So if you’re not already a playtester for us, and you think that sometime in late May/early June you’ll be able to do some multiple-session playtesting (2 to 4 sessions worth is probably 2 to 6 hours), I am interested in hearing from you. Volunteer with your credentials in the comments below, or you can email me at evilhat on the gmail.

So who’s going to write these letters? Well, we’ll write a few. But mostly: you are. We’d love to have your letter, and to give you a chance to be a part of Do with us. Interested?

We can’t promise we’ll accept every letter we get, but we will do our very best to get into trouble with it. Ideally we should have your letters in before the end of April. This will give us time to select the letters we’ll use, and get some editing and artwork done on the booklet. And even if we don’t use your letter, we’ll save it up and possibly share it on Daniel’s blog later on. No letter goes unheard by the pilgrims.

Here are your guidelines.

Inspiration:
Avatar: the Last Airbender, The Little Prince, Kino’s Journey. Stories of young people traveling through the strange, often absurd world of adults.

Premise:
There are hundreds small worlds orbiting a flying temple. Like islands, these small worlds often have strange cultures and unique problems. Whenever the people have a conflict that cannot be resolved on their own, they send letters to the temple requesting assistance. The temple sends young monks on a pilgrimage across the universe responding to a stack of letters one at a time. Their goal is to leave each world with less trouble than when they arrived.

Your Mission:

• You’re a worldly citizen (that is, a citizen of one of the tiny worlds floating in the sky) with a weird problem. You’re writing to the pilgrims of the flying temple for help. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a letter to be included in the next supplement for Do.
• Your letter should be around 150-500 words.
• List key phrases from the letter, including character names, important locations, important objects, adjectives and verbs. Repeat them up to three times if they are very important. Depending on the difficulty level of your letter, the letter should have a list of 10 key phrases (Easy), 15 (Medium), or 20 (Hard)
• Tag your letter with two or three of the symbols that describe the subject matter in the letter. These are described in this PDF. (There’s a sample letter in there too!)
• Email your letters to Fred Hicks at evilhat [at] gmail [dot] com

Guidelines:

Getting Inspired: To get started, what is your favorite episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Kino’s Journey, Star Trek or Stargate SG-1? Pretty much any show where the heroes go from place to place helping people and getting into trouble is a good place to start. Imagine you are one of the people who needs help from the heroes. First you may have to explain a little about the world you’re on, just to give the heroes some context for your problem. That also gives the players more hooks and inspiration to begin their adventure.

A Dose of Realism: You may find inspiration in stories of the real world as a way to start your letter, like natural disasters, historical conflicts, and even outright wars. But make sure you approach those subjects with sensitivity and respect. Do is by its nature a comedic game. Before you submit a letter “ripped from the headlines,” try to change the circumstances enough that the letter doesn’t seem like it’s just making light of a real-world tragedy.

Symbols: The trouble symbols are described in this PDF. Think about the subject matter of your letter. What makes a TREE+BOOK letter different than a SWORD+BOOK letter? What kind of troubles do you expect pilgrims to get into when they visit this world and meddle with people’s lives?

Difficulty: A good letter suggests a complicated situation with no clear solution. A great letter suggests several problems with several unfavorable solutions. Present a Gordian knot to the pilgrims and they’ll figure out the rest.

Age Appropriateness: Do is a game designed for players 12 and up, so adjust the tone of your letter appropriately. The editors reserve the right to revise or re-word your letter in order to make it more age appropriate, if necessary.

Fundraising Exceeds Expectations for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
New storytelling game for YA and family gamers wins massive support

In less than a day, the fundraising campaign to publish Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple met its initial goal. Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions quickly pivoted into Phase 2 of the campaign, intended to raise more funds next several weeks. Phase 2 goals were surpassed in less than 6 hours.

“Our initial goal was to raise $4,000 in 45 days, enough to do a print run of 500.” Hicks said. “When we met that on Day 1, we knew we’d tapped into an enthusiastic fanbase. Our next goal was to raise enough funds — another $2,500 — to get a bigger print run, which meant we could lower the cover price through the economies of scale. We busted through that goal in less than 6 hours on Day 2.”

Game designer Daniel Solis believes a long development cycle and a transparent design process built up years of anticipation.

“I design a lot of little board games and post them on my blog, ready to play for free.” Solis said. “I followed that same philosophy for Do. The basic rules have been online, free for anyone to play, for about a year. I’ve also been posting art from the game for quite a while, too. I guess people just wanted the game, finally!”

