Girls' Heist Out - The Designer Experience

One of the best ways to connect with backers is to offer unique rewards. This can be a tricky part of a Kickstarter, because unique often means higher overhead or delving into additional logistics problems. Early wave Kickstarters were awash in T-shirts, mugs and other traditional promotional items. I didn't do any of those because, quite frankly, there are still some Kickstarters I'm waiting on years after the fact that never got off the ground because that stuff got underfoot. 

I considered talking to the companies I design for to offer PDF packages of the games I've done as rewards. I decided against it for a few reasons. Not everyone would go along with it easily. It seemed counter productive to talk about breaking into comics but reward people with RPG products. Most of the people supporting the Kickstarter likely already own whatever work I've done that they want to own. My licensed work might be a big draw but could get wrapped up in legal issues. Ultimately, much of the work I've done as a designer I don't completely own, which is why I'm doing a creator owned comic in the first place.

But my time, on the other hand...  my time is something that I do own. What my rewards didn't have were that elusive experience one where a backers gets to do something few people rarely get to do. How often do you get a chance to play a game with someone that's made something for the game? The opportunity usually only comes at a convention once or twice a year, if you luck into tickets for the event. Why not offer the people who keep asking how to play Fate or Firefly a chance to see how the pros do it? 

Backers have an opportunity to play in a game that I run over Skype or Hangout which is pretty cool. You can pick from any game that I've worked on in the past fifteen years of my design career. Big or small. Licensed or original. The idea started as a reward tier for international backers who wanted to get a little more than just the digital basics but more and more people have asked me about this reward than any of the others. Outside of the Ella Fitzgerald, which I still can't believe someone took, it's the most unique reward I have for the project, because it offers me as the reward directly.

There are opportunities within these opportunities. The big one is that for backers near me, which the overwhelming majority of my backers are, I'm happy to set up a time and place to run the game in person. Beyond just playing Shadowrun or CAMELOT Trigger, I rarely get a chance to talk design and theory in person and I love doing it. It's why I enjoy hosting D&D&D events at 42 Ale House. Book one of these sessions and you have me as a resource for GM advice, game structure and whatever else you might want to talk about relating to RPGs. 

It's also one of the few rewards you can really share comfortably. Whether that means splitting the cost between your players (which comes out to about what you'd spend for a night at the movies) or picking it up as a gift for your spouse who doesn't get out to game as much anymore.

I'm excited about all the rewards I have to offer, but this one intrigued me the most. Con games are like Christmas presents to me. The backers who book my time and who want to see more of my work make me feel a little like Santa Claus.

Girls' Heist Out runs for the next two weeks on Kickstarter. I hope to see you there.

Save Game - The Outline

I submitted my outline for Save Game to Evil Hat. How much of the outline survives to the end is pretty flexible, especially once words start pouring out and mechanics are solidified. My goal is to keep Save Game split evenly between mechanics, setting and adventure, but once I carve out the text we'll see how well that split maintains.

The outline I submitted is a bit more detailed with bits of text, but this should provide a good tease for where I'm going. Full outline after the jump!

Save Game - The Ingredients

With the release of Venture City Stories this week, the Fate Patreon experiment begins to bear fruit. My project, Save Game, is moving forward, so I thought another series of development blogs would be in order.

What's going into the pot this time?

Tron: The grandaddy of pop-culture inside the computer fantasy. It's a bit of a mixed bag between the original, the sequel/reboot (requel?) and the animated series, but it's got a lot of great ideas that still resonate today. 

Wreck It-Ralph: This love letter to video games put the idea of video game heroes coming together into the public consciousness. It also mashed up video game genres in fun ways. I want the heroes to deal with problems they aren't used to in the safety of their own game. they also did a lot of clever references and Easter eggs, which should be evident as setting details come out.

ICONS: This excellent supers game has a fun random power generation engine that compels the player to come up with a reason to link the randomly rolled powers. When I saw some combinations, I immediately thought of classic video game heroes that had really odd collections of abilities. You've got a surfboard and you're a ninja? Makes sense. You are an angry hockey player with a laser guitar? Obviously. You're a plumber who can shapeshift, jump really high and hurl fireballs? Welcome aboard! Sounds like a group of players to me!

