New Blog Location!

Hi, everybody --

I'm relocating this blog on over to my shiny new website. If you're looking for Atomic Dragon Battleship or Baker's Field posts, well, I'll leave them here for the indefinite future. But all my new posts and newsy updates are going to appear here:

https://richardbakerauthor.com/blog-posts/

Thanks for stopping by -- and please come visit my new site!


Rich

GenCon 50, Monuments

Hi, there! Thanks for stopping by. I haven’t posted in quite a while, so I thought I’d share a few quick updates about what I was up to. I just returned from GenCon, where I spent four days running Alternity games, participating in the “GenCon 50” special presentation track, and meeting interesting people. Here are my ten takeaways from GenCon, in no particular order:

10. It was great to sit down side-by-side with Peter Adkison, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, and Jonathan Tweet to reminisce about the job of designing D&D 3^rd Edition. I haven’t been in the same room with all four of those guys in almost twenty years. I know that the whole seminar was recorded; if you’re interested in D&D history and 3e in particular, I think it would be worth your time to track it down.

9. Pearl Street Pizzeria is one of Indianapolis’s hidden gems. I picked up pizzas there to bring to a game session we ran for a special backer, and I gotta say, that’s a damned good pie. I find myself doubting whether I should tell you about it, because I don’t want to see it buried under a Ram-like avalanche of hungry con-goers. Anyway, twenty beers on tap and the best pizza in Indy. You heard it here first.

8. No, Sasquatch Game Studio didn’t have a booth in the Exhibitor Hall this year. We didn’t have any new products to debut at the show, and without something new, we weren’t sure we’d see the sort of sales it would take to justify the expense of the booth. Instead, we focused on running Alternity with Baldman Games and the Herald’s Guild event management, and spent most of our time actually playing games for once. But there’s a good chance that we’ll try to booth-up again next year.

7. Wow, companies left money on the table this year. Paizo sold through their Starfinder stock on Thursday. Ditto Fantasy Flight Games with some of their new releases. I guess I’d rather sell out early than overprint for the show, but Thursday’s a little too soon to run out, isn’t it?

6. Flying in late on Wednesday is rough. I didn’t get to bed until 2 am on Wednesday night, and I had to get up a little after 6. Even without a booth to set up, it might be better to fly in on Tuesday.

5. There’s a great little game store called Good Games just a couple of blocks from the convention center. They ran a 40% off sale on Warmachine and Hordes during the show. I took the opportunity to break into a second faction: I now have a lot of Skorne to assemble and paint after I get through some more of my Menoth painting.

4. I happened to run into Mark Tassin of the Writer’s Symposium while looking for somebody else, and we had a great chat. I’ll be adding some Symposium panels to my schedule next year, somehow; I’ll also be trying to run games and maybe staff a booth!

3. The Baldman Games team at GenCon is first-rate. They’ve got a great set-up and they’re providing hundreds of tables of great gaming throughout the show. They really took care of us, even though our Alternity presence was small potatoes compared to D&D. If you’re looking for games to play at GenCon, you really should check out the Baldman Games events over in the JW Marriott.

2. I played Alternity with a lot of awesome gamers over the weekend. Every single player I had the pleasure of hosting at my table was smart, engaged, and happy to be there; when you’ve got a good table of players, running a fun game is a breeze. Thanks to any of you who might be reading this! You guys really made my show.

1. Wow, I think we’ve got something with Alternity. People picked it up fast, they had a lot of fun playing, and I heard the things every publisher wants to hear (“where can I get this?” and “when does it come out?”) Kudos to my fellow Sasquatch Steve Schubert for creating a great adventure; it was a little bit of a tight fit for a con slot, but the players seemed to enjoy it quite a lot and there were a lot of ways for those of us GMing to try out different endings.

Current Events

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Confederate statues and what to do with them. As it happens, I just finished reading Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels (a fascinating study of military leadership, as well as a great historical novel). As a history buff, my default position is don’t remove monuments. To me it seems like an effort to erase history, and I put a lot of stock in the Santayana quote about what happens to people who don’t remember history. But . . . then I thought about what it would be like to be a person of color who has to walk by a Confederate statue every day. And I also recalled that quite a few of those monuments were built by people in the early 20^th century who were trying to rewrite history for their own purposes. Leaving the statues in place endorses the narrative of the Lost Cause, and that narrative’s done a lot of harm to a lot of people.

I do think that some Confederates deserve remembering. Robert E. Lee performed an enormous service to our country by convincing his fellow Confederates to lay down their arms; without his courageous choice to surrender at Appomattox the war could have tapered off into years of unrest, local uprisings, and guerilla fighting. James Longstreet endured vicious opprobrium for his support of recently freed slaves after the war; it seems to me he tried to atone for the part he played. Perhaps because of my recent reading of Killer Angels, I feel some compassion toward men who felt that they couldn’t participate in a war against their home states. People of the time saw their states like we see our country; Lee loved Virginia the way you love America. Could you imagine helping the United Nations to subjugate America, even if you thought America might be in the wrong? I wouldn’t want to make that choice.

Anyway, I guess I come down on the side of removing statues to places where they no longer symbolize state power. They don’t belong in courthouses or capitol buildings or maybe even city parks. Leave them in museums, battlefields, and cemeteries—and make sure the true story of those men, both good and bad, is told. And I wouldn’t destroy works of significant artistic merit. Stone Mountain is wrongheaded, but destroying that relief would be a terrible thing to do. Tell its story instead, including how and why it came to be built and why we would never build it today. 

Relay For Life

I devote a lot of this blog toward talking about fun things like games, science fiction, beer, and baseball. Today I’m changing it up a little bit to take on a not-so-fun topic: cancer. I’m participating in my church’s Relay For Life team this year, and I’d like your support. Here’s the link to our team page:

http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?fr_id=80595&pg=team&team_id=2120842

You can donate directly to the team by selecting the Donate button in the middle of the page, or you can credit me by selecting my name down on the team list and hitting the Donate button there. Either way is fine with me. I’m not keeping score—I sent my own donation right to the team.

About the Relay

The Relay For Life is a fundraising event sponsored by the American Cancer Society. Team members take turns continuously walking a track or path for the duration of the event to signify that cancer doesn’t take a break—and neither should we. The Relay fundraising effort spans thousands of events in many different countries, but you’ll find me at the May 13th event at Auburn Memorial Field in Auburn, Washington. I’m participating as part of the Auburn First United Methodist Church team.

Why I’m Participating

Everybody has a cancer story—someone you know, maybe someone you care about deeply, has battled cancer. I want to tell you about three people today.

Paul Randles was a co-worker of mine at Wizards of the Coast, and a friend. We played together on the company softball team and shared plenty of after-game beers back in the day. He was one of the most positive people I’ve ever worked with—a great game designer and a man with a big, big heart. Paul was just 37 when he died from pancreatic cancer back in 2003, but his favorite saying has stuck with me in all the years since: Every day is Christmas! If you knew Paul, then you know he meant it every time he said it.

My Aunt Cathy was my mom’s older sister, and just about a second mom to me at times. She and my mom were inseparable, even if she did have that special older-sister talent for getting under my mom’s skin at times. There’s a great family story about fried oysters: When my mom and my Aunt Cathy were growing up, my grandmother sometimes served fried oysters for dinner, a meal that my mom just hated. Since my grandmother belonged to the “I’ll keep serving it until you finish it” school of thought, it always developed into a colossal row. Many years later, my Aunt Cathy admitted to my mom that she didn’t eat the oysters either. “How did you get away with it?” my mom demanded. “Easy,” said Aunt Cathy. “You always made such a fuss about the oysters that I quietly slipped them into my napkin and threw them away while everyone was paying attention to you.” Aunt Cathy was a lifelong smoker, and it finally caught up to her: lung cancer, Stage IV when it was diagnosed. She got a better hand than Paul did--almost a full lifetime before cancer took her--but I miss her.

And lastly there’s Kim, my wife. Her outcome is going to be a lot better than Paul’s or Aunt Cathy’s, thank God. But she’s fighting cancer right now. Back in November she was diagnosed with Stage I breast cancer—the second time she’s had it. The first time (ten years ago) required a little bit of surgery, a few weeks of radiation, and years of taking Tamoxifen. This time around, Kim came down with a more aggressive type of cancer, so the oncologist recommended chemotherapy. In fact, I’m taking her to the hospital tomorrow for her sixth and final treatment of the “rough stuff”—the broad therapies that clobber all fast-growing cells and make someone feel sick and run-down. So, the good news is that we’re just a week or two away from Kim starting to really get her energy and health back. And she couldn’t have a better prognosis—the cancer was detected early and there are targeted therapies that’ll work on it, so we’re pretty much 100% confident that this will be a good outcome. But the reason she gets to win this fight is that smart people have directed money and resources toward R&D for early detection and effective therapies. And that’s where you come in.