So what’s the next move?

“Our next move is to use the remaining time to develop additional content for our supporters. We’ll produce a booklet of additional letters and adventure seeds, which will be shipped exclusively to those who pledge at the $40+ level. We intend for those to be the only copies in print that we produce. Those who contribute a smaller amount will get the booklet in PDF form,” Hicks said. “When it comes down to it, the early-adopter $40+ contributors are the reason we were able to hit our goals so rapidly. With their help, the cover price of the hardcover is down to where we believe it will be well-received by parents, teachers, and YA fans.

“These generous backers deserve our gratitude in a palpable way. This specially-produced Book of Letters is our way of doing that, a unique gift showing that they were a key part of Do’s success.”

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is a storytelling game about helping people and getting into trouble, for 3-5 players, ages 12 and up.

Evil Hat Productions publishes Spirit of the Century and the Dresden Files Role-Playing Game.

Fundraising was facilitated through the crowd-source service Kickstarter, a no-risk way to raise funds for creative projects.

Relevant Links:
Fundraising Page: http://kck.st/fwk4DD
Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com
Evil Hat: http://www.evilhat.com
Daniel Solis: http://www.danielsolis.com
More about Do: http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/do-pilgrims-of-flying-temple.html

That said, with the goal hit, it’s time to talk about phase two for the kickstarter.

Our initial funding goal was set on the idea of producing the Limited Edition of Do as a small run boutique item, at about 500 copies to be printed in hardcover and with color interior. But there’s a literal price that comes with printing such a thing at that level. Despite the book being a modest-sized affair (you’ll hear more about that from Daniel in the coming days), we had to set the minimum level for getting a printed copy at $40.

But (checking… yep) now that we’ve hit that $4,000 target, it’s time to think about what to do with any additional funding we get. The way Kickstarter works, you keep raising funds until the deadline. In this case, that deadline is May 24. Until then, you can keep pledging, pre-ordering the game and telling your friends to do likewise.

As I suggested before, we’ve had our eye on expanding the print run to 750, 1000, or even 1,500 copies (but probably no more) if we get more funds. With the economics of printing being what they are, at each new increment we’re facing a steadily lower unit cost. And to us, it doesn’t seem right to keep the cover price on Daniel’s crazy little game up at $40 if our costs are dropping.

So here’s the plan we’ve got in mind:

At $4,500 raised, we’ll increase the print run to 750 copies, making this gorgeous (but still limited) edition available to more people. But we’ll also drop the cover price to $35, and ship a copy to anyone who has contributed at least $35. (International customers will still need to bump up by $10 to cover the additional cost of non-domestic shipping.) And HOLY CRAP, we may hit THIS level before I even finish this post!

At $5,500 raised, we’ll increase the print run to 1,000 copies — and we’ll drop the cover price again by $5, to $30, and ship a copy to anyone who has contributed at least $30.

At $6,500 raised, we’ll increase the print run to 1,500 copies — and yet again drop the cover price by $5, to $25, and ship a copy to anyone who has contributed at least $25.

(At that point, we’ll have the price point more in a range that we’d like to see, and we’ll have enough copies at a good price point for getting this game out to more people. Once that print run runs out, we’ll transition to a black and white softcover standard edition of the game.)

In addition, for the high-end patrons out there who are sad about missing out on the Flying Turtle contribution level, Daniel is currently looking into the possibility of providing a few more high-end rewards at the $150 and $250 level, but it may be even as much as a few weeks before we can share that (conversations need to conclude, and stuff needs to move from point A to Z, before we can commit there).

Dan & I will also talk about what could happen beyond the $6,500 level, if it comes, but that’s a longer conversation and he has some travel planned a week from now. Possibly an exclusive benefit for all contributors to the kickstarter, at that point. But for that, you’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks so much, everyone. It’s incredibly gratifying to see how many folks out there have the same kind of enthusiasm and faith in Daniel as we do here at Evil Hat.

One of the interesting aspects of this kind of work is the degree of disconnection between the “skin” of a game (the story-conceit, what it looks like, all that) and the “bones” of it (its rules). If you’re doing a licensed game (we’re not, at least not as our first one), you probably start skin first, and then feel around for a rules concept that can play comfortably inside that skin. Personally, though, I’m a rules junkie — I like the fiddlies — so when I look at a design, that’s where my head starts.

