The White Wolf LiveJournal Community

making your mark

2008-07-18T18:40:17Z

so, as we begin to make the convention rounds, and look at many an artistic portfolio, we are asked the same question over and over...

"what do you want to see?"
its a very simple question, but leads down many roads. so, where to begin...

easy answer...
we want to see the best work you are capable of — what you consider to be finished pieces of artwork.

we use a variety of art styles from pencil renderings, to inked line art, to oil paintings to digital paintings. every gameline has its unique look, and different books and projects within those gamelines have their own unique looks.

the longer answer...
we want to see 5-10 finished illustrations that evoke a story, emotion, setting, etc. we want to see multiple figures interacting (it could be as simple as the way two characters look at each other, or as complex as a bar room brawl in a room of mirrors), backgrounds (walls, windows, chairs, tables, the things that make up the area the figures are in), environments (is it night, is it day? if its day, why are the vampires outside? are there cobwebs? these are the things that set your illustrations in our world) and all the other elements that lend to making the piece believable.

hints and tips...
- we know you are showing your work off to alot of companies, make sure to set a section of your portfolio up to aim at us. while we enjoy swords and dragons and the like, we're not really in that market. we want to see what you do in our worlds.
- character templates are cool. i draw a lot of them in my sketchbook, but we would rather see full illustrations telling stories. every artist can illustrate someone standing around looking cool. we want to see your storytelling skills.
- be considerate of your fellow artists. don't show us everything you have done in the past year and a half. be prepared to show us a sampling of your work, and have a leave behind with even more work there. make sure your leave behind has your contact info, as well as pieces from your portfolio (so we remember you).
- along those lines, show us your most recent work. we don't need to see how your style has progressed, we want to see the style(s) you currently work in.
- when you show your portfolio to us, don't make excuses. if you are apologizing for your piece of art, why is it in your portfolio? your portfolio should be your best pieces.

'til next time...
the matt

whitewolf_lj @ 2008-07-17T10:14:00

2008-07-17T14:24:03Z

Just got Operation: Darkness and its strategy guide as a present, and I was leafing through the "lore" section of said strategy guide. (Shut up, I like strategy guides when they contain lots of color art and extras.) It's a very well-written section, talking about werewolves and vampires and WWII history and where the designers got Carmilla and "Herbert East" from and what the Scorched Earth Policy was and stuff like that. A pretty fun little read.

Then I got to a section where they begin with: "Probably the most important sources of a fictional rivalry between werewolves and vampires were the tabletop RPG sourcebooks published by White Wolf Games beginning in 1991." Three paragraphs follow, talking about our take on vampires vs. werewolves in scholarly detail, including the fact that the current WoD does not emphasize the same rivalry.

That was pretty neat, I thought. Thanks for the salute, guys!

Behind the Lines: Experimentation, Pt. II (#25)

2008-07-16T20:12:34Z

Ethan's column about experimentation got matt and I talking, and he suggested that I might want to write about some of the other upcoming experiments that we're doing. Since alternative products is something of a petri dish for our RPG experiments right now, it sounded like a good idea, so I asked Ethan and John if I could take over for a week to talk about some of the other experiments we're doing nowadays.

When I started, I had tons and tons of creative and innovative ideas for alternative products, both in terms of production and content. (I've already covered production alternatives like PDF and print-on-demand pretty thoroughly, so if you want to know more about that side of things, check out column #18.) As I settled in and got to talking with Rich and matt, I found out that they also had a lot of ideas they wanted to explore, and we spent a lot of time just talking about what's possible against what's actually a good business idea to explore. They were (and are) great sounding boards to help me sort the wheat from the chaff; I know that if I have an idea, I can shoot Rich an email or walk across the hall to matt's office, and they'll be able to help me boil down the idea to sort out what's really key about it and whether it's worth pursuing or not. If you're a fan of something really innovative we've been doing this year, odds are it points back to one or both of them at an embryonic stage.

Let me give you an example. Shortly after I got hired (in fact, in one of the first emails I got from Rich post-hire), we started talking about doing another book or two for Scion. These books evolved into Scion: Ragnarok and the Scion Companion, but at the time it was really just kicking ideas around. Somewhere between kicking ideas around and turning them into books, Rich asked me where the outline for the Scion Companion was. Turns out that me saying "hey, I'd like to work on this" was actually me saying "this is mine now." Who knew?

The idea of doing a serial PDF release for the book was Rich's very early on, and there was a LOT of talk between the three of us and John about how many parts it would cover, whether it would be all PDF or have a regular book release, what order the parts would go in, what we would cover in that book and so on. I rewrote the outline probably half a dozen times, but each time it got a little better as we were able to really pin down added value and what didn't. So much of what is cool about how that book came together is really due to that initial conversation (and what has been less than awesome about how its been put together since then is more my fault than I care to admit). It was a totally new way for us to put together and release a book, and like all experiments we learned a lot from it.

Another idea that's coming up evolved in a similar way. As I'm writing this, first drafts have already started trickling in for the tentatively-titled New Wave Requiem, which is a historical book for playing Vampire in 1980s America -- think of it as Requiem for Rome meets Miami Vice. It all started as a joke between myself, Joe, Russell and matt about taking cheesy 80s vampire movies and making them into SASs. I tried to put the idea aside, but it kept gnawing at me for weeks. Finally, I wrote up a very rough outline for it, and gave copies of it to everyone involved, as well as Rich for his perspective. There was a lot of side conversations about focus and logistics and how it would look and read, but I never once heard "That idea will never work." It's not a new idea (it'll technically be the fourth historical Vampire book we've done), but it's a different kind of "historical book," and absolutely an idea that would never have flown as a traditional hardcover release. It's another experiment, another step away from what's safe and solid for us, and I'm excited as hell to see how it turns out.

So, expect that our attempts to experiment and innovate will continue. Some will work well -- the first part of the Scion Companion has been given an honorable mention in this year's ENnie Awards, for example, and many of you have posted on fond memories of experiments in the past. Others won't work as well, and only time will tell which camp our future experiments will fall into. But I hope all of you will continue to hang out with us for the duration of the ride.

Monday Meeting: DEATH TO THE INTERNET

2008-07-15T14:31:34Z

This Week's Work (paraphrased from email)

Team Exalted
John: "Graceful Wicked Masques art notes, Scion: Ragnarok proofing, Exalted errata and Scroll of Fallen Races development."
Brian: "Approving sketches for Scion Companion. Starting art direction of Graceful Wicked Masques once I get the art notes from John."

Team Vampire
Joe: "Prepping Immortal Sinners for a last bit of development before it sees an editor's hands. Working with Russ to get Nosferatu into an editor's hands. Tending to some administrata, probably similar to Ethan's administrata, only not as cool. And with less umlauts. Which is, now that I think about it, a failing on my part."
Craig: "Mekhet." [Eddy's Note: Seriously, that was the entire email. His sig file was longer.]