Final Word

I find myself in the position of asking folks for money a lot. I’m the Finance Committee chairman at my church, and my partners and I at Sasquatch Game Studio run Kickstarter campaigns to crowdfund our game publishing. You might think that approaching people about opening up their wallets would be tough, and it is. But I put out the word anyway, because I believe I’m not just hitting up people for money: I’m making them aware of an opportunity that I think they’d want to know about. In the case of a game I’m publishing through Sasquatch, that opportunity is pretty tangible: you get a game. In the case of the Relay For Life, it’s the opportunity to be a part of the fight against cancer. So even if it’s just a few bucks, please—help us beat cancer once and for all!

Lethality in the Alternity Game

A little change of pace this time: I'm going to talk about some of the mechanics I'm working on for our new Alternity Science Fiction Roleplaying Game. We released a beta version of our Quickstart Guide, and we've been thinking hard about just how deadly deadly ought to be. (By the way, you can download the Quickstart Guide for free here: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/206864/Alternity-Science-Fiction-RPG-Beta-Test-Edition.

Lethality in Alternity

Since releasing the Beta test rules for the Quickstart Guide, we've seen some good discussion in a few different forums about the rules we’d created. We’re still looking for feedback on our game and we hope to incorporate some “lessons learned” into the Core Rules as we develop them, so we think it’s a *good* thing to see some of our assumptions challenged. One of those assumptions is, naturally, just how deadly guns ought to be to player characters.

If you haven’t looked at the Alternity Quickstart Guide, most of this probably won’t make much sense: This is for folks who are wondering what we did and why.

First Assumption: Let me start with one key assumption you might not agree with: Heroes are special. We’re not trying to model real-world gun lethality for the PCs. We’re trying to model action-movie, cinematic lethality. Heroes in action movies rarely drop from one shot… but mooks and civilians usually do. The typical hero’s durability track might have 6 to 10 boxes, but a mook or noncombatant might have only 2 boxes. And those boxes might have lower values than the hero’s wound boxes. For example, Dr. Ayers in the Magellan adventure has two boxes: 1-9, and 10+. That’s much more vulnerable than we want heroes to be, but that’s okay—she’s not the star of the show.

Second Assumption: Average hits produce injuries; it takes Excellent or Stellar hits to generate wounds that might be instantly life-threatening. So damage ranges for Average hits shouldn’t reach values that might punch out a hero.

So, with those two basic assumptions out of the way, let’s look at the real interaction people are curious about: one hero shoots another hero, or a NPC who’s supposed to be just as tough as a hero. (That isn’t a typical foe in our Alternity action movie, BTW—most mooks should be a lot more brittle.) So what are the odds of one-shotting the near-peer foe?

Lucky 13

The key number here is 13. If a weapon hit gets into the 13+ damage range, you’re in the wound band right before the punch-out at 16+. An unarmored character with one wound box at 13-15 is at risk of instant punch-out from any weapon that can deal 13 damage, because a Stellar hit automatically deals 2 boxes of damage. The first box of damage marks off the 13-15 wound box, the second ticks off the 16+, the bad guy drops. Assuming you get a Stellar success in the first place, that means:

Plasma Pistol (2d8) = 15% chance for one-shot
Heavy Pistol (1d8+6) = 25% chance for one-shot
Battle Rifle (1d8+8) = 50% chance for one-shot
Sniper Rifle (1d8+10) = 75% chance for one-shot

Remember, those are the same chances that Badguy Miniboss punches *your* ticket if he gets a Stellar success on your character. Good thing you’ve got a hero point or two just in case, right?

The conspicuous absences from that short table above are the weapons that max out at 12 or less damage: the light pistol (1d6+5), the laser pistol (1d6+6), the combat knife (1d4+5), etc. They can’t one-shot an “Evil PC,” but I’ll note again that they can certainly one-shot Dr. Ayers or the typical mook—because two boxes of damage kills a mook, and Stellar hits produce two boxes of damage. Whether those light weapons should be able to one-shot your PC is a fair question; maybe we should nudge them toward that magic 13 as a maximum damage roll, although it might make the heavier weapons too deadly for our taste.

Some weapons—shotguns and blast cannons, for example—routinely produce 2 wound boxes under the right circumstances. For a Stellar hit, that increases to 3 wound boxes… which means that suddenly the magic number of 13 is actually a magic number of 10 for characters with one wound box at the 10-12 band. A Stellar hit from a shotgun at close range has a 50% chance to one-shot because of that. And *any* close-range hit from a shotgun punches out a mook or noncombatant.

In Summary

Overall, how close did we get on the lethality? Well, you can be the judge of that. I’m reasonably happy with the chances we’ve described above: Some hero in the party receives a Stellar hit from the bad guys in just about every gunfight, and we don’t want a good roll from the GM to be an automatic death warrant. And hits against non-heroes tend to punch ‘em out on any Excellent success with a halfway decent damage roll, which also seems good to me.

Closing Thoughts

There are two lessons I learned from writing all this down. First, we probably ought to look a little closer at heroes with 2 boxes in the 13-15 wound band. That’s pretty good, and maybe we were a little generous with that. Second, the laser pistol and light pistol might want a wee bit of a boost to threaten a 13 on a max damage roll. But those are pretty straightforward adjustments as we continue to develop the Alternity game.

(Hmm, weirdly enough the right way to boost the light pistol might be to use a damage range of something like 1d10+3. That d10 looks wrong as a damage expression for a small weapon, but what we’d really be saying is that your .25 cal pistol only has a 10% chance of one-shotting as compared to the 25% chance for a heavy pistol. Have to think more on that!)

Thanks for helping us to dig in on our new rules set—and thanks for caring enough to share what you think about Alternity!

Kipling and Casablanca

Welcome back! I see that I’ve let a couple of weeks slide by since the last post. Time is a serious constraint for me these days: I’m finishing up a contract gig with En Masse that keeps me out of the house from 8 am to 6 pm every day, I’m doing design work and Kickstarter preparation for my upcoming Alternity sci-fi game, I’m shepherding my Plan Number B expansion for Ultimate Scheme through art and layout, and I’m working on the second draft of my novel Restless Lightnings. 

With all that going on, blog posts tend to fall to the bottom of the stack. I guess the “good” news is that my contract at EME is winding up, so I’ll be able to devote 50 more hours a week to my writing and my own game design. I can use a few weeks to catch up on my various projects before the next contract rolls around, although I have to admit that I’ll miss that regular paycheck. That’s the life of a writer, I guess.

I Don’t Know, I’ve Never Kippled

I’ve been spending a few hours here and there over the last couple of months reading through Rudyard Kipling’s poetry because I’ve been looking for catchy turns of phrase I might use as titles in my Sikander North series. The first title, Valiant Dust, is drawn from the Kipling poem “Recessional.” The second title, Restless Lightnings, comes from the poem “The Islanders.” Then I discovered that I’d inadvertently established a “personality trait-inanimate object” naming system in my first two titles, and I needed to find a third turn of phrase that followed the established system. Naturally, finding just one more that suited me proved much harder than I’d expected! I’ve read dozens of Kipling poems in search of the right bit of verse.

Kipling is a writer not remembered kindly in many quarters these days. Yes, it’s tough to get around the jingoism of “South Africa” or the racism of “The White Man’s Burden.” But Kipling loved India enough to write Kim and The Jungle Book. And the man who wrote “Buddha at Kamakura” was no Christian supremacist. That last one is worth a read if you’ve never run across it. I’ve been thinking about it for days. I'm beginning to think that Kipling was a much more complex guy than we give him credit for nowadays.

I did finally find a title phrase I like, but I’m going to keep it to myself for a little bit longer. Book 3 is still a long ways away! If you’re curious, though, you might try reading “The Destroyers.”

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the heading… it’s an old, old punchline. The joke begins: “Do you like Kipling?”

