D20 | The | NOUN | of the | COMPLEMENT | NOUN |
1 | The | wrath | of the | red | queen |
2 | The | revenge | of the | two-headed | king |
3 | The | love | of the | mad | serpent |
4 | The | hatred | of the | unholy | phaoroh |
5 | The | city | of the | pale | prince |
6 | The | fortress | of the | ghost | dragon |
7 | The | tower | of the | dread | mage |
8 | The | lair | of the | dead | sorcerer |
9 | The | crown | of the | lost | knight |
10 | The | sword | of the | weeping | beast |
11 | The | spear | of the | purple | giant |
12 | The | tomb | of the | yellow | werewolf |
13 | The | lust | of the | cloud | wizard |
14 | The | death | of the | mountain | princess |
15 | The | return | of the | cave | assassin |
16 | The | sorrow | of the | invisible | khan |
17 | The | blood | of the | undersea | lord |
18 | The | slaves | of the | whispering | demigod |
19 | The | lover | of the | silent | demiurge |
20 | The | treasure | of the | iron | priest(ess) |
Creator of Yoon-Suin and other materials. Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games. Jotting down and elaborating on ideas for campaigns, missions and adventures. Talking about general industry-related matters. Putting a new twist on gaming.
Thursday 23 February 2023
Generate Your Own Module/Pulp Novel Title
Monday 20 February 2023
Against TV
Tuesday 14 February 2023
Kickstarter/Publishing Lessons Learned
I am by no means the most prolific of one-man-band RPG publishers, but I have now run two successful Kickstarters and published, er, 4 or 5 things. This at least qualifies me to, if not give authoritative advice, at least rant semi-coherently in an extemporaneous way about the do's and don'ts of the matter. Perhaps some people will find it useful to do so.
- Pricing. I err on the side of value for money, but I wonder if I am excessively Thomist about this. In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard is around 200 pages of content for £15 in print; Yoon-Suin 2nd edition will be 400 pages of content for £30 in hardback; The Peridot's first issue is 80 pages long and £6 in POD. But nobody ever, ever, ever, comments favourably on this approach. Meanwhile, people seem to amass vast sums in Kickstarter backing for (to me) absurdly slim volumes at very high prices (e.g. £28, not including shipping, for a 48 page 'book', which I saw recently). It is useless to complain, so I do not do so - I merely offer the observation to people thinking about pricing a product.
- Doing the packaging/shipping oneself. It is best not to if you have anything else going on in your life, like a real job and/or a family. It is feasible to do it, but comes associated with all kinds of unexpected ball-aches and hidden costs (like the printer delivering all the books to the wrong address, etc.). Best avoided if you value your sanity.
- Doing 'pledge management' oneself. This is much more doable. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Kickstarter launchers they need pledge managers (or marketers for that matter). There has evolved a very complicated ecology of companies who are basically parasitic on the existence of Kickstarter; I am sceptical that many of them actually add value, though of course I could be proved wrong.
- People will come out of the woodwork to give unsolicited 'recommendations' about how to do things; ignore them. (I'm aware of the irony of giving this advice in this form.) If they were such geniuses they would be doing it themselves.
- Stretch goals are fine, but probably best limited to one achievable and relatively cheap thing. My stretch goal for IHOTB was an adventure I had already 80% written; my stretch goal for Yoon-Suin 2 was a piece of art by somebody I know is reliable and good and quoted a good fee. That's enough. If the core of what you are offering is good enough, have faith that it is.
- Kickstarter's main benefit may be in advertising/promotion. A Kickstarter campaign provides you with what is essentially free advertising (well, almost free - you pay them 5%) for a month. This gets your product out there as very few other things can. Matters might be different if you have 10,000 followers on Twitter or whatever already, but almost no indie RPG publishing one-man-band has that, and the days when one could simply post something on G+ and receive endless reshares are sadly long gone.
- Human nature being what it is, people like shiny, good-looking things. There is a monkey- or magpie-like acquisitive element of our nature that leads us to gather prettiness to our bosoms, no matter how superficial that prettiness really is. Have at the very least a nice, blingy cover. I learned this with the first Yoon-Suin. Yes, people liked the content, but only after being snared by Matt Adams' art.
- If you can write AND draw/paint then it is like having a license to print money, and if you can only do one of those things, it is might be worth practising really hard on the other so you can maximise your talent stack. Then again, what would David Ricardo say? I haven't made up my mind.
