Category: publishing

Merchant Warehouse is a Terrible Company.

Many people who read this blog are small publishers like I am. You often find yourselves at conventions needing to take credit cards. I’d like to give you a piece of advice: Don’t Use Merchant’s Warehouse. I got stuck in a contract with them almost two years ago for our booth at Gen Con. They were consistently misleading and charged for every little thing, including doing nothing. Their sales staff is fantastic. Their service staff don’t write back, and they’re careful to send important information at the point in time most convenient to them and least convenient to you.

I got out of my contract because they sent me a notice on December 20-somethingth that they were adding $25 of charges to my useless monthly bill. It’s a clever time to send such a notice. After all, who’s checking all their business mail right before the New Year? There’s family around, you’re probably scrambling with business stuff on the ground. It said that, if I did nothing, I was accepting their new charges. I called them and told them that I wanted out. They emailed me a form that I had to fax (“Email of the 80s!”)back. I filled it out and faxed it back. I just got a final bill with the extra $25 tacked on because I called them in January, rather than in the 45 business minutes at the end of December that they allowed me.

There are new smartphone apps that allow direct access to PayPal like Square’s nifty little gadget. I bet that, by next Gen Con, that shit will be worked out and you won’t have to deal with this kind of shyster like I did.

Human Contact Dreamation Preview Edition Front Cover

Shock:Human Contact 2010 Dreamation Preview
Cover of the Shock:Human Contact 2010 Dreamation Preview

I’m excited about running Shock:Human Contact at Dreamation 2010 (The Year We Make Contact) with folks! I’m getting the edition put together right now and I’m really happy with the way it’s shaping up. I’ll have copies of this edition for all players of the game, and depending on the cost of production, might have a few more for sale at the con.

Human Contact

Academy Starship
A starship of the Academy, crewed by tens of researchers. When it arrives, its crew will spend years studying and learning from the hominins at its destination who have been separated by thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years from the rest of Homininity. While they do that, the engine module will be on a months-long mission to the Oort Cloud of the solar system to refuel reaction mass. Upon launch, 90% of the mass of the ship is the massive sphere of "smart ice" you see here. Thrown down the vectoring needle with fantastic force, it can maintain an acceleration of .1G for months on end, taking as little as 100 days to get to a wormhole from a planet in the Goldilocks Zone of a solar system.

Human Contact is a version of the Shock: system, focused for a far-future, spacefaring setting. Its science is as hard as I can make it while still having fairy dust things like “interstellar travel” work, while at its core, the setting is about culture clash and the moral challenges of being an explorer and being explored.

There’s an interesting tweak to the system that has to do with interpersonal relationships, and I’m curious to see how it works. It’s untested but in theory doesn’t break anything. It should mostly tell you who should be in future episodes of the game, a bit like the Owe List in In a Wicked Age, but it also gives a little oomph to interpersonal challenges that I often find lacking in games of Shock:

I’m running it a couple of times at Dreamation. Sign up if you want to be a researcher on a starship! I promise the locals will be friendly and grateful for the civilization you’ll bring*.

I’ll have a handful of copies of the preview edition of the game and its alternate rules at the con for players at the table. Sign up! Shock: always overbooks (usually by a dozen or so people!), and I won’t be able to run multiple tables at once this year because of this experiment.

*Promises will not be kept.
Because you know who’s going to be playing the locals: You are. And I know how you are.

Choose Your Adventure! [Oo! Let’s Make a Game!]

SUPERCOMPUTER

51:04 long & 49 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss major changes to the game, spend a lot of time with feedback, and discuss how Jewish someone has to be in England.