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

I watched The Maltese Falcon for the first time on Saturday evening. It’s been on my list of movies to watch for years now—I’m something of a Humphrey Bogart fan and I just hadn’t checked “the Black Bird” off my list yet. I’m afraid the movie just didn’t do much for my wife or my mother-in-law, but I liked it well enough, especially the great dialogue between Sydney Greenstreet’s “Fat Man” and Bogart’s Sam Spade. Casablanca, Key Largo, The African Queen, and The Caine Mutiny still retain their top billing at the top of my Bogart list, but I liked seeing Bogart play a quick-thinking, resourceful troublemaker. Sam Spade’s not as cynical or world-weary as other iconic Bogart characters, although I suppose that The Maltese Falcon was early in Bogart’s career.

(Note to self: Track down The Big Sleep sometime. Still need to check that off, too.)

I don’t know if this is official writer advice or not, but I’ll recommend it anyway: Read and watch some of the classics. Casablanca’s dialogue is pure genius; it’s well worth a couple of hours of your time if you haven’t ever seen it, because you’ll learn something about snappy and unforgettable dialogue if you pay attention. Heck, The Caine Mutiny’s court martial scene did “You can’t handle the truth” to perfection forty years before A Few Good Men.

So, there you go: Read old poems. Watch old movies. You might learn something!

Rich's Teenage Ten Albums

There was an interesting question circulating around Facebook a couple of weeks ago: What 10 albums most affected your teenage years? I’ve been thinking about this one off and on for days, trying to remember what was really important to me when I first started listening to “my own” music and developing my tastes. Naturally, I decided to answer the question here rather than answer it on Facebook—why waste a good blog topic on a single post?

Let me establish a couple of things right up front. First, I became a teenager on October 1, 1979 (yeah, I’m getting old). I turned 20 on October 1, 1986. But some albums on this list predates that 7-year window because I tended to pick up records that had songs I liked, regardless of whether they were current—I was starting my collection with stuff that was in some cases ten years old already. Second, being a big sci-fi and fantasy nerd, I naturally zeroed in on any album that had a science fiction or fantasy theme to it. Teenage rebellion wasn’t really my thing, sorry.

Anyway, here’s my list. Enjoy!

10. The Wall (Pink Floyd). If you were a schoolkid in 1979, “Another Brick in the Wall” was your anthem. I listened to this album a lot in college, but I long ago decided that I like Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon, and Meddle way, way more than The Wall. It’s just too damned dark for me to really enjoy listening to it.

9. The Game (Queen). In 7th grade I fell in with three good friends, and the four of us played D&D together throughout high school. I didn’t like “Another One Bites the Dust” (and still don’t, Queen was so much better than that), but we killed a lot of monsters to that song. And there was an off-track on the album called “Dragon Attack,” which as you might imagine was pretty popular at the table too.

8. Rumors (Fleetwood Mac). My discovery of Rumors just squeaks into my teenage years. In my college days I spent entire semesters drinking beer and throwing darts at a dart bar called Ton-80. They played Rumors just about every night in that place. Everyone knows the mega-hits on the first side, but I always liked the second side better; “Gold Dust Woman” and “The Chain” are serious, powerful songs.

7. Heavy Metal (various). The movie Heavy Metal came out in 1981. Thanks to the wonderful magic of HBO, I eagerly watched a rated-R sci-fi cartoon with a great rock and roll soundtrack. I guess I’ve outgrown a lot of the songs from the collection (and the drug jokes and animated sex scenes), but to this day I love Donald Fagen’s “True Companion.” 

6. Synchronicity (The Police). The Police owned the charts for a couple of years when I was in high school. I wasn’t a huge Police fan, but when they came to Atlantic City, I saw an opportunity to impress a girl I wanted to impress, so I went. I had to take my sister and her friend too, but that was okay—I saw the Police Synchronicity tour. 

5. Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie). Let’s Dance was Bowie’s giant hit album during my teenage years, but I was always drawn to his earlier stuff. God, Ziggy Stardust is a great album. I can listen to “Starman” or “Moonage Daydream” all day long and not get tired of ‘em.

4. Decade (Steely Dan). I often started my exploration of different bands by picking up a “Best of” album. Steely Dan’s Decade compilation was the one that converted me into a lifelong Steely Dan fan. I bought all their studio albums on vinyl, then bought ‘em again on CD. I think Steely Dan is the only band I can say that about. If I had to pick a favorite Steely Dan album, I’d say Aja—it’s simply perfect. But they’re all good. I’ve also had the good fortune to catch Steely Dan in concert a couple of times.

3. Fire of Unknown Origin (Blue Oyster Cult). Remember that sci-fi thing? Well, a heavy metal band with science-fiction themed albums was pretty much sure to win over teenaged Rich. Fire of Unknown Origin was BOC’s big commercial success, and put them on the map at exactly the right time for me to notice. From there, I picked up Cultosaurus Erectus and Agents of Fortune and loved those albums too, although these days I think Spectres is their best. I’ve seen BOC play a couple of times—they still tour, believe it or not! 

2. Led Zeppelin IV (um, Led Zeppelin). I bet I don’t have to tell you about Led Zeppelin IV. Let’s just say that “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Battle of Evermore” hit my not-so-hidden Tolkien geek right between the eyes (although “Misty Mountain Hop” really doesn’t have anything to do with The Hobbit). Anyway, this was another soundtrack to those D&D games of my teenage years.

1. The Yes Album (Yes). When I turned 14, I got my very first album: The Yes Album. It was a gift from my Uncle Jeff. Jeff was a music guy and he knew I was into science fiction, so he figured a little progressive rock would be up my alley. Turns out he was right. I didn’t know a thing about Yes before I got the cassette, but I listened to The Yes Album until I wore out the tape. When I wrote The Last Mythal trilogy, a book about elves in the Forgotten Realms, I pretty much listened to Close to the Edge and The Yes Album continuously to put me in an elf-y frame of mind. Yes actually came through Seattle a couple of years ago with a show in which they promised to play The Yes Album in its entirety, and I couldn’t talk anyone into going with me. I should’ve gone by my darned self.

These ten albums aren’t necessarily my top ten right now. My tastes have broadened over time, and believe it or not I don’t just listen to prog-rock all day. Anyway, I had fun thinking up this list, and maybe I reminded you of some albums you used to love when you were a teenager. 

Studio Ghibli, Steampunk

On Saturday, I did something that I hardly ever do anymore: I sat down and watched a DVD. These days, it’s so much easier to just wander over to whatever’s playing on the movie channels or to check out On Demand or Netflix. Somewhere along the line I became too lazy to actually get up, root through the DVD collection, pick out a disk, turn on the Blu Ray player, and then remember which input mode on the TV brings up the player. Fortunately my daughter Alex was home, and she wanted to watch some anime and spend quality time with her sister Hannah before going back up to school. She decided to watch Princess Mononoke.

I watched Princess Mononoke once before, sometime back in the late ‘90s. I didn’t remember it all that well and what I did recall was that it was confusing (hey, it’s been like twenty years), so I tried to watch it a lot more carefully this time. It’s a really strange story, with lots of morally gray characters. In some ways, there isn’t really a villain—even the lady who runs Iron Town and seems to be doing the most villainous things in the story is a protector of lepers and mistreated women. We’re really used to Westernized story arcs and roles in our entertainment, and it’s a bit of culture shock to be immersed in a story told in a different way.

 It was especially fun to watch Hannah (an 18-year old anime fan) become engrossed in the story. She’d never watched Princess Mononoke before. Early on, I could tell she was really struggling to digest the conflicting messages about the characters and their motives. But she was completely hooked halfway through, and by the end she was literally sitting on the edge of her seat (and observed at one point, “Okay, now this is terrifying.”)

I’ve only seen a half-dozen or so of the Studio Ghibli movies: My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo. Of those, I’d say my favorite is Castle in the Sky (possibly the best steampunk story anyone’s put on film so far). It’s also the most conventional (well, Western conventional) story arc of those half-dozen movies. It makes me wonder if I like it best because it’s delivering a story in the format I’m most used to, or if I like it best because I like the steampunk world in which it takes place.

Speaking of steampunk: Being a gamer, I also find myself wondering what’s the most definitive steampunk/anime RPG experience out there. Big Eyes, Small Mouth comes to mind, but it’s not really focused on steampunk. Castle Falkenstein and Space:1889 are good steampunk settings, but they’re also old. Where’s the 21^st-century RPG that provides the definitive steampunk adventure? It seems like a real oversight on the part of tabletop RPG publishers everywhere. Maybe I’ll do something about that as soon as I get a suitable window in my schedule.

