Josh Roby's LiveJournal

Paraphrased from Mari our intern minister’s debut sermon:

“Faith is trust that the power of love will make the world a better place, and God is a personification of that power.”

I like this. A whole lot. Defined positively, forward-looking, self-aware, functional. I could say more, but it would be pages long.

Mirrored from robern.net.

From the fantastic SucceedBlog.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Lin-Manuel Miranda raps about Alexander Hamilton at the White House. No, seriously.

He’s doing an entire album called the Hamilton Mixtape.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

So one of the things I like to do to amuse myself is present my games in the medium of the day. For Full Light, Full Steam, this meant as excerpts from pamphlets, which were booming in the victorian era. For Sons of Liberty, this meant a newspaper-like format, although I decided not to cram everything down to 8pt like the colonial papers of the time. It’s something that I doubt anybody notices, but it keeps me entertained.

One of the unforeseen advantages of my approach, though, was that it left me with a lot of steampunk “pamphlets” full of colorful descriptions of a fictional solar system and short-short stories of the people who call it home. Content I might be able to use in other ways. For instance, I’ve had a “Spirit of the Full Light Full Steam Century” project on my hard drive for years that I never quite complete. Recently, though, as I’ve been putting Stories from Rooksbridge onto Kindle, it occurred to me that this stuff might be of interest to folks all on their own: pamphlets of the digital age, as kindle minibooks.

There are three, and I fired them off into the intarwebs at 99 cents a piece:

• For Queen and Country
• A Daring Tourist’s Solagraphy
• The Layman’s Reports from the Royal Society

And of course, I’ve got Rooksbridge available on Kindle, too, for the usual two-buck price:

• Dirty Work
• Getting By
• The Divide
• Ravens, Rooks, and Crows

Publishing to Kindle, it turns out, is dead-easy… as long as you have your content in an easily-accessible format, like XML or HTML. The above titles were approved for the Kindle store a couple days ago; when I went to check if they were live, they already had a couple sales on them. This with absolutely zero promotion, which is pretty neat. For maybe an hour’s effort on my part, it’s a nice little revenue stream that I don’t really have to do much to manage. The percentage of revenues that gets back to me is less than awesome (35%), but in the grand scheme of things, that’s 35% of revenue that I doubt I’d be tapping any other way.

So those of you who are Kindle-enabled: here’s another way to get some tasty, tasty content from my corner of the world. Hope you enjoy!

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

The fourth installment of my Rooksbridge serial fiction project is now available at Rooksbridge.com. This chapbook, Ravens, Rooks, and Crows, sees the arrival of George Aldcourt, the Baroness’ dissolute brother, trailing behind him a train of unwanted courtiers and suitors. Now the once-quiet town of Guilford is awash with strangers, which makes it that much easier for conspirators to maneuver against the Bramwood court.

You can read the preview or order the digital edition.

So far I’ve been releasing these on the first of the month, and as you can see, I fell a little behind this month. Summer travel really sucks time out of a schedule! I’m putting up the Digital Edition now, and recording the Audiofile this week: if all goes well, posting it by Friday. The physical chapbooks are going to take a little longer than that. I don’t expect to see them before November. Chalk this one up as a lesson learned, and extra motivation to get the next chapbook, Where There Is Smoke, in the can and into the pipes as soon as humanly possible!

Aside from scheduling, this chapbook had its difficulties in writing. You’ll see when you read, but I had to be pretty awful to my characters, and that’s sometimes difficult to do. I went through a number of versions, each one flinching away from what Had To Be Done, and each one spawning off problems in theme wrinkles and plot holes, until I finally told myself to just go ahead and Do It. Miraculously, all the problems cleared up as soon as I made certain characters sorry they ever got involved in Rooksbridge. It’s amazing what a red-hot coal can do when properly applied.

With this chapbook, I feel like the cast of characters is assembled, the setting is established, and the premise of the series is pretty solid. In a lot of ways, this was the chapbook that I’ve been looking forward to writing since I started. We finally see the baroness in action and most of the cast working together (which is to say, working at cross purposes) to create the kinds of stories I’m really after. This is the kind of fiction I always want to read — and I hope it’s the kind of fiction that you enjoy.

