Projects Update

Here's a general update on what I'm working on and what stage it's at presently.

Author

Heroism and Other Lies

I honestly expected Episode 101 to be out by now. However, my editor has been held up due to unforeseen circumstances. I am hoping to have the edits before the end of the month, and then with my edits in hand it shouldn't be long before I can release the final product.

I have Episodes 2-4 written. Two will be sent to editing soon, but I'm still going to work to make some more revisions on 3 and 4 before sending them.

I have begun working on Episode 5.

Short Stories

I am working on two different short stories. The first is for an anthology that is being published in honor of Carrie Fisher. The proceeds of the sales will go to a charity supporting those with bipolar disorder.

Game Master

Toybox

By far my biggest creative focus right now is gearing up for my upcoming Toybox campaign. This campaign utilizes a tabletop game system of my own design and takes place in a setting heavily inspired by/based on Monte Cook Games' Numenera. While the setting is not directly the same as the Ninth World, it does have many of the same creatures and essential elements of it.

I'm hoping to post session summaries up here in story-form as the campaign progresses, but we'll see how that goes.

The first Toybox session will be January 26th-a little more than a week away-and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Looking Glass Moon

My surreal sci-fi setting for Cypher System isn't getting much attention at the moment. I've dropped the ball on this while focusing on other projects. I'm considering dropping this project altogether. However, if I do continue with it, I will probably roll out the setting incrementally, with various smaller books focusing on specific elements or parts of the setting rather than all at once in a huge volume. This way people can pick and choose the parts of Looking Glass Moon that they want to use, while choosing to overlook the rest.

Islands of Peril

I have recently been thinking about the Instant Adventures provided in Monte Cook Games' Weird Discoveries (Numenera) and Strange Revelations (The Strange), and I have to say that I like the format.

My first instinct was that the format of having the ability to pick up and play a session of Numenera (or really any RPG that I enjoy) without any prep seemed like an awesome idea with a lot of potential. Looking at some of the adventures, they seemed to flow nicely and have a format that played in with Node-based design, which I've mentioned in the past as something that makes interesting game sessions.

My second thought, after running one or two of these, was that these adventures are very short in comparison to what I normally think of when I think of running an RPG adventure. Not to mention that the ones I ran seemed pretty "easy" too.

This was disappointing to me, until I really thought about it. The intro to the adventures is pretty clear. They aren't trying to take the place of full RPG adventures. They're trying to fit, instead, into the slot that might be held by board games. To a degree, they're designed to be quicker and simpler. They're designed with the idea that the players may not be familiar with the system in mind.

This intrigued me as a way of introducing people who aren't familiar with tabletop RPGs to the hobby, which is something I think these sorts of adventures would do very well.

In my thinking about these sorts of adventures, I began to consider making one myself (and what that adventure might look like). One turned into more than one, and thus Islands of Peril was born.

Another thing that interested me was that the adventures in Weird Discoveries mention links to other adventures in the book, in a way that one story can lead to others. In this way, if you're playing with the same (or an overlapping) group of players, they can experience some interesting connections between their adventures. The problem that I had with it is that these adventures assume that the PCs never advance. They never gain new abilities (which sort of makes sense for the pick-up-and-play nature of the game.) In fact, in general it seems to me that there are very few cypher system adventures geared towards characters beyond Tier 1.

It is my hope to unveil 8 adventures in the Islands of Peril series which can be played stand-alone or as a linked campaign which takes the characters from Tier 1 all the way to Tier 6.

I have the skeleton of the first adventure completed, and look forward to working on the next seven.

Theme: Amnesia

Considering that lately two of my projects involve complete amnesia as a major starting plot point, I figured it might be good to talk about amnesia and why I like using it as a device, as well as some of the issues with it.


Toybox
In my upcoming Toybox campaign, using a system of my own design, the player characters will wake up with no knowledge of who they are or how they came to be in the mysterious location where they start.