Cover Reveal, Civ VI, Plan Number B

Welcome back! Three thoughts for today: Valiant Dust cover, Civ 6, and Plan Number B.

Valiant Dust Cover Reveal

Okay, so I know I mentioned Valiant Dust just last week, but this is pretty cool: Tor revealed the cover for my book today! I am super-happy with the artwork and the snazzy cover design work (and Mike Stackpole’s generous testimonial is double-super cool). Here’s a link if you’d like to go have a look for yourself.

http://www.tor.com/2017/01/11/horatio-hornblower-in-space-revealing-the-cover-for-richard-bakers-valiant-dust/

I love the cover. Hope you like it too!

Civilization VI

I’ve been a big fan of the Civilization franchise for something like twenty years now. I pretty much run out and buy each new edition as soon as I can find the right moment to pick up a twenty-hour-a-week habit for a couple of months. So I’ve been happily exploring Civilization VI for the last month or two (at substantially less than twenty hours a week, since I am insanely busy these days). I’m still forming my impressions of how the newest offering stands in comparison to previous versions, but I generally like it so far. I like laying out districts for my cities, I like the civics and government, I like the lower number of units on the board, and I like the mix of strategic and luxury resources. It’s a fresh new take on the series, which is probably good—it would have been very hard to “out-Civ 5” the Civ 5 game.

One thing I wish the diplomacy interface let you do: I wish there was more of a “same to you!” function available. When a NPC leader Denounces me, I want a button right there on that screen to Denounce the guy right back. And when a NPC leader asks to build an embassy in my capital, I want an option that says, “Sure, if I can build one in yours.” In the mid- to late game NPC leaders *never* let me build embassies. It’s hard not to take that personally.

I’ll touch on Civ VI a little more as I play through a couple more games, but so far I’ll give it a thumbs-up.

Plan Number B

You Ultimate Scheme fans out there will be happy to know that I’ve got a rough design hammered out for Plan Number B, the expansion deck for Ultimate Scheme. We’re lining up artist Claudio Pozas to do our card illustrations again, and we’re playtesting right now. Plan Number B introduces 5 new factions, 3 new ultimate schemes, and a couple of new X-factors. The biggest new elements of the expansion are a brand-new scheme deck (Power schemes) and the introduction of the Interpol Agent (that mysterious pawn from the original box), plus plenty of Action cards to support the new stuff.

I generally feel that game expansions ought to offer something besides just “more,” so you’ll find that the Interpol Agent provides you with a new complication to scheme around (and a new weapon to use against your rivals). The Power schemes are built around a theme of controlling the Interpol Agent and accomplishing special “mission” schemes that offer valuable new abilities as rewards. With a little luck we’ll have Plan Number B finished up in about 4-6 weeks. We’ll print and ship it very quickly after that, since we’ll be using a print-on-demand vendor for this (it’s a pretty small print run).

That’s all for now!  

New Year, New Look!

Hi, everybody! Welcome to my newly updated blog for 2017. As you can see, I made a few changes to the template, updated my profile, and came up with a new name. Atomic Dragon Battleship was fun, but it wasn't particularly clever or any kind of play on my name, so I decided to up my game a bit. I've never actually been to Bakersfield, but it rolled off the tongue better than Baker City (it's in Oregon, and I have been there). I would have called it Baker Street after Sherlock Holmes' famous address, but Jeff Grubb kind of beat me to it with his Grubb Street blog. So Baker's Field seems okay for now.

I'll try to keep my posts shorter and more frequent than in the past. So, without further ado, here are three things I'd like to share to start the year.

Valiant Dust in November

I'm busy working on a new series of military-themed science fiction novels for Tor Books. The first one is entitled "Valiant Dust" (it's a reference to a Kipling poem), and it'll be out early in November (2017). I've actually been done with the book for more than a year, but publishers have schedules to keep, and I had to wait for a slot to open up. Valiant Dust (and its sequels) tell the story of Sikander North, an officer from the colony system of Kashmir serving in the star navy of the Commonwealth of Aquila. I'm pretty proud of it and I think it's a good read! I'm now working on book 2 of the series, working title of "Restless Lightnings" (another Kipling reference).

Hired Gun at En Masse

Back in September, my friend and former WotC colleague Daneen called me up because her employer En Masse Entertainment (publishers of the popular TERA MMORPG) had just landed a big new localization project. Daneen needed writers, stat! So for the last few months of 2016 (and the first couple of months of 2017) I've been working in a contract gig with EME to help bring a Korean game to the US market. I don't speak a word of Korean, but fortunately we're working off files that have already been translated. 

One of the interesting parts of the experience is that I'm working in downtown Seattle for the first time since moving out to the Northwest in 1997. I catch the train in Auburn at 8:01, I debark at King Street Station around 8:35, and I walk a short mile to the En Masse office (3rd and University), arriving a few minutes before 9:00. It's strange to be a non-driving commuter! I only wish the train ride were a little longer so that I could do some serious writing in transit.

Warmachine

At GenCon this year, fellow Sasquatch Dave Noonan persuaded me to buy into Privateer Press's excellent Warmachine Miniatures game. I'm still learning how to play, but I'm having a ton of fun assembling and painting minis again--it's been a good 15 years since I did any painting at all. My faction is the Protectorate of Menoth. Here's a look at my Vanquisher (I use an alternative paint scheme featuring off-white and Prussian blue, just to be creative).

That's all for now!

GenCon, Summer Beer

Hello! For a change of pace, I’ll talk about a bit of the game biz that starts to loom large in my mind every year around this: GenCon. If you’re a gamer, you know about GenCon. If you’re not, let me just say that GenCon is the biggest pure gaming show in the US, the flagship convention experience if you’re a D&D fan or a boardgame aficionado. There are bigger gaming-focused shows (PAX, for example) but they lean toward digital games these days—if you’re a tabletop enthusiast, GenCon is a must-do at some point in your gaming career.

Now, here’s the strange thing: I have never really attended GenCon as a fan. During my 20-year career with TSR and WotC I served as part of the company contingent presenting seminars, running demos and games, and generally making ourselves available to the fans. Since parting ways with WotC, I’ve attended 3 GenCons as Rich Baker of Sasquatch Game Studio. So I’m going to talk about what it takes to go to GenCon if you’re a tiny company.

First, GenCon is expensive. A small booth (10 by 10) costs $1800. If you want a premium corner location, that shoots up to more like $2700. You can get in quite a bit cheaper by choosing the “entrepreneur’s avenue” for $1000, but you’re going to be in a pretty remote part of the exhibit hall. Is the corner space or end space worth it? I think it is. There are *so many, many, many* exhibitors at GenCon these days that most attendees only ever see a fraction of the dealer’s hall. Your booth is one tiny little shining star in a big night sky full of stars just like yours. Seriously, you cannot imagine how lost in the crowd you’ll feel with your 10 by 10 booth. So anything you can do to get a good location is probably worth doing, and paying for the end space or a bigger booth is one of the few things that’s in your power (see below).

You can save money by sharing a booth with someone else. GenCon adds a stiff booth-sharing fee ($350) so you don’t get it at exactly half cost, but it will save you many hundreds of dollars if you can tolerate being in the same space with a friendly competitor for 4 days. We shared space with Wolf Baur of Kobold Press the first year we got a booth. You also get a nice price break if you can commit to next year’s GenCon on Sunday of this year’s GenCon and pay 50% up front.

You don’t get much control over where in the hall your booth will be. Don’t count on landing a spot right by the busiest door so that everybody walking in and out will see your booth. The primo spots go to companies buying gigantic booth acreage, followed by companies that have been coming to GenCon forever—there is a “priority point” system that means the smaller booths in good territory go to folks who have been coming to the show for many years. As a first-time exhibitor your booth is going to be in the “nosebleed” section. You can still do okay there if you have a name, a great product, or eye-catching booth décor, of course. But it might take you a couple-three years of steady exhibiting (or paying extra for an end spot) to climb the priority ladder and secure better booth locales.

