I’m planning to have unique Panic Tables for all six classes in Stranger Stars, my work-in-progress Mothership total conversion mod, which begs the question: What in the standard Mothership Panic Table is good? What’s bad? Can you write a whole blog post that is just a review of a single table?
That’s right. This is a review of all 20 entries on the Mothership Panic Table.
Read MoreCharacters are the window through which most players view the world of roleplaying games, and they are often where I start when designing a game or writing adventures.
For Stranger Stars, I’ve been building the character classes as a starting point to see what changes I’d like to make to Mothership’s core mechanics and how much of the setting I can hardcode into characters without limiting them in scope or diversity. Let’s dig into where I’m currently at with the 6 character classes and why I’m doing what I’m doing.
Read MoreOne of my background projects for the last few months has been picking away at what I’m calling a “total conversion mod” for Mothership - something akin to Cloud Empress in that it’s Mothership compatible but also so steeped in a particular setting and style as to be functionally its own game, like the total conversion mods of PC gaming yore.
My working title is Stranger Stars and the basic premise is:
Read More99 years after a wormhole gate leads humanity (and its largest corporations) to a new, resource-rich galaxy far across the observable universe, the gate collapses. In the Collapse, all ties with Earth and Milky Way are instantly and entirely severed. A century of chaos, corporate war, religious reawakening, and bitter survival followed.
Some cybernetically-enhanced humans are old enough to remember the original worlds of mankind, even Earth, but their numbers dwindle every day. Thousands more androids of that era, known now as Pregalactics, remain in operation either in their corporeal forms or as cores operating entirely within digital systems. They are the scholars of the Old Worlds.
work-in-progress layouts/mockups (and text, for that matter)
Earlier this week, I sent the Bloodfields manuscript off for copyediting! It was an exciting and intimidating moment. I spent a whole day knocking out all the remaining little bits and bobs throughout the text before having a video chat with my editor, Vi Huntsman. The chat with Vi was great and they really helped to make the process approachable and were very open and honest which is great for me as a newcomer to editing in the RPG space. In the past, I have almost always been the one editing my own work and most often in a local newsroom environment. RPG writing is a very different beast, but as always, everyone in the community is so helpful and transparent so it is much easier to get in and to grow then I would have initially thought.
That said, now that I am not focusing on the text of the zine itself. I need to focus on the next big task: the Kickstarter page! At this stage in the project, a great Kickstarter page is probably the single most important thing to do. There is plenty of time to finish the text, experiment with layout, commission more art, and get books shipped, especially with the extended time tables I’m giving myself as a first time crowdfunder, but there is less than 2 weeks to launch and what’s on that page is all that is going to make the majority of people decide to give me their money (or not)!
In the past, I worked a handful of sales jobs and was quite good at them, but I didn’t like that I was. Being too good at sales often feels like straight up manipulation or exploitation of others, especially if you don’t truly believe in the value of the products you are actually selling (like when I worked for a huge corp in car insurance, for example).
This is where self-promo differentiates itself from the typical sales work: I have already spent all of this time (and some money) creating this project I want to see exist and now I get to tell people, openly and honestly, about how excited I am to have the chance to make it a real physical thing for myself and others to enjoy. If I have to “sell” anything, I would always rather it be something I created and I am excited to have exist in the world (beyond any hopes of individual profit or some grander career plan).
work-in-progress section headers
I’m straying here from talking about the actual Kickstarter page itself though! Here are the elements I believe are key to any Kickstarter page and the biggest things I hope to convey as I build my pitch:
What is it and do I want it?
Do I believe you can do it?
How much does it cost (with shipping info too)?
While some of these seem really straightforward, I know I’ve experienced KS pages myself that don’t clearly answer all 3 of these and really they are all that matter for me. Bower’s Game Corner on Youtube does a great series of KS review videos in which he enthusiastically walks through this thought process in a way that really clicks with me.
The faster I can answer those 3 elements the better and then everything else is just extra bits to build excitement in my audience.
Right now, I am working on a handful of sample layouts and mockups (seen throughout this missive) that will give me images that will do a lot of that work for me. A key mockup with some additional text can, in a glance, tell you what it is (oh, so it’s a zine - I see the cover has the Mothership logo and a brief tagline on it - oh okay, so it’s a battle royale zine for Mothership) and the biggest aspect of what it’ll cost (aw, so $8 digital and $15 physical).
