Meme-Free Zone

Final tally on the drivethru RPG Haiti thing - it raised $178,900.00 for Doctors Without Borders!

Mark me as astonished and EXTREMELY pleased - because that strongly implies there's a good few thousand tabletop RPG fans out there committed enough to spend $20 and help a good cause. Now if I can somehow tap into that market...

I added Diana, Warrior Princess to the contents of the bundle of PDFs that are being sold in aid of Haiti, but it isn't showing up. Not sure what's happened here, but very annoying!

later - apparently it's in the bundle but the list is truncated - full list is here

The list value of the stuff in the bundle is just under $1500!

Gamers, please publicise!

Here's the plot summary for the TV show I've invented for the fanfic RPG:

Once upon a time there were three ordinary college girls leading ordinary lives, who were unexpectedly abducted by aliens, brainwashed, trained as ninja assassins and programmed to help conquer humanity, escaped, stole a spaceship, and are now trying to find their way back to Earth, paying their way by slaying monsters on the worlds they visit. Along the way they’ve acquired a crew, several implausibly powerful weapons, numerous enemies, and a reputation for gratuitous violence. These are the Ninja Monster Slayers in Spaaaace!

Sound promising?


Also, I'm a bit puzzled as to how I'm going to word the "Slash" card without causing offence. The version I have so far doesn't feel quite right


( card text )

Having verified that Dragonmeet is indeed on December 1st, here's what I hope to be running:

Forgotten Futures X: The Tooth and Claw Role Playing Game
First preview of the new Forgotten Futures setting!
The Crimson Claw Mutual Assurance Company

When Yarge pirates start to target merchant ships flying Tiamath's
flag of convenience things show signs of going a little pear-shaped
for the country's oldest insurance company. Fortunately the Management
knows just the right people to handle the problem...

2-3 hours, 3-6 players, the adventurers are dragons.


Diana: Warrior Princess / Elvis: The Legendary Tours
Jailhouse Rock

There are strange rumours of hideous monsters at the tyrannical Uncle
Sam's most secure prison, The Rock. Someone needs to get inside to
find out what's really going on, and nobody else seems to be
volunteering...

2-3 hours, 3-6 players, ready-made characters.


Yes, I know that one of the Elvis adventure outlines is Jailhouse Roc - this is a different rock!

An interesting statistic at e23.

Their customers are asked to rate downloads from 1 (dreadful) to 5 (excellent). Currently, with 13 votes received, Diana: Warrior Princess is rated somewhere between 4 and 5; I have no idea where it falls on this spectrum, they just show 4 stars and a half star, which can be anything from 4.01 upwards.

The interesting statistic is that their all-time "Top Ten Rated Items" (based on a minimum of five votes) have scores ranging from 4.74 to 4.90, and one of the higher-scoring games has only six votes. So it's possible that just one or two more 5-star votes will put Diana onto that table.

So if you downloaded Diana from e23 and haven't already voted, PLEASE do so...

Yesterday's Dragonmeet was, as always, extremely good fun. Also exhausting, since I had a sore throat from the start.

I made a big mistake in the pacing of the first Flatland / Forgotten Futures adventure, which ended up lasting just under two hours instead of nearly three - the problem was that I originally designed it with a Forgotten Futures detective phase which given the time constraints would have had to be done entirely by NPCs; instead the players (as Flatlanders temporarily occupying 3D bodies) got to cross London, destroy things and frighten the horses, then rescue someone and destroy a nameless evil (with rugose tentacles). I think everyone had some fun, but it was a lot shorter and more linear than originally intended. I'll write it up properly when I'm a bit better. One possibility is that some of the players could run two characters, one human and one Flatlander, with the human leaving the stage in the second act.

I'd compounded my timing error by allowing an hour's break between sessions, instead of half an hour, so ended up sitting and talking to passing friends for nearly two hours between games. Fortunately doctor_toc is now resident in the UK and made it to the con, and helped me out by table-sitting while I got lunch and had a fast mooch around the dealers. Also saw Phil Masters, Mike Cule, pwca, karohemd and other familiar faces.

The afternoon Diana Warrior Princess session in which Diana and Elvis characters (through a bureaucratic mistake during a silly-season crossover episode) ended up in the afterlife - it went well, but I think the plot needed more work. It seemed to go down well enough, but I hadn't quite thought through some of the things the players might do, so a lot of improvisation was needed. Such as coming up with a version of Death - yes, with the scythe - whose idea of playing Rock - Paper - Scissors was to materialise a boulder over the head of the person challenging him. The Supreme Being (a John Cleese clone, of course) seemed to go over well, as did various undead barmen, talking lizards, etc. Again, I'll write it up eventually.

After that I nipped home and dumped my stuff, and got back in time for the auction where I singularly failed to get any of the things I bid on - I only had 50 quid left, and that wasn't nearly enough for the things I wanted. It raised £1600+ for children's charities, which I think is a record for Dragonmeet. Highest price was the last item, signed and dedicated copies of the recent Dork Tower cartoons about Dragonmeet - bought by Angus Abranson for I think £400. Unfortunately muskrat_john didn't make it over this year, so he'll have to wait on the transatlantic post. After that I was pretty shattered and ended up going home for an early night. Didn't even make it to the post-con booze-up today because I just didn't feel up to it.