With a card game, you can find yourself skinless to start. You may find yourself with the root of a rules concept you’d like to explore, and it’s only through the exploration that you’ll uncover what your best-fit skin for that might be. Part of it is about fitting the rules, and part of it is about making sure the high concept of the game is something you can explain clearly and succinctly, in a way that piques interest and gets folks willing to sit down and play a hand.

With our first game in development, I brought an idea to Jeff that had been banging around in my head for a few years.

The idea grew out of a drive back from one of the big summer conventions with Matt Gandy and Rob Donoghue, where we devolved into a certain amount of “leet speek” trash-talking: IM IN UR BASE, KILLIN UR MANS. Of course, that phrase right there stuck with me and I got the vestiges of a card game idea, where each player is frantically trying to build his base, while the other players were sending invading DOODZ who might kill his MANS. I didn’t take it very far, but the core idea there stuck with me: each player trying to build a 3×3 grid of cards in front of him as his base of operations, the center card representing the player himself in the command & control center, and the ring of cards around that card forming the perimeter of the base, with various defenses and weaponry in place.

So I tossed that idea at Jeff, and he liked it enough to get off to the races. We gave the prototype the code name SIEGE, knowing we’d be changing it; the design concepts Jeff hashed out (which I’ll talk about in a later post after it’s had a little more development & testing done)  didn’t have a home yet in terms of skin. What was the 3×3 grid of cards going to represent? What about the occupant in the center card of the “base”? We kicked around a few ideas over the course of this, including:

• Sci fi/future war techno-bases, cleaving close to the original roots of the idea
• Castles with all sorts of fantasy tropes & flair
• Video game playtesters at a (collapsing) start-up, holing up in their cubicles in order to fight off the HR goons coming to pink-slip them

Each of these had their charms, but they didn’t necessarily sit perfectly right for some of the rules ideas Jeff was coming up with. Then the idea of treating the 3×3 grid less as a physical structure and more as a formation came to mind. That’s when it got interesting for us. A formation of what?

As a publisher, one of the things worth looking at is what else you have in your catalog that your new product can “vibe” with, hopefully driving some cross-sales traffic. We talked about some of Evil Hat’s intellectual property, too, through the course of this — and when we said “a formation of what?”, pretty damn quickly we arrived at the only possible, the only right answer.

Zeppelins.

Stay tuned to see what we’re going to let fly.

This is a bit of a companion piece to Hack: Use Your Grid-Maps With Fate. Symmetry.

So, you like Fate‘s idea of zones, and you’re not a fan of the one-inch-square map gig, but you’re playing 4e, and you definitely want to see a map get some action, just not one with all of that regimentation and orderly geometry. How to mix 4e play with Fate’s zones? This is a very brisk exploration of my initial thoughts about that.

Your Map

First off, let’s adopt our earlier idea that roughly 5-6 squares equals a zone. When eyeballing a combat space and drawing up your zone-ified maps, something to keep in mind. But really, you can stick with your developed-in-Fate instincts for drawing our your maps, too.

Move

Anyone who could do a 5 square movement can move one zone; anyone who can do a 10-square movement can move two; etc. This is your guiding principle. You’ll need to think long and hard about what this does for characters who can only move 4 squares (I say let ‘em anyway), or have a base move more like 7 squares. Maybe you divide by 4 instead of 5, and round generously for the ones that come out at x.75; clearly someone built for a base 7 move is looking to get some extra pizazz from that.

“Running” is simply doubling the number of zones you can move normally (usually going from 1 to 2).

Engagement: Opportunity, Flanking, Pushes, Pulls, Slides, Shifts

So, attacks of opportunity and all the elements of shifting or forced movement. Interesting, tricky things when your space is more abstractly defined. To preserve that element, I’d do something like the following.

You can use a move action to engage a target occupying the same zone as you. This places the “engaged” condition on the target, and the target places the “engaged” condition on you as well. (I’m calling & framing this as a condition; maybe there’s a better way?)

Engaged:

• If the target makes a ranged or area attack, it triggers an attack of opportunity by the character that engaged him.
• If the target moves out of its current zone, it triggers an attack of opportunity by the character that engaged him. This condition is then cleared.
• If two or more characters have engaged a target, the target provides combat advantage to those characters.
• The target may use a move action to clear one instance of the engaged condition.
• If the character that has engaged the target no longer possesses the reciprocal condition, this condition clears.

