created by Howard Tayler and Alan Bahr, and set in the universe of SCHLOCK MERCENARY
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This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This is taking longer than we wanted it to take. It is not yet taking longer than our schedule will allow it to take, but Alan, Sandra, and I are looking at the approaching deadlines for printing and manufacturing, and we're feeling the pressure.
Two things have been negatively impacted by the Planet Mercenary deadline pressure:
Put another way: We accepted money to make Planet Mercenary. We're not done making it, so with the exception of putting out the daily Schlock Mercenary comic strips, we're not working on anything else.
We haven't announced this anywhere else yet, but we will make that announcement soon.
The first of four manufacturing runs is complete! The challenge coins and pins are finished, and have been packaged. Between Sandra and our allowance-paid minions, it took around a hundred hours to get all these components sorted, bagged into sets, and double-checked for consistency.
The second manufacturing run is about to begin. The designs for the dice, dice bags, and RiPP tokens have been sent in, and the cards are almost finished. We'll be getting proofs back from the manufacturer who is handling these components, and then paper, resin, metal, and linen begin being bent to our will.
By the way, there will be a Planet Mercenary dice bag. Our manufacturer for the second set of components came far enough in under our budget that we decided to add something most of you probably wanted. It is an embroidered linen bag with dual draw-strings, and it will hold all the dice AND all the RiPP tokens quite easily.
We're awaiting a full report from our friend Random in Australia, but his short updates suggest that the Planet Mercenary game he ran at PAX Australia have been very well received thus far. In particular, this gem:
"The mission was a complete and utter disaster, and the players loved it." -@HalloranElder, Twitter update, 30 Oct, 2015
Obviously, any RPG should work this way. Less obvious: this happened without Alan or Howard being there to help. We had a fantastic game session at GenCon Indy, but both Alan and I were there. Similarly, our session at LibertyCon with Steve Jackson was brilliant, but hey... we were there with Steve Jackson.
At PAX Australia, however, our friend Random is running this thing unsupervised in the wild, and to hear him tell it, it is working exactly the way it is supposed to work.
Summarized, the best news is "the Planet Mercenary game is awesome."
This is a large part of what has been slowing us down. As much as I want to just sit and write at 80 words per minute, I have to be writing into a framework that Alan knows is structurally sound. We've wrestled with game mechanics surrounding ship combat and player character finance, and have weighed (hah!) my world building against principles of game balance, and we've gathered solid proof that it works.
We were pretty sure it worked back in February, and even more sure in July, but today we are confident enough to start pouring real concrete. Except it won't be real concrete, it'll be allegorical concrete, in the form of ink on paper.
Here we are, then, just 60 days short of the end of 2015, and we're ready to dive into layout and editing. There's a lot of work still to be done, and we're off to do it.
—Howard
Just a quick update here: We're still quite busy, and working on things. Last week Howard added 12,000 words to the core book, and this week Sandra is tackling a big stack of page layouts. Alan has been grinding on "economy" and game balance, and we've finally got a good sense of how much these ships cost. Putting a price tag on a Battleplate is hard, but we can do it now.
We are behind schedule a bit, but not so far behind that we need to slip the stated shipping date. If that changes, we'll let you know.
--Howard, Sandra, and Alan
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