Thank you, Field Marshals, for a Brilliant Exhibition Game
almost 9 years ago – Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 04:32:43 AM

The Planet Mercenary Exhibition Game at Gen Con Indy went off without a hitch. In part this is because Alan has several levels in Extreme Dungeon Master, which skill translates directly across to being a great Planet Mercenary Game Chief. Mostly, however, we had a great game because our players, the "Field Marshal" supporters here on the Kickstarter project, dove headlong into the adventure.

I was very anxious about the event, but I came away seeing that my anxieties were unfounded. The game worked exactly the way it was supposed to: our players told themselves a hilarious, exciting story set in the Schlock Mercenary universe, and they did it without me telling the story. 

I played the company doctor, and I took great care to sit back and follow the lead of the others. I did not know the twists Alan had planned for the adventure, and the few times I did step to the fore it was because I could see that Alan was counting down on his fingers, which is a nice meta-game cue for the players to do something NOW. 

We did not cite maxims or quote lines from the comic in order to have humor. We built our story around the characters, and created our own "running gags" on the fly. This is important because it meant the cues on the Mayhem cards, which encourage this sort of behavior, worked exactly the way they were supposed to. 

At one point our demolitions expert defused a bomb, and drew a Mayhem card that upgraded his success level, granted a skill point, and suggested that if he did a "Happy Dance" he might be awarded a RiPP (Role Play Point) on top of all that. So the player, Wally, owned it, and showed us the rolling, bouncing dance of a tetrisoid by bobbing in his seat and gesturing. Once we were done laughing, I tossed the RiPP to him myself, and said "thank you for validating my decision to put that card in the deck."

We did not record the session. We considered it, and even brought recording equipment, but we decided that the distraction of being recorded might inhibit us. Right or wrong, we had a great game, and that's the important thing. In just two hours of play we blasted through as much adventure as a D&D party would see in six hours, further validating the design decisions Alan and I made several months ago. He and I went into this pretty sure we'd built the right game. We came out of it knowing we had, and loving the game besides. 

We're back from Gen Con Indy now, and it's time to get back to work.

We're Quiet Because We're Busy
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Aug 07, 2015 at 02:33:43 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Print-On-Demand MAYHEM!
almost 9 years ago – Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 02:18:15 PM

Alan and I will be at LibertyCon ten days from now, and will be running a demo/playtest with a few of the attendees. We needed cards for the event, so we did a print-on-demand run of the first 54 MAYHEM! cards, and made some blank cards as well. 

They came out looking pretty sweet:

 We only made six 54-card decks, and another two decks of blanks, so I'm afraid you can't have any of these. The final print runs for the cards will be offset printed rather than POD, which is the only way to make five thousand decks of cards cost-effectively.

If you're at LibertyCon, however, we may be able to "lose" a few collectible souvenirs after the game. And sign them, of course.

—Howard

(p.s. Sorry I've been so much quieter since the project closed. There is a LOT of work to do around here, and Sandra and I decided that mostly I should be locked in my office and made to do the work.)

240 pages, Sample MAYHEM!, Game Screens, and the $250k Reveal
almost 9 years ago – Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 03:27:13 AM

We Reached $200k in Pledges

The Planet Mercenary core book will now be 240 pages long. We'll be adding four playable races, including the radio-telepathic bicameral Uklakk, along with more ships, weapons, and (most importantly) locations for your game.

Some administrative notes: 

• We're finalizing an agreement with an EU shipper, and it looks pretty solid. Details will be posted soon. 
• We're going to be working with Backer Kit once this project closes, so that you can add to your pledges, and specify exactly what you want, a la carte, from among the add-ons. 

Thank you for getting us this far, everyone. We're deeply appreciative, and humbled by your support (though we do retain the enormous egos required to dream up cool stuff and then charge money. But it's okay. You want us to keep that conceit.)

Sample MAYHEM!

These are already on the main page, but not everybody checks that. Here are some sample MAYHEM! cards. 

There's a lot more detail on the MAYHEM Cards over at schlockmercenary.com, including images of five more cards.

