Sunday, November 30, 2008

Design Diary: Evocative City Sites

There is a new preview for A Witch's Choice Patronage Project for The Rituals of Choice Adventure Path. Rite Publishing has released the current draft to the senior patrons, and have opened up the patron forums for the project

There is also a nice review of our newest product Items Evolved: Conflict on Emerson's Bookshelf. 

Our next Items Evolved book that deals with races and classes is now in editing. 

Monsters of Verdune the follow up to Veiled Denizens and Mythical Monstrosities is currently in layout. 

I have also started a new systemless project tenitively titled "Evocative City Sites"  It will consist of 10 urban setting tropes, in essence these will  be set pieces that a GM is reasonably likely have present in any city setting he is running and are likely to be places that are present in the minds and expectations of the player characters. 

For example the Trauma Inn,  a place where adventures only want to rest and heal up so they can get on with the adventure. I am going to justify the trope of the Trauma inn (a Rpg video game trope that sleep can heal just about everything, including death), in that it is acutally a mystical site, that is taken care of by an Zen Survivor/Cassandra figure, they focus all their efforts on healing PC "heroes" and the stay is even free.  Also i wanted subvert the normal lack of Inn Security in adventure games.  Our Trauma Inn  actively tries protect with a zelous group of eliet guards, that is led by an immortal and the secret passages he knows about always get you away from your enimes rather than them using them to find you asleep. This is not the Rob-U While-U-Sleep Inn    

I will be handeling each of our sites in this fashion justfying, inverting, subverting and playing the trope straignt to create a unique encounter and then adding that little something extra to make it an evocative location. 

In creating the descriptions in the immersive first person point of view of a "hero traveler" so that A GM can provide the information a Player Character would want to know,  I call this "useful flavor" (TM) in a manner similar to the Volo's Guides, I also took some inspirationf rom the location description template, Npcs will be presented without stats using the 7 sentance npc rule plus multiple choice secrets for the GM to use.  

Each site will be about a 1,000 words. 

I have The Rogue's Gallery (Bad guy bar), and The Next Inn (Trauma Inn), and am working on an Abandoned Warehouse next. 

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Inteview with Wolfgang Baur (Open Design) part II

Welcome to the second part of my interview with Wolfgang Baur as we talk about his ground breaking work with Open Design his fey gone wild 4e paronage project Wrath of the River King and my favorite clockwork 3.5 patronage project Tales of Zobeck You can read Part I HERE


11. What specific design choice are you most happy with, and why?

I'm very happy with a couple of them, the use of "alternate history" encounters in Castle Shadowcrag has gotten raves (and neatly sidesteps the problems of time travel adventures), and the expansion of 4E encounters to include heavy use of roleplaying and skill challenges in Wrath of the River King, in direct contradiction of the WotC "house style" that privileges combat as 95% of the encounters. They know their audience, of course, but there are other audiences out there as well, which aren't being as well served. I'm happy to step up for some of the storytelling groups and some of the exploration/sandbox style gamers.


12. What has been your best moment playing with an Open Design product?

I've very much enjoyed the 4th Edition Wrath of the River King playtests. Even when the design is getting shredded, I know we're going to have a much stronger adventure as a result. The sad fact is that most adventure published by the big houses don't get much (or in some cases, any) playtesting. Paizo is a big exception, which I think is part of their formula for success.


13. What has been your most memorable fan response to Open Design?

I think the essay and local legends from our patron in Kuwait count as a major high point, since that was during the Six Arabian Nights project. There's nothing like having someone in Arabian to give you some added insight into an Arabian project.

14. Are you happy with where Open Design is today?

After winning the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in gaming, you'd think I could rest on my laurels for a little while, wouldn't you?

But I can't. I want the next patron project to be even bigger and better than the two currently underway. It may be a massive sourcebook,a Cthulhu adventure, or a traditional Conan-style sword-and-sorcery epic. It may be an extremely experimental city adventure with planar overtones and unusual villains. The beauty of the patron approach is that it will be something that no one else is likely to try, because it doesn't need a mass audience.

So, yeah, I'm happy that we're taking chances and doing niche items. And I expect to try to raise the bar even further on the design, the art, and the interaction with patrons. There's always a higher mountain.

15. Where do you see Open Design at a year from now? 5 years?

Hey, I'm not an oracle! I have no idea where it goes, because it's a creative endeavor first and foremost. It may flame out in the edition wars, if the patrons continue their split into 3E/Pathfinder and 4E camps.

