Releasing a Plague

The book PLAGUE CITY, another project from Stuffer Shack Press was released today.  I'm responsible for the layout, PDF production, and some of the art design.  This is an ANY RPG side-plot, essentially that means it's a series of related scenes designed to be shuffled in amongst the events of a primary campaign.  It takes advantage of this "background events" presentation style to attempt to sneak a few things past the PCs.  Ultimately, it's a small mystery with a supernatural cause.  A clever little item coming in at 26 pages.  Of course, everyone on Earth should own a copy of Plague City.

For me personally, it is yet another notch in my belt for being involved in the indie RPG publishing scene.  I'm a cog in the machine! :-)  Seriously though, I'm having a lot of fun and this is step by step leading me to more and more involvement, so it's all good stuff.

On the technical front, I'm continuing to use the free and open source DTP software Scribus.  I've been using the latest stable release version, but I'm going to upgrade to the latest "stable" beta version.  There is a further version under development, but rumours of it's eventual release are now many years old so I'm not going to wait on that.  Just the features of the beta version are enticing enough at present.  I'll be using it to lay out my own upcoming RPG project, an adventure for the Hero Kids™ RPG.  It's an adventure I began writing two years ago, set aside, forgot about, lost due to an external hard drive failure, recovered from the HD this past Summer, and am now finally free to resume work on!  I hope to be releasing it within the next 2-3 weeks so people can check it out on DriveThruRPG before Christmas.  Fingers crossed!

I've been busy...

As it's been quite some time since I've posted anything, here's is an update of the pile of things I've been up to since... October?  last year?  Yeah, I need to post more often...

Novel Writing

Everything looks easy from the outside

I started a novel.  Yep, I'm checking off an item from my bucket list.  I'm writing a science fiction novel and will self-publish it on Amazon and other places online.  I won't subject you to a litany of what my novel is about, but I may devote a future post to talking about this project, as there is some cool (to me at least) setting development I've done which leaves room for additional stories in the future about these and other characters, and some people may find my methods interesting and or useful.

I've always wanted to do this and like a lot of aspiring authors I've had my share of dreams of writing many novels, making mountains of money, and having scores of fans.  Right now, I just want to finish this novel.  I have too many started novels, and no completed ones.   This one is different though, I swear! :-)  I'm further along than any previous novel attempt, I know 90% of the plot, including the ending!  I have almost half of it written.  It's a slow process, far slower than it needs to be, but we Humans do tend to throw obstacles into our own paths.

Board Game Design

prototype board w/ no graphics

I designed and prototyped a board game.  The original concept was created by my 5 year old son.  The basic gist is each player is a Potion Maker, searching the land for ingredients with which to produce various potions.  At the end of the game, the player with the most valuable potions produced wins.  There's a lot more to it with exploration, monsters, equipment, special locations to visit, set collecting, unique player abilities, and so on, but it's a workable one sentence description.

I've played it with my son and with a couple of adults and they all enjoyed it.  There are two levels of play, making it playable in either "kid" or "adult" settings.  I made cards using the free NanDeck software (a powerful program, but the learning curve is somewhat steep).  I'm not sure if I want to publish it though.  It's a fun game, but I'm concerned about spreading myself too thin.  I have an account at The Game Crafter, so I could make it available, but I'm also busy with other projects right now so who knows...

Hero Kids Products

I do intend to produce more Hero Kids material, however... my external HD died recently, taking with it all my working files for everything I was working on last year for Hero Kids.  Yes, you may freely deride me for my lack of data protection.  I was dumb and I can own up to that.  Next time will be different though, I swear! :-)

Anyway, I do have some ideas of what to make next.  For example, I want to produce some adventures to go with Corvids: A Racial Supplement, which has been selling rather well (thank you!) considering it has no supporting adventures and I haven't promoted like I should.  I have other ideas too, but any Hero Kids product has to stand in line for a little while longer until I finish some OTHER other projects...

Customisable and/or Expandable Card Game

Not exactly visually exciting yet...

I'm making a card game with a friend.  It has deck building, CCG like elements, and a handful of design choices we've not seen done in any other game to date.  Hopefully people will like it.  We are planning on professionally publishing it  - probably with a Kickstarter and all the bells and whistles.  We're still at the designing stage though, so it'll be at least a few months before version one is ready for internal play testing and then we're allowing 1-2 years of external, blind play testing with play groups and the further re-designing before we'll even consider publication.  We want this to be a polished and fun game, so we're putting the time in to do it right instead of rushing a half-baked idea to market.  I've designed about 20 or more board and card games over the past 20 years, I even self-published about a dozen of them around 1998-2001, so I'm comfortable in completing this project.  It's my friend's first game though, so he's pretty excited about it all.