Lord of the Rings: When I originally  envisioned the setting, I was thinking of it in superhero terms. But reframing it as an epic quest not only fit the video game paradigm, but also let me focus on the Glitch, the main bad guy. Rather than a battle against other characters, it became protecting home from the invaders. It also explained why the most well-known characters aren't fighting this battle - they blew it.

NES: I needed to pick a specific timeframe of video games because that's a pretty broad category to cover in 15,000 words. The 8-bit era was when I remember characters having personality on a regular basis rather than only the breakout stars. I'd love to see the artwork done in 8-bit style for a unique visual look. In theory, there are other islands on the Sea of Information for 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit versions. I don't think I'll be able to go into much detail, but I do know that the same character's different versions are distinct - and they squabble like family.


Mystery Men: The odd combinations of powers and the lack of famous video game characters reminds me this is a story of unlikely heroes. There are hundreds of characters that were made. This is their chance to shine, as the last defenders of their home, with everyone else unwilling or unable to do anything. I think a lot of groups will have fun playing knock-off versions of popular characters, heroes who think they are more popular than they really are or has-beens who never thought they'd get a chance to save the world.

That's what's currently bubbling in the pot. Thanks for taking the time to read this first entry. If there's anything you'd like to see in one of these entries, feel free to comment or Tweet me at @robowieland.

CAMELOT Trigger - Hostage Armour & Patchwork Knights

We are almost to the end of the Fate Core Kickstarter. In case you haven't heard, the final stretch goal is an adaptation of the awesome Dresden Files RPG for the Fate Accelerated Edition. If you haven't backed the Kickstarter yet, you should consider it, because you get an insane value for $10. My contribution is just one part. Evil Hat has been awesome to work with and I hope to get to work with them again soon, hopefully on  the other projects the Kickstarter unlocked.

After the jump I include more cut text from the backer draft. The information deals with the Petty Barons of Jupiter and the knights of the Saturnine Senate. If you have any feedback, suggestions, compliments or complaints, leave them here, the Fate Core G+ group, or contact me @robowieland on Twitter.

CAMELOT Trigger - PASTAC

Response to CAMELOT Trigger has been great. We've gotten a lot of good feedback from backers who were excited from the word go, as well as quite a few who came around to enjoying the setting after reading the full release. I look forward to hearing actual play reports and additional suggestions on how to make things cooler. Hearing backers discuss using the armour mechanics for everything from Eclipse Phase to Rifts is awesome. Thank you all once again for your support. Take to your favorite social media to spread the love for FATE Core and CAMELOT Trigger in the final week of the Kickstarter.

As promised, this is the first blog entry featuring material cut from the general release. Tom Cadorette was my editor on CAMELOT Trigger. Nothing makes a writer feel better than "This is great, but we have to cut it for space." The project was originally 10,000 words but Fred opened up the word count to range between 10,000 and 15,000 words. It was enthusiasm for these blogs that pushed me to hit that upper limit, and I even ended up going a bit over. Items were also cut to make room for some examples of mechanics, so I have a few of these entries planned to highlight some additional elements to bring to your CAMELOT Trigger game. Consider these additional plot hooks to inspire.

After the jump, I talk about PASTAC, an organization that thinks Earth needs to return to the way it was before technology. I wanted a reason for armour to mix against the visual of old castles and carts. PASTAC was born of that desire. The name came from Tom's suggestion, and it solves a unique problem with the setting.

Camelot Trigger is GO!

The bad news is that I won't be able to post the previews I originally intended.  The good news is that it's because the backer draft of CAMELOT Trigger was released! I'm so excited to get it out to everyone and get some feedback. This draft went through a few rounds of edits, but I hope from the 7000(!) backers to catch more mistakes and suggest additional edits for clarity.

Please leave your comments here, on the FATE Core G+ group, or in the Kickstarter comments.

Next week, I'll post some of the stuff that was cut for space that digs a little deeper in the setting. Until then, read, enjoy and make haste to armour launch!