Looking Glass Moon
In the Looking Glass Moon setting, the default for player characters is that they are humans that have come from another world. These humans arrive with no knowledge of the setting of Looking Glass Moon other than the sense that things are very wrong. The people of the setting are aware of this issue and provide some guidance, but there's much that has to be learned by the characters themselves.


1. Motivation
Some players are very good at finding things to motivate their character. Others are less so. Starting out with amnesia provides an automatic motive for your character: Find out who I am.


In my Toybox campaign, I expect some of this will revolve around discovering the past and putting together the pieces of how the players got to where they are. This mystery is inherent and different clues can lead the players down varying paths to more answers.


In Looking Glass Moon, there's no apparent way for the player characters to return to where they came from, so determining who they are isn't so much about the past. Instead, Looking Glass Moon focuses on how characters will choose to fit into the world where the story is taking place, and who they are as people. Are they kind? Are they selfish? What do they care about? The setting will test all of these things, especially if the players travel on the "Path of Truth", a literal and symbolic journey that teaches the players more about the world and about themselves.


2. Setting Discovery
Tabletop games often focus a lot on exploration. Still, characters are generally a product of their setting and are expected to know certain things about it. Having a player start their character with amnesia allows the player and the character to explore the world together, with everything being new. In this way, a GM can inspire wonder and surprise through things that would be less wondrous to natives to the setting.


3. Simplicity
While some players like writing out long complex backstories for characters, others find the process tedious. Starting a character with amnesia is a way to simplify the process by stopping this requirement.


A warning: there is a danger with this that players will become more focused on the game as a game. If that's the sort of thing you want to encourage, it's fine. However, if it isn't, then it is important to encourage the players (in advance of the game as well as through it) to focus on their character's personality and, as the game develops, their motivations all the more because of their lack of backstory.


4. GM Control/Adaptability
I'm a big supporter of working in player backstories in campaigns. However, it's not always easy to do. Especially if players form their backstories independently and they contain widely disparate events taking place in far separated parts of the setting. When characters have amnesia, the GM has control over their backstories and, therefore, can work in details from them more easily and relevantly as the story progresses.


A warning: One of the advantages of working in backstories is that they help the players feel ownership over the game. By inventing the backstories for the players, you're taking some of this ownership from them. If you are going to do this, it is important to establish a connection between the player and their character's past. This might be done through introducing NPCs the player/character like from their past, or other plotlines that make the player excited when they can learn new things about who their character used to be.


What are your thoughts on amnesia as a storytelling device, either in RPGs or in written fiction?

Looking Glass Moon: An Explaination

Invisible Sun promotional image by Matt Stawicki

I've mentioned Looking Glass Moon on here a couple times, but I haven't really talked much about it. If you've purchased either of my adventures, or if you've looked at the Upcoming page on this blog, then you may have seen that Looking Glass Moon is a surreal science fiction setting inspired by Invisible Sun and designed for Cypher System. I'd like to talk a little more about it.

Looking Glass Moon

Looking Glass Moon is primarily based around a planet and it's collection of eight moons. Each moon is a particularly unique environment, and each moon holds pieces of the puzzling truth of the universe.


The Looking Glass Moon, Miravis, the namesake of the game, bears a flat, silvery, and reflective surface that appears to be devoid of life. However, push against the surface, and you will find that you pass right through. On the other side, metropolitan cities, grown from the moon itself, thrive with life and civilization.


Players take the roles of Righthanders (most people who are natural born to the setting are left-handed). These are people who come to the world of the Looking Glass moon through an odd mirrored cube. They have no memory of where they came from, or of anything else before their arrival, only that it was somewhere else, somewhere very different than this place.