Happy reading (and cringing)!
— Josh

Rooksbridge Serial Fiction Project – Rooksbridge #4: Ravens, Rooks, and Crows – Digital Edition

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Over on his blog, Rob Donoghue was saying, tangentially:
When a player buys a power or skill at a high level (like a fighting skill), he is communicating one of two contradictory messages. The first is “I am really interested in this thing, and I want to really get pushed hard within it” and the second is “I want to be good enough at this that I don’t have to worry about it.” The contradiction means that this is a potential landmine unless the GM takes the time to communicate with the player to figure out which is which.

Which makes me ponder: what if you design a game with two ratings for each stat: the number that determines your effectiveness as we’re used to, and the rating that determines some sort of incentive-reward when you use it (similar to octaNe). The idea being, you are displaying both what you’re good at and what you want to see in play, avoiding the two-contradictory-messages thing.

So say, for instance, we rate stat effectiveness with a number 1-6 and stat incentive with die size: d4s for stuff you actively don’t want to deal with, d6s for neutral stuff, d8s for “that’s sort of cool,” and d10s for “this is what I want my corner of the game to be about.” So I have Willpower 5d4, which is a clear indicator that I would really like to avoid things like mind control, and Kill People With Swords 4d10, which shows that I’m all about killing people with swords. I also have Eloquent 2d8 — flagging that I want to see social interaction and maybe even politics despite the fact that I’m shit at it.

Say you roll a couple different stats for any check, and evens are successes and odds are failures. After everybody has rolled, you not only count up successes, but the GM can also count up big dice to see how he’s doing. To put teeth into this, for every d10 rolled, the GM gets an Adversity Point to add to his budget; for every d4 rolled, he loses Adversity. (And every two d8s give him one point, or something — details are sketchy; this is just an illustration!) Play should very quickly move towards highlighting what the players want to jam on. The system also still preserves the ability to resolve the occasional conflict in an arena that a player finds disinteresting.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

All my games and books are now available at the Kallisti Press Un-Store!

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Matt Snyder (author of Dust Devils, Nine Worlds, and various other awesome things) has published his new game, 44: A Game of Automatic Fear, for free from his site. As a bit of backstory, Matt initially started 44 as a design challenge. The game has surfaced before as a playtest ashcan — and a very pretty one — and Matt has taken the feedback garnered from that to polish off the game. Instead of selling the thing, though, he’s giving it away for free.

You can download the game from the 44 page of Stories You Play. Free registration is required; it’ll take you thirty seconds. The game is well worth it, if only for seeing the Clever Dice Tricks. The color is expertly embedded into the text; as I read it, I could see the rainy streets, 50s-era city blocks, and classic cars. This game will definitely get added to my game bag, and I suspect will make an appearance on my convention play list.

Thus ends the review portion; the game itself is very neat and you should download it. What interests me the most, though, over and above the actual (and very well-done) game, is its status as Free.

Matt is not spouting off a deluge of justifications for this decision (at least, not that I’m aware of), but I suspect he’s gone the Free route for a lot of the same reasons I’ve been eyeing it, myself. There is something very appealing about simply contributing to the community rather than wading into the marketplace. You can focus on making the product the best it can be, divorced from profit-driven marketing (which is not the same as no marketing at all). You don’t have to worry about making your investment back. You don’t have to remind yourself to pimp your game over and over and over again. You can just design and publish the best game you can make, and then release it into the wide, wild world.

Which sounds all nice and pretty, but there are of course a slew of caveats attached. Free is not simple.

I do have a few misgivings about how microfame garnered from previous retail sales contributes to adoption rates of free games. Or in other words, Matt can do this because he’s Matt Snyder; same with John Harper, and certainly the same for the game snippets that Vincent Baker occasionally throws off just to illustrate a thesis. I’m not sure if just anybody can walk into our schism-riddled “community” with a free product and have anybody take notice.

Because, let’s be frank, the only reason to publish is if you’re offering it to other folks. That’s sort of the definition. Otherwise it could remain a set of notes on your googledoc that you and your friends reference. If a designer goes through the effort to publish a game and there’s no splash, the effort to publish is (mostly) a failure. So the question is: how does Free publishing connect the publisher with an audience? Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. Not yet.

I am intrigued by this Free thing. I would like to see more Free games — I suspect that would actually do some good for the broader community of players. I think, once properly harnessed and practiced, it could help develop the state of design. I’m just not sure what functional Free publishing looks like — but I’d like to find out.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Tomorrow is the New Moon. Tonight, six nobles ride into the greatest city in the world. </p> They seek vengeance, justice, patronage, and destiny. They seek the ransom or rescue of family. They seek to stir the dying ashes of love. But what you seek is not always what you find. They come to Davfanna Aldrena the city whose walls challenge the sky. They come to sit in the Senate, to gamble, to scheme, to plot. They come to the quarterhouse of the Hidden Moon, where they will find what they did not seek. Lessons. Lessons. Lessons. — from the Aria of Bajinoth Steele, Minoan-C Manuscript Fragment

The Six Ineffable Lessons of the Hidden Moon, or Six Lessons as it is more commonly known, was one of the greatest ven operas. Unfortunately, only fragments remain today. However, we can still experience the “Apotheosis of All Art” — at the gaming table. I’ve compiled everything that modern research knows about Six Lessons from my “Mysteries of Shan’ri” seminar, and packaged it together as a game scenario for John Wick’s Houses of the Blooded.

Ideally suited to convention play or as a one-shot “introduction” to the game, Six Lessons plays out in three to four hours before reaching its inevitable, bloody conclusion. The best part, though, is that there is a different bloody conclusion each time, whether it’s duels on rain-slicked precipices or murder on the Senate floor.

Six Lessons includes:

• Six Player Characters
• Seven NPCs, including Bajinoth Steele
• Developments for the Narrator to keep Players on their toes
• An Abstract of Senate Politics of the Period

Download Six Lessons here.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

With Meg and I flying back into town after a weekend at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, it appeared that we were going to be playing at the low ebb of our energy. Our babysitting for the night was slightly different than normal, which meant we’d also be playing a bit shorter. Thus, I planned for a short session: some stir-the-pot developments along with some opportunities for the players to make things worse. In other words, a party.

As we headed back to the car after the game was done, I tweeted: “The ven word for ‘party’ is spelled the same as the word for ‘carnage.’ There’s not even a different accent.” That should tell you how the evening went.

I asked Moryandal’s player if she minded hosting a party for her returning mother the Countess as the night’s session. She agreed not knowing the benefits. I then told the other two players that, if they were attending the party, they should bring a gift. Art is preferred; Goods are nice; Resources are acceptable. I didn’t let them off easy; I made them pay to attend. Thus Moryandal picked up some Spices and some Wine. Then I brought in the train of NPCs, who festooned her with Art and some Herbs, to boot.

Like any good ven party, it was filled with people who might otherwise be trying to kill each other. Bail Uvan, who had just suffered an earthquake that destroyed his castle, was there. So was Fyx Krev, Bail’s fellow-baron whose guardsmen he fears enough to hire the PCs as protection while he’s vulnerable. Add to that mix, we had Count Haroon Adrente, Rajh’s father (they don’t get along well). The overbearing Haroon kicked off the evening’s intrigues by telling Rajh that they would be coordinating Rajh and Moryandal’s patrols of Bail’s lands so that Rajh’s brother Vangalio could swoop in and conquer stuff when the patrols weren’t there. Vangalio picks up lands, Rajh fulfills his contract, everybody wins!

Rajh considered the win-win long enough to consult with his fellow-baron Niassa, the Bear Who Kills Secrets. Aghast at such a treacherous gambit, she decided they would inform Bail’s liege, Count Illudyl Krev, of Haroon’s plans. Barons bickering is one thing; a Count sponsoring an invasion is another. It was at this point that I quietly pointed out that Fyx Krev was Illudyl’s son, and so the PCs went storming over the Fyx to liberate cats from bags and generally wreak havoc.