Team WoD/VtES
Ethan: [Eddy's Note: His subject line was "DëthWeek."] "Finishing up [WoD book] this week. Trying to jam some sekrit project talk/planning in there as well. And there's administrata to catch up on... there's always administrata..."
Aileen: "My week has already started, and it consist of [Hunter board game]."
Chaney: "Looking for some more art for the Hunter board/card game...whatever the hell it is. Slasher....just have to finish up Chapter Three and do the fictiony bits and it can start proofing. Spirit Slayers...art coming in. VTES...art coming in still. Night Stalkers...sending out notes to artists as Spirit Slayers is wrapping up. Working with the artists on [three more WoD books]...."

Team AP
Eddy: "Going to SWRE this week from Wednesday-Monday. Since it's a lot of just sitting in a booth all day, I'll probably get some work done at this con. Current plans are to get Scion Companion pt. 5 to edits while waiting for the last little bits to get in, redlining bonus material and the Changeling and Witch Finders SASs when they come in, start development work on two new projects and write on City in the Sand. Also, I'm taking this Wednesday's LJ post."
Jess: "corrections on Ragnarok also filling it out more as the rest of the art comes in. also working on the To The Flame SAs"

Team EVE
Russell: "Working with Joe to get Nosferatu into an editor’s hands. Hopefully, more EVE manuscripts coming back this week. EVE Online story team work, including working out a bunch of new setting details."

Team the matt
the matt: "meetings. repairing my computer, lj post, eve boardgame, etc. fun times."

The meeting actually started with a meeting with just the developers that slid into the normal Monday meeting. Somewhere in there we were told that our internet provider had died, and we didn't get internet back until close to the end of the business day.

Anyhow, Chaney starts us off by pointing out that Mike Tenay is still the most annoying announcer in professional wrestling. (Note: not to be confused with Our Fearless Leader Mike Tinney.) Russell loses "Not It" and tries to find Chad, but can't. I claim he's invisible. John suggests that we use the Frankenhooker special release box to lure him out. Chaney admits that he's a huge, hulking black man, and explains that being in a relationship with a woman is the downfall to gaming. Joe breaths a sigh of relief, explaining that he'll never have to worry about his gaming. Chaney explains that at 43, you're no longer a Suicide Girl, you're a Euthanasia Girl. Somehow, polar bear fights come up as well.

The meeting was actually pretty short. We talked a little about regular gaming sessions with IPDD and Marketing in the coming weeks. Kelley also talked a little about our upcoming GenCon plans, as well as the ENnie Awards and a few new ideas WWP Marketing is cooking up.

Yesterday's Reason to Drink: Yesterday was Bastille Day! Some of us celebrated by going out to have Mexican food.

matt will be back next friday

2008-07-11T18:59:40Z

matt planned to do his first LJ entry today. This morning he tried to install something on his Windows partition for his Mac, and the whole system crashed. That was around 10am.

It's now close to 3pm, and he's finally gotten the Mac to recognize the new installation of OS X. It'll be another... oh, several hours, while he reinstalls all his software, updates everything, and then reinstalls Windows back on his partition and updates THAT. In the slew of profanity coming from the office across the hall from me, I think there was some muttering about telling people on LJ.

So now you know. He'll try again next week.

2008 Ennie Nominations are Out!!

2008-07-10T17:37:47Z

We’re a giddy bunch of people in the White Wolf offices today. Nominations for the 2008 Ennie Awards have just been posted and the following products made the cut!

Scion: God – Best Cover Art
Art of Eve – Best Regalia
Changeling: The Lost Quickstart – Best Free Product
City of Brass – Best Setting , Best d20
Monte Cook’s World of Darkness – Best d20
Changeling: The Lost – Product of the Year, Best Interior Art, Best Production Values, Best Writing
Lords over the Damned, the Ventrue Clanbook – Honorable Mention: Best Production Values, Honorable Mention: Best Supplement

What are the Ennies?
Annual Gen Con EN World RPG Awards (or ENnie Awards) are annual, fan-based awards for role-playing game products and publishers hosted at Gen Con in Indianapolis, Indiana. The name of the award is derived from the EN World web site that has hosted the awards since their inception in 2001.

From July 21st to August 3rd, gamers from around the world are invited to visit the ENnies voting booth to express their preferences for products. Voters are tracked by IP address, and limited to one vote per individual, tracked by IP. To learn more about how to participate, please click on the Ennies link below.

We’d like to extend our congratulations to all the other companies who have been nominated this year, including our license partner, Dragonfire Laser Crafts. We can’t wait for the envelopes to be opened at Gencon 2008.

Behind the Lines: Experimentation (#24)

2008-07-09T14:22:12Z

We've had some pretty dark times here at the Wolf. When money isn't coming in, for a variety of reasons, the focus becomes more on putting food on the table than on running with experimental books. After all, like most businesses, you need to put out what will sell. When you work full-time for such a business, those sales directly translate to rent payments, grocery and doctor bills, and the like.

But on the other hand, when business is going well enough that you can subsidize some books that might not sell well with the money from books that do well — neat stuff can happen.

Experimental books are books that, essentially, you're not sure how well they'll do, but that you want to do anyway. They're the books that come from thinking outside the box. For example, back in the early days of Vampire: The Masquerade, the various Diablerie books weren't really "experiments," because they were effectively adventures. Every RPG put out adventures, right? They didn't do so great, of course, which taught us that adventures don't generally sell well compared to sourcebooks (true of almost any RPG business model), and World of Darkness adventures were particularly tricky, given the incredible diversity of character types and motivations. They weren't thought of as an experiment at the time, but in a way they were; they taught us something we hadn't previously been aware of, which was that the conventional wisdom of "you need adventures" is not always true. Or rather, it is to some point, but much of the money you invest in adventures is not coming back. (This would lead to the much later experiment of the SAS, and .pdf adventures... but I digress.)

But there were plenty of experiments in the old days as well. Kindred's Most Wanted was a fairly basic concept, of course; many RPGs put out large rogues' galleries of significant antagonists or potential allies in the setting. The experiment there was in presentation, in the book's size and artistic direction. But an example of an experiment that did really, really well? The Book of Nod. An artifact book, usable at a LARP as a prop as well as a source of lore. Characters could read it in-game as well as players reading it out-of-game. And though certain aspects of that book are a little hard to fully immerse oneself in these days (I always get jolted out of it when I recognize the artists at work), that was a hell of an achievement. It let us play with artifact books later on, including my personal favorite, The Chronicle of the Black Labyrinth (creeeepy with four 'e's). And it triggered a new experiment, too: the clanbooks of Vampire: The Requiem. While not 100% artifact books, due to the inclusion or rules at the end, they are a very immersive read through a collection of in-world artifacts. Your characters could come across the documents there. And of course, part of the experiment is the gorgeous, full-color art.

Not bad, eh?

