Observations of the Fox

I've been trying a few different techniques over on OneBookShelf/DrivethruRPG/RPGNow to see which ones are more effective at generating sales for me. I've had quite a few of my games and gaming products for sale as Pay-What-You-Want, and these remain consistent sellers, but most people choose to pay nothing for them. This means exposure is building, but income isn't. Adding The Law into a charity product bundle similarly didn't generate any more money for me, but it wasn't really about getting money, it was about contributing to a good cause, and getting a bit of exposure for a game that I'm pretty passionate about. almost 500 copies of the game went out in that lot. Using the sales of The Law, I now had a list of emails in the OBS system. I used this as a promotional tool when releasing The Dispatch Guide, and within the first week sold half a dozen copies, which was a little faster than I normally would reach that point, but as a second book in a series ...

OneBookShelf has a function where a product can be sent to a group of reviewers. The idea is that this will get at least one of them to read through the product and provide a bit of feedback, because good reviews are one of the strongest promotional tools available to a new product. When I released the Dispatch Guide for The Law a fortnight ago, I sent comp copies to their reviewer's circle, and figured I'd send a copy of the core rules for The Law along with it... after all, a GMs handbook makes more sense when the rules it refers to are also present. I indicated at the time that I'd provide feedback on this feature... I can't remember if I made that indication here on the blog, or in one of the game design Facebook groups I'm a part of. Either way, a fortnight has passed, I've sold half a dozen copies of the Dispatch Guide , and a few more copies of The Law . I haven't had a single review from the reviewer's circle.

So, the last post was on transhumanism, and it generated some decent conversation. Then I saw this awesome post by Joshua Macy . It provides robots as a character option for Space Crawl (which seems to be a sci-fi version of Dungeon Crawl Classics). I could pretty easily convert some of these ideas to the SNAFU system, which is my working name for the game system underlying The Law. Characters in this system start with d4 in each of the four attributes, then generally 4 dice upgrades, 4 abilities, 4 defences, and then a range of 3 upgrades that could improve elements in any of these three categories. In The Law, two of the attribute upgrades (and two of the abilities), are defined by the character's caste. There are six castes, each increasing a different pair of attributes (and providing abilities associated with those skill increases). A series of automatic abilities are added to characters based on their training in the agency academy. Defences are added to each o...

(If you have issue with any of this, let me know. I'm trying to wrap my head around some big concepts here, and I honestly believe that getting more opinions on the subject matter will give a more complete picture) I generally fit into the mainstream of game designers. I'm white, I'm male, I'm generally cis and hetero, I have enough spare time to actually work on game design because I'm not working stupidly long hours on minimum pay to support a family. Yes, I've got a degree of privilege, I accept that, and I do what I can to take that into consideration when dealing with other people. I'm not in the US or the UK where there are bigger opportunities for networking, so I'll always struggle to get my voice heard over those folks who are in closer proximity to those hubs of game design, I'm not completely neuro-typical, but I've learnt enough to masquerade as neuro-typical to most people. The reason I've started writing this post is to take...

Since I’m doing these in batches of 10, it’s time to start working through the next sequence. 11. Wildest Character Name I’ve had some crazy character names over the years. Sometimes offering them as a hint toward the type of character that I’m playing… there was “Sir Ashley Williams, Keeper of the Third Sacred Boomstick, and Scourge of the Undying”, it actually took players two years to work out that I had basically named the character “Ash” from the Evil Dead series. One of the more interesting character names I used was for a character who walked into a LARP with no name. Based on the first conversation exchange the character, they became known as “No Kick Mushrooms”.      There’s plenty of others, but these two come to mind first. 12. Wildest Character Concept As mentioned, “No Kick Mushrooms” was a LARP character, and was a tiny goblin inhabiting a bio-organic power armour suit that was roughly human sized. This was modelled by using a pain...

I've been sharing my progress with the mini-comics I've been writing and illustrating for "The Law", and a few people have started commenting on how much their enjoying the comics, and whether they might end up relating to a larger comic series. Honestly, at this stage I'm not sure. I'm happy writing four page comics, and maybe expanding those to six or eight pages... and themes or elements from those comics will crossover between the sequences that I'm producing, but this project isn't about the comic book, the comics are being written to support the game. The current comic is one of those four page sequences, that will get a couple of extra pages scattered through the book it's presented in. It relates to a mysterious object that needs to be identified. A follow up pair of pages for this comic will go into rule explanations about identifying things, and making things. It includes two of the characters who will probably make ...

In the 1980s, the Traffic Authority of New South Wales released a number of booklets on cycle safety named "The Bike Book". These were serious books about what kids needed to be aware of when riding bikes in public spaces such as parks, paths, and roads. No, that's not actually true at all. They released a series of books under the pretence that they were serious booklets on cycle safety, but British comedian Spike Milligan had scrawled all over them with jokes, funny insights, and surreal additions to the text. The basic in for action in the book was carefully laid out and typeset, and Spike's handwriting and crudely drawn sketches were scrawled across the pages. Sometimes chunks of text were scribbled out, sometimes he'd make comments about how certain aspects of the text were fine in theory but didn't work that way in reality, often he'd underline bits and agree with it. There were three levels of book. One for "small" kids, which had ...