The booth cost includes two exhibitor badges, a table, and a couple of chairs. You can get extra badges if you want them. It also puts you on the list for exhibitor housing, so you have a better shot at securing close-in accommodations for the show. But downtown hotels in Indianapolis get really expensive around GenCon, so with two plane tickets and a double-occupancy room and your booth rental you’re talking about $3500 to $4500 to get to the show and have a place to sell your product. If you can drive to Indy or if you have a place to stay in town, that helps quite a bit. We’re fortunate: Dave Noonan’s brother lives in an Indianapolis suburb, so we stay in the Sasquatch Game Studio Indianapolis Regional Headquarters each year. (Thanks, Doug!)

The convention hall in Indianapolis is run by an outfit called George Fern Exhibitor Services. George Fern makes available to you a number of booth upgrades like carpeting, extra tables, better network access, and so on. If you’re a small outfit with a 10 by 10 booth, you don’t need that stuff. I think it’s quite overpriced compared to what you can bring in yourself. (You are absolutely allowed to schlep in any reasonable furnishings you care to bring.) We fly in on Tuesday night so that we can use part of Wednesday for some CostCo trips or other booth-decorating expeditions, and we find that we can handle things pretty well ourselves.

A note about friends and visitors. This is hard to say, but I’ll say it anyway: If I’m in my booth and the Exhibit Hall is open, I’m there to interact with my customers and make sales. I love seeing folks I haven’t seen in a long time and I will happily make plans to go grab a bite of lunch when I take a break or spend the evening visiting. What I really can’t do is allow knots of friends to “form ranks” between me and my customers and then stay there all afternoon. So if you’re buying booth space at GenCon, remember that you’re paying $100 an hour or more to be there and be available to customers. It’s reasonable to take a few minutes to say hi or make plans to meet up after the hall closes if things are quiet, but then you can in good conscience shoo your visitors along.

Overall, my personal goal at GenCon is simple: See and be seen. I want to be at the show so that I can see what’s going on in the game business—what’s hot, what’s not, who are the interesting new publishers, what the industry leaders are up to. I also want to be at the show because it’s a powerful bit of marketing and brand-building for our little company, and an opportunity for fans to come and meet us if they want to. I’m not looking to make GenCon a profit center for Sasquatch (although I certainly want to do my best). I just want sales at the show to subsidize the cost of being there to see and be seen.

Summer Beer: Now that the weather’s warm, I find that my beer tastes change a bit. For most of the year I’m a big fan of smooth darker beers with nice roasty malt flavors. But in summer, nice refreshing crisp lagers and pilsners just can’t be beat. This year, I’ve stumbled across a couple that are very much worth your while. The first is Sierra Nevada’s Summerfest—reminiscent of a macrobeer but just better all around, which makes it very drinkable by my standards. The second is Hellas Bellas, by Ninkasi.  Ninkasi is known for their IPAs, but this excellent helles lager is just about my favorite beer on the planet right now. It’s smooth, crisp, refreshing, and complex, just what I’m looking for in an upscale lager.

When I can’t find the Ninkasi or the Sierra Nevada, or if I’m looking to save a couple of bucks on a six-pack, I sometimes turn to Red Stripe Jamaican Lager. Many years ago I drank quite a few Red Stripes at the Officer’s Club in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Definitely a step up from a canned macrobeer and usually quite affordable. Or sometimes I’ll pick up a six-pack of Peroni. You don’t think of Italy as a place to get a decent lager, but Peroni is very crisp and carbonated and goes down nice in hot weather.

Rebuilding Ultimate Scheme, Portland Beer

I’m back! I set my blog aside for a couple of months after finishing my tour of adventures I’ve written for various RPG systems, but now I’m ready to resume. I’m just going to wander around a few different topics for now, and we’ll see where this thing goes. I’m assuming that many of you read this because you’re interested in what I do as an author and game designer, but I intend to mix in a few thoughts about current events, pop culture, or politics as they strike my fancy. (God knows there is no shortage of things to say about politics this election season!)

Anyway, this time: Rebooting Ultimate Scheme, and brew pubs in Portland.

Ultimate Scheme

We’ve re-launched my Ultimate Scheme boardgame on Kickstarter! (When I say ‘we,’ I refer to Sasquatch Game Studio, the small game publisher I founded with Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert.)  Here’s a link—please, feel free to share it around and help me spread the word!

http://kck.st/1pBFzda

I designed the game back in 2014, and we’ve shown off different iterations to many people over the last two years. We took a shot at launching the game on Kickstarter back in January, and to our surprise, we just didn’t get that “critical mass” of backers. So, we took the game back to the workshop to see if we could bring it in at a lower funding goal, offer a better value to our backers, and change the emphasis on our pitch to make it about the fun theme of the game and less about the details of the mechanics. The mechanics are nice and clean, but the thing that people love when they see Ultimate Scheme is the idea that they’re playing an Evil Genius and they have a bunch of wacky plots to pull off.

We did some legwork to research potential manufacturers, and we eventually found an outfit that could produce an affordable print run of 1,000 units for us. While the business plan sure looks better if we assume we’re running off 2,000+ copies, we had to adapt to the idea that we might be looking at a $20k Kickstarter instead of a $50k Kickstarter—people know us for our RPG work, and we are still trying to get noticed in the boardgame market. The manufacturers we originally targeted weren’t interested in print runs below 2,000-ish copies, so we found an outfit that would work better for us.

We also took a hard look at the game components to see if we were making a game too expensive for its market. In my original design (and my prototypes) I used wooden cubes for the resource markers, mostly because I love Lords of Waterdeep and I thought that was the gold standard for what components we ought to shoot for.  The result was classy, but it meant more expensive manufacturing, leading to a MSRP of $50 or more. So we reworked the components to go to nice, heavy cardstock, linen-finish punchboard tokens instead. That let us bring the MSRP down under $40. And the tokens let us make better use of Lee Moyer’s handsome icon designs. You’ll have an easier time telling the Finance tokens from the Science tokens when one is clearly a dollar sign and the other is clearly a gear-and-atom than distinguishing green and blue wooden cubes.

The last big component shift was changing the box size. We originally planned a “square” box like Ticket to Ride. It turns out square boxes can be more expensive to ship, and shipping adds up fast. Saving $2 to $4 on each unit you ship can make a big difference to your bottom line if you’re mailing out hundreds of reward packages to your backers. So, we adjusted the box size to more of a “book”-type package, which involved reworking the cover and making some adjustments to the board design.

Finally, we also redesigned the cover. We thought our original cover was pretty good, but folks just gave it a “meh.” You hate to buy things twice, but when your audience tries to tell you something, you’re stupid if you don’t listen. So we went back to Claudio Pozas, our illustrator, and commissioned a new cover image from him.

So, the upshot of all these component adjustments and finding new printers and new outreach and marketing (I didn’t talk much about those, but we did some of that too) is that we were able to slash our Kickstarter funding goal from $30,000 in the original to $15,000 in our current Kickstarter, and we knocked $15 off the “baseline” pledge level that gets you a copy of the game.

It’s a weird truth of Kickstarter that you are a lot more likely to get $30,000 by asking for $15,000 and funding fast than you are by asking for $30,000 and hoping you just squeak over the finish line. People want to see that projects have a good chance to succeed, and the sooner you can put the audience’s minds to rest on the question, the better off you are.

And, if you haven’t done it already: Go ahead and share the link to our Kickstarter! We can use all the awareness we can get.

Brew Pubs in Portland: Last week I went on one of my semi-annual beer pilgrimages to Portland. I join a group of Boeing engineers who take the day off to take the train from Tacoma down to Portland, buy a transit pass, and try out new craft beer places. This time around we hit Pints, Zoiglhaus, the Horse Brass Pub, 10 Barrel Brewing, and Backpedal Brewing. All were excellent, but I really loved Zoiglhaus and Backpedal. Zoiglhaus had a great menu of German food (try the brat!). Backpedal was extremely basic—no warm food, just beer and tables, they’re the base of operation for the pedaling bar you see in town—but they were super-friendly and the beer was amazingly good. On a day when I drank a lot of good beer, the Red Druid at Backpedal really stood out.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 28: The Moon-Door

Well, I’m finally there! After almost a year, I’ve finished with my look-at-each-adventure retrospective. During the course of writing these 29 blog posts, I discovered that I did *not* have 28 adventures, as my first count indicated. Instead my final count comes to 33, since I managed to forget or overlook a few in my initial list, and I also wrote a couple of new ones during the course of the series.