You can probably tell what some other experiments were. For the old World of Darkness, the "Year of" supplements started out as a bizarre experiment, and a successful one. Black Dog Game Factory was technically an experiment, but it was seen as sort of a necessity at the time, to cover material you couldn't otherwise do. (Until the lines started being pretty Black Dog in their own right, forcing the ol' Shuck into obsolescence.) Sometimes they were weird — I'll nominate my own World of Darkness: Blood-Dimmed Tides and Rage Across the Heavens as books nobody thought to demand but that we figured might have a shot at working.

The shift between Worlds of Darkness, old and new… that wasn't an experiment, I should probably clarify. That was a bit more of a gamble. For purposes of this column, I'm defining an experimental book as something that diverges from a proven formula, but the old World of Darkness wasn't quite "proven" enough at its end to support the company. It had run its course, and there wasn't much vitae left in the stone. The shift in presentation was a pretty strong gamble, but you'll note that there weren't many experimental books on the table for a few years. We tried for vital stuff, things that would be likely to reach the widest audience. (Arguably, we did so well with lines like Werewolf that there wasn't much room left for anything but experimental books after a few years.)

But now we're doing experiments again. The Rome books are experimental: historical settings, with heavy production twists. Damnation City was a hell of an experiment, and though it didn't get the sales it deserved, the book is tremendous (in quality and size). We're sending Keys to the Supernal Tarot to the printer this week, which is a book unlike anything done for Mage so far: twenty-two "chapters", each one with different content, linked by the overarching theme of the Tarot's Major Arcana. Oh, and some cartomancy guidelines, and ideas for Storytelling by drawing cards at random and building a story from there. Was there demand for this? Heck no. Is the book grand? I think it is. The art is simply fantastic, and the book's theme is neatly explored. But we'll have to see how it does, because it's certainly an experiment.

I'm pretty happy that we've had the opportunity to get into experiments again. What do you think? What have been some of your favorite products we put out that you never knew you wanted until you saw them? Anything that really affected your chronicles? I'd love to hear about it.

For the purposes of Science, you understand.

--
Ring Name: Jason Bolte
Hails From: The Warehouse
Angle: Face; wants to be liked
Style: Brawler
Entrance Music: “Thunderstruck”, AC/DC
Working the Crowd: Produces a shipping invoice
Foreign Object: Damaged copy of Damnation City
Finishing Move: Thunderbolte (slingshot spear)

Monday Meeting: The System Is Down

2008-07-07T17:57:39Z

This Week's Work (paraphrased from emails)

Team Exalted
John: "Tweaking the final chapter of Graceful Wicked Masques, GWM art notes and then on to Scroll of Fallen Races development."
Brian: "Getting the East put to bed and to sleep with the fishes maybe with a horsehead or just a fish wrapped in a newspaper. Or am I just thinking of Luca Brasi? Finals rolling in for Scion Companion. Coercing more artists to work on the last bit of Scion Companion. I guess at some point soon there will probably be some ads to work on."

Team Vampire
Joe: "This well, I'm continuing to tend to redlining."
Craig: "Some meaningful time with Mekhet and Boargame help if it is required."

Team WoD/VtES
Ethan: "Looking ahead to the next Chang'lin' books when I can to spare some attention to them. I'm sure there's some administrata that needs doing here and there as well. Still owe Aileen art notes, too, so those will get filled in between larger chunks."
Aileen: "Keys to the Supernal Tarot to press this week. A couple of contracts, some warehouse requests, some archiving and making DT pdfs."
Chaney: "Slasher layout continues. VTES art wrangling. Spirit Slayers art trickling in along with sketches. Night Stalkers splats and fulls are in, well ahead of schedule. Reading through [new Hunter book] this week to figure out how to make it look cool."

Team AP
Eddy: "Waiting for final bits of Scion Companion pt. 5 final draft to trickle in. Waiting for final sign-off on Scion Companion pt. 2. Prepping Bad Night for editing. Work on bonus material. Start development of two SASs and two AP books. Writing for SAS."
Jess: "today putting final tweaks on Ruins of Ur getting that up. the rest of the week Scion Ragnarok and starting Scion Companion 3."

Team EVE
Russell: "Nosferatu swiftly coming in from freelancers. EVE drafts slowly coming in. Left mouse button on laptop going quickly."

Team the matt
the matt: "proofs. meetings. eve boardgame."

Team Marketing
Kelley: (given verbally) eQuarterly and prep work for GenCon. Kelley also wanted me to remind people about the eQuarterly fan submission contest and the Hunter: The Vigil trailers contest.

Brian tried to log into the library computer so we could look at our schedule, and couldn't. He claimed that The System Is Down. A few of us start laying down the techno beat for him.

Joe proclaims his undying hatred of Windows XP. Chaney: "What? There's a button that says 'Uninstall Windows? Let's click on THAT. Oh wait, it runs better now...."

World of Darkness: Wang is discussed, but the conversation is shut down by Kelley before we roll around to the inevitable reference to Sexalted.

Kelley tells us that for the first time in 18 years, Dragon*Con denied Bill Bridges a guest badge, but does mention that all of the "Play with a Developer" slots at GenCon are full, and the GenCon seminars are starting to fill up. Chaney offers to run "Out-cuss an Art Director." Brian says he shouldn't set people up for failure.

matt submits an IT ticket. "Come fix our meeting." I point out that such a ticket will never expire.

We talk a little about the Vigil Security window clings that some store owners are putting up. Sounds like people are really liking them.

There's an HR summit in the office this week. We don't know what an HR summit looks like, but it apparently involves hiking up Stone Mountain. The roller skating, however, is open to all of us. I try to avoid images of goths roller skating to Xanadu, but Kelley insisted that I post it.

Witch Finders went to press last week.

matt tells us that we all have to grow up sometime. The meeting rebels at this point.

Today's Reason to Drink: Russell actually gave me three good reasons to drink today. However, my closet Sherlockian requires me to post that on July 7, 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack after he was found clutching his chest in his family garden.

mirror, mirror on the wall...

2008-07-04T03:15:21Z

so, it comes to my attention that we haven't had an art discussion in ages. as such, I would like to know what secrets of the art side of things are y'all curious about? do you want to know...

what we look for in a portfolio?
what decisions go into the design of a book?
what does an art director do?
who does what on the art team?

just add your questions in the comments and I will answer them as best I can on Fridays. I may even pull in a surprise guest here and there.

- the matt,
ww publishing
production manager

Chambers of Love: The State of Creation Edition

2008-07-02T19:45:21Z

So, as Eddy mentioned in the Monday Meeting post, I was in Columbus, OH this past week for Origins. Much fun was had, and I got to meet and talk Exalted and Scion with a lot of fans and freelancers. I took the opportunity to give people an overview of where the books they’re looking forward to are in the publishing process and a bit more about what’s going to be in The Manual of Exalted Power—The Infernals due out in 2009.