- Drive Thru RPG is a terrible blight on all of our lives, and takes a really almost criminal cut of royalties, but in the end it is the only game in town when it comes to the PDF market, because that is where all 90% of your prospective customers are making their purchases. It is important to use it, because you will get 'window shoppers'.
- I could probably make a living doing this if I quit my day job and did two successful Kickstarters along the lines of Yoon-Suin 2nd edition every year. Make of that what you will.
Friday 10 February 2023
A Mere 20 Hours Remain: Yoon-Suin 2nd Edition Kickstarter
The Kickstarter for Yoon-Suin 2nd Edition will soon be at an end. Back it now or forever* hold your peace!
Also, for your amusement, I did a trawl through the archives and uncovered some of my old doodles, drawn when I was just beginning to think about the setting circa 2009. I have a vague memory of sitting alone in my old apartment in Yokohama on a day off while my then-fiance was at work and for some reason being imbued with the need to, well, draw pictures of weird things. I was no artist then and nor am I today, but I suppose I was really bored.
*Well, until it's out in print/PDF when you'll probably be able to buy it, but only more expensively than original backers...
Wednesday 8 February 2023
On Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, Limits and the Unlimited
I have recently been reading Terry Eagleton's On Evil, a slightly madcap but always entertaining tour d'horizon of the way the subject of metaphysical evil has been dealt with in literature across time.
Amongst quite a lot of rambling and digression, Eagleton identifies something which I think is of great significance for contemporary society but also, more importantly, for D&D alignments. This is that evil metaphysically speaking expresses itself as simultaneously a rejection of being itself (and hence of the limitations that necessarily accompany being itself) and an ambition to transcend the finite, the temporal, the physical, and indeed the real, and become therefore an infinite expression of 'pure will'. This is as true of the school shooter who expresses his malice towards the very concept of being by targeting children; to the serial killer who transforms human lives into mere objects of his will; to the pedophile who asserts his desires despite and in a sense even because of the way they transgress society's most fundamental limits; and to Nazism and Communism and their absolute refusal to tolerate the fundamental facts of human biological, communal and spiritual life as barriers to the realisation of their utopian dreams. Evil is in fact almost synonymous with what Kojeve saw as the end point of History as such - the 'universal and homogenous state' in which there are no distinctions or classes of persons and no limits placed on individual will (because everybody's individual desires are known in advance and realised).
It follows that 'good' is an embracement of being itself - an acceptance and love for the finite, the temporal, the physical and the real - and hence a respect for limitations on the expressions of one's 'pure will' (indeed, a desire to submit and sublimate one's will to 'the greater good'). Good in a sense inheres in a reconciliation of one's will with the fact that there are not only other human beings with wills (and characters) of their own, but also with the fact that there is such a thing as natural right and things that are objectively better and worse than each other for human flourishing in the round and this is discoverable by reason.
This, interestingly (to my eye, anyway) chimes to a certain extent with what we also think of as the dichotomy between chaos and law, which I have written about before, where chaos represents the dissolution of human nature as such and law represents the essential characteristic and requirement for a distinctive human nature to exist in the first place. Chaos/evil despises being but particularly the notion of 'human beings' as a distinct and special category; law/good is the opposite.
Nobody should interpret this as having anything to say about politics, I don't think, not least because nobody ever describes themselves as being 'evil' and even the most evil people - Lenin*, Stalin, Hitler - present themselves (and presumably think of themselves) as doing things that in the long run are objectively 'good'. But I do think it has something interesting to say about metaphysics, and especially the metaphysics of D&D. We talk a lot about the alignment system and its apparent inadequacies and incoherences. Perhaps there is something to it after all, and particularly across the dimension of law/chaos, where chaos is understood to be in some way anti-being, and especially anti-human being, and law as both affirmative of being and essential for human-being.
*Gorky descibed Lenin as being animated by love for humanity but that he percieved it through a 'cloud of hatred', which I think strikes at something important.
[I am currently running a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin, the renowned campaign toolbox for fantasy games. You can back it here.]
A Dungeon Based on an Album: Romantic Warrior
Is it possible to make a dungeon (or setting) based on an album, with each level corresponding to a track and vice versa?
Almost certainly - in fact you could probably do it with every single Iron Maiden album just for starters. But my first attempt, if I ever do it, will be based on the classic 1976 album Romantic Warrior, by Return to Forever.