My real total might be 34, because I skipped over my work on the 2^nd Edition First Quest boxed set. I know I worked on an adventure for it, but I just cannot bring any details to mind and I can’t swear as to which of the adventures in that set are mine! I guess that’s a drawback to a long career—sooner or later you forget some things you worked on.

One more thing before I move to the adventure: If you haven’t checked it out yet, take a look at my Ultimate Scheme Kickstarter! We’re really coming down to the wire on this one, and we can use all the support we can get.

http://kck.st/1ny7Ely

Even if it’s not for you, please—share the link and help spread the word!

#33: Secret of the Moon-Door

After finishing our work as the design studio for WotC’s Elemental Evil, my fellow Sasquatches and I realized that we had a good deal of 5e knowledge and an audience with a serious demand for more 5e content. After some brief deliberation, we decided to move forward with plans to present a new version of our Primeval Thule Campaign Setting compatible with the newest edition of D&D.  Not knowing if or when a 5e Open Game License would be made available, we looked closely at the 3e-era OGL, and we realized that it would work just fine for a 5e-compatible setting.

So, in the summer of 2015, we launched our second Kickstarter. This time we wanted to produce just one version of our Thule setting, not three in one book. For stretch goals, we at first planned to create more PDF adventure content for the 5e Thule game . . . but on thinking it over, we decided to provide a mix of bonus material, including a player-oriented book (the Player’s Companion) and a GM-oriented book with monsters and rules variants (the Gamemaster’s Companion). For the third book in the set we decided to collect the first two stretch goals—the adventures by Steve Winter and Rob Schwalb—into an Adventure Anthology. Better yet, we figured out how to make the booklets available as print-on-demand softcovers as well as PDFs.

That all seemed good to us, but I was dissatisfied with the Adventure Anthology because I felt it was pretty thin at just two adventures. I wanted to make sure we were providing good value for the dollar. So I talked with my partners, and we decided that we’d add a “bonus” adventure to the Adventure Anthology to make it a threesome instead of a duo. That became Secret of the Moon-Door.

Primeval Thule had its origins in my love for Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea stories—one small corner of the Cthulhu Mythos stories that happened to match up very well with my favorite game, D&D. Secret of the Moon-Door is my homage to Smith’s stories. In fact, the plot is based on a mash-up of Smith’s story The Door to Saturn and some parts of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

(If you’re a fan of Lovecraft and D&D and you haven’t read Clark Ashton Smith, I’d really encourage you to do so. Smith’s Hyperborea stories feel like something halfway between Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar and Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. They are the most D&D-ish Cthulhu stories around. Some of the best are “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” “The Testament of Athammaus,” and “The Ice-Demon.” Smith’s Atlantis stories are pretty good, too. Check ‘em out!)

I set out to provide a party of Thulean heroes with plenty of Smith-like touchstones such as a wizard trafficking with Things from Outside, subhuman savages, and an expedition to an alien sphere to bring justice to an evildoer who thinks himself far outside the reach of any human power. More than that I really can’t say without dropping major spoilers (I probably spoiled a bit already). But I think there’s a nice mix of mystery-solving, a simple puzzle, and a truly far-out setting for the adventure’s climactic scenes. I hope you enjoy it!

Next Time: Beats me! Having just finished a long stroll down memory lane, I’m inclined to spotlight a few of my favorite games from my collection and talk about why I like them. But if you have something you’d like me to blog about, let me know! The topic spinner is spinning.

  

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 27: The Giant’s Tribute

I’m slowly getting close to finishing up my adventure retrospective. It’s been a busy few months; during the summer and fall I was working like crazy on Primeval Thule 5e and my new sci-fi novel Valiant Dust (coming in 2017 from Tor Books). These days I’m pushing hard on ULTIMATE SCHEME, my new boardgame. We’re planning on sending files to the printer at the end of February, and there’s a zillion things to do!

Let me take a moment to engage in some naked self-promotion: ULTIMATE SCHEME is awesome, and you should back it now at Kickstarter. It’s a lighthearted game that mixes some resource management and worker placement mechanics with a fun theme of global mayhem through villainous plots. If you’re into good Euro-style mechanics, nerd culture references, and lots of replayability, I think you’ll like it. And tell your friends, too! We’re fighting to get the word out and we can use all the help we can get.

Here’s the link: http://kck.st/1ny7Ely

Don't make me melt the icecaps to get your attention!

#32: The Giant’s Tribute

As you have no doubt noticed by now, the overwhelming majority of my adventures have been published by TSR, Wizards of the Coast, or my own little outfit, Sasquatch Game Studio. But last year my friend and occasional collaborator Robert Schwalb asked me if I’d be willing to pitch in on his Shadows of the Demon Lord project by serving as a stretch goal adventure author. Since Rob had just committed to doing the same thing for me by helping out on Primeval Thule 5e, I was pretty much obligated to say yes. But I was also real curious to see what happened when Rob managed to slip the leash and run off to do anything he wanted.

As it turns out, Rob asked *everybody* to do short SotDL (that’s Shadows of the Demon Lord) adventures, and he was clever enough to stagger out the schedule of adventures so that no one got buried early on with the landslide of adventures he arranged. My turn didn’t come up until about five months ago. By that time, Rob was looking for SotDL adventures suitable for high-level characters. Since I didn’t know all that much about the setting, I asked Rob if there was anything he felt was under-served by the previous adventures. Rob thought about it for a moment, then said, “No one’s done much with giants yet.”

So, giants it was!

I read through Rob’s excellent setting and the interesting rules set for his game, and thought hard about what a “Demon Lord” giant adventure ought to be. The classic D&D giant adventure is, of course, the G1-G2-G3 series (Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, and so on). But the giants you fight in those adventures are not really all that unnatural or horrifying. Sure, they’re big and they have lots of hit points, but they really act like big 10^th-level orcs. You cut them down four or five at a time, and you feel pretty mighty about it.

I asked myself what would make a giant horrifying, and I thought about the classic giants of myth: Wicked, sinful brutes that gleefully devoured children or ground your bones to make their bread. SotDL giants are pretty stupid, but something that is big and filled with evil cunning and an instinct for petty malice . . . that’s a little more interesting. It reminded me of the Raver-possessed giants from Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, and I found my hook: (SPOILER ALERT) What if the PCs found out the hard way they weren’t dealing with a dull-witted brute, but a demon that had possessed the biggest, strongest thing around?

The nice thing about the format for the Shadows of the Demon Lord adventures is that they’re pretty short. A short adventure is just the right format to challenge the PCs by presenting a situation they think they understand (a giant is demanding tribute from a village), put a nasty twist into it (the giant has a demon’s magic and wickedness), and deliver on an exciting finale. If you have a chance to play it, let me know if the adventure delivers!

Next Time: Secret of the Moon-Door, the last in my series!

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 26: Elemental Evil

As you might guess, I took a nice holiday break and let the blog slumber for a few weeks. I meant to start things up again last week, but I’ve had a hundred things going on with finishing up the stretch goal projects for Primeval Thule, prepping our Ultimate Scheme Kickstarter, and beginning the rewrite on my novel Valiant Dust. The blog seems to be the item that always slides to the bottom of the list.

Speaking of the blog, I’m finally getting close to finishing up my tour of old adventures I’ve worked on. It’s time to pick a new theme. An obvious one would be novels or game sourcebooks, but I’m a little tired of talking about myself, so I’m considering a more or less random tour through Games that Rich Likes.  Got any suggestions for things you’d like me to write about? Let me know!

One current event of note: The world is a less interesting place now that David Bowie has checked out. I discovered “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” when I was in college and played the hell out of that record. I had a few other Bowie albums and liked them pretty well, but Ziggy Stardust is genius, pure and simple. Everyone knows the title track, but I always liked a couple of the deep cuts like “Starman” and “Moonage Daydream” (both picked up recently for movie soundtracks, incidentally—I guess other folks like them too). Anyway, it really caught me off guard. Bowie was great, there was nobody like him.

#31: Princes of the Apocalypse

Shortly after I knocked out my work on the D&D Starter Set, Chris Perkins of Wizards of the Coast approached me to sound out Sasquatch Game Studio about WotC’s new “studio” model for producing big D&D adventures. Taking on a huge Forgotten Realms project wasn’t exactly on our radar—our plans post-Thule were centering in on my Ultimate Scheme boardgame—but we were intrigued by the idea, and we recognized that it would put Sasquatch “on the map” for the general gaming audience with a much bigger and more prominent product than we could pull together on our own. So, we decided that we were in. Focusing on the Elemental Evil campaign meant pushing Ultimate Scheme back, since El Evil (as I came to call it) would require 100 percent of our manpower and resources for six to nine months. In fact, that’s why we’re just now getting to an Ultimate Scheme Kickstarter; if we hadn’t done Elemental Evil, we would have launched the boardgame last year.