Game Chief Screens

Over the weekend Howard and Alan ran afoul of "scope creep." We designed an ultra-deluxe game screen, and had Keliana Tayler create cardstock prototypes which convinced us that this was awesome. It would also require $10,000 in injection mold tooling just to get started. And then there'd be no guarantee it would work, because we're not experts in injection molding.

Scope Creep Is The Enemy. We decided to scale back. The Game Chief screens will be simple tri-folds, 25" x 6.5" fully extended, 8.5" x 6.5" folded flat. That's plenty of room for the references you'll need (including some spiffy 3d6 sum probability curves, and D6³ permutation probability charts for you hard-core game-balance types).

It's not what we originally thought it would be, but it's easy to make, and instead of it being an add-on, it's going in the Extended Mag. No additional cost to the Commanders and Commodores. If anybody else wants it, it's a $5.00 add-on.

The 250k Reveal

Howard has wanted one of these for ten years now, but nobody has volunteered to make one. If we reach $250k, we will hire a professional sci-fi space-ship designer (no, really... that's his job) to do an "All The Ships, To Scale" poster for the Schlock Mercenary universe. 

How big is the Kitesfear when flying alongside a battleplate? What about Athens vs Touch-and-Go? Can Jumpstar Prime fit inside Cindercone?

We'll take care to create this so that the smaller ships appear in detail, while still showing the larger ships in their entirety. This will be accomplished through the magic of a multiple-scale poster. 

Not coincidentally, this poster will be designed so that we can print it on the back of the Game Screen, turning that space into a handy visual reference for everybody. 

If we hit this stretch the "All The Ships, To Scale" poster will be available as a PDF, and the PDF will be a Core Upgrade. Everybody who gets game content will get this full-color, fully rendered image. 

Included at this stretch level: Alan and Howard will be writing a "Game Chief's Secrets" PDF that will be full of fleshed out plot hooks and play tips for first-time and veteran Game Chiefs alike. Think of it as a condensed set of adventure modules, with easy instructions for decompressing/reconstituting it at your game table. The PDF will also be part of the Core Upgrade.

Sneak Peek

This is going to get digitally painted in crazy detail, but for now all you can see is the blue-line under-drawing for the cover of the Planet Mercenary core book. 

A team of mercenaries stares across one of the shattered plains of Ellwor, surveying the battleground that stands between them and the shining, lawless metropolis that is home to the nearest Planet Mercenary franchise. They've already been paid. Now they want to buy stuff...

The project closes in about seven days from the moment of this update. Thank you for your support this far. 

—Howard, Alan, and Sandra

(Note: If you're reading this and you've been on the fence, we're a week away from knocking down the fence. Pick a side...)

The Final Lockplate: What Does Risky R&D Mean?
almost 9 years ago – Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 03:27:08 AM

This update is kind of long. Let's start with the news...

$250k UNLOCKED

You've unlocked the "All The Ships To Scale" image, which will be on the game screens. Spaceship artist Jeff Zugale has been engaged for this project, and here is a sample of completely unrelated work from his sketchbook.

You will also be getting the "Game Chief Secrets" PDF as part of the core upgrade. 

Here's a fun story: The bid that pushed us over the edge was from Austin Eberle, who threw $103 onto the stack when we were sitting pretty at $249,897. I had, only seconds earlier, staggered out of bed and opened a tab to the project. I looked at the "almost there" number, and before I could even articulate the thought "I wonder how long it will take before..." Austin's pledge rolled it round to $250k. 

Well played, sir. Can we take the cameras out of my office now?

About The $300k Stretch

Kickstarter is a lot of things, and one of those is a tool to mitigate risk. Project creators can do pre-production design work, and then launch their projects to raise money for the final, expensive phases without worrying whether or not anybody will actually buy the thing they want to make. If nobody shows up to fund the project, no further money gets risked. If lots of people show up, the money gets spent, but the consumers are already in line for the product.