So, first off, The Roll of Glorious Divinity II is at the printers, and the logo is, in fact, spelled correctly. Brian got a printer proof Monday, and everything looks good. The Compass of Terrestrial Directions—The East is being proofed internally at White Wolf right now, and it should be heading to the printer too before the July 4th holiday. We’re waiting for a bit of the final art to come in on Scion: Ragnarök, and then, it too will be headed into layout. Another Scion Companion installment will be available soon as well, chock full of new crunchy bits for players. Graceful Wicked Masques—The Fair Folk will be out of development and into editing this week, and then I’ll be diving straight into the Scroll of Fallen Races. Initial drafts are coming in for The Compass of Terrestrial Directions—The South, and they are being redlined by Dean Shomshak, who’s co-developing that book with me. In addition to the aforementioned East layout, Brian Glass is working on an as of yet top-secret assignment that will be revealed to you guys and gals soon. And then, there’s the next fatsplat currently being written for Exalted, namely The Manual of Exalted Power—The Infernals.

Since I dished some Infernals info at Origins, I figured I’d give you folk the lowdown as well. It’s a standard Exalt-type fatsplat, with full rules for playing the Green Sun Princes. Michael Goodwin’s Charm set ideas are great, and I can’t wait to see his draft. The book also devotes a chapter to the akuma, focusing on how these fallen Chosen differ from the Green Sun Princes and also on how they operate in Creation. There is also a full chapter devoted to Helltech, which I can’t go into much detail on, but am really excited about.

Well, that’s what’s going on now with my two games. I’ll be back with a similar “State of Creation” entry in a few months, and a new Chambers of Love in two weeks. Have a great Independence Day holiday, my fellow Americans, and everyone else enjoy a terrific weekend.

Monday Meeting: Three Places, One Party (with pictures)

2008-07-01T18:41:33Z

What We're Doing (paraphrased from emails)

Team Exalted
John: "East proofing and finishing Graceful Wicked Masques."
Brian: "Getting the East into proofing today. Out Friday (as I’m assuming most everyone is since it’s the 4th)."

Team Vampire
Joe: "Continuing work with a whole bunch of Immortal Sinners. Getting chunks of Nosferatu off to edits."
Craig: "Con decompression. Mekhet."

Team Rest-of-WoD-and-VtES
Ethan: "[Upcoming WoD book] is the main thing. Also some administrata, and finishing up the
art notes for [upcoming project]."
Aileen: "Finishing up first proof for Keys to the Supernal Tarot. Pestering Ethan for more art notes."
Mike: "Slasher layout continues. VTES packaging layout....figure get that out of the way. Witch Finders proofs from Transcon. Probably some other stuff that I can't remember at the moment."

Team EVE
Russell: "Writing design proposals for EVE Online. Receiving pieces of Nosferatu from writers."

Team AP
Eddy: "I got far less accomplished at Origins than I thought I would (and will be reducing future expectations of availability to work as a result) and a lot of things rolled onto my plate between being out for a week and the month changeover, so I've got a lot of ass to kick this week. Proofing Ruins of Ur (and Manifestations of Ichor if matt has further revisions). Redlining the Hunter SAS. Prepping Scion Companion pts. 5 and 6 for editing. Prepping Scion Companion pt. 3 for production, and submitting To the Flame to production. Start development of [four different projects]. Catching up on a lot of administrata from Origins, including future OBS and AP planning and following up on networking from Origins. Writing."
Jess: "making corrections to Ruins of Ur and working on Scion Ragnarok"

Team the matt
the matt: Likely recovering from convention, proofing and deleting WAY too much email.

Between a party at the office on Friday and two crews going to conventions at the same time, this week's meeting was a lot of catching up on what happened in various places in various times. Of course, tons of pictures were taken.

Office Party: While we were out, the building was struck by lightning, melting a panel and taking out our magnetic locks until it was replaced. This is a great lead-up to the actual party celebrating (among other things) the launch of our Empyrean Age expansion for EVE Online. There was a mechanical bull there. There were also no trips to the hospital, which is a first, but that may have had a lot to do with the fact that there were three operators and padding present.

Wizard World Chicago: Chad ran a tight ship at the convention.

The guys met some fans of our games.

To remotely celebrate, the guys drank with all of us in spirit, inventing a new drink -- the Cowbell (equal parts vodka and Yoo-Hoo).

Origins: Like our detached comrades in Chicago, we also partied on Friday to celebrate in spirit with our co-workers. (John Chambers has the pics, I believe -- I'll upload them later.) When we found out that we won an Origins Award for Vampire: The Masquerade going into the Origins Hall of Fame, however, a few of us went out to celebrate all over again. (No pictures of this exist that I know of, and that's probably for the best.) John and I spent a lot of time doing seminars and interviews, and we had lots of cool conversations with fans, but I know I'm glad to be home.

And special kudos to our EVE demo teams, who spent a lot of time creating new fans for the game.

Today's Reason to Drink: ~~On July 1st, 1881, the world's first international telephone call took place between New Brunswick and Maine.~~ It's Canada Day, too.

Behind the Lines: Genre Fascists (#23)

2008-06-25T20:20:28Z

If you're into the meta discussion of RPGs, you probably know something about identifying gamers by "type." You know, saying things like "Well, Jason is a Powergamer who wants to be the best around, and Jill is an Explorer who's happiest discovering new things about the setting." One of the first books that I remember doing this was Aaron Allston's Strike Force for Champions, which was basically a book full of "Let me tell you about my characters/campaign" that was written well, and full of insanely great advice on how to keep a game going and your players happy. I bring Strike Force up in particular not just because it's the first place I ran into those labels (I was a crazy-mad Champions gamer back in college), but because of one particular label he used: the Genre Fiend.

The Genre Fiend, or Genre Nazi, or Genre Fascist, or Genre Fanatic, or Genre Enthusiast — pick your favorite — is described as the sort of gamer who really likes the tropes of a given genre, and who will be happy when they're played up and unhappy when they're ignored or broken. He might be happy subverting them as an intellectual exercise, but most often he really likes playing a game in a fairly uncut genre. Despite the fact that terms like "fiend" and "Nazi" are not that complimentary, the Genre Junkie is actually not seen as a negative type of player. If you're running a pulp game, the Genre Tyrant will exult in two-fisted action, helpfully getting into fights atop zeppelins or car chases along winding roads with Tommy guns a-blazing. If you're going for a gritty Western, he'll create a character that showcases the interesting frontier ethics and morality of the time, rather than trying to reenact Back to the Future 3.

The people who work here in the development trenches of White Wolf? They are Genre Overlords, let me tell you. They tend to be more experimental when it comes time to run games, mind, and may subvert tropes and do genre mash-ups in order to stimulate their brilliant, fevered minds — but once you actually set the genre of a game, they adhere to that puppy.

