Morning chapesses (and chaps) who are handsome and clever enough to follow this blog!
DriveThruRPG has a new featureette where one can set games as “pay what you want”. Since I like to think I’m a decent sort, I’ve enabled this for Æternal Legends — originally released in 2007, it’s the roleplaying game of fantasy heroes in the modern world. Hope you enjoy, and think it’s worth it. 
You might remember that my 2012 was pretty much defined by one book: Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition. I put a hell of a lot of words into that book, and ended up developer for the resurrected Werewolf line.
It’s now available from DriveThruRPG in PDF and Print on Demand versions. The Kickstarter-exclusive deluxe versions will take a little longer to come through since they’re a traditional print run, but the book’s available now!
I don’t post all of my White Wolf/Onyx Path releases here, but this one’s the big one.
I’ve got some spare books going as a result of Conpulsion: three copies of Æternal Legends and one of BLACK SEVEN. I don’t want to just sell them, because DriveThruRPG, Indie Press Revolution, and Lulu already do that for me.
Instead, I’m going to give them away. Inspired by all around fantastic human being Joe Mcdaldno, you can get one by doing good deeds.
It’s fairly simple: You do good deeds, you let me know what you’ve done by sending me an email, and on the 17th of May I’ll pick people who have emailed at random to receive a free book. I’ll cover shipping. If you don’t get a printed book, you’ll get to choose between a free electronic copy of either Æternal Legends or the ANIMUS complete pack (BLACK SEVEN and ANIMUS). Everyone who tells me about a good deed gets something in return, I promise.
Details: you need to do a couple of “normal” good deeds, or one “significant” deed. Both those terms are in quotes because even one normal deed can make a real change to someone’s life. Examples of both categories are below, but don’t let these limit you: you get to judge what counts as a good deed and as long as it’s not an obvious attempt to game the rules, I’ll happily accept it.
“Normal” deeds include:
- Donating to charity (I’m personally a fan of Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Marie Curie Cancer Care). $10/€8/£5 or equivalent in your local currency1 is enough to qualify.
- Spend an hour volunteering at a soup kitchen, homeless shelter, charity, or local non-profit organization.
- Bake a loaf or bread or batch of muffins and give them to someone you know who would appreciate them.
- Take a bag of clothes to a homeless shelter.
- Drop off a big bag of books at a charity shop.
“Significant” things you can do:
- Set aside a full day to help someone you know to move house.
- Commit to a weekly volunteer position and complete the first few weeks.
- Donate blood or platelets. I’m aware that the restrictions on blood donation are needlessly discriminatory, but people need blood and just about nowhere has enough.
- Help a friend who is looking for work with both writing a CV/resumé and the longer process of finding a job.
Email me and tell me what you’ve done. I’ll hook you up with free stuff on May 17th, which also happens to be my birthday.
Assuming this idea has legs, it’s just the start of a longer-term plan to give people my games in exchange for good deeds.
- Values roughly equivalent at time of writing; designed to be a round number for people in the same country as I am. Suck it up for charity.↩
Conpulsion was pretty damn fantastic. I got to meet a number of people who I’ve only known online up to now and really reconnect with the Scottish gaming scene. I’m fired up and ready to go. Nothing to do with drinking that much Red Bull, oh no.
One of the side effects of meeting so many people was giving out cards so they’ve got my email address without having to write it down (yes, I’m sad enough to have business cards). Now, I know that’s kinda old-fashioned, especially among gamers, so I’ve got a way to make those cards useful to you.
If you were at Conpulsion, drop me an email and you’ll get a free copy of the premium laid-out version of Beyond — my ghost-themed two page game — as a thanks for making the con so great. If you’re too cool for email, send me an @reply or DM on Twitter, a message through Google+, or whatever other means the cool kids are using these days. Just as long as it’s not Facebook, as I’m allergic.
As I mention over on the W20 Blog, the Editing Pass of Doom™ is done on W20: Changing Breeds. Which is nice. What’s next?