FATE Core - In Nomine Hack:The Basics

I posted a question to the Fate Core Google Community to keep my busy while CAMELOT Trigger is in edits. After a spirited discussion, I decided to take on one of Those Games Where You Love The setting But Hate The System. The In Nomine books by Steve Jackson hold a special place in my heart. The right mix of drama, humor and horror. But the system was just horror to me. I tried running the game a few times and the story never got a grip because of the rules.

This began as a DFRPG hack with the help of my friend and awesome In Nomine GM Brent. He crafted a game that his players still remember fondly to this day, which is no mean feat with the D666 system. This is meant to get the feel of the fiction right rather than convert the mechanics. Although, the mechanics that I did like I did try to save.

If you're just here for CAMELOT Trigger, I hope to have news soon. Otherwise, check out the jump for the first part of the hack. If you want me continue, please let me know here, on the G+ community, or

CAMELOT Trigger - The Peril of Sir Malcolm

The important points of the playtest:

• The new shutdown rules work well.  Having the opponent choose to hit a system for more stress relief really digs in some hard choices.
• Contests are fun to run, especially when someone spends a Fate point to force a tie.
• Still unhappy with how siege armours feel. They work okay but not quite the 'boss monster' feel I want.
• Boosts are fun - ties mean something now.
• Having someone play a character is a great way to find typos on their character sheet.
• Creating the settlement H377 on the fly was great. Thanks Steven!
• Watching a player new to FATE cook up their first aspect is fun. 

More information about the scenario after the jump. As always, drop me a line in the comments or @robowieland to discuss.

CAMELOT Trigger - A Run Through The Wyrmgates

The next draft is finishing completion. I thought I'd take this entry to talk about how the knights travel around our solar system.

The Wyrmgates are jumpgates built at each of the major inhabited planets in the system. They stretch from Mercury to Saturn, each a different color. They were built in the style of giant dragon heads. To travel through the gate a knight steps through the dragon's mouth into a strange dimension known as The Breach.

MerLN uploaded himself to the Wyrmgates as a measure to control access. As long as he is in control, MerGN-A can't use them. MerLN often speaks with knights during their time in The Breach, learning about humanity as best he can.

After the jump, let's about the planets in the setting. We're entering Spoiler Territory here, so if you want to save yourself for when the full draft hits, you make want to turn back now and skip out of the comments. Keep following my posts on Twitter @robowieland and on the Fate Core G+ community. Once again, thanks to everyone who has shown their love for the setting.

CAMELOT Trigger - Armour Aspects?

The manuscript is currently working its way through rewrites and edits. One of the areas currently under debate is whether or not armour should have Aspects.

Currently, armour is built entirely of stunts. A few readers have expressed wanting a better connection with their armour though an aspect or two on the armour itself. I feel like once players get a chance to build armours and flavor systems, they will have a good connection.

I'm still leaning towards no Aspect on the armour. Between the five aspects of each character, scene aspects and the ones players drop by creating advantage, I'm afraid that any flavor created by the Aspect would get lost in the shuffle. Most players are going to have high concepts they can use in battle reliably. If a player wants an aspect like My Father's Armour, having that come up in the phase trio seems like the best place to do it.

What do you think?

CAMELOT Trigger - Heraldry

While I wait for CAMELOT Trigger to come back from the editor, I thought this would be a good time to talk about some elements of the setting.

Heraldry is important to knights. Colors, symbols and patterns have important meaning about who the knight is, where he falls in his household and what he's accomplished.

A blog entry isn't big enough to go into the meanings of everything, but a quick Google search can lead down a rabbit hole. In addition to the basic symbols above, there are animals whose meaning is different depending on their positioning. The crest on the shield was how you let someone know who you were when you met them on the field.

There are, of course, symbols for the planets as well:

Mixing these in with the classic symbols gives a distinct flavor to the knights of the setting. Arthur's armour, Calibur-N, featured the Earth symbol with each quadrant filled with an allied planet's symbol. Mars in the lower right corner, Venus in the upper left, closest to his heart.