I bring this up because sometimes people have asked why we haven't done something like "World of Darkness: Cyberpunk," or why Andrew Bates' light-hearted and cartoony pitch of "WoD: Kids" never saw the light of day while we turned around and did World of Darkness: Innocents. The World of Darkness is in itself a genre. You could even argue that it's two, overall — the original WoD was a more over-the-top, supernatural action-adventure with a couple of shots of serious philosophy and gritty noir-ish aspects, while the current incarnation is a more classic horror genre. Each of the game lines within that are additional genres, too, subsections with odd hooks like "Modern Fantasy" and "Savage Fury." And holding the reins of these settings are the kind of Genre Aficionados that keep things as consistent as they can. (This is also true of any non-WoD game we've done, I should note; a versatile system is great, but truly generic RPGs are not really our thing.)

Now, that said, we're sensitive to the needs of players who like to do genre mash-ups with the WoD, and even those who like to take the Storytelling system and go brand new places with it. So we do try to provide neat things for you. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could take the core magic system of Mage and have it work as a magic system for a fantasy setting — hell, the basic orders key in very well to classic fantasy tropes like necromancers, alchemists, enchantresses, diabolists and the like. There's some neat stuff in the upcoming Hunter that, if you were to rip the flavor text away, could serve as the basis for some serious genre-bending.

But we don't do that sort of thing ourselves terribly often. The WoD is something that has a certain value to it if it remains within genre. I don't just mean that as a marketing concern (though that concern is present) — I mean it as a Genre Brute, someone who sees the aesthetic value of something that remains largely true to itself. Now, as a Genre Zealot, I'm not going to be pushing to put World of Darkness: Superheroes on the plate. Though that could be an interesting mash-up, it wouldn't really fit as a not-so-mashed-up setting element. But on the other hand, as a designer, I do like the thought of character design subsystems that could be used to make a fairly low-level supers game. Stuff like the Ridden or skinchangers are a start. Maybe you say "Hey, Skinchangers and/or Changing Breeds could be the basis for a supers game where supers get their powers from Moreau-like hybridization," and you build a setting around that. It does require a certain amount of ripping and repasting, but that's because the stuff to be ripped and repasted is ultimately material created out of love for the original genre, and with a desire to keep that genre well provided for.

But you know, anything we put out might turn into something completely different in your own games. Wink wink, nudge nudge. And if you wind up with a subgenre or mash-up that rocks your players' faces off and leads to some of the best gaming ever, trust us — we're all for it. We might even wish we could play in those games ourselves. Never enough time, am I right?

--
Ring Name: Priscilla “Thug” Kim
Hails From: The Far East (or West, actually, if you live in America; Eurocentricism isn't very helpful, is it?)
Angle: Heel; thug by name, thug by nature
Style: Martial brawler
Entrance Music: “Enter the Dragon,” Euroboys
Working the Crowd: Revels in the downstairs air-conditioning
Foreign Object: 2”x4” with a nail in it (old-school!)
Finishing Move: Jackboot (top-rope double foot stomp)

Monday Meeting: Too Damned Hot

2008-06-23T17:51:08Z

This Week's Work (paraphrased from each person's email)

Team Exalted
John: "Graceful Wicked Masques development, whipping up questions for Errata Team Prime and attending Origins, possibly with a side of East proofs."
Brian: "Fighting a headache again. Got the text files from John on The East book, so that'll start layout today. Art continues to come in for that book. Still have a little more Scion AD'ing to wrap up. Gotta take off a little early today as I forgot that it's my birthday this weekend, so I gotta get my car inspected and all that crap taken care of."

Team Vampire
Joe: "Today, I shall spend some time slamming my head against Hansoft, trying to make its little bars reflect what is actually going on in my line. Wish me luck. I shall also be checking up on [VtR book] with its developer. The rest of the week is all about unleashing awesome, in the form of Immortal Sinners."
Craig: "EVE BG shenanigans and maybe a little Mekhet. Then off to the Windy City. Remember folks… Scotch."

Team WoD/VtES
Ethan: "Woo Internet out! Wasn't even a storm this time; could have just been a
mess-o'-mist. Some Changeling advance work for [upcoming books]. Going to set up a sekrit stuff meeting for the end of the week, when we come down for the All-Hands. Some miscellany to boot, no doubt."
Aileen: "Keys to the Supernal Tarot. Should be getting the rest of the art any minute now so I can get a proof done this week."
Chaney: "Out of Office all this week. Post hunter/witchfinder break before tearing into the rest of Slasher and the big VTES set. So, hopefully I’ll be catching up on my commission painting and guitar learnin’s. But for those who want to know.... Spirit Slayers is AD’d. Night Stalkers is just awaiting the hunter artists to finish up with SS, and then they hop on Night Stalkers. Witch Finders got uploaded and approved Thursday, so all that’s left is the hard proof to come in."

Team EVE
Russell: "Nosferatu rewrites this week, other Nosferatu development. Haunts and Worms, oh, yes. EVE Online backstory writing/planning meetings with Tony Gonzales and possibly Ryan Dancey."

Team AP
Eddy: "Putting off what administrata I can until next week. Focusing on Scion Companion pt. 2 proofing, Scion Companion pt. 3 and To The Flame revision and Wyld bonus material development before I leave for Origins. At Origins it will probably be redlining of the Hunter SAS and proofing of Ruins of Ur."
Jess: "working on Ruins of Ur should have a proof of that one tomorrow & Ragnarok"

Team Intern (GOING OUT OF BUSINESS!)
Priscilla: "Wrapping up Scion Companion part 2. Otherwise, I think that's about it before I transition downstairs."

Team the matt
the matt: No email, so proofs, meetings and melting prior to leaving for Chicago.

Bonus Email
Team Marketing: "Come meet WW people at WW Chicago (Matt and Craig) and Origins (Eddy, Oscar, Kelley)! Feeling the Quickstart love (we even got a comment on Ain’t It Cool News) and the success of Free RPG Day. Giggling about the fact people have started to realize there are not one, but two quickstarts to celebrate Hunter! In fact – I love our fans so much, the first ten to email me at: kelley@white-wolf.com, after this LJ goes up will get an exclusive additional bit about the Union, from the book, directly from me."

The AC broke in the office today. As I'm posting this up, it's 90 in my office, and that's with two fans blowing. Russell was smart and shaved his head, although he now looks like Mini-Ken Cliffe. John is asked to call Ethan and Aileen, and is conquered by the conference phone (causing Chad to slap him). matt has played through most of Lego Indiana Jones, and thinks it's better than Lego Star Wars. Kelley mentions that the original Batman movie from the 60s is being rereleased. There's something happening here on Friday, but Chad only got out "mecha" before Brian cut him off. So, he clarifies that they're bringing Mechagodzilla. John makes a note to bring in Jet Jaguar.

Most of Publishing will be out this week due to conventions -- me, John and Kelley for Origins, and matt, Craig and Chad for Wizard World Chicago. So, odds are our next Monday Meeting will be a Tuesday meeting. Chaney just went ahead and took the whole week off, after his Hunter crunches, so he can come back fresh with a new set of curse words. Joe says that it'll just be him and the tumbleweeds. Which makes Brian and Russell tumbleweeds.

