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2010-08-15 : Apocalypse World
If you're here looking for Apocalypse World, I can set you up. Go to:
- apocalypse-world.com for free downloads;
- the un-store to buy;
- barf forth apocalyptica for discussions & hacks.

2012-05-07 : Flattery!
I'm feeling like maybe sharing some nice things people have said to me recently.

Here's Chan Sterling:

I know you hear this all the time but Apocalypse World really inspired me to make my own game. This is it Coliseum of the Gods

I have to post this. I have a class full of kids right NOW playing Murderous Ghosts by Vincent Baker. Life is so good. Nine pairs are playing. Imagine hearing all of these creepy stories at once. Awesome.

Pete: I like the restrictive nature. Freedom within structure...a sonnet of death if you will.

Scott: There's also something very intimate about one-on-one gaming. When you're a player in a group, you get a breather when the focus moves on to someone else, but there's no escape in Murderous Ghosts! You're always under pressure.

To date, this is the only RPG ever to unsettle me during play.

Just wanted to give some praise. I'm a high school English teacher, and I've been part of an Apoc World group for the past few months, and having a great time with it. Today, I used several of the Hx scenarios to have my sophomore students create backstories for characters in Macbeth that they were rehearsing. It worked great; they had a ton of fun, and it added a whole new level of depth to their readings.

I scanned through my PDF of AW (which I fortunately had on my flash drive) and picked out six of the Hx questions that seemed like they would give the kids some creative avenues to pursue. I put them up on an overhead, then asked each student to pick out three questions, apply them to one of the characters in their group, and write a 3-4 sentence explanation of their answer.

In the end, I got great results. The students developed all sorts of love triangles (and some love rectangles, as they put it), childhood traumas, failed business ventures, and a host of other incidents that had all taken place among the characters in Macbeth. They were excited to tell me how Macbeth & Malcolm were children together and one of them stole the other's favorite boots, which escalated to a lifelong hatred; others developed a backstory on how Lady Macbeth is secretly having an affair with the soldier who speaks only five words in the whole play. We discussed how these different backstories change the meaning of a lot of scenes and moments in the play, and discussed acting approaches, and how having those histories changes the way actors might play roles and interact with each other.

Overall, I can't wait to go back to this; I sort of pulled the idea out at the 11th hour, so I didn't have the time to fully explore possible combinations of questions, or have as much time for students to share stories and play out different attitudes toward each other. But overall, it added a wonderful amount of fun and depth to the lesson. So thanks for not only developing a great game, but for helping me teach a great lesson!

2012-04-30 : Updates!
For those of you who've been following along and keeping score:

1. Trauma Games presents: The Dragon (aka Llama Flames 2) didn't playtest the way I hoped. It's on the back burner. It's probably lost its place as the second Trauma Game. Trauma Games presents: Can You Save Your Boyfriend From the Cannibals? is looking more likely to me this afternoon.

2. Mobile Frame Zero kickstarted like crazy, and its pre-release community is going strong. If you haven't, come check out the Mobile Frame Hangar. I've been previewing the rules there, J's been previewing the setting background, and there are pictures of approximately one million cool and inspiring Lego mechs, including Soren's.

3. PAX East was good. I made shortsighted business decisions and ran out of supply before I ran out of demand. Meg made better business decisions and matched Psi*Run's supply to demand to within 3 copies, I believe. It was the booth's top seller.

Our panels were a whole lot of fun. Ben's and my rpg theory panel was especially satisfying for me. We managed to cut through a whole lot of crap, I think, both conventional rpg wisdom crap and big model entrenchment crap too.

4. May is the last month of the Forge! June 1st, Ron and I are going to close it up. Emily's already started a good publishers' retrospective thread, State of the indie publisher. Ron's planning some sort of blowout for the last week of May, I don't know precisely what, but meanwhile, if there's anything you want to discuss at the Forge, now's your last chance.

5. Putting out a call: my uncle Benjamin is looking for illustrators for T-shirt logos for a project he's working on. If you're an illustrator looking for that kind of gig, drop me a line and I'll put you in touch.

Anything else?

2012-04-29 : Monster of the Week
I'm wicked excited for Monster of the Week. I've been reading the pre-release document this morning about how to create a monster mystery as GM, and it's the very monster hunting game I was hoping it would be. I can't wait to play it.

Here are the publicly available character playbook files. I'm totally playing a professional in utility coveralls, scruffy and bottle-it-uppy. My agency's got rigorous training and weird tech gadgets, but an ever-shrinking budget and this frickin 24/7 on-call policy. They expect me to keep up my training and equipment on my own dime and they don't pay overtime but they need me to work overtime anyway. Ha ha ha! I'm such a sucker.