Romantic Warrior was probably the pinnacle of popularity for Return to Forever - which isn't saying all that much - and therefore you stand a fighting chance of possibly having heard it, but if you haven't, the best way to describe it is that it's as though a very low-budget late 70s/early 80s exploitation fantasy or SF film was being made, perhaps somewhere like Italy or Sweden with faded ex-Hollywood has-beens and B-listers, and the director was inexplicably able to hire some of the greatest, most virtuoso musicians then living to play on the soundtrack.
Or, alternatively, you can just listen to it through the marvels of the internet and see what I mean:
It's difficult to put into words how much I love Romantic Warrior, not necessarily because of the music itself (which, while I do really like, I think at times is a little too showy even taking into account Al Di Meola is playing on it) but just because of the intense atmosphere it creates. How does one describe that atmosphere? Really you need some visuals; it's kind of like the distilled essence of all this:
Tell me you don't feel it too.
The dungeon almost writes itself, of course, from the titles of the tracks alone. The whole is set in a complex of palaces with extensive, lush gardens surrounding them, perhaps in an improbably inhospitable spot in a hidden mountain valley, and the levels are:
1. Medieval Overture, featuring a pastiche of medieval bestiary monsters.
2. Sorceress, a tower where the eponymous sexy sorceress holds sway.
3. The Romantic Warrior, a fortress ruled by a chivalric knight with a hypertrophied sense of glory and honour, served by minions and stalked by the foes his imagination has conjured.
4. Majestic Dance, a series of vast ballrooms where decadent mask-wearing dilettantes prance and pose.
5. The Magician, 'nuff said - an arch-wizard's lair, filled with his slaves and constructs.
6. The Duel of the Jester and Tyrant Parts I & II, two linked levels devastated by the struggle between the two demigods of chaos and order.
Now all I need is to find an artist to illustrate it for me. Perhaps Larry Elmore is available.
[I am currently running a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin, the renowned campaign toolbox for fantasy games. You can back it here.]
Tuesday 7 February 2023
Interview with Patrick Stuart on Yoon-Suin
I was interviewed again, and it was good.
Subjects include Yoon-Suin, scientologist-inflected jazz fusion, 70s/80s SF, hating on Hollywood, monetizing D&D, the Spear of Eternity, and more.
Monday 6 February 2023
Poetic Dungeon and Hex Keying
For a long time now I've wanted to write up a pseudo-Japanese dungeon or hexmap (maybe in a setting like this one) in which each entry in the key consists of a single haiku (5-7-5 syllables) or stanza of an extended renga (5-7-5-7-7 syllables) - not excluding stats. So a typical entry for a dungeon chamber might read something like:
Here eight red oni
Cluster around a dead troll
Skinning it with knives
Red oni: HD 2, AC 5, #ATT 1, DMG By weapon +2, Move 120, ML 9, TT S, U, V
And a typical hex entry might read something like:
A gold dragon's lair
Is found here in a dark cave
Atop a sheer cliff
Within is a captive girl
The local daimyo's daughter
An entire book written in this form would have a rhythmic and mesmerising quality to read, and keeping to a fairly strict poetic structure of this kind would be a way of benefiting from the creativity of constraint. One wouldn't have to use Japanese poetry as the model, of course - think of a pseudo-European version written all in the form of sonnets, or rondels, or Beowulf-style alliterative verse, or alcaic stanzas, or even clerihews; or a pseudo-Middle Eastern one all in ghazals, or whatever.
[I am currently running a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin, the renowned campaign toolbox for fantasy games. You can back it here.]
Saturday 4 February 2023
An Interview Featuring ME Talking Yoon-Suin: A Vehicle For Fate
Long, long ago there was a podcast called A Gaming Podcast About Nothing, which for a brief period rivalled Joe Rogan in terms of audience numbers, reach and influence. Since 2016 it has lain in abeyance. But BEHOLD! It has been reborn in video format, much as a long-dormant volcano, in rousing itself from slumber, spews not only magma and toxic gases into the atmosphere, but also GROWS. You can watch it above. In it, I talk about Yoon-Suin, Cohen brothers films, DMing philosophy, give Kickstarter advice, moan about the Royal Mail, and much, much more.
(And if you want to hear old episodes of A Gaming Podcast About Nothing or 'AGPAN' as it was affectionately known by the 3 people who actually listened to it, they should all still be available to download.)
[I am currently running a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin, the renowned campaign toolbox for fantasy games. You can back it here.]