A cycle has been found-a way of repetitively moving through the spheres of the planetary system-through which one can learn more about the universe. In this way, one can learn varying Truths which are expanded on one's journey. The more one learns about a Truth, the more that Truth can be bent, granting strange and often mighty powers. This is not a path; it bears no beginning nor end. It can be begun at any point along it, and those who wish to gain the most of it, those who want to solve the mysteries of the universe, must continue to circle around over and over again. As a moon revolves around it's planet, and the planet revolves around its sun which revolves within its galaxy, so too do those who follow the cycle revolve around the Truth in never ending loops.

Invisible Sun

I was there at GenCon this year when Monte Cook Games announced it's new project, Invisible Sun. I missed the announcement, but I did look it up when they posted the video of the announcement. From the get-go, I felt like Monte Cook games had reached into my head and taken ideas I'd been thinking about for a while. Everything from the broad idea of having a game that engaged players when the session wasn't going on to having ways for players to be absent from the game and for session to still happen to a world built up on secrets that have to be solved even right down to the box. All of this was stuff I'd been considering in an earlier version of what would eventually become my Toybox project.


When the kickstarter for Invisible Sun launched, I watched it avidly. There were a lot of things about it that I felt captivated by, and I read through every update.  Admittedly, there were some things I was disappointed by. Some of my play is online and in my regular group, I have a player who comes in digitally. An absence of a digital play option was, is, more than a little disappointing, given that it means I can't really play with some of my more involved players. The price is also a bit restrictive. On the kickstarter, it was $200 for the base set, and $500 for one of everything. I had a hard time striving to justify the $200, and as a completionist, I have a hard time accepting a lower level when I know that a higher one exists.


Note that I'm not saying the product isn't worth the price. If you take a look at everything that's included, I'm sure that at either level you definitely get your money's worth. It's just also pretty hard for me to spend that much on an RPG, especially one I can't play with some of my regular players, all in one go. I do wish that they had come out with a version that was digital and slightly cheaper (maybe $100 for the base set and $250 for the set with everything but digital), even if it didn't provide access to 100% of the secrets that the physical set had.

Looking Glass Moon's Inception

I had been working on preparing The Machine God's Temple for release through Cypher Creator when the Invisible Sun kickstarter was running. As I moved on from that to working on The Wonder Vault Heist, I was thinking about other potential Cypher products that I could design. Thinking of how there were many MCG fans who were feeling sort of the way that I was about Invisible Sun, I realized there might be people interested in a somewhat similar setting for Cypher.


The idea was infectious and I began thinking through the hurdles immediately. To begin with, I was thinking with something of an 'opposite' type connection, and I'd thought of using a moon instead of a sun as the central base of my setting. Thus, the moon part. Then, I began thinking about how the moon wasn't really an 'opposite' of a sun, but how it just reflected it's light. Since I'd already been thinking about surreal fantasy, it was only a short jaunt past Wonderland to get the idea of calling it Looking Glass Moon.

Science Fiction Vs Fantasy

Invisible Sun is a Surreal Fantasy RPG, so that was what I was trying to make when I started with Looking Glass Moon. However, the further I got into working on the project, the more I realized that it was much more Sci-Fi than Fantasy. The role of space and travel through it was important in my setting. The idea of moons and planets and orbits was important in my setting. Overall, while the setting of Looking Glass Moon still captures a very surreal feel and shares many elements with Invisible Sun, it definitely has more in common with science fiction than it does with fantasy.


And embracing that has really helped as I've been going through writing the draft. There are many ideas that work very well within that genre that wouldn't have worked as well in Fantasy. I feel that I am able to do more unique surreal things to fit within Looking Glass Moon, and that the pieces just fit together better than they would otherwise.


On top of that, it does create more uniqueness to the product and makes it more different from Invisible Sun. While I feel that the two still share many core elements, I think that the paths I've gone down make my product unique in its own right and as through I am adding something useful to the masses of existing material, rather than just imitating something else.

Only the Paranoid Survive

I know, I was supposed to post yesterday and I missed it. But it was for a good reason(s), I promise.