When making a knight for CAMELOT Trigger, take a moment to design your crest. You can do it even if you are a terrible artist. Original knights painted their crest on their shield. A CAMELOT Trigger knight has a huge canvas in her armour. The colors and patterns might run across the whole of the armour, rather than a shield or a shoulder joint.

Night's Black Agents - Double Tap Outline

Now that the first draft of CAMELOT Trigger is away at Evil Hat HQ, I can talk about my next project.

Night's Black Agents combines to great tastes that go together - vampires and spies. Anyone who knows me will tell you how much I love these things. Ken Hite, Gaming Mastermind, brought them together in the simple genius of my favorite GUMSHOE game.

He also posted the outline for Double Tap, the first supplement to the game. I have three sections I'm cleared to talk about. I will be writing the expanded skills section, which includes suggestions for how to use skill spend to be even more badass than usual. I will expand my Adaptive Tradecraft article with more neat in the field tricks for tracking vampires and their minions. And I will be discussing how to run Night's Black Agents for a solo agent, since Bond and Bourne rarely roll with backup.

He's taking suggestions on the Pelgrane site. I'll open this entry to any questions or comments I might be able to answer.

CAMELOT Trigger - MerGN-A

Today gives you two bonus looks in one. MerGN-A is the leader of the threat looming over the Solar system. After the jump there's her story, her stats, and the stats for the massive Medusa Moon she uses in battle. This photo was my inspiration:

Imagine this floating toward your armour...

The first draft is nearly complete. Thanks once again to everyone for your discussion and excitement on the project. Have a good holiday and we'll see you next week.

CAMELOT Trigger - Megatron, Voltron and Unicron Walk Into A Bar...

The first draft of the mecha rules look well in hand. I'm excited to get them out so people can really fold, spindle and mutilate them. The enthusiastic response to the setting has fueled my creative fires, and I thank you for your anticipation. Since starting the blog, the biggest questions I've seen are "Can you do this kind of mech?" Let's look at the top three requests.

Transformer: Most of the legwork on this one has been done to me thanks to the Dresden Files RPG. There is an internal System that offers a variable split in Skills at the cost of a Fate Point. You can turn a Great Melee into a Good Melee/Average Zeal, a Fair Melee/Fair Blast, and so on. You must pick one Skill that must always be part of the mix.

Combiner: Choose 'Combination Socket' as one of your Systems. When you combine with other mechs that have the right Combination Socket System, the following occurs:

• The Combined Form gets it own Stress Track - one box for every mech part of the combined form.
• It gets its own set of Consequences. If the Combined Form takes Consequences, they must be divided up between the individual mechs when the Combined Form goes away.
• It also gets an additional Mild Consequence for every pair of Combination Socket Systems in the Combined Form.
• The pilots may chose at the time of Combination if they want to keep their own initiative or take the average initiative and all act on the same turn.
• The Combined Form gets an action for each active pilot inside. Each pilot may use a Skill or system once in a turn.

Manowar: The Manowar is how to do the type of mechs that are bigger than the standard mech. It's built like a Combined Form, except it always stays in that form. The bigger they are, though...

• The Manowar Form gets it own Stress Track - one box for every part of the Manowar Form.
• The Manowar Form gets an additional Mild Consequence for every pair of Massive Superstructure Systems in the form.
• The Manowar Form always goes on Mediocre.
• The Manowar Form takes a number of actions equal to the number of parts in its construction. Systems may only be used once per turn, but multiple systems of the same type may be built into different parts.

You want an example of a Manowar? Check back in on Friday for an introduction to MerGN-A, the literal Big Bad of CAMELOT Trigger!

In the meantime, feel free to leave comments, check out the Fate Core community on G+ or drop me a line on Twitter @robowieland. Don't forget to use #camelottrigger !

CAMELOT Trigger - Fellow Travellers

I have a wedding this weekend, so my time to work on the setting is limited. This does give me the opportunity to talk about the other settings and what I love about each of them.

J.R. Blackwell's Court/Ship
Social mechanics flow effortlessly in FATE. I love that the system makes trash talking just as dramatic important as fighting. This setting will offer some great ideas on how to run games where a sharp tongue is more deadly than a sword.