Free RPG Day was last Saturday, even though no store in the Atlanta area was signed up for it. As Kelley mentioned, our Hunter quickstart got some buzz on AICN, which is, in fact, cool. There's been a lot of good buzz on our forums, too, including discussion about making Devo a hunter cell.

Priscilla will soon be a not-intern -- she has been hired to work downstairs with the MMO guys. So, she'll be wrapping up the Scion Companion pt. 2 and then taking her title of "thug" with her. Congrats, Priscilla!

Today's Reason to Drink: Raise a glass to the man who told us what words we couldn't use on television, because George Carlin passed away last night at the age of 71.

Behind the Lines: DIY (#22)

2008-06-18T19:48:47Z

I didn't grow up with a lot of other kids around, so it's hard for me to tell just how much of my own childhood was par for the course. For example, sometimes my cousin and I would play pretend with existing characters — him picking Mark and me picking Jason, for instance — but a lot of the time, making up our own characters was just far more interesting. You have a whole bunch of G.I. Joe-types with their own codenames and backgrounds? Hey, there's a template to build your own! It's no wonder I hooked onto RPGs as hard as I did when they came around to our holler. (That's "hollow," or "valley," to you non-Appalachians.) It was a chance to start mucking around with a lot of the things we thought were interesting, but with our own creations.

Even then, though, I would typically go one step further, particularly as I started moving into my teens. We would play Marvel Super Heroes, but not always in the actual Marvel universe. We'd play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, but never actually meet Shredder or the turtles or any of the established characters. When I started running games in college, I cemented myself as the "homebrew or nothing" guy — never ran any existing settings, or even adapted existing settings. I still bought a lot of setting books, mind, and I suppose my Champions game was pretty close to their default system because I kept on using their villains, but actually offering to run a game set in Krynn or the DC universe? Not me.

And somewhere along the way I wound up getting assimilated into White Wolf, specifically the World of Darkness.

So it was back into the realm of mucking around with existing settings. And truth be told, part of that duty was being a caretaker to an existing setting (as I moved into actually doing creative work), and part of it involved actually getting to create, to make up new things. But interestingly, I was learning to design things that weren't actually how I would run a game. Where I would often purchase a setting book, read it, say "ah, that was interesting, throw it all out and maybe plug some loose inspiration in my own game, now I was designing stuff to be used as is. And that was a bit of a change. To go back to the example of G.I. Joe, instead of designing a "build your own over-the-top paramilitary setting" game, I was working on designing "The G.I. Joe RPG, with rules for playing your own Joes/Cobras!"

Now, here's the thing. In order to be a really good designer, it's important that you should be able to come up with freaky new settings almost at the drop of a hat. You corner any one of my talented co-developers for five minutes, tell them something like "Give me a cool pitch for a superhero game with a twist, GO" — and two minutes in, they will be dishing out something like "It's Vedic mythology rewriting the world when Kalki emerged as the first superhuman" or "Universal Studios monsters meets pulp action — "Doc" Adam Savage is the bronzed superman sewn together by his genius "father," a protege of Victor Frankenstein! The Shadow clouds men's minds because he's a vampire!" And so on. They're insane and also uber-talented like that.

But there is a little bit of a trick. People like us, we can sometimes write for ourselves too much. In other words, we get so enamored with the idea of systems that can be stripped down and kit-bashed and presented in a way that the Storyteller is encouraged to Build Your Own Vision, that we forget about the other half of the equation. And that's the folks who roleplay to explore — and who also like to explore through purchasing product. I don't just mean that folks like this buy RPGs just to read them — such customers are out there, but they're not the focus of our efforts the way some have accused us. I would instead call them "guides." These are the people who buy RPGs to explore the world, and then stage a game so their friends can explore it as well, as they act as the overall ringmasters, barkers, tour guides and sherpas.

And sometimes it's possible to do those folks a disservice. By going too toolkit, opening things too much, we don't provide sights for the guides. Yes, we empower things for the world-builders and the sandbox engineers. But optimally we should be doing that just as we're making the setting vivid and interesting and full of details. While the previous incarnation of the WoD could go too far, stifling too much with the "you can't do that, it breaks the setting" premises, I know that my own dread of repeating that level of concrete setting detail could color my work into being a little too soft. And that's a shame. Even back in the day when it was "homebrew or nothing," I still needed my inspiration.

Changeling: The Lost, and now Hunter: The Vigil, are some recent examples of how we've tried to refine that approach. We're working to provide a lot more inspiring setting detail, while at the same time opening things up to be essentially customizable. You could use either of those games' cores as the basis for your own, completely different setting. (To be fair, you could do that with any WoD game, but I think it's more evident how easy it is with these two.) And yet we wanted those books to crackle with ideas, to charge people up and say "This is a setting I could play in." You see it as well with the new Vampire clanbooks — more setting goodness, more ideas, more inspiration, while still avoiding the rules of nailing down "how your chronicle 'should' be run."

I'll always be a do-it-yourself gamer, I think, at least as the setting material goes. But hopefully the stuff we put out won't require you to be a fully DIY gamer to make the most use of it. We always want you to take the World of Darkness and make it your own. We want you to revel in the stuff you create. But we also want to make it fun, and inspiring, and easy. Let us know if it's working. And if you know some people who thought we were a little too soft and amorphous before, lend them one of our recent books and tell them to let us know if we're getting closer to the right balance — we'd like to hear from everyone who has an interest in this sort of thing. After all, we're willing to learn.

--
Ring Name: Conrad Hubbard
Hails From: The Server Room
Angle: Tweener; depends on whether you see “hippie” as virtuous or wretched
Style: Classic grappler
Entrance Music: “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” The Fifth Dimension
Working the Crowd: Tears his tie-dye T-shirt Hogan-style
Foreign Object: Vegetarian snack platter
Finishing Move: Peacemaker (modified schoolboy roll-up)

Monday Meeting: Return of the Revenge

2008-06-16T15:58:42Z

People Doing Stuff (paraphrased from each person's email)

Team Exalted
John: "Getting RoGDII out the door, developing Graceful Wicked Masques, going through the East files with a fine tooth comb and more errata (including possibly errataing some earlier errata)."
Brian: "Roll of Glorious Divinity 2 is in proofing stage. Art directing Scion Companion pt. 3-6."

Team Vampire
Joe: "Mekhet gets final touches today (hopefully not of the sort that need to be illustrated on a doll in a therapist's office, but hey - whatever gets it out the door). Then, I turn my steely gaze to Immortal Sinners."
Craig: "A little board game help and working on Mekhet. Also probably a little prep work for the trip to Wizard World Chicago next week. If you can make it please stop by the booth and say hello. Oh and bring Scotch."
Russell: On loan to Team Vampire this week. "In Nosferatu, the masters of fear meet my mighty thews. Or at least my rewrites and contracting."