Review: Paranoia: [Your Security Clearance is Not High Enough For the Title of This Adventure]

A few years ago, I kickstarted a new version of the slapstick dystopian dark humor RPG, Paranoia. Paranoia takes place in a future setting called Alpha Complex, which was built to save humanity from [REDACTED]. Now everyone lives here. It is run by an entity known as The Computer. Things run smoothly and efficiently all throughout the complex, and everyone has happy lives. Except that they don't.


Players take the roles of Troubleshooters, people who work for the Computer to root out trouble in Alpha Complex and shoot at it (or fix it through other means.) Given the Computer seeing threats behind every corner, somewhat malfunctioning, and all the things that go wrong, Troubleshooters tend to live very challenging, frustrating, and short lives.


The new version of Paranoia has been perpetually pushed back over the last few years, as kickstarter projects tend to be, but moreso than my usual experience. Shortly before GenCon, we got PDF files of the books. Yay. Sometime after that, we got "final" PDF versions. The most recent update on the physical version is "Early 2017". We'll see what happens.


So, last night, I got a group together and I ran the first adventure of the Mission book.


I really like Character Creation, in general as well as in Paranoia. The Paranoia system is designed to create tensions between the party to begin with by having them go in cycles where one person chooses a skill to have a positive rating in and then chooses someone to have that skill in an equal negative rating. I decided to run through Character Creation, rather than using the pregens provided in the Mission book.


It took a little longer than I'd expected, but I think this was in part because the players wanted to try to help each other/coordinate more than the game wants them to and partly because players like to think through their decisions more than the game wants them to.


Once done with that, we headed into the first adventure. This adventure is definitely designed for new players/GMs to Paranoia, and maybe to RPGs in general. It's very good at introducing things, and it does so in a very straightforward manner. It gives long selections of text for the GM to read to guide them in how to set scenes and run a Paranoia mission. Helpful. It goes pretty systematically through different setting and mechanics things for the players to get used to them. Also helpful.


However, it's also fairly restraining in it's helpfulness. The mission is rather linear, to the point of literally giving the players a yellow arrow on their iBall display to follow to each point in the mission. There are a few things that "MUST" happen in particular ways that seem to take control away from the players in manners that seem a bit forced.


So, it's very good for new people, but some more flexibility would be nice for those with some knowledge of the game and/or experience.


And it's very odd/in stark difference with the next couple missions, which I haven't yet run, but which I've read and feel are oddly lacking in direction. The second one gives a fair number of options of things to have the players do, but it gives a lack of guidance in how to lay out or handle presenting the main conflict. It has a general suggestion in regards to setup, but doesn't give specific ideas for how GMs can execute that. The third adventure is much more of a sandbox, with different things in different locations which the players can interact with. There's still a lot of improve/decision making on the GM's side, but I feel like there aren't obvious holes like with the second adventure.


I'll be running the second adventure in a couple weeks, but I'll be doing a fair bit of prep work to make sure it goes well-the actual product may be quite different than what's in the mission book.


I look forward to running the third adventure after that.

NaNoWriMo Update:

I passed the 50,000 word goal today. I expect to still write a fair bit more this month, but I do have some other things I need to focus on getting done, so slowing down and changing my focus for a bit will probably be good.

NaNoWriMo and Me 2: My History with NaNoWriMo

Sidenote: On Tuesday, I got the cover image for the first Heroism and Lies book. With the editing almost completed, I'm very excited to be on the verge of putting out the first book. The cover looks good, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with all of you soon.


In my previous post, NaNoWriMo Pros and Cons, I mentioned that I've done National Novel Writing Month for 10 years. Each year I've met the 50,000 word goal, but I've had mixed results in terms of what I've produced. I'm going to go through and look at each year of my NaNo participation, and see if I can pick out things I've gained from them.


This could be long and largely uninteresting to people who aren't me, but I am interested in the experiment of going back through.