2012-04-14 : Jessica Hammer on Dread
Jessica Hammer's written up her ideas about marketing Dread to non-gamers: Making Horror, Selling Dread. Her analysis lines up really well with Eppy's, Bret's and my observations - I'm nodding along straight through.

We talked about quick to pick up packaged scenarios while we were at the con. Jess's additional idea of stand-up character cards is really great, for Dread in particular, because putting them on the table with the Jenga tower would communicate beautifully about the game. They'd say "this is Jenga, but it isn't just Jenga, but don't worry. It makes sense anyway."

Also, the 90/9/1 split she talks about? I'm going to incorporate that into my thinking starting right the heck now.

2012-04-09 : Last Chance Game Chef
...Is live! From now until the 15th.

I was at PAX East so I couldn't announce it on the day, but I did check and get my 4 random ingredients:
Night and Day
The Art of Destruction
Unnumbered
The Memory Cheats / Has This Been Done?

I'm not tapping in - I don't have a good record of actually managing to participate in design contests - but still. Those are some pretty evocative ingredients, no?

2012-04-06 : Panels at PAX East
Doing a last minute check on my schedule this weekend and I happened upon the descriptions for the little tabletop panels I'm running. I submitted them so long ago I'd forgotten what they said.

Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore
What's a GM? Is there even such a thing? What's the relationship between your character - a fictional person - and your character sheet? Who really owns your character and what can you do about it? What are dice for, and do we really need them? How does roleplaying even, y'know, work?

Join Vincent Baker (Dogs in the Vineyard, Apocalypse World) and Ben Lehman (Polaris, The Drifter's Escape) for a crash course in the tabletop roleplaying theories that kicked off the indie rpg movement. From social context and creative agenda to reward cycle, currency and the components of character, with a good hard look at the real causality at the table. Guaranteed to push conventional wisdom down and take its lunch money.

An Inside Look at Indie RPGs
Curious what's been going on in the coffeehouses and dark alleys of tabletop roleplaying? Wondering what's got those stodgy old dudes' and self-appointed moral watchdogs' knickers all bunched up? Just looking for something beyond “roll to hit, roll damage”? Join some enthusiastic long-timers for an off-the-record tour. We'll show you what's out there, why it's cool, and how you can be part of it. Tell ‘em lumpley sent you.

2012-03-28 : The Mobile Frame Hangar

The Mobile Frame Hangar, a new webforum for Mobile Frame Zero (née Mechaton), courtesy of Schoon.

Check it out, MFØers!

2012-03-27 : Indie POV pt 3: A Small Pep Talk
If you try to compete with conventional RPGs on money or infrastructure, you'll lose. They can buy thicker books with fancier illustrations, and get them into more stores, than you can.

If you compete with them on the strength of your vision and your design, you can win.

Be as bold, as fresh, as incisive, as aggressive as you can be. If you want to make profit on your time, you have got to design sharper games than they do.

There is no secure ground. Don't design a good game then get comfortable. If you're not stretching yourself, you're falling behind!

2012-03-21 : Monster Mania Con: barriers to interest
Going to Monster Mania Con and failing to sell games cut years of wishful thinking and plans doomed to failure out of my future. I'm going to tell some more details.

We had a sign that said "Scary Games" (thanks to our dear friends of the Final Girl Support Group), and it worked, it caught their interest. We had people stopping and saying "games, huh?" and "really, scary games? How scary?"

When we said the words "roleplaying games" to them, they visibly lost interest. On Friday we led off with "you're familiar with roleplaying games?" and it didn't matter whether they answered yes or no, as soon as we said the words we lost them. Once we just stopped saying the words, they started sticking around long enough for us to talk to them about the games.

The fact that the games weren't games, they were books, was the next barrier. Eppy's Jenga tower was as always a draw, but the connection between the tower and Dread, the book, wasn't one they could easily make. We'd put the book straight into their hands and run little on-the-spot demos, as is right, but when they'd flip through the book you could watch the incomprehension settle over them. Most of them then were like "huh okay," put it down, walk away.

A few of them, the little demos and our enthusiasm carried them through. The final killer was price. The $10 and $15 we were charging for Final Girl and Murderous Ghosts was really tough, but a couple of people were willing to risk it. Dread, at over $20, no way.

There were some solid moments of connection, though, in the little demos. Scary games have an audience there, I'm pretty sure, if we can get the price down and make them evident as games.

2012-03-19 : If it isn't an RPG, is it still an RPG?
Down here, Matthijs says:

If you/we want to make RPGs that appeal to non-gamers, and you/we are willing to make them into something people won't call an RPG...

...what exactly are you/we doing? Just making games, right?

What's the point of thinking about them as RPGs anymore?