You have funded the role-playing game that Sandra, Alan, and I want to make. You have provided money sufficient for us to pay our artists, our editors, our manufacturers, our distribution partners, and yes, even ourselves. That last bit is pretty important. We're going to be putting in about 1500 hours each on this project between now and shipping time, and because of you we get to eat and feed our families while we work.

Enough pre-amble: The $300k stretch has two kinds of things in it

• More stuff that we know we can make
• A vague promise that looks a little sketchy when you really think about it.

If we hit $300k you will definitely be getting more cards. We're not quite sure how many more just yet, but we might be able to double the size of the MAYHEM deck (while still taking care to allow a subset of the deck to be used as regular playing cards.)

If we hit $300k you will definitely be seeing more art. A portion of the additional $44k ($50k minus Kickstarter and Backerkit fees) will be allocated to commissioning additional pieces for the book, for the "Secrets" PDF, and perhaps even for other things, like in-universe advertisments, or postcards.

And finally... if we hit $300k, we're going to go out on a limb. We're going to invest in a couple of projects which may or may not bear fruit. We cannot promise to deliver anything to you as a result of this. If we succeed, we might end up with something we can sell. We might also end up with a heap of scrap. We don't know. 

The GCS-X

The first of those projects is injection-molded Game Chief screens. Keliana Tayler built card-stock mockups of these last weekend (and prevented her siblings from cleaning the kitchen at the time):

These are designed took like the canted, rounded-rectangle monitors from the comic. They'll have drop-in slots on top, and open faces so Game Chiefs can write on the sheets they drop in (they can drop-in pre-printed sheets, obviously.) They'll be sized for half-sheets of A4 or 8.5"x11" paper (8.5"x6.5" with some wiggle room,) which makes them smaller than many game screens, but still large enough to be useful.

With no sheets in place, Game Chiefs can use dry-erase markers. They're free-standing, so Game Chiefs may scoot them around freely, hand them to players, or slip the angle-stands off and lay the screens flat.

This sounds really cool, and Alan's group loved the prototype, but for all our preparation we might fail.

This is an experiment which, if it works, we'll happily re-sell to interested parties. If it fails, well, maybe we would have enjoyed spending $10,000 on ale and whorled soft-serve cones. Our promise to you is that we'll try to make this work, AND that we won't let a failure distract us from the enormous stack of other stuff which we've promised you.

The sharp fellow who designed Zach Weinersmith's "Gentleman's Single-Use Monocle" is working with us on these, so we stand a good chance of success, but it's still a costly, risky experiment.

It is not the only one...

We Can't Call it The Extended Universe

... and we won't. 

Sandra, Alan, and I know a lot of authors. We've approached a few to see if they'd be interested in writing additional game content. At the $300k mark we can afford to offer one or two of them modest advances, and see what happens.

These modules would be PDFs (unless there's huge demand for print) with an adventure through-line, additional adventure seeds, plus new locations, weapons, ships, gear, enemies, NPCs, and perhaps even playable races. 

Again, no promises. We're not even naming names at this point, because that is itself a promise. All we can say is that we'll try to make this work, and we'll spend actual money in doing that. 

Actual Money

Here at the $250k mark you have provided Alan, Sandra, and I with funds sufficient to deliver the PM-RPG project, and to support ourselves while we do. 

We're not greedy. Rolling around in money is dumb. We want to make things. 

At $300k (and beyond, but let's not get ahead of ourselves,) we can afford to invest in this project in ways that might not pay off, and that is what we're going to do. You'll see some direct benefits (more cards, more art) but the biggest part of this stretch is us dancing on a high wire over a net made out of money. Which we will not roll around in. Thank you for the net.

Huge Thanks For Huge

Thank you for affording us with this opportunity. None of us have ever been involved in something this big before. As Alan pointed out yesterday, only one brand-new indy RPG has crowd-funded at this level, and that was Numenera from my friends Monte Cook and Shanna Germain. We are in some impressive company up here, and the air is kind of thin...

The pressure for us to deliver something truly wonderful has been on since the beginning, and thankfully that pressure has now been packaged with the resources to make it happen. 

Thank you.

—Howard, Alan, and Sandra