Targets may shift or be pushed/pulled/slid into or out of engagement within their current zone, essentially converting every 2 or 3 squares (2.5) of effect into one instance of the engaged condition either created or shed. If the target’s movement is 5 squares or more — in other words, a zone — then that principle may not apply, with all engaged conditions simply dropping as the character leaves the zone. (That said, I could see someone with, say, a 8-square push effect pushing a target into the next zone, and then into an engaged position with one of the characters in that zone with the remaining 3 squares of effect.)

Maybe there’s a more elegant way to do this, by introducing the idea of block actions, by playing with the idea of borders, etc, but I’m not swiftly seeing the path to that. If you do, pipe up. I think the bookkeeping part of it could be elided simply by using your figures/markers on the map and grouping them close to each other when “engaged”. Visually simpler than writing down “Engaged by X” each time it happens.

Range, Close Effects, Area Effects, Wall Effects

Ranges usually divide up into increments of 5, so turning that into zones of range is pretty easy.

Bursts and Blasts are interesting, but not too hard to work out a good equivalence for. If something affects an area that’s up to 5×5 (so, up to blast 5 or up to burst 2), that’s a zone, 6×6 on up is 2, etc.

Small-sized close blast (1) and burst (2 or 3) effects might warrant some kind of sub-selection of targets — say, all targets currently engaged by/engaging the character.

Walls are almost nonsensical in this setup, but I might say that you can hit one target within a zone for every 2 or 3 squares (2.5) of wall, and you can extend the effect into another zone for a similar cost (so a wall of length 10 could hit two targets in one zone, cross into a neighboring zone, and hit one more).

So, you like Fate‘s idea of zones, and you’re not a fan of the one-inch-square map gig, but you’re playing 4e, and you definitely want to see a map get some action, just not one with all of that regimentation and orderly geometry. How to mix 4e play with Fate’s zones? This is a very brisk exploration of my initial thoughts about that.

Your Map

First off, let’s adopt our earlier idea that roughly 5-6 squares equals a zone. When eyeballing a combat space and drawing up your zone-ified maps, something to keep in mind. But really, you can stick with your developed-in-Fate instincts for drawing our your maps, too.

Move

Anyone who could do a 5 square movement can move one zone; anyone who can do a 10-square movement can move two; etc. This is your guiding principle. You’ll need to think long and hard about what this does for characters who can only move 4 squares (I say let ‘em anyway), or have a base move more like 7 squares. Maybe you divide by 4 instead of 5, and round generously for the ones that come out at x.75; clearly someone built for a base 7 move is looking to get some extra pizazz from that.

“Running” is simply doubling the number of zones you can move normally (usually going from 1 to 2).

Engagement: Opportunity, Flanking, Pushes, Pulls, Slides, Shifts

So, attacks of opportunity and all the elements of shifting or forced movement. Interesting, tricky things when your space is more abstractly defined. To preserve that element, I’d do something like the following.

You can use a move action to engage a target occupying the same zone as you. This places the “engaged” condition on the target, and the target places the “engaged” condition on you as well. (I’m calling & framing this as a condition; maybe there’s a better way?)

Engaged:

• If the target makes a ranged or area attack, it triggers an attack of opportunity by the character that engaged him.
• If the target moves out of its current zone, it triggers an attack of opportunity by the character that engaged him. This condition is then cleared.
• If two or more characters have engaged a target, the target provides combat advantage to those characters.
• The target may use a move action to clear one instance of the engaged condition.
• If the character that has engaged the target no longer possesses the reciprocal condition, this condition clears.

Targets may shift or be pushed/pulled/slid into or out of engagement within their current zone, essentially converting every 2 or 3 squares (2.5) of effect into one instance of the engaged condition either created or shed. If the target’s movement is 5 squares or more — in other words, a zone — then that principle may not apply, with all engaged conditions simply dropping as the character leaves the zone. (That said, I could see someone with, say, a 8-square push effect pushing a target into the next zone, and then into an engaged position with one of the characters in that zone with the remaining 3 squares of effect.)

Maybe there’s a more elegant way to do this, by introducing the idea of block actions, by playing with the idea of borders, etc, but I’m not swiftly seeing the path to that. If you do, pipe up. I think the bookkeeping part of it could be elided simply by using your figures/markers on the map and grouping them close to each other when “engaged”. Visually simpler than writing down “Engaged by X” each time it happens.

Range, Close Effects, Area Effects, Wall Effects

Ranges usually divide up into increments of 5, so turning that into zones of range is pretty easy.