I can tell you that patrons will set the pace as much as I will. It may continue to evolve the Zobeck campaign setting into material that reaches the broader public, like the Gazetteer that will be released after Thanksgiving, or the Kobold Guides to Game Design (Vol 2 ships in December!). There may be more patron-designers "graduating" from Open Design to carve their own niche in the freelancing world. Who knows?

16. What is the Patronage Project you want to join?

Heroes of the Jade Oath, of course!


And after that, I would love to see someone try a genre that we haven't seen yet, maybe Cthulhoid horror or a conspiracy project.

17. The Ollamh Lorekeeper is dedicated to Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved , so I askeveryone this question. Can you name for us a totem type, champion type and witch type that would be cool but you have never seen from the fans?

Alas, I am woefully underinformed when it comes to AE... But I'd say my favorite totem is the raven, my favorite champion type would be the Flagellant Witchhunter, and my favorite witch would have to be the redheaded kind.

18. Is there anything else the world should know about you?

I'm a workaholic (you know that already!), and I have a secret love of arquebus and pike AKA 16th century history. Don't tell anyone, it'll ruin my medieval street cred.

19. Is there anything else the world should know about Open Design?

I think it's an eye-opening view of what it really takes to publish professional work, and a great chance to go behind the scenes, but it's also a community of the smartest, most engaged, and most passionate gamers out there. Because everyone has donated to fund the work, everyone

Monday, November 24, 2008

Interview with Wolfgang Baur (Open Design) Part I

Welcome to the first part of my interview with Wolfgang Baur as we talk about his ground breaking work with Open Design his fey gone wild 4e paronage project Wrath of the River King and my favorite clockwork 3.5 patronage project Tales of Zobeck

1. Please provide a brief bio about yourself, your gaming habits, and your professional work.
I'm a D&D from the age of 12 and a Cthulhu gamer from the age of 21, and I've been writing adventures professionally since high school. I entered the RPG industry as an editor

I still play weekly or close to it, usually as a DM for D&D, and an investigator for Cthulhu.


2. Could you please sum up Open Design in a sentence or three?

Patrons choose from among a handful of possible projects, and vote for their favorite with a donation that funds the writing, maps, and art. They are, essentially, the Popes of the Open Design world, and the mapper, artists, and I jump to their whims.

Well, okay, there's a stage in the middle there where patrons critique an outline and we agree on the broad parameters of the project. Then I write chunks of it, and the patrons critique those encounters, monsters, or setting materials. The constant feedback keeps me on my toes, and makes Open Design adventure much better-written and more playtested than the typical adventure.

Which is why we have so many ENnie nominations to our name. The fact that the adventures are limited editions probably explains why we've never won an ENnie. Not that many people have heard of us.



3. What do you say to a perspective patron who has never experienced it before, but "feels" it is too expensive?

They're probably right, if they think of it as buying an adventure off the shelf. But really, you're getting design essays and back-and-forth with a designer who knows the field and the issues. It's a 6-month course in game design; if you get involved and ask questions, you'll get a lot out of it. And most gamers like seeing their suggestions incorporated in the work. By the time 100 patrons have critiqued it, there's no room for junk text.

If you just want to buy an adventure, well there's lots of places you can do that.



4. How did you first become interested in creating the OpenDesign Project rather than the standard rpg production model?


I was just messing around on my blog, and posted to see if anyone would fund me as a patron. I had this dream that someone would drop $1,000 and I'd be working with a tiny handful of patrons. It didn't quite work out like that, but it is a small community of people who are shaping outlines, contributing suggestions for story, monsters, and mechanics, and playtesting heavily. I wanted a way to connect directly to the audience without a lot of editors, publishers, and other intermediaries, and I got that, both good and bad.

What I really wanted was the freedom to work on projects outside the mainstream, and that has been wonderful and nicely acknowledged by the ENnie nominations and Diana Jones Award. What I didn't realize at the time was just how much more collaborative and demanding patron work can be. I would really like to meet some of the patrons of the olden days, and see how they compare to the folks commissioning these adventures and sourcebooks today.


6. How do you feel, when you first discover someone has signed up for an Open Design Project? When you met goal for the first time?