Apotheosis Drive X is coming along nicely. At time of writing, it needs just another $1000 to see Topher Gerkey’s Apotheosis of the Rose: Princess Drive X funded. After that, the funds go towards funding my own Guardians of Steel. I’m working on the outline for that now and realising that what started as a system for gaming robot toys punching the crap out of each other has a surprising depth and nuance when taken beyond the initial spectacle. Reading the old Grant Morrison Zoids comics really helped with that. The initial pitch is below the cut, but my ideas are racing at the mo.
Also, I’ll be a guest at Conpulsion up here in Edinburgh, running Werewolf20 and BLACK SEVEN. The con will feature an exclusive sneak preview of the Skinner SAS (“exclusive” assuming it doesn’t come out between now and then, anyway) that I’m running as a prize in the charity auction.
Apotheosis Drive X is:
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The first mecha RPG powered by Fate Core.
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A high drama, high action game with a philosophical and humanist bent.
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Using a system of “generations” to represent vast technological advances that come quicker and quicker each time.
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Focused on epic mecha battles. This is not Fate: The Tactical Wargame.
And y’know what? That’s not all! If the game funds, each extra $2,500 unlocks an additional setting and system hack for the ADX New Titan Report Anthology.
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See Geoffrey McVey do fightin’ Hindu magical mecha!
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Awe as Bruce Baugh writes mecha-piloting cephalopods fighting Wells’ Martians at the bottom of the sea!
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Thrill to Topher Gerkey’s shoujo-style adventure, with young girls unlocking the power of the Princess Drives!
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Watch as some giggling cretin smashes together Cthulhu, Mechagodzilla, Iron Man, and the Transformers and tries to make sense of the wreckage!
Apotheosis Drive X: You want this.
I’ve put together a fully laid out version of Beyond. It’s now on sale through DriveThruRPG. The original text version will remain online indefinitely, this version is fully laid-out. If you enjoy Beyond and want to say “thank you” with money, please consider buying this version.
If you need me to sell you on it some more, Beyond is what happens when you take all the ideas behind Through and condense it down to two A4 pages. You do lose a couple of things in the translation:
1) The wider setting. One of the things I liked about Wraith was everything going on beyond the Shadowlands. So you had the Ghost of Empire and the Ghost of Heresy and the Ghost of Rebellion all mixed up in each other’s grill, and you had the Tempest and the Labyrinth and all of that, and I want to bring some of that back with Through because it makes the game properly about the dead qua the dead, rather than the dead as they interact with people.
2) Emotional conflict in the characters. Through has the idea that the only reason that ghosts have independent capabilities is because they have conflicting passions, those with just one passion are mindless fanatics and those with none end up as building material. Instead of Through‘s four or five passions, Beyond only uses one.
At this point, Through will take a lot of work to get from what I’ve got to a real thing; it’s one of those bits that I started then got stupidly busy with. As it is, Beyond is maybe 75% of what I wanted to do with Through and will likely serve as the basis of any further work I do on it.
The February Game Design Contest on Something Awful is all about designing a game that fits on two pages of single-spaced 12pt Times New Roman. That’s the sort of thing I can get into.
Now, I don’t really do things by halves, so instead of doing an outline, then part one, then part two, then a playtest and all of that guff, I just sat down and wrote a two page game. It’s about ghosts. It’s got the essence of what I want to do with Through, but with a bit more of a focus on ghosts interacting with humans, rather than the ghosts of society.
I’ve put the raw text online as a Google doc, to demonstrate that yes, it does fit into the size limit. Please check it out; I’ve left comments open on the doc. I’m tempted to format it for an official release type thing, but I’d appreciate any feedback you’re willing to give based on just those two pages.
Me and some of the other Onyx Path/White Wolf folks are doing an Ask Us Anything on reddit just now. Come along and join in the fun!
BLACK SEVEN, my stealth-action RPG, is now available in print through DriveThruRPG and partners.
If you’re in Edinburgh, Black Lion Games should be getting some copies very soon. If you have already bought BLACK SEVEN and receive emails from DTRPG, you should see a discount code for the print version of the game as a “thank you” for supporting it while it was electronic-only.