2006: Y Rot Skcab

The title is "backstory" spelled backwards. Yes past Douglas, you are so very clever. *Rolls eyes*. So, 11 years ago, I was very interested in film and made very low quality movies (both shorts and full length features) with my friends. We had no budget and very little in the way of acting talent, so most of the things we made were hard to watch. Y Rot Skcab was my attempt at exploring the backstory of a movie that I was trying to create not long thereafter.

What I Gained:

Y Rot Skcab was my first year doing NaNoWriMo. I'd been surprised at how simple reaching the 50,000 words was. I also actually ended my story that year, probably just a little bit over the 50,000. There's a lot I like in the story, and there are ideas that have resurfaced in other things I've written as well as other RPG games that I've run. The characters are great, and I think through writing Y Rot Skcab I helped to flesh them out. I learned a lot about my writing in that year, and I gained plot devices and characters to use in future projects. I may well return to Y Rot Skcab's story and those connected to it one day, although I'll have to change it's name. And probably the name of the secret organization in the story (Destroyers of Evil Masters, Objects, Necromancers, Incasing ones, and Creations)...someone really wanted their name to spell DEMONIC.

2007: Catch the Wind/The Fiction Game

In 2007 I decided to write a story devoted to the girl I was dating at the time (and a couple that was close to us). Catch the Wind was a thrilling tale of high adventure about a "boy" with strange powers from another world who met up with a girl and together they tried to battle a sinister villain who was controlling strange monsters that were attacking them. Lots of elemental stuff going on. Then the girl and I were no longer dating, and I lost my desire to write a story for her.


So, I picked up a story called The Fiction Game, something of a parody of a story I'd been working on for a few years before that called The Reality Game. It was a book that acknowledged it was a book and was generally odd with irony.

What I gained:

Both these stories would go into future NaNoWriMo stories. They tickled my brain and, while they were underdeveloped, they formed the basis for bigger ideas that would come from them later.

2008: The Life and Death of Love and Worlds/Shattering Reality

In which I make the same mistake twice and cheat the rules of NaNoWriMo.


The Life and Death of Love and Worlds is a very long title for a book. I wouldn't have kept it as that, but I didn't have a better title in what I'd written. This was an interesting tale about a guy whose world was destroyed by a group of people that tear apart parallel dimensions for the fun of it, and so he goes dimension hopping to try to set things right and/or get revenge. This was also written for a girl, and I think that's why I lost steam in writing it.


Shattering Reality was a serial novel I'd been working on at the time and putting out one hurried chapter a week. When the long titled story wasn't happening, I started focusing on SR, and counting those words towards my word count, even if I had already started that story. (Although, I don't remember exactly, I may have ended the first book before NaNo started, so it would have been starting a new book).

What I gained:

Dimension hopping is something that comes up in my writing from time to time. I like it. It interests me. One of my current projects, Looking Glass Moon, uses it a lot. The setting for the RPG system I'm designing might use it a good bit, I'm not sure yet. The long titled book helped me to develop more thoughts and ideas on dimension hopping, and the "evil" organization in the book was great. It will definitely show up again.


SR in general was helpful to my keeping writing at a time when I otherwise had a lot going on. There were some good ideas there, and while it's not my best writing, and while I never finished the story (I got a good ways through book 3 and had 4 books planned), I think it helped me to grow as a writer. Sometimes I wish I could finish the story. Perhaps someday I will revisit it, gutting it of the issues that makes it unreadable for those separate from my life (it was largely written for people I knew so it had a foundation in things we had together.)

2009: Castor and Friends

This year I was juggling not only writing, but also being an Municipal Liaison for my local region. I planned gatherings for writers to come together and write together separately, tried to speak encouraging words, and generally did my best to keep things going. I was working with another ML who had been there before me, so my load wasn't too heavy.


Castor and Friends was sort of my first foray into a weird dystopia setting. I think I was trying to write something that was critical of society by dialing all it's problems up to 11, but I don't think it came across as terribly insightful or realistic. There was also some weird split personality stuff going on. It was a weird book. I don't like it that much.