I was thrilled! And that early enthusiasm helped a lot, because I didn't know what I was doing, really. I wanted to see if the idea would attract some of the hard-core gamers who enjoy design and writing for their own sake, and it certainly did. I didn't expect to see a lot of power-gamers show up, and they didn't.

And hitting the first commission goal was a huge high. I think I overwrote that first project by about 50% based sheerly on joy and adrenaline.


7. What does Open Design need more of?

Playtesters and statisticians, at the moment. There's a huge demand for people to test just one or two encounters each, because much as I like to discuss the theoretical pros and cons of (say) a monster or encounter design, the real test is at the table.

I think that the discussion of points in theory is often useful, but the most compelling arguments of all are the ones based on playtest results or on mathematical models of the rules results and probabilities. The editor and I are doing most of the statistical review, and that's fine. That's why it's paying gig; everyone loves the creative side, not everyone loves the number-crunching.


8. What role do you think Open Design and Patronage Products play in the future of the gaming community?

I think we're a small but important niche, a bit of an incubator for innovation and experiment. You see things from indie/small-press games getting picked up by Wizards of the coast all the time. To take just one example, after Open Design released Empire of the Ghouls, WotC's Bruce Cordell is now working on a new version of Kingdom of the Ghouls.

Sometimes the small PDF press can be more nimble than the bigger outfits; sometimes we're really just chasing after scraps and figments. I leave it to other people to figure out which projects are which.

Overall, though, it's a good thing for the hobby to have someplace to experiment like this, and try things that no marketing department in its right mind would every approve.


9. Describe your best moment working on an Open Design Project?

When I first realized that the gloves were really off, and the marketeers were not going to be allowed in the room. I got a real sense of that with the first few projects, knowing that the patrons were behind taking some chances creatively.

But really, the best moment on every project is often the same moment: it's the moment when I'm most frustrated and not making progress on some mechanic or plot point or encounter setup. If it were a standard project for another publisher, I'd either tough it out or bounce an idea off the editor.

In Open Design, I don't do that: I open up the question to brainstorming by the patrons. And as you might expect, having 50 or 100 smart gamers look at a problem means that more solutions and better solutions are suggested. I still wind up doing the work of writing it, mapping it out, doing the math on it. But having immediate feedback from the audience that the adventure is intended for means that they get what they want, not what I want or what I *think* they want.

I makes a huge difference, and it brings a smile to my face every time.


10. What do you feel was the most ingenious part of an Open Design project that you devised?

The patron feedback has been crucial. I could have just said "Fund this project, and I'll go write it and give it to you when it's good and ready." And that would have been boring. Patron feedback makes a big difference, because they surprise you.

For instance, the patrons really, really surprised me when they voted for Six Arabian Nights to be Open Design #4. I was shocked. Al-Qadim was 10 years out of print, and Arabian culture hasn't exactly gotten good press lately.

But people wanted it, and I got two of the original Al-Qadim authors (David "Zeb" Cook and Jeff Grubb) to contribute adventures to it. It was a huge success creatively, and a joy to work on. I keep getting reports from patrons who have run the adventure, as well, and it seems to have struck a chord.

It's one of those projects that would NEVER have come from Wizards. And I don't think Open Design can claim more than tangential credit, but after the success of Six Arabian Nights from Open Design, we see Paizo doing the Legacy of Fire adventure path.

There's a sense that Open Design is trailblazing some creative ground, and revisiting importnat bits of gaming history. And that's important to me.

Part II continues HERE

Monday, November 10, 2008

Preview: A Witch's Choice

A Witch’s Choice Preview Part I of The Rituals of Choice Adventure Path is now available as a free download. This preview showcases the adventure hooks the players get to choose, an event encounter, and a unique magical item that PCs can acquire. The previewed sections were chosen by the current senior patrons of Rite Publishing's patronage project, based on their reviews of the current manuscript.

We currently have 18 patrons, with a threshold goal of 40, so we still need 22 more patrons.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

[Rite Publishing] Items Evolved: Oaths released



Items Evolved: Oaths
, this supplement for the 3.5 OGL and Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved presents 10 new magic items, focusing on the idea of oaths, one of the major themes of Arcana Evolved and the Lands of the Diamond Throne, these magic items help to cement in characters the significance of that which lies within themselves. 

Items Evolved offers a simple reference format that includes read-aloud text descriptions for each magic item. It also includes object loresight information for each magic item specific to the Lands of the Diamond Throne campaign setting, along with Lore DCs to help provide greater meaning and depth to your next game