Contract Graphic Design

Definitely NOT a staged screenshot... ;-)

Most of my readers won't know this already, but during the tail end of the 1990's I was a graphic design professional, doing all sorts of work for small to medium sized clients - everything from business cards, to brochures, catalogues, books, magazines, comic books, and web sites, I even did corporate branding for a few clients.  Then the "Dot Com Bomb" struck, the small design house I worked at shut down, and I refocused, heading in a different direction for over a decade (ironically enough, co-founding a successful online custom clothing business, but that's a story for another camp fire).

The upshot of this preamble is I have "mad skilz yo" with layout - I am the shizz nizzle and various other silly, self-aggrandising statements.  So, when my good friend and owner of The Stuffer Shack, Chris Stevens asked if I would do graphic design and layout for his new publishing imprint Stuffer Shack Press, I was happy to oblige.  That was about a month ago and now he's willing to talk about it, (check it out, he's offering cash prizes!), so I'm able to show you a little as well.  I'll be talking about this project again, so stay tuned.

They totally should compete, they'd rule!

It's been a really fun project for me as he bravely gave me pretty much free reign to design and reorganise his work, allowing me to bring my creativity to the table.  Obviously, anything I did had to be approved by Chris, but overall I was free to come up with whatever I felt would work best.  It's given me a welcome opportunity to further develop my software skills with Inkscape and Scribus.  I was already pretty good with Inkscape, but in truth only a novice with Scribus.  Luckily DTP skills, even old ones, are very transferable though, and I've been scaling the Scribus learning curve like an Olympic quality mountain goat - er, if mountain goats were competitive climbers in the Olympics that is... You know what I mean!  Of course, I have tonnes of things still to learn, but I'm quite pleased with being able to take my ideas and realise them on the page.

Will Graphic Design for Food?

I can make stuff look great.

This project reminded me I REALLY enjoy working on graphic design.  It's creative, puzzling, and has a zen mantra like aspect to it - basically, it feels like combining artistic painting, Sudoku, detective work, and meditation into a single activity.  Hey, that's what it feels like to ME, okay?  Back off and get your own sammich! :-)  My point is, I like doing it, and without being boastful I think I'm pretty good at it.  So, if anyone out there in internet-land is looking to take their Word docs, napkin scribbles, or whatever and turn them into something professionally publishable, hit me up and we can talk turkey, or some other meat if turkey's not your thing.  I can produce in multiple styles, and I have at least one very recent reference for RPG graphic design I've done for someone other than myself.

An Endless Supply of Adventures for Hero Kids

HK Monster Compendium

Hi roleplaying fans, I've been out of touch for the last few months, but thankfully I've just been busy doing a bunch of other things, not actually having a difficult time.  One of my blog readers, Josiah approached me with a wonderful tool he crafted for use with the Hero Kids - Fantasy Expansion - Monster Compendium inspiring me to make this blog post.

Josiah has compiled all the monsters from the compendium, assigned them relative challenge ratings, and cross-referenced them by region or terrain to create a system for randomly generating an encounter's-worth of monsters, adjusted to match both the area you're in, the number of players in your party, and the difficulty you're looking for - and he has produced it as an automated Excel spreadsheet and a PDF of random dice tables for those who want to manually roll.  Josiah has generously allowed me to present this delightful tool on my blog.  He calls it a Monster List, but as you'll quickly find out, it is so much more powerful than that!  By pairing up this encounter generation system with Justin's Monster Compendium, you can now effortlessly create any number of monster encounters for your Hero Kids games.

Josiah's Monster List - Excel

Josiah's Monster List - PDF

The Monster List Encounter Generator in Action
I believe this system is so robust it can create the foundation for a whole adventure as well.  To prove this, and to satisfy my gleeful exuberance for Josiah's extremely cool encounter tables, I'm going to show right here how easy it is to use and how it's output can then be fleshed out into a full fledged adventure.  I will assume two Heroes for my adventure, thus each encounter needs 8 points of Monsters.  Also, I've decided my adventure will have five encounters with varying location types to mix things up.