Brian Engard's Wild Blue
I love Westerns. I love superheroes. And I love fantasy games that are set outside of the pseudo-medieval Tolkien paradigm.

Mark Diaz Truman's Timeworks

As much as I want to get back to work with Mark on REDACTED, I want to see his take on time travel even more. Time travel is a ripe genre for RPGs. Even though The Coriolis Defect didn’t fund, I’m still excited to see what Mark does with one of the most challenging ideas in gaming.

Jason Morningstar's Fight Fire
Jason is the super-genius behind Fiasco, which is one of those rare games that hits the table and always creates memorable stories. Anything he does is work reading. I also love that modern designers are willing to push themselves out of genres that are focused on fighting.

Filamena Young's White Picket Witches
The evolution of the modern supernatural genre is fun to watch. Shows like Supernatural don't get a lot of respect even though they are carrying the torch of X-Files and Buffy. This game looks like a fun balance between soap opera and supernatural drama, which as anyone that's played Vampire with me know me how much I love that blend.

John Rogers' CrimeWorld
Besides gracing my Leverage blog with an interview, John knows a thing or two about clever capers. Since so many RPGs have busting into places for treasure as part of their mission statement, this segment will go a long way even outside the original genre.

Shoshana Kessock's No Exit
FATE games have a reputation for being big, loud and heroic. This looks like it's going to be none of those. There's a clamor for "gritty" FATE games and this looks like a great place to start.

Sarah Newton's Burn Shift
Most post-apocalyptic games are about wallowing in the destruction of second (and possibly final) dark age. The appeal to gamers is obvious, since there are a lot of parallels to the classic setting for fantasy game. But a game focused on rebuilding? That's awesome.

Brennan Taylor's Fantasy Adventure
Bulldogs is the favorite FATE version at our table. Fantasy is the most popular genre in tabletop gaming and this looks more like a Grey Mouser tale than a D&D riff.

Thanks to you, CAMELOT Trigger is GO! But the battle rages on. Tell your friends to back the Kickstarter you you can see all of these fine settings in print!

CAMELOT Trigger - The Ingredients

At the behest of Fred Hicks and inspired by some of the other enthusiastic writers for the FATE Core stretch goals, I'm putting up some design blogs about the game. I can't promise keen designer insight or FATE system wonkery, but I'll do what I can to entertain.

So, to start, let's look at my inspirations for CAMELOT Trigger.

Battletech: This game is the gateway to a love of big stompy robots for so many people. For me, the real lure was the Battletech Center in nearby Chicago. It was a LAN party before LANs where you paid to sit in a simulator of a mech with all the buttons, switches and controls at hand. The original neo-feudal setting was also something I loved. This was where I pulled the idea of knights in mecha.

Pendragon: You ever have one of those albums that everyone tells you to should listen to and when you finally you feel like time travelling because you should have picked it up after the first friend's recommendation. That was Pendragon. Virtues and Passions are fascinating and flavorful mechanics. The dynastic game is also amazing and is one of those campaigns I wish I had the time and patience to run.

Mekton: My friend Deacon and I would sit around and design dozens of mechs for this game. He was a huge Robotech nerd. His love of big stompy robots was infectious, but I always had more fun running pilots through their life path. The mechs in this game a bit more anime than walking tank, but I want to make something he could sit down with and crank out some fun robots to blow up today.

The Once and Future King: This was my first exposure to Arthurian legend in high school thanks to my friend Jeff. It was mythic, funny and irreverent enough to make me seek out the original legends. I might even go so far at to prefer it to Lord of the Rings, but my taste in fantasy is not the usual. While I want to mess with Arthurian myth, I still want to be respectful of it.

Camelot 3000: This is one of those Iron Age comics that straddles the line between silly and serious. But it has some neat takes on elements of the myth and clearly does so out of love.

That's what's currently bubbling in the pot, . Thanks for taking the time to read this first entry. If there's anything you'd like to see in one of these entries, feel free to leave a comment or Tweet me at @robowieland.