Dave, Steve, and I met with the D&D team at WotC (primarly Greg Bilsland and Chris Perkins) to dig into what they had in mind for Princes of the Apocalypse. The first thing that surprised us was that WotC wanted the Elemental Evil adventure to be set in the Forgotten Realms. “Really?” I asked. “I mean, really really? Because that’s always been Greyhawk, and people are going to holler about getting the chocolate in the peanut butter, aren’t they?” (Possibly a bad metaphor on my part, since chocolate and peanut butter are awesome together. It’s a reference to an old Reese’s ad campaign.) But Wizards was very sure about it: They wanted Elemental Evil in the Realms, and they even had a good idea of where they wanted set: The North.

Our first reaction was a bit of skepticism—after all, I know the Realms quite well, and I can tell you that there is more set down in print about the history of the North and every flyspeck village along the Long Road than just about any other corner of Faerûn. But as I looked at the area that Chris and Greg had identified, I realized that there was indeed an opportunity here where we could develop something really new and interesting for the Realms, while anchoring it carefully in the existing continuity. Wizards had also worked out the broad storyline of the adventure. What we had to do was to translate that story document into “actionable” plans. For example, Wizards asked us to make sure each of the four cults had a “surface outpost,” but we used that guidance to create sites such as Feathergale Spire and the Sacred Stone Monastery.

I wore a lot of different hats for Princes of the Apocalypse. First off, I wrote large sections of the adventure, including Rivergard Keep, Sacred Stone Monastery, the earth and water temples, and the temple of the Elder Elemental Eye. I was the art director for Sasquatch, which meant that I created the art orders for the book, contracted illustrators, and provided feedback to help develop sketches into finals. (Kate Irwin at Wizards was tremendously helpful in that task.) And finally I was the overall project manager for Sasquatch, which meant I was trying to ride herd on all the designers and editors, keep up with WotC’s deadlines, field WotC’s extensive, extensive, feedback, review everything that was being written, and pull together the book’s design turnover. I was originally going to write the earth and water nodes too, but I had to hand them off to talented freelancers Jeff Ludwig and Steve Townshend—I was just buried by the amount of things I was trying to do. Let’s just say it was a crazy nine months or so, and I learned some hard lessons.

While the process was brutal at times, I’m very pleased by the way the adventure turned out. As I’ve mentioned more than once in this blog series, I’m a big fan of sandbox-style play. Princes of the Apocalypse is the biggest and most ambitious sandbox adventure I’ve ever pulled together, and there are enough storyline events and investigations between the adventure sites to allow the players to feel like the adventure is naturally developing from the choices they make. I have a few regrets about things—for example, we needed to do a better job at helping the DM identify where NPCs and clues and story elements appear or recur. As it stands, the DM needs to study the adventure pretty carefully to get the most out of it. But Princes of Apocalypse rewards that effort with a great campaign.

Next Time: My Shadows of the Demon-Lord adventure, The Giant’s Tribute.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 25: Primeval Thule

Time is flying by these days! I’m pushing to finish up all the Thule 5e stretch goal projects and make sure our Thule 5e books all get to where they’re supposed to go. I’m also up to my eyeballs in prepping our next Kickstarter project, Ultimate Scheme.

Ultimate Scheme is a Euro-style boardgame I designed a year ago that is now well on its way into production. Here’s the basic pitch: You’re a sinister genius or secret organization out to take over the world. You’ve got an ultimate scheme such as Become a God, Destroy Rock ‘n’ Roll, or Global Chaos. You’ll need to execute a number of stepping-stone schemes such as nuclear extortion, making a deal with the devil, or creating a dance craze to pull off your master plan. For you boardgame nerds out there, it’s basically a “worker walkment” game that’s easy to learn and hard to master, built around a not-too-terribly-serious theme. You’ll be hearing more from me about this soon!

Speaking of fun things from Sasquatch Game Studio, that brings me to this installment of my adventure collection: the adventure I wrote for the Primeval Thule Campaign Setting.

#30: Cavern of Golden Tears

A couple of years ago, I had what I thought was a good idea. “Hey Rich,” I asked myself while driving back and forth to Redmond. “If you could write any game you wanted, what would that be?” And the answer I came up with was a RPG setting that brought Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea stories to life for today’s D&D and Pathfinder fans. So I invited my good friends (and former WotC colleagues) Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert to join my little cabal, and Sasquatch Game Studio was born.

Along the way, the initial concept of Primeval Thule—basically, the subgenre of fantasy that I like to think of as “fantastic horror”—broadened a bit to absorb influences such as Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Pellucidar, and pulpy sword and sorcery stories in general. Much as the old Dark Sun setting captured “desert” sword-and-sandals adventure, we decided to build the 21^st-century d20 setting that could capture lost worlds, barbarians, thieves, and a little dash of Lovecraftian horror. In my opinion, a game or setting should meet the “you know it when you see it” test, and I think Primeval Thule holds its savage head high in that regard.

We also decided to try out the experiment of seeing what happened when you created one IP (intellectual property) and supported it with multiple game systems. We initially built Thule for Pathfinder, the new 13^th Age game, and the 4^th Edition Dungeons & Dragons system license – and just this month, we’re bringing out a 5e version of the setting. So if this sort of thing interests you, check out DriveThruRPG for the pdf version, or ask your FLGS to see about ordering it for you!

Okay, on to the adventure part of this whole thing. We wanted to make sure Primeval Thule was playable “out of the box” so we made room in the outline for several short adventures. Mine was Cavern of Golden Tears, my best take on a pulpy sword-and-sorcery tale complete with hostile natives, a lost city, and a sinister priest of Set who’s out to beat you to the prize. It’s all about capturing a memorable hook—a hidden ruin where a dead king weeps tears of gold—and presenting it as if you were playing through a Conan story.

As it turned out, I used my design draft of Cavern several times as a playtest/demo of Primeval Thule—I ran it at PaizoCon, GenCon, and once or twice in private settings. At the time I felt it was a good taste of what the setting was about, and I’m lazy enough to fall back on “What have I already written?” when I’m looking around for a scenario to run. I also put together a fun group of pregen PCs for the convention games, including the ranger Zargon the Deadly, Marresh the thief of Quodeth, and Isko Yhoun, the Atlantean wizard. (In one game session I killed Zargon dead in a single round of combat when he failed to note the approach of a saber-tooth tiger. Heh.)

Is Cavern of Golden Tears any good? I’d have to leave that to the readers. As I’m getting close to the end of this retrospective series, I’m naturally drawing closer to things I worked on quite recently, so it’s harder to get a sense of what other people think about something as compared to what I think about something. Cavern of Golden Tears really isn’t that old yet, and hasn’t been played by all that many people. But I think it’s a fun little one- or two-session expedition into the jungles of Thule, and I hope that the folks who have seen it enjoyed the trip!

Next Time: Princes of the Apocalypse.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 24: D&D Starter Set

Turns out this is a busy time of year, and keeping up on a regular blog post is a little challenging. My apologies—I really had planned to finish up this little retrospective series before the end of the year. Juggling the Primeval Thule print job, our PDF accessories, and shifting Sasquatch to a new distribution partner wound up absorbing a ton of my time and attention over the last few weeks. Plus, there was an exciting new development this month: My agent sold the first three books of my Sikander North military sci-fi series to Tor Books!

So what exactly is Sikander North? About a year ago, I found myself with a good writing window and asked myself a simple question: If I could write anything I wanted, what would I write? I decided that since I enjoy sci-fi with plenty of military action, “geopolitics,” and thriller trappings, that’s what I ought to focus on. So I came up with a take on the future that’s inspired by the Great Power rivalries of the late 19^th century and the dreadnought era, and a character that I could write some fun stories about (the aforementioned Sikander North). Valiant Dust, the first book in the series, should debut in 2017—it’s almost done now, but I need to do one last set of revisions for Tor.

As much as I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to write Forgotten Realms novels, it’s always been my goal to break out of the shared-world reservation and write my own stuff. So, as you might imagine, this is a very exciting bit of news for me. I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

Okay, on to the meat and potatoes of the blog post today: My ongoing look back at adventures I’ve worked on over the years.

