Category: shock:

Shock:Human Contact Is At the Printer

Human Contact

For 800 years the Academy has been slowly bringing the humans of Earth back from the brink of extinction to enlightenment. For the last 300, it has looked in wonder at the faint signals from the stars, knowing that humans had fled their home deep in its terrible past and may now be struggling without aid. Only now, with its powerful wormhole technology, can the Academy bring its light to the rest of the galaxy.

This special Dreamation 2010 preview includes material about the Academy and limited rules specific to its mission of exploration.

You need a copy of Shock: to play.

The Dreamation 2010 Preview of Human Contact is at the printer as we speak. I’m running two official sessions of it on Friday and Saturday night and anyone who goes will get one.

I’ve got a bunch of extras printed that are helping me pay my way at the con, too. I’ll be running games off the schedule, too, so pick up a copy and corner me if you weren’t able to get a slot! We’ll sit down with your and your friend for a couple of hours and see what happens where the Academy goes next!

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.

Money money money

Scrooge McDuck Enjoys Shock:

One of the great things about publishing independently is that you get to make all sorts of decisions about your work on the fly. Some of the most important decisions are financial, and they’re tough. One of the biggest financial decisions you can make is how much to charge. Kenneth Hite once said that Vincent hadn’t printed a price on Dogs in the Vineyard because “money is evil”. Really, it’s so V could change the price whenever he wanted to, since he didn’t know what was going to be a sustainable price. It’s hard to figure out.

Shock: has been $23 up until recently. This is partly because I wanted to make back my investment in a certain amount of time, and to do that I needed a certain number of sales at a certain dollar point. I also don’t like to make prices that end on a $5 mark* — $20 or $25 for instance — because then the price is compared to another product on a dollar-by-dollar basis, as some sort of information commodity, which it isn’t. The Dollar:Fun ratio is hard to pin down. Is Shock: expected to be 1/3 as fun as D&D because it costs 1/3 as much? Or is it unexpectedly three times as much fun, and I should be charging $60 a book? That just doesn’t make sense. The only measure that is worth anything is What The Market Will Bear.

I like bears. Sometimes, they’re not funny. But this one is. Because determining what the market will bear is hard to do in and of itself. Not only will different people pay different amounts for things depending on how much they want it, but your ability as a publisher to determine price point is determined by a number of factors outside of your control: the cut taken from various middlemen, changes in the price of paper, changes in the prices of shipping, and so forth. Then, of course, publicity changes how much people want the product in the first place.

So I’m doing an experiment: I just got a great deal on the next print run of Shock: and I’ve reduced the price to $19. The retail price is going down by more than the price break warrants by itself, but the price break softens the blow some because I wanted to try a lower retail price point anyway, and this means that I can take the same per-unit blow I was going to before, while charging an even lower price. I am hopeful that sales will increase by at least the same percentage as the price break, netting me a greater satisfied audience. If sales increase by more than the price break, then super-awesome: I’m making more money and more people are enjoying the game.

Shock: is available now for $19 from both the Shock: page and Indie Press Revolution.

*Thanks to Ben Lehman for this idea. Who accidentally made a price point at $23 when he started selling Polaris.