Team WoD/VtES
Ethan: "Catching up on some administrata after assisting with the Witchfinders thing. Double-checking the word count and maths on some contracted books. Some initial work on [upcoming WoD book]. And maybe some work on Goblin Markets if it all pans out."
Aileen: "[Mage book]. Trying to steal some time on Ethan's computer to send out comps."
Chaney: "Finishing up Witchfinders...hopefully. Doing some last minute AD fixing on Slasher. Contracting the cover for [upcoming WoD book]."

Team EVE
Currently in the hands of our viking overlords.

Team AP
Eddy: "Catching up on stuff before Origins next week, due to sudden loss of the ability to balance on Friday. So, this week is development of [upcoming SAS], [potential project] and [October SAS], getting Scion Companion pt. 4 to edits and getting Scion Companion pt. 3 and To the Flame to production."
Jess: "mostly working on Ruins of Ur and Scion Ragnarok"

Team Intern
Priscilla: Out today, but she's working on Scion Companion pt. 2.

Team the matt
the matt: The usual: meetings, secret stuff, proofs.

matt came in and talked about the constantly-bleeding hole in his forehead. There was a Requiem LARP at the office on Saturday -- kind of small, but entertaining. However, the speakerphone ended up behind the old Werewolf standee, so I was asked if I was having the standees talk to each other. (Damn it, why didn't I think of that?) There was also a VtES tournament downstairs, but the nerding was carefully segregated.

Chaney said something about his balls at one point, but I think my brain shut down in self-defense.

We talked about the alleged Internet rumors of our demise and/or the demise of EVE Online (which, if all were true, meant we had a very productive weekend in destroying all we know and love). Some discussion about marketing needs and book length. Chaney loudly proclaimed who is now dead to him. Grim Fears went to press last week. I went over the AP sales -- I can't share numbers, but I can say that Daughter of Nexus is very, very popular, holding the number one "Hottest Item" slot on DriveThruRPG.com! I also talked a little bit about the future of AP and what kinds of tactics we'll be taking in the future.

Today's Reason to Drink: On June 16th, 1963, Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

Chambers of Love: Double Vision Edition

2008-06-12T20:57:33Z

So, I’ve just finished rewriting 20,000 words of an assignment that, through various misadventures, had gone through four separate authors, one of them twice. This is actually the reason there’ve been no Chambers of Love entries nor Exalted errata recently, as I’ve been juggling this writing with keeping the schedule of Exalted and Scion on some semblance of track. This experience, plus my recent perusal of the forum threads devoted to Dreams of the First Age, led me to pick out today’s topic of discussion: developer vision versus freelancer vision.

Whenever a developer comes up with a supplement, he has a vision of how he’d create that supplement and the things he’d like to see in it. Those things he would include might be thought up by the developer himself, they might be things he’s heard fans clamor for at conventions or online, or they might be reiterations/reinterpretations of things from previous work done on the supplement’s subject (a common occurrence in games that have been through multiple editions, such as Exalted). To pass his vision on to the authors he’s hired, the developer composes an outline. Outlines vary in complexity and size based on the project and the person who is developing said project. Regardless, they have one basic goal, to convey the vision of the developer to those he’s hired to do the writing that, realistically, he doesn’t have time to do himself. Using Dreams of the First Age as an example, I composed a 23-page outline to let authors know what I expected to see in the three books that make up the set. That’s a long outline. But consider that the three books add up to 386 pages, and you can see there’s a lot of leeway for authors to express their own vision.

And that’s what’s interesting about the process of game development. In most situations in the publishing biz (in fiction at any rate), a book is the product of a single author, and by extension, a single vision. Roleplaying books are a different animal. They represent a sort of creative gestalt, where multiple visions combine to form a greater whole, much like the actual gaming experience around a table, where the visions of the players and Storyteller combine to form a narrative that’s greater in scope than the sum of its parts. When the process goes right, it’s a terrific experience. You’ve probably been in games where your gaming group is firing on all cylinders and each member is complimenting the other, making the story itself more enjoyable… and you’ve probably played in games where the opposite is true and one person in the group derails the whole plot, ruining the play experience.

This sort of thing happens when it comes to RPG writing as well. To go back to Dreams of the First Age as an example, there were many things I asked be in its books: the five First Age incarnations of the five Solar sigs getting write-ups, outlining of a public transportation system that allowed for folk to travel fairly rapidly from one side of Creation to the other, artifact stats for crazy things like Luthe, the reveal of Old Realm script, etc. The authors then brought their own ideas in, some of them awesome, like I AM (an Easter egg for long-time Exalted fans aware of Eyem from Aspect Book: Air), Operation Wyldhand (a great example of the growing disconnect between the Curse-maddened Solars and the people they rule) and Titan-class aerial citadels (which from talking to the author recently, I now realize his intention was that one of these was still hiding in plain sight in the present—something likely to come up in a future supplement), some of them… significantly less awesome. There was a lot of variance from my original concept of the First Age to what was submitted by my authors. And then there was some stuff that just didn’t jibe at all. If you noticed my name in the credits, well the reason it’s there was because I had to write a good bit of replacement material. See, it’s a developer’s job to let his authors expand upon his vision and add what jibes of their own ideas to it, not to let them shatter said vision. Just like a good Storyteller does what he can to mitigate the damage to a game caused by a problem player or ejects her from the gaming group, a developer reins in problem writers and, if necessary, replaces them. This is not to say Dreams was a case where a writer or several got out of control. It’s just a common occurrence. It happens to Russell, Ethan, Joe and Eddy as often as it does to me, and it’s one of the main jobs of a developer: maintain the vision.

And so, I’m tired after all my recent writing, but I know the book I did it for will be better for all the work. So, on to the next supplement, and the next Chambers of Love. See you in two weeks.

A taste of "The List of Words Mike Chaney Can't Say"

2008-06-09T19:39:23Z

In my Monday meeting posts, there have been references to a list of words Mike Chaney can't say. I didn't know much about it, so today I asked Brian about it. He emailed it to me. Then I asked Kelley if I could post the list, and she looked nervous and crossed off a good half of the list. Then took the list back and crossed off some more. Given the... explicit nature of the list, I'll post a handful of terms to give you an idea of the linguistic master that is Mike Chaney.

Tijuana (accompanied by donkey noises)

Grape

Ape

"blue"

Hitler

Sex Turbine

Any phrase that contains "roll like that"

Hot Carl

Post-Mortem

Tractor Pull

Hummer

Scrum

Shelf Dangler

Chewing Gum

"She touched my yardarm." (added today)

Monday Meeting: Pee-Pee Dance

2008-06-09T17:53:37Z

This Week's Work (paraphrased from each person's email)

Team Exalted
John: "Graceful Wicked Masques comes back to the fore, hopefully to be wrapped up this week. Also, a new LJ entry, Exalted errata, proofing of RoGDII and some outlining/contracting of future books."
Brian: "Today I'm focusing on getting the lumps out of my yogurt. I don't like lumpy yogurt. This is going to take some intense concentration to make happen. I'll also be getting back with a ton of artists over corrections and questions for the East. Fair amount of art came in over the weekend to approve. Hopefully wrapping up ads today/tomorrow."