#29: Lost Mine of Phandelver

About two years ago, I decided to part ways with Goblinworks and focus on Primeval Thule, my own writing, and freelancing work as the opportunity presented itself. (I liked Goblinworks just fine, but the 75-minute commute each way was stealing too much of my day.) Anyway, I sent a note to Chris Perkins at Wizards of the Coast to let him know I had some bandwidth to take on any work he might have, and it turns out Chris had just the right project: the adventure that would be included in the new D&D Starter Set for 5e. I’d worked on 5e for a few months right at the end of my time on-staff at WotC, so I was happy to dive in and pick it up again.

The opportunity to work on an adventure that appears early in an edition’s life cycle is both fun and challenging. It’s fun because you know that a lot of people are going to see it, and some of your work is going to wind up becoming a touchstone of shared experience across many thousands of D&D players. I wound up writing the second adventure in both 3e and 4e (those being Forge of Fury and Thunderspire Labyrinth), plus Reavers of Harkenwold in 4e Essentials Dungeon Master’s Kit. It’s cool to create starting towns and introduce monsters and villains that players might be seeing for the first time ever. The challenging part is that writing early in an edition—potentially before the core rulebooks are published—means that some things just haven’t been figured out yet. The encounter-building rules and treasure rules that would appear in the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide weren’t even close to finished when I worked on the 5e Starter Set.

The other challenging part was that Wizards of the Coast provided me a list of “make sure you include X” about as long as my arm. There were dozens of locales in that corner of the Sword Coast that WotC wanted to touch on, a bucket of old Realms lore, different types of dungeons, a mix of combat, exploration, and roleplaying . . . I kind of started to think of the mission statement as “write the kitchen sink adventure.” That daunted me a bit at first, but then I realized that it actually dovetailed nicely with the idea of a wide-open sandbox, which is probably the strongest and best example to give a new DM on how adventures should be put together. Plus, these days, new D&D players are almost certainly coming to the tabletop game after years of experience in World of Warcraft or console games featuring ideas like “quest hubs.” Creating a D&D adventure for beginners that used those expectations effectively made a lot of sense.

So, with that in mind, I looked through all the material WotC had dropped on my desk, and winnowed down the list of locales and elements to something I could fit in the space I had to work with. Borrowing a bit of Realmslore, I decided to “hide” the final dungeon (the mines of Phandelver proper) and make the finding of that dungeon the major story thread tying together the earlier pieces. As it turns out, the story of the Phandelver Pact, Phandalin, and that little era of the history of the North is actually quite confusing and contradictory in places, so I had to work pretty hard to present something that was not too deep in Realmslore for a casual FR fan to understand. In a perfect world I actually would have omitted a lot of that material, but fitting the new adventure into existing Realmslore was important to WotC (and me, too, to be honest).  I was also handcuffed a bit by things like the requirement to feature the banshee Agatha but not let her fight the PCs and making sure all the player factions got into the mix—nothing that was really onerous, just a bit more complicated and nitpicky than I would have liked.

When I was close to wrapping up the adventure, Chris Perkins asked me for a title suggestion. I just drew a blank. This was a kitchen-sink adventure, after all, and it was hard to figure out what it was *about.* The best I could come up with was something like “The Lost Mine,” but that felt super-generic. Since I couldn’t come up with a title hinting at the sort of activities or plots the heroes were facing or a clever twist on a well-known turn of phrase that would apply, I settled for adding a proper noun that would at least make the title distinctive. I thought the suggestion was weak and I figured WotC would brainstorm up a better one, but it stuck. So, there you have it: Lost Mine of Phandelver. Sorry if you don’t like the name.

Next Time: Primeval Thule!

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 23: Loch Finnere

Greetings again! I’m afraid I got caught up in a collision of Primeval Thule 5e deadlines and fell behind on my write-something-each-week resolution. The good news is that I seem to be mostly climbing on top of the pile again—I’ve got the 5e Primeval Thule Gamemaster’s Companion pretty much in hand, I’ve got Steve Winter’s Red Chains adventure for 5e Primeval Thule edited, and I’m digging in on my assignment for the Primeval Thule Player’s Companion. Plus, I think I’ve got two printers, one bindery, three freelance illustrators, and a freelance cartographer all pulling in the same direction, so things are slowly coming together. Finally, I tried out a change in the Ultimate Scheme play sequence last week that worked like a charm. It might be the change that takes Ultimate Scheme from being a good game to being a great game. We’ll be Kickstarting it after the holidays, aiming for a midsummer release in 2016. So get ready to get your sinister genius on!

For those of you living in the Cincinnati area, I’ll be out your way next week. I’m going to be a guest at AcadeCon, November 13^th to 15^th at Hueston Lodge. I’m going to run a couple of Thule games, run a couple of Ultimate Scheme games, and maybe even play a game or two if I can. I hope to see you there!

#28: Banshee of Loch Finnere

Next on my list is a little PDF adventure I wrote for the Accursed game from Melior Via: Banshee of Loch Finnere. This was something new for me on a couple of counts. First of all, it was the first thing I’d ever published outside of the TSR/WotC/Paizo family. Secondly, it was the first thing I’d written specifically for publication as a PDF. A number of things I worked on over the years were made available as PDFs after they were printed and distributed as physical products, but Banshee was intended for digital publication from the get-go. Finally, it was the first time I’d written for the Savage Worlds game system, one of the more successful and broadly published non-D&D RPGs out there.

My contribution to the Accursed setting came about because Melior Via happened to be Kickstarting their new game around the same time that me and my fellow Sasquatches were Kickstarting Primeval Thule (the first one, for Pathfinder, 4e, and 13^th Age). I’ve known Ross Watson of Melior Via for many years, and when he reached out to ask about some cross-promotion for Thule and Accursed, I was happy to oblige. The Accursed guys offered to serve as a stretch goal for our Primeval Thule Kickstarter, and we offered to return the favor by supporting the Accursed game. As it turned out, John Dunn of Melior Via wound up writing our Night of the Yellow Moon adventure for Thule. I, in turn, wrote Banshee of Loch Finnere for John and Ross.

In case you haven’t heard about Accursed before, it’s a dark fantasy setting in which evil has essentially won. The world is in the hands of a small number of powerful and terrifying witches, each of whom rules her own dark domain carved out of the defeated nations of the old world. The “heroes” of the setting are actually monsters who have turned against their mistresses—vampires, zombies, golems (Frankenstein monsters), and so on. It’s a nicely done world, a little reminiscent of the old Ravenloft setting from TSR. I started my work by reading through the Accursed files, and trying to wrap my head around the idea of what would make a good adventure in the setting.

Reading through the book, the part of the setting that really caught my eye was Caer Kainen. It’s got a great Gaelic/Black Cauldron feel to it, and I found myself thinking of Scottish ghost stories. I hadn’t worked on a horror-based ghost-story adventure in quite a while (the closest would be Night of the Vampire, Part 6 of my blog series). The first thing you need to figure out about a ghost story is, of course, who’s the ghost? Why is he or she haunting the living? And why is it important to stop him or her?

A number of years ago, I read a good book on writing by Orson Scott Card, and I remembered a bit of advice from that book: In any given setting, who’s in the most pain? Who needs things to change the most? That’s a great choice for a villain, or a protagonist. I realized that the story of Caer Kainen’s fall began with a terrible betrayal. The heroic king was seduced by the witch known as the Morrigan, and abandoned his wife and children. Later on, when the witch drew him completely into his doom, he slaughtered his family with his own hands. As bad as it was for the kingdom that the heroic king was lured into evil, the most tragic part in this play belonged to the betrayed wife and mother of murdered children. That would be someone with a reason to be angry and miserable in death, but she came to blame the wrong people for her tragic fate. After all, a ghost that hated the right people for the right reasons wouldn’t need stopping, would she? For this to be a tale of horror and betrayal, Queen Aideen’s vengeance had to be focused on the wrong victims—in this case, her own family, Clan Finnoul.

More than that I won’t say, because if you do wind up playing through this adventure, you’ll want to be surprised by the twists and turns. As far as I can tell, Banshee of Loch Finnere was well received. Even if you don’t play Savage Worlds, I think it would be easy enough to pick it up and use it in your game system of choice.

Next Time: Something that quite a lot of people have played through in the last year or so: Lost Mine of Phandelver!