. A very hard choice I had to make was whether or not to include the Superlambanana in the booklet. In the end, I decided not to include it, more because an idea like it would need artwork and I wasn't quite sure about what I could or couldn't do with a work of art, and I was struggling to come up with a name that was as expressive as Superlambanana.

So in the end, it was cut out, but it left a nice giant-sized hole for the Pool-Auks, which are actually much more symbolic of the city. The Superlambanana would have been nice though...

Superlambanana
Twenty-feet high, apex wandering creature
STR15, DEX15, WIL20, 25HP
Driven to protect babylambananas. d8 stomp, Armour 2. Can always hear any distressed offspring and will come to their aide. Spawns a new child every four days, extruding from the back surface over a period of an hour. Often accompanied by 2-8 babylambananas.

Babylambanana
Horse-sized smooth sheep/fruit hybrids
STR10, DEX10, WIL7, 2HP
Driven by curiosity. No attack, Armour 1. Harmless, mouthless, bleats. Will approach strangers and shiny things. Will have a nest of shiny objects, which may contain treasure.

(Oddpool - now down to the last six of the signed and numbered print copies!)