From there, I go into the text descriptions, most of which I already have put together from existing threads, the original Kickstarter page I sent in for approval, or from the press kit I recently put together as part of Tony’s awesome #ZIMO2022 workshop. After the initial explainers (1-2 paragraphs each on the key aspects of the zine, with custom headers splitting them up for more visual flavor), I’ll move onto #2 on that list: why folks should believe that I can deliver on the promises I’m making. This aspect may be the hardest part for many folks as it is where you most have to sell yourself, but you should never talk yourself down - just try to avoid talking yourself up. Be honest with yourself and your audience. People connect to that!
For me, that means I will speak to my experience as a writer and editor, the awesome team I have working with me in Roque Romero and Vi Huntsman (and a tbd fulfillment partner possibly) and then my own recent experience of writing, editing, and doing layout for The Mole on Pirad One, an adventure that has sold over 350 copies since its launch in September and I fulfilled myself prior. I don’t need to boast or lie about anything, just tell folks the facts.
more work-in-progress layouts/mockups/text (with NPC art by Roque Romero)
Lastly, I need to get all of my ducks in a row in terms of whether I’m doing the fulfillment in-house (most likely) or with an external partner. I’ve reached out to a few but have yet to hear back and really want this ironed out before the launch, given the wild year of printing and shipping ahead of us. This would answer the second half of #3 - how much will shipping cost, how will it work, etc.
Beyond that, everything else will just be about building excitement and hopefully getting folks to talk to their friends about the project! I think there’s a lot of value in looking at other past Kickstarters that you would like to be in a similar size and scope to if things go well and going after the structure and style of those pages. For me, that’s projects like Lone Archivist’s What We Give to Alien Gods or Ian Yusem’s The Drain - not that I think I’ll be as successful as either of those awesome books. Thousands of past campaign’s pages are still live so find successful projects like yours (or that you’d like to be like) and take what worked for them!
This was a rambley one as you can see I am still working through a lot of my thoughts on this front. I will probably do a post-mortem sometime after the campaign where we can dig into how these things actually worked out for my page.
If you’ve got any big tips on Kickstarter page must-haves, let me know in the comments cus I don’t want to miss anything!
Tim Obermueller, creator of The Burning of Carbex, is itchfunding his newest project as part of #ZIMO2022 and was awesome enough to ask me to create a shady corporate sponser for the zine’s deadly game show as part of a stretch goal for the project! I’m really excited for this one. If Bloodfields is Battle Royale, PUBG, and Hunger Games, The House Always Wins feels more like Running Man and Squid Game to me - a different but just as horrifying kind of death game!
Stella Condrey just launched a really awesome Patreon in which you get a physical pamphlet in the mail every month for $4! An awesome way to support an indie creator doing really wonderful stuff able to be added in to loads of existing games (Mothership-focused so far) and for Stella to keep the pamphlets flowing!
Just look at this art!
Marco Serrano over at SpicyTuna RPG has been a really wonderful and super helpful voice for me over these handful of months of being active in the indie rpg creator scene and his new project, Knights of Lazarus, just got a proper unveil and launched its Kickstarter pre-launch page as well. It looks SICK - wonderful art, awesome layout, and a dungeon blending science fiction and fantasy in some ways I’ve never seen in any other Mothership adventure to date. Follow it HERE.
Zine Month continues to be a great repository for the MASSIVE amount of rad upcoming projects out there. Give it a look as the showcase continues to grow!
this cover was originally just a quick mockup but I have fallen in love with it now
Thank again for reading! I really do hope these are at least entertaining and at most valuable! Feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me on Twitter if there’s anything you are loving, disliking, or anything in particular you’d like to see me share my thoughts on. - Christian
This is the first in a semi-planned series of preview deep dives into The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station, my Mothership zine coming to Kickstarter next month!
First, I wanted to walk through the thought processes around translating battle royale structures and tropes to tabletop and how, specifically in a rules-light roleplaying context, I really had to hone down what was worth focusing on and what was simply dead weight.
The prior, almost entirely scrapped, way to run the Bloodfields as the Warden
In late November of last year, I reached the point of knowing that I really wanted to make this project a reality and as such, much of it had to go from some decent ideas typed quickly out into a Google Doc and had to actually take shape as a thing that was playable for a group at the table.
Originally, I wanted to create an almost systems-free structure for running a battle royale game on top of an existing TTRPG (Mothership, in my case). This earliest version of the Bloodfields saw Wardens, using a number of random tables and a battle tracking sheet (see above), placing all of the enemy teams, deciding their movements around the arena according to preset “attitudes” (essentially fight, flight, or freeze), and then using certain values to determine if teams won or last battles that were occuring “off-screen” across the arena. The original idea being that the Warden could pull from all of these extra details because they knew how everything in the entire arena was playing out. Of course in practice, this was (just as it probably sounds from me writing it out) a lot of work. I do think it was well streamlined for what it was - but even 5 minutes of dead time between in-game rounds for the Warden to essentially simulate everything happening in the whole arena was too much. It felt like it created a cool story in many cases, but it was a story that only the Warden would see in the vast majority of cases. So… I threw almost all of it out.