We took some during-the-show notes. If you have Google Wave you might be able to take a look at the Wave we created while recording. For those of you without, you can check out the Google Docs transcription

– The Weird Jews Livejournal group that Joshua joined
– The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution
– The Alas, A Blog entry about the New York Times piece on England and Jewishness
– Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit
– The Starship Troopers and Robocop films
– Feedback from Doc Holaday, Luke Crane (sorta), Vincent Baker, Jj
– cat and man!
– We know who the game will always be about now!
– Larry Ellison
– Rutgers and Yale Universities
– Blackwater Worldwide
– Postmodernism
– On Mighty Thews, by Simon Carryer
– Frank Frazetta
– The Draconis Montreal convention

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Taffy Lewis’ Night Club” by Vangelis.

Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 9: Secret Powerz!

ooh-lets-300

57:39 long & 52.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss the abilities of the hunter-fog-cloud thing, talk a bit more about the tech web, then get into brainstorming some of the possible powers that the different characters in the game have.

Notes taken by Joshua and I before and during the episode, with lots of detail on what we came up with.

– Joshua tells a story about badasses and kukris
– Listener feedback from Renato Raimonda, Dave Michalak, and Noah Trammell (02:54 – 10:00)
– Archetype / Dramatic role as a class / race combination
– Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World
– Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki’s (aka “Slash”) board game, Salah Ad-Din: Rise of a Leader
– We tried to use Google Wave, and there’s a public Wave to look at from our planning session (you need a Wave account)
– The James Herbert novel The Fog, which Joshua conflates with the Stephen King novella, The Mist
– The German boardgame Keep Cool (you may be able to buy this if you speak German), and Vincent Baker’s Mechaton
– The Steven Spielberg sci-fi film Minority Report
– The limbic system (for those of you perplexed by Joshua’s “limbically”)
– The unlinkable but cool Chris Moore game, Psi Run (it was an Ashcan Front game
– Return of singularitarianism
– Return of the tech web!
– Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
– DARPANET

Listener homeworks (2 of them):

1) Give us a name for the cloudkill
2) Give us a name for the little quanta of information the cloudkill gets on you

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel.

The Game Design Studio Opens Its Garage Doors Again

bauhaus

Fellow students of game publishing, the Game Design Studio is open once again. If you have rules that you’ve playtested, layout you want help with, concepts you want to clarify, come and enlist the aid of others while offering your help in return!

As last time, the doors will be open for a finite time. When useful critique has ended, we’ll shut down so everyone can head back to their home studios to work on their stuff some more.

Before you do anything, read the rules for presentation, please.

OLMAG Episode 6: How to Start a War!

Check out that kid's face.

(EDIT: I’ve changed the header image that was originally on this post because it was NSFW. For posterity, in case someone is curious, you can find the original image here. Edit: No, Rob. That wasn’t the real image. That was for a completely… different project.)

52:24 long & 50.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), we talk about a few possible initial scenarios, and decide which one we want to explore first. There’s some good progress here from the absolute slaughter and misery we inflicted on each other in the prior episode.

Joshua’s homework and Rob’s notes during the show

– Joshua tries to let Rob off the hook for being lazy
– Vincent Baker gave us extremely helpful feedback on the forum
– We get more status by talking about Vincent’s input than we do from discussing Paul Beakley’s
– Joshua talks about a whispered Story Games thread between he and Alexandre (board name Kobayashi), who was a soldier in the Yugoslav Wars
– Joshua’s scenario idea is the refugee one
– In LIFELESS, you play…. (around 10:30)
– Simon C’s feedback, which brings up discussion of Vincent’s fiction-first posts
– Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Crystal Express
– Requisite references to Dollhouse and Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– We settle on the refugee thing, as at least the first “module”
– A mention of (and spoiler for) the film Silent Running
– Emily Care Boss’s Sign in Stranger
– We want to have the game to come with the scenario all set to go, like John Harper’s Lady Blackbird
– Our homework: each of us writes: a setup for the war, 6 characters, a relationship map, and the initiating technology that made it terrible
– No listener homework
– Working title: “Lifeless”
– We mention the comic book/game store we were about to head to in Northampton, MA: Modern Myths

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is from the same band and the same album. The song is called Sheena’s Got a Microwave Now, and I chose it because it’s the harrowing story of a love denied and interfered with by an insurmountable gap in technology.