• Encounter One will start with an "Any" location.  I roll on the chart until I meet or exceed 8 points of Monsters.  I get a Brigand Archer (3 pts), and a Knight Blaggard (5 pts).
• Encounter Two is in a Forest, giving me a Weasel Warrior (4 pts), Hissing Snake (2 pts), and a Coot (5 pts).
• Encounter Three moves into the Mountains with a Tengu Slinger (3 pts), Tengu Groundling (2 pts), and a Tengu Archer (4 pts).
• Encounter Four takes place in a Castle, so we are facing a Guard (4 pts), and two Guard Nightwatch (2 pts each).
• Encounter Five is also in the Castle and is the Big Boss showdown, so we're upping the points total to 13, and our opponents are a Guard Sharpshooter (4 pts), two Guard Nightwatch (2 pts each), a Guard (4 pts), and a Guard Spear Bearer (3 pts).

All of this is just a skeletal framework for an adventure though, now we need a story to hang it on and some story-based motivations to entice the players to take part in it.  So let's spin a story to tie this together...

The Duke's Family Jewels

A Hero Kids adventure for two players

The players are approached by the local Duke who tells you that a handful of days ago a number of priceless family heirloom jewellery were stolen from his manor.  He is fairly certain these criminals were hired by a larger unknown group as several other Noble's manor houses in the area were robbed at the same time and none of the thieves have been apprehended, nor have the stolen goods shown up anywhere for sale.  If you can find out where this controlling group is located, the affected Nobles will reward you handsomely.

The Rusty Nail - inequity on tap

All the Duke knows is the pair of thieves whom he suspects stole from him are known to frequent "The Rusty Nail", a local eatery near the lumber mills and carpentry workshops.  Once the players reach The Rusty Nail they immediately recognise them sitting at a table, one is a man known to have no reputable income and be good with a bow, and a Knight who recently moved into the area and has done nothing every day but drink and boast of the many conquests he's had - elsewhere.  The situation will quickly turn into a fight should the Heroes approach them.  After defeating them, the Knight Blaggard confesses he works with a large group of thieves based in an abandoned keep in the mountains north of the forest surrounding this town.  If the players are more lethal in how they deal with combat encounters, this information can be discovered from a letter in the Knight's clothing.

Journeying through the forest towards the mountains, the party is beset upon by a Coot, his pet snake, and his Weasel Warrior companion.  They aren't associated with the thieves, but they aren't friendly to anyone travelling through "their" woods either.  Defeating them doesn't provide any useful information, although some food or healing potions might be suitable loot.  If the players are KO'd by the Coot and his companions, they will awaken at the edge of the forest near the mountains, minus any food or healing potions and with a note pinned to their chest warning them to stay out of the forest.

I swear I saw something moving up ahead...

Leaving the forest behind, the party travels up into the mountains in search of the abandoned keep.  The PCs have never personally been there, so they aren't completely certain of it's location.  If you'd like to introduce some non-combat skill use, you can have the players make tracking skill rolls at a difficulty of 5 or 6; success allows them to skip Encounter Three and arrive at the Keep, while failure results in them being attacked by a band of Tengu who are patrolling their territory.  Defeating them could have two different results - you could simply beat them and gain some loot and possibly directions to the abandoned keep, or you could make them submit to you and agree to assist in storming the keep.

If the Tengu join forces with the Heroes, then they will conduct the advance attack on the keep, allowing the players to skip Encounter Four and go straight for the leaders of the whole thieves organisation.  If the Heroes reach the keep on their own, they are faced with a small stone keep whose gatehouse tower has collapsed long ago, leaving a simple walled courtyard with essentially a large archway as the entrance.  In the courtyard is a two story keep which has its upper story half ruined, leaving just the ground floor usable by the thieves.  The courtyard itself is guarded by two Nightwatch Guards and their Guard leader.  Obviously, they won't welcome you with open arms...

Once this was a nice place I'm sure.

Once the Heroes are past the courtyard they are faced with a stone keep which is essentially just a great hall with stairs leading up to the mostly ruined second floor.  Inside, next to a cooking fire is the leader of the organisation, a Guard Sharpshooter, his Guard Spear Bearer companion, and the second shift of courtyard guards in the form of two Nightwatch Guards and their Guard leader.  Upon defeating them, the Heroes will discover not only the missing jewellery from their Nobleman patron, but the stolen valuables of six other Noble families of the surrounding countryside and a journal listing the contacts for buyers for all of these goods who apparently are wealthy Nobles from a neighbouring kingdom.  Returning home with all of this will see the Nobleman very appreciative, possibly even setting up a valuable contact among the local nobility who could be a source of further adventures.

There you have it, add in a few maps, npc names, and other such details and you have a nice little adventure for two players, courtesy of Justin's Monster Compendium and Josiah's Encounter Generator.  All you need to do is spin a plausible yarn to connect the dots so to speak!  Try it yourself, you'll have a blast coming up with explanations for each of your encounter results.