So we are getting close to closing out another quarter (our financial year at the VSCA is a little wacky and one day I may clean that up, but also maybe not) and the last three months will probably our best yet. No one is close to quitting any day jobs — we’re still looking at maybe a week’s worth of regular work pay in three month’s time, but not bad for not doing any new work at all. Anyway, that’s slowing down a lot now: I expect the upcoming quarter will be our weakest though I hope to see some rebound after Evil Hat’s spotlight time moves on (Dresden Files is doing amazingly well — kudos to Fred and the team!)

Anyway, thanks to everyone who lobbied for us to produce a PDF. That turned out to be profitable as well as a useful education, and I’ll say it clearly to anyone who’s still holding their breath: you were right.

I was right too, which makes that easier to say of course.

The past is fun, but the future (especially for someone with a reputation for science-fictional interests) is more fun. And so, here’s what’s coming. I can’t announce dates yet.

Diaspora. Yes we are still doing stuff with Diaspora, though not creating new content. Sometime in the next few months we’ll be getting Diaspora printed through a cheaper printing service so that we can supply it in bulk to IPR and consequently get in more physical stores. This has never been a huge priority for us, but the cash flow is sufficient now that it doesn’t actually burden us much to do it — and keeping this thing fun and riskless has always been a priority. We are doing this for a good time and cheap whiskey and not much else. It’s also a low priority because I don’t want to get stepped on by the giant releases in the FATE and FATE-ish world around now — Dresden Files from the aforementioned Evil Hat and ICONS from Adamant Entertainment. I don’t want to step on their toes either, but it would be a little egotistical of me to claim that was likely — these guys are selling the hell out of great products.

Hollowpoint. This is a strange beast that burst into my head just about whole after spending a weekend re-reading 100 Bullets and then chatting with JB about dice systems for Chimaera. Basically we worked out a cool system for his game and then while he was thinking about it I went away and wrote Hollowpoint to use it. I stole his toys. I am a bad man.

This is okay, because Hollowpoint is about bad men. It’s about a crew (and this is essential — this is not a game about a group of individual heroes) or maybe even more about a mission (the crew can be secondary as you’ll discover). The crew is super-competent, very cool, not necessarily all that smart, and they love their violent, dirty, underhanded, evil work. They love the noise and the smell of a gunfight. They do not argue but rather they act.

So this game is very much crafted around the idea of a mission and will include tools to build that at least as carefully (okay probably more carefully) as the characters are crafted. This game is not an opportunity to create a deep understanding of a single character (though that could happen) and in that sense it owes a debt to 3:16 (Gregor Hutton’s game over at Box Ninja) I suppose. Certainly it arrived in my head after playing a bunch of 3:16. It is an opportunity to sit down with a minimum of preliminary fuss and run an exciting and twisty heist or investigation-turned-sour or extended chase or double-cross. Or really anything with guns and shouting.

It will contain swearing and you will probably want to swear while playing it. In tests it runs about 2-3 hours a session, so it’s fast. You will be encouraged to let your character die in order to get two cool scenes all to yourself — one where you die, and one where you play the replacement berating the team for getting a valuable member killed. ¹ It’s fast, unusual, and a lot of fun. You can run a campaign, but in doing so the running constant is really the organization that employs the characters — that’s what you’ll come to love and elaborate, because the characters will come and go.

Hollowpoint is basically done as far as design and development goes. This week I’ll box it all up and start writing it as a flat document (which means no one else can directly modify it) and we’ll start editing and playtesting from this document. So you will stop seeing the current rev at the skunkworks and we’ll start making a real artifact. It’s a short game (Toph says around 20K words) so I bet we can have this laid out and read for sale in the fall. But I am not committing to that.

Soft Horizon. This game is suddenly interesting me a lot after a bunch of time on the shelf. It’s getting a lot of fairly deep revision now in the skunkworks and so it’s not coming out any time soon. It needs a lot of playtesting too.

This is a game about fantastic heroes like Elric or Conan or Den. It’s Heavy Metal and it’s stream-of-consciousness (a la Mobius). If you read The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius or Arzach and loved it, you’ll hit your stride playing Soft Horizon. Heroes in this game are individual wonders that you will want to explore over the course of a campaign and hopefully the environment is too. The setting is, like Diaspora, loosely defined through the game mechanisms and largely developed during a first session of cluster generation. This cluster, however, is a group of planes that are of interest to some pantheon of deities and the characters are people who can act across planes and have an interest in opposing or siding with these gods. These are big characters. We don’t care about their farm-boy period. They have already had adventures and already bear scars. Now they are icons of their specific competences — a Soft Horizon character whose best skill is Sorcery is the sorceror in the cluster and not a sorceror. An advancement system will not be necessary, but some system for change will be.

The actual mechanisms under the covers in this game are actually still in flux. It was originally intended as a FATE game but we are still thinking (as anyone following this blog has already seen). New dice are implying new resources and, well, everything is moving. So I don’t see this getting out of the skunkworks soon but if the enthusiasm remains high it could. A lot of new text has gone in over the past few days and it’s feasible this could see print by the end of the year.

The other two games, Chimaera and Soulscape, do not show signs of being released this year so I won’t talk about them in detail. They both remain interesting and are both getting work, but the former needs some time alone with itself and the latter needs a champion to drag it out and wonder what it is out loud at the table.

Oh Jack just told me the Lulu cheque came in. It’s a little lower than last quarter but this time around we get to add two deposits from RPGNow. The total is about 35% over last quarter’s profits per author. So we will look back, I think, on this as a peak period for Diaspora and the start of some great new things. I hope you all are open to new ideas, heartless violence, some cussing, poetic tales of strange people in strange places, the motives of gods, and a little risk.

I’m in, at any rate.

–BMurray