Team Vampire
Joe: Joe's back! "Putting the finishing touches on Mekhet for production, and then tending to Immortal Sinners."
Craig: "Still playing with Mekhet and helping out marketing with a project."

Team WoD/VtES
Ethan: "Need to get some one-sheets done for Kelley today. Scrambling to fill some writer holes. After that, it'll be work to keep the schedule months out on target."
Aileen: "Finishing up Grim Fears, getting that and HtV screen/sheets to press."
Chaney: "This week is pretty simple..... finishing up Witchfinder. Also this week, Slasher art round up and starting layout. VTES art status checking....mainly to see where all the artists are and if they need any last minute source materials. ADing out Spirit Slayers. I think I got the guys to do it, now I just gotta send notes....that includes the cover. And last but not least toughen up my fingertips on my left hand so that I don't slice them open while doing my fretting exercises....all I know is they hurt like a son of a bitch right now after only about 3 one hour long practice sessions."

Team EVE
Russell: "More development on Nosferatu, examining the things that lurk beneath the streets. Working with the EVE Online team on story material for the winter and beyond."

Team AP
Eddy: "Redlining Scion Companion pt. 5 as the last bits trickle in, as well as prepping pt. 3 for editing next week. Prepping To The Flame for Jess so she can get an early start on it. More development of [AP book]. [Hunter SAS] mostly-complete draft also in."
Jess: "this week other than tons of unpacking and assembling things: prologue, getting started on the SAS for next month, getting the Scion pt 2 together for Priscilla."

Team Intern
Priscilla: "Scion Companion part 2. Will also be out a couple of hours early on Wednesday, and gone Friday and Monday--have a court appointment Wednesday, traveling for the other two days. Might in Thursday instead, if I can."

Team the matt
the matt: ~~Taking over the world with collectable Star Wars figures~~ "meetings, ragnarok stuff, companion stuff, eve bg stuff, eve rpg stuff, secret stuff, proofs"

Bonus Email
Team Marketing: "Teasing people about Hunter. A lot. Getting ready for Free Rpg Day. Starting work on the next E quarterly. Summer Con Season! – Come see some of us at Origins and WW Chicago this month!"

The jocularity and meeting was kind of intermixed today, but I'll try to extract one from the other.

Jocularity: matt says we can have Prosac, as long as he can have some first. I coin the word "prosiatic." The Apple Developer conference is today, and matt forbids us to take off work to watch the keynote speech.

The Pirates of the Carribean Online game is seen as generally awful; matt and Chaney could barely get through a couple of hours of it. I'm reminded of Link (one of our programmers) and his rants about Disney princesses and "power zones." matt says that the Captain Jack Sparrow actors at Disney theme parks suffer the highest rate of sexual molestation.

Russell relates his experiences being stalked by a gothapottamus. We discover that one of Merry's favorite words, "chillax", is actually from Jimmy Neutron. John watched a documentary on RATT, and Chaney decides that Will Farrell will play Brian Glass in the White Wolf movie. Joe says of Dustin Hoffman: "Clearly Balley's does embalming now."

We start recounting bad cartoon retreads, like the Mortal Kombat cartoon, the Highlander cartoon and the New Adventures of He-Man. This leads into an observation that some of the retread movies coming out are a little too faithful to their roots, and end up reminding us how much the original material sucked through the haze of nostalgia.

Ned stops by and does a little dance, but we can't tell if it's out of joy for being in the Monday meeting or because the bathroom is right next to the library we're meeting in.

Business: We talked about some of our initial impressions of D&D 4th edition, as a few guys in the office bought copies and run a few sessions. The first Exalted SAS, Daughter of Nexus, is doing really well on its first weekend, and forum commentary has thus far been pretty positive. We also talked about the usual variety of office things that aren't interesting or we can't talk about in an LJ. I'm going to try to start putting out lists of what has gone to press starting next week, but it might take a couple of tries to remember to bring it up at the meeting.

Today's Reason to Drink: June 9th, 1934 - Donald Duck makes his debut in The Wise Little Hen.

Behind the Lines: Spreading the Love (#21)

2008-06-04T20:18:57Z

So, Aileen and I went to our local comics/gaming retailer recently, and he said to us happily, "So you guys know about the upcoming big release this week? You know — the Vampire book?"

That was nice of him, I thought.

Of course, to some extent it was true. He'd lost some sales of the D&D 4th edition to people who cancelled their preorders and went to buy the book at a big chain store that had broken the street date. And up here around Asheville, World of Darkness stuff has been nicely competitive with D&D. Enough so that it kind of illustrates a point about just how unusual the hobby is.

Basically, RPGs spread through viral transmission. You might be infected by picking up a game cold because it looks cool, but it takes social contact in order for the RPG to properly incubate and grow. And at that point, it starts infecting others. D&D is a particularly popular game in part because it had a big epidemic outbreak in the '80s, and it's had a lot of carriers ever since. Vampire and the rest of the World of Darkness enjoyed their own heavy outbreak in the early '90s as well, giving us a nice little foothold in the collective gaming consciousness.

The interesting thing about this is that communities can become interesting pools that incubate odd preferences. For example, locally Werewolf was consistently more popular than Vampire; a trend that doesn't reflect the market in general, but up in Appalachia where the woods are closer and the cities smaller (or at least, they were — goddamn "progress"), the werewolf seems a more natural fit than the urbane vampire. There are towns where games that are far from market leaders are dominant, thanks to some gamers who run good games that have inspired other people to run more of the same. You might know of a town where Toon is remarkably popular, where Paranoia has never gone out of style, or where Spirit of the Century has caused a lot of people to quit delving into dungeons and start swinging from zeppelins. LARPs can skew this even further (as I'm sure happened locally); even in the oWoD days, you could see places where a boisterous Changeling LARP meant that Changeling was far and away the most popular game.

Now, this does make things a bit tough for us when we're trying to figure out just what's working and what isn't. Changeling: The Dreaming was never a major contender in sales; yet in some places, it was clearly tapping into the local mentality quite nicely. It can be hard on fans, too. I've always hated to have to tell someone who asks me "Why in the world did you cancel [Game X]? It was the most popular game around here!" that well, we wish it had been that popular elsewhere, too. But for some reasons, perhaps filtered through my oh-so-charming disease metaphor, the virus just didn't prosper and transmit itself quite as vigorously.

So you look at games a little harder. You want to find out ways to make them more... contagious, really. You want it to be easy to describe to other players what exactly you do, or why the game is so cool — but you also want your ideas to be distinct enough that they don't feel recycled. You want to try finding talking points that a reader just has to tell a friend about. And that's hard. Seriously, it's like trying to find the philosopher's stone; if we'd perfected the art, we'd be rolling in gloriously weak American dollars. But even if you can't find the perfect formula