Later edit - sorry, that was £450 for the cartoons, and it's Angus who'll have to wait, of course, since muskrat_john will be sending them from the USA.

My big disappointment was that all of my sales were Diana and Elvis material - none for Forgotten Futures or Flatland, despite lots of people admiring the plastic cutout characters for Flatland and apparently liking the game concept. Again, it would really help if the game got more publicity, higher ratings on e23, etc., so if you've bought it and liked it please say so. Remember that all proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders.


I've been thinking about the long-term future of Forgotten Futures, and one possibility I'm considering is to make the core rules mechanisms (in the PDF version up to page 37) available on a free basis - anyone would be able to use them for their own games, add additional rules, etc., subject only to an acknowledgement of their source - and to allow anyone to write and sell worldbooks and adventures based on the complete rules (but not to print the entire 100-page rule book unless they want to pay royalties) if they don't want to develop their own game. I won't make money out of this directly, but Forgotten Futures is a reasonably flexible system and it ought to work reasonably well as an "engine" for most types of game, and encourage people to look at my material. At this stage this is still a "something I might do" idea, not a firm proposal, and I'd be grateful for comments.

Here's the blurb for the adventures I'll be running at Dragonmeet this time next month:


SCENARIO TITLE: Charlie's Angles
System: Forgotten Futures AND The Original Flatland Role Playing Game
Time: 10.30-1.30 approx.
Genre: Victorian weirdness
GM: Marcus L. Rowland
Players: 3-6
Venue:
Blurb: When eminent mathematicians start to disappear, the League of Extraordinary Geometers calls for the help of a few adventurers with unusual talents, for a mission into another universe with peculiar properties. But can anything really prepare anyone for an encounter with the chaos of the third dimension? Ready-made characters, 2-3 hours.


SCENARIO TITLE: How I Spent My Summer Vacation
System: Diana, Warrior Princess
Time: 2.30-5pm approx
Genre: Humour
GM: Marcus Rowland
Players: 3-6
Venue: xx
Blurb: Even adventurers need time off occasionally, but it's odd that so many seem to have chosen to take a break in the same resort. Coincidence? A vast conspiracy? Coincidence AND a vast conspiracy? Or just a travel agent without much imagination? Whatever the reason, there's trouble ahead... Ready-made characters, 2-3 hours.


Now all I have to do is finish writing them...

Diana is back in the top ten for the last 30 days at e23; admittedly it's right at the bottom, with a less-than-massive eight sales, but it's there. It seems to be plodding along at about the same level it's had most of the time since I launched it, except for a couple of peaks (the initial rush when I launched it, and another short burst when I launched Elvis...), so presumably only nine other PDFs have outsold it in the last 30 days. If so, Diana is doing better than a thousand-odd other products. I suspect that this is a temporary blip, possibly due to thousands of the most rabid D20 gamers being at Gencon, since the usual bottom number is at least 12 or so. If not this does not bode well for the future of PDF publication...

Having said that, it's cheering that all of my stuff has made it into the top ten, and Diana has done so three times now. Today I got confirmation that e23 will be carrying Forgotten Futures as a freeby, and it'd be interesting to see what happens with that one - but I suspect that free downloads don't go into the charts.

It'd be very nice to see The Original Flatland RPG back in there, since all of its takings go to charity. If you've bought it please give it a rating, that might help to sway undecided buyers; if not, go spend some money!

Here's my first stab at a rationale for Gandhi's Angels - not the details of the show, but the reason why it exists.

You already know the score if you’ve read Diana: Warrior Princess. Imagine our world, seen by someone as remote from us as we are from the ancient Greeks, and with as many gaps in their knowledge. Imagine it converted into a TV series by a production company with the loving attention to historical accuracy we have come to expect from such series.

Like most successful series Diana… has spawned spin-offs. The most popular is Elvis: The Legendary Tours, in which wandering bard Elvis tries to find a way back to his home, the mystic Land of Grace, and overthrow its evil ruler, his half-brother Costello, but Elvis… doesn’t catch all the key advertising demographics as well as it should. In particular, it doesn’t quite meet the intellectual needs of that large percentage of the audience that wants to see scantily-clad women deal out violent justice as graphically as possible, to the accompaniment of machine-gun fire, car chases, and loud explosions. To service this group another show is needed… that show is Gandhi’s Angels.

Does this seem like a reasonable premise for an RPG?

Okay, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that I do go with Gandhi's Angels for the next Dianaverse book...

How does this look as a cover - very compressed jpg, will be better quality for the real thing:

( Gandhi's Angels cover )

Think it needs something more - maybe a helicopter and a couple of explosions - but I think it puts the idea across.

The gun the middle woman is holding has a very Freudian look - obviously that will have to be changed!

Later - now changed