There was a short interlude in which a song about Moryandal’s generosity was sung to the party — one of her gifts — and there was style-flipping and aspect-gaining. Then Moryandal’s mother, the Countess Tjan, the liege of all three PCs, stood up to speak. She thanked everyone for showing up for her coming-back party and spoke about the wise guidance of her new suaven devotion, Lisle Steele. She produced three Relics, gave them to her barons, and asked that they build shrines in their lands.

After which, Fyx came to Moryandal and asked for a jury, because he was claiming Insult in his father’s name and challenging Haroon to a duel. In the ensuing jury, the secret of Bail’s destroyed castle and Haroon’s planned conquest were laid out for everybody at the party. Rajh stood and spoke eloquently about how his dear father was a Wolf Who Had Lost His Teeth and was sending minions to do his dirty work. That became a Rank-6 Insult attached to his father, and in the ensuing duel, Haroon was soundly beaten.

While Bail complained to Rajh and Niassa about his secret coming out, Moryandal took a moment to talk with Fyx about marriage — “ideally, it should be with someone you don’t hate, don’t you think?” Fyx also asked about “the other thing” her spy had talked about (that being the conquest of Bail’s lands while his pants were down), and Moryandal demurred, saying that opportunity had passed. At the same time, Niassa was telling Bail, “This is how we protect those who would move against you. You should thank us.” So apparently the PCs are playing at being white hats, if harsh ones. We’ll see how long that lasts…

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

We kicked off our Houses of the Blooded campaign last night. I ended up tailoring the night’s content pretty well to our “abbreviated” play footprint; in my head, we’re playing through a half-hour political drama teevee show, not a full hour, which fits our available three-and-a-half hours of play pretty well.

My three players were instantly at each others’ throats, even without the earthquake destabilizing the neighboring barony.

The unmarried Moryandal Thorne extended hospitality to her unlucky neighbor Bail Uvan and his two unmarried sons and sent their destroyed castle a relief caravan. Of course, said caravan was harboring a spy that contacted the unmarried baron on the other side of Bail’s land, with a combined mission of scoping out marriage prospects and coordinating conquest. She didn’t tell either of the other PCs about caravan or spy (although another PC did find out…).

Rajh Yvarai spent most of the story avoiding his wife, the niece of Bail Uvan, while at the same time sending the beleaguered visiting ven whores to make sure they were comfortable. He oversaw the contract negotiations with the neighbors, winning rights to explore their ruins and a hefty payment for all three PCs in exchange for a few season actions on their part. By the terms of the contract, the PCs decide when and where everything goes down, so they can string poor Bail along indefinitely, keeping him vulnerable.

Meanwhile, Niassa Burghe moved her men into her absent liege’s castle, to “protect” it while the Countess was away. When the staff started getting suspicious, she gave them a massive feast, which only served to erode their loyalties to the Countess further. When the PC barons sat down to negotiate with Bail Uvan, she exposed Moryandal’s spy hiding in the relief caravan.

Moryandal exploded in emotion, convincing Bail that the spy was actually proof that she was interested in marrying one of his sons.

It was lovely.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Wow!

Mirrored from robern.net.

I recently came to the conclusion that the Agora ruleset, while pretty tight mechanically, need to be rewritten with an actual voice rather than the dry, technical-manual presentation found in the most recent edition. I struggled with how to do this for some time, but then genius struck in the form of an assassin droid in the video game Knights of the Old Republic. What better voice to guide players through destroying their enemies and conquering the last remnants of humanity (oh, and rebuilding civilization) than good ol’ HK-47?

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

From The Lies of Locke Lamora by Mister Scott Lynch:

It will be mine. Yes: I will make and have myself a ginger scald. After the success of Sausages a la Camorr, there is no way to avoid making the cocktail concoction that immediately made my mouth water when I read the description. There are a couple hurdles to overcome, of course.

Firstly, ginger oil is relatively expensive, ringing in at about twenty bucks an ounce. My reading of the above indicates that a ginger scald probably uses two ounces, and forty bucks for a cocktail is a little steep. Of course, I could make my own ginger oil — if I had an alembic, a run-of-the-mill piece of equipment that any good alchemist would have. However, as I am not a good alchemist, I will have to jury-rig an alembic using a light fixture.

Luckily, pear brandy is relatively easy to come by. What isn’t easy is ajento, primarily because it is a fictional liquor. Therefore I will just have to make my own. It’s a cooking wine flavored with radishes? Pah, that’s easy. I’ve got a jug of chablis infusing radishes as I type. It should be ready in a few days…

If I’m feeling especially puckish, I’ll video it for the amusement of the internets, but I am really looking forward to giving this a try!

Mirrored from robern.net.

You know how, in television shows where the protagonists are about to deal with the introduction of the Antagonist of X, the show leads with a flashback to their first encounter with X? This gives the audience some understanding of the protagonists’ current stance towards X, and presumably Antagonist of X, so when the first confrontation happens, it goes right towards the meaty story-stuff.

To be mundane, in the episode where the veteran witch-hunter protagonists will be fighting a cabal of sorcerers, the show starts with one of the protagonists, back before they were a witch hunter, crossing paths with a sorcerer. What happens in the flashback tells us how the present-day witch hunter will feel (and sometimes how we’re supposed to feel) about sorcerers when they crop up next.

Now, when you’re writing something and you set this sort of thing up, you know exactly what sort of first encounter you need in order to get the conflicts you want later. You want undying enmity from your witch hunter, you have that first sorcerer murder his parents and rape his sister and write the nascent witch hunter shaking his fist at the sky in front of his burning childhood home. You know where you’re going, so you start off by pointing in that direction.

But what happens if you don’t know where you’re going? I don’t recommend such a stance for writing, but for roleplaying, it can be the order of the day. If you’re running a game off of the bandolier-o-bangs method, where you’re throwing challenges in front of the PCs to see what happens, what prevents you from doing this in flashbacks, as well? About here, you might be saying, “Sure, Josh, I guess you can do that…” but think this through. If you throw out bangs in flashbacks, you’re giving the PCs an opportunity to retroactively edit their character. That antagonist that you have statted up ready to come in both fists swinging… he may turn out to be an old friend rather than an old enemy. Maybe the witch hunter got his start helping the sorcerers kill his entire family. All of which puts a very different spin on the ‘current’ action in the present-day portions of the game.

I’m intrigued by the idea right now, and will probably give it a whirl in our upcoming HotBlooded game. I’m not sure if this will turn out to be a nifty technique or playing russian roulette with the game…

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Download Situation Report!

This little project was a long time coming. Waaaay back when I first published Full Light, Full Steam, I put together demo materials: six “half-gen” characters and a handful of situations engineered for those characters. As a theme, I set each situation on a different planet: one on Mercury, one on Venus, one on Mars, and one in the Asteroid Belt. I also tried to diversify the situations as much as possible, so while one is all politics and social maneuvering, another one is all action-adventure, and another one is all scifi spaceships shooting ether cannons at each other. It was a nice little package and I was proud of it. It was, however, all in long hand and filled out cog cards. I always meant to fire up Illustrator and transfer all those characters, sets, props, and situations over into a pdf and publish it. Life intervened, of course.

As of a month ago, I actually thought I had lost the longhand originals, one or two drifting off at a time into the untold mess that is a Monday unpacking after a gaming convention. A couple weeks ago, though, I was pleasantly surprised to find three of the four situations in an old folder, and the fourth one filed away for safekeeping. The cog cards for all four situations were scattered all the hell over, but I managed to find them all and put all the pieces back together. In other words, I lucked out — it was all still there. Sensing that having all the pieces all in one place was not something I was lucky enough to have happen twice, I resolved to sit down and finally get the situations in a nice, safe, digital format.

Thus I present you Situation Report!, a free supplement for my three-year-old game Full Light, Full Steam. It includes six characters and four situations engineered for those characters, ideally suited to one-shot, short-form, or convention play. Hope you enjoy!

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.