Bursts and Blasts are interesting, but not too hard to work out a good equivalence for. If something affects an area that’s up to 5×5 (so, up to blast 5 or up to burst 2), that’s a zone, 6×6 on up is 2, etc.

Small-sized close blast (1) and burst (2 or 3) effects might warrant some kind of sub-selection of targets — say, all targets currently engaged by/engaging the character.

Walls are almost nonsensical in this setup, but I might say that you can hit one target within a zone for every 2 or 3 squares (2.5) of wall, and you can extend the effect into another zone for a similar cost (so a wall of length 10 could hit two targets in one zone, cross into a neighboring zone, and hit one more).

Different format this time, because I wanted to use a spreadsheet.

The high level “gut” view: sales were down (as expected) in the fourth quarter of last year, but not horridly so. In terms of sales volume, for example, Q4′s DFRPG sales were only a few hundred less than Q3′s for each title. That’s a palpable drop, sure, but not a “it’s drying up!” On top of that, we got a nice boost out of launching & selling our limited edition “Wizard” Fudge Dice, clearing over half of the units we produced in just a couple months through direct and distribution channels.

The quarter’s numbers from Q3 can be found on my previous post. While the percentage drop on the smaller volume titles was more brutal, comparatively speaking, the overall robustness of the DFRPG and the addition of the dice did nicely by us.

Here’s the high level sum-up. Lifetime sales-wise everything is looking pretty rosy:

And the source-by-source particulars (“special” just means “the spirit of the century hardcover from Lulu” for now):

The high level “gut” view: sales were down (as expected) in the fourth quarter of last year, but not horridly so. In terms of sales volume, for example, Q4′s DFRPG sales were only a few hundred less than Q3′s for each title. That’s a palpable drop, sure, but not a “it’s drying up!” On top of that, we got a nice boost out of launching & selling our limited edition “Wizard” Fudge Dice, clearing over half of the units we produced in just a couple months through direct and distribution channels.

The quarter’s numbers from Q3 can be found on my previous post. While the percentage drop on the smaller volume titles was more brutal, comparatively speaking, the overall robustness of the DFRPG and the addition of the dice did nicely by us.

Here’s the high level sum-up. Lifetime sales-wise everything is looking pretty rosy. I’m particularly happy to see that Your Story is within striking distance of 10k copies sold (as always our lifetime totals reflect digital and print combined, but counting Print+PDF bundle sales as only a single sale, not one of each), and Our World falling just short of 8k. That’s a nice footprint for us and gives us a good shot at selling a few thousand copies of our in-development Paranet book, I think.

And the source-by-source particulars (“special” just means “the spirit of the century hardcover from Lulu” for now):

Resolutions or not, here’s your mission in 2011:

Play More. Run More. Share More.

Sounds simple, and it is simple, but just because something is simple does not mean it’s easy.

Play More because playing more makes you happy, and your happiness is important. Own that, make time for it, make it a priority, and engage the people who are a part of your life in this mission. Be honest that it’s about your happiness, and ask them how you can help them with THEIR happiness by finding ways so that they can Play More too.

Run More because the biggest enemy of Play More is inertia, and everyone is looking for the guy to run the game they want to play as the way to beat that inertia. If you’re looking for that guy too and nobody’s stepping up, you’re that guy. And other people will be that guy, too, but you’ve gotta get the ball rolling. Do it.

Share More because our hobby is social, and is only improved by putting more energy into the social side of it. If you love a game, show other people why. Organize an event at your local game store. And importantly, play with people you don’t play with right now.

That last bit, in a lot of ways, has been the lynchpin in my recent revitalization of my own gaming. It might be in yours. It was a big block: I had a lot of time going on where gaming wasn’t happening and, yes, some of it was because I was “busy” (I had to make time for it), and some of it was because I was waiting for that guy to run it (I was that guy), but more than anything I was wanting gaming to happen with the same people that it’s always happened with … and the reality was that within that small circle our schedules were just not working out. Breaking past that sacred-cow barrier in my thinking about my own gaming is what limbered up the rest.

Your situation might be different. You might have a different sacred-cow barrier. Be merciless in identifying that cow and shipping it off to the meat plant. It’s standing between you and your happiness, your deeper satisfaction with your hobby, and through you it’s shaving off just a little of the vitality of your hobby itself. The solution is simple, but that simple solution is going to take a little work. Identify that work. Comment below and tell me what that work will be for you.

Then get off the damn computer and do the damn work.

Your year will look all the brighter for it.