In going back to the beginning on my design process, I thought about what is key to any battle royale story and came up with a few core aspects: sudden/unexpected action, a variety of contestants coping with the situation in a variety of ways, massive hazards and ways the arena shifts to push contestants together, and more ways to win than simply playing by the rules. Whether it’s the original book or movie Battle Royale or more recent forays into that subject like Hunger Games, there’s always more than just a simple kill-or-be-killed game going on and the horrors of that game are always focused squarely on the central characters and their perspective. I kept all of this at the forefront of my mind and designed a system of play with some big changes from the original.
Now, Wardens only track enemy teams when they first enter the players’ story, simply rolling 2d10 and writing a team name on the Bloodfields sheet. If the enemy team is killed by the players right away, they cross them off and move on. If the team is evaded or flees or the players flee, the team stays on the list and that list becomes its own table for future prompts - seeing memorable enemy teams returning, sometimes multiple times in the same game. Wardens still track sectors being “redlined” where they are filled with a variety of hazards to push contestants towards one another — again a few simple rolls and crossing out of a sector on the map, but there’s not bookkeeping around tracking or moving or dictating offscreen combat between enemy teams. Importantly to play as well, this minute-or-less of tracking of the battle royale game itself is also played out at the same time via in-game announcements from Wren Sinclair, the owner of Blackstar Station and MC for the event. So the Warden simply narrates through the few rolls they need to make as they make them and then play continues.
Beyond that, everything else is player and table driven. When players enter a new hex, the Warden rolls on a table depending on the in-game round to see what happens and goes from there. When a round ends, roll on another table and see what wacky modifiers the slimy business mogul running the game throws into the mix, etc. Ideally, it will be “sight-readable” — a term normally used to show someone’s skill for reading music but that I apply to adventures in which I am able to GM them without any prep (and without even having read the book beforehand). It’s my goal to make Bloodfields a completely sight-readable experience. It’s not there quite yet but a few edit passes and a bit more testing, and I think it will really be something special.
WIP Contestants List
Maybe one day I’ll go back to that original version of the Bloodfields and turn it into a solo story game where you get to simulate a battle royale all on your own and see what stories it creates from that top-down perspective, but now as I am about to wrap up the full manuscript, I feel confident that the new Bloodfields is one that will be vastly simpler for Wardens to run and will create faster-paced and more exciting stories for the players.
If you haven’t seen, Kickstarter recently only sort-of announced that Zinequest won’t be happening this February and is instead being moved to August to coincide with GenCon, a move that has largely baffled everyone and left many folks (like myself) without any real support from the crowdfunding platform less than a month out from when we thought we would have another big promotion (like there was the last 3 years).
Thankfully, Feral Indie Studios was already in the works on a February zine promotion focused on moving away from Kickstarter in the long term. Enter Zine Month 2022! So far, ZIMO has seen a massive swell of support in the last week and a lot of it is still in flux in terms of what it is and isn’t exactly. Whether or not it becomes a more community-driven way to support one another as indie creators or a more directed effort by Feral Indie Studios with specific goals, it’s definitely worth following, especially over the next two months.
Check out the site with more information about what the event is and isn’t currently as well as a wonderful showcase of projects (including Bloodfields) coming next month! #zimo2022
I completed my read-through and reactions to the Mothership 1e WIP Player’s Survial Guide over on my Twitch and archived on Youtube. I’d love to know what others have thought after their initial reads of it. Especially if you’ve found anything interesting in how the rules are coming out in play!
I’ve been buds with the folks over at The Jodo Cast, a Star Wars gaming podcast, for years. They have been out of the actual play game for a while (at least in terms of longer-form, more serious-minded campaign play). They asked if I’d be willing to play in their new Force & Destiny campaign set during the High Republic era and I was happy to join! It’s a 2 PC campaign where I play Jedi Knight Colil Nu and my friend Evan plays Jedi Padawan Vulkite Aggeros. Having one player be significantly higher than the other and getting to roleplay out that really core SW relationship was already a ton of fun. I’m excited to see where we go from here!
Guess what else? I have a project coming to Kickstarter on February 1st! If you are reading this, you probably already know that, but I’m not really going to shut up about it until the end of February! Sorry!