What I gained:

Uhm...uh...aside from the general experience with writing more, I think I just gained an understanding of certain things that I don't do well. Odd mindscapes and exaggerations being among them.

2010: Blatant Acts of Heroism

My most successful year.


The former Municipal Liaison left, putting me more in charge. I pulled in another person from our ranks to elevate to ML and provide aid. We got organized. We advertised. We brought in new blood. Our group thrived. This was also the year that the alternative philosophies to NaNoWriMo came to my attention, and my other ML and I butted heads some.


Blatant Acts of Heroism took the outline from Catch the Wind and improved upon it. Now set with college aged heroes instead of high school, the story focused on Terra, a down to earth girl (yes, past Douglas, you're still so clever) who meets a boy from another dimension and gets caught up in vast adventures against her will. She is pushed on the path to becoming a hero and developing powers of her own, while a psychopath hunts them both.


I also doubled the word count goal. 100,000 words. And I still had more story left to write at that point.

What I gained:

Blatant Acts is by far the best NaNo novel I've ever written. It may be one of the better things I've written overall. It's definitely the closest thing I ever came to really publishing (aside from current projects.)


I learned a ton from Blatant Acts, and from the subsequent process of sharing it with people and getting their input. I learned about things that I did really well, and I learned about some things that were critically flawed in the story.


There's a decent chance that I'll turn my attention to Blatant Acts at some point in the future once more, and that it will make it to publication. But I have no active plans for this right now.

2011: Em of Maerd

No longer an ML, I could focus on my writing and my life.


Following the Fiction Game's idea, this was a book that knew it was a book. It was super meta and focused on an adventure-seeking, zeppelin driving girl named Em. It's other main characters were a writer who shared my name while being nothing like me and living in a flying invisible castle, and a homicide detective who had a habit of murdering people he perceived as being bad for society. Together (although also somewhat separately since they don't really trust each other or ever open up about anything), they investigate the death of a man named Bernard, while exploring varying forms of fiction and coming to grips with being characters in a book.

What I gained:

A story that I'd definitely like to revisit, and an increased sense of irony and meta humor.

2012: Monster Hunter?

New region. New writing group.


I honestly have very little memory of what I wrote this year, but I remember gathering 1-2 times a week and hanging out with other writers.

What I gained:

Many new friends and a group that would become my support system for my growth as a writer.

2013: Respice Finem

This was a book I was writing to a younger version of myself. It was the book I wished I'd encountered when I was younger. It was also my first step into magepunk.

What I gained:

If nothing else, an increased perspective on myself. But also developing a magic system taught me things that I continue to use and think about.

2014: Designs of Dragons

This book definitely wanted to have a high-action lighthearted comic-book feel to it as my main character began to develop draconic powers and abilities and found himself caught up in schemes and politics of men and dragons. It started pretty strong, but it became more politics and conspiracies than lighthearted comics, and I ended up setting my main character up to turn evil, which I didn't really want to happen.

What I gained:

Well, I'd love to go back to this story and do it right, but I'm still not quite sure how to do that. However, the style that I tried to develop in writing it definitely went into Heroism and Other Lies.

2015: Heroism and Other Lies (Episodes 101, 102, 103/2)

Heroism and Other Lies takes place in a future city and looks at the effects of technology, both good and bad. It has the comic-book feel that I'd tried to develop in Designs of Dragons, and takes place in short novellas, or episodes. I wrote two of these last year and made substantial progress on a third (although I'm going back through this one and basically starting it over from scratch this year.)

What I gained:

These books I do plan to publish. The first one, hopefully very soon. These are fun stories to write, and hopefully they're fun to read. Hopefully too, they get people thinking about the technologies that we're developing.

Concluding Thoughts

While I don't have a lot published yet, I do have a lot of experience that I'm drawing from as I progress further, and I have a lot of ideas that I've developed and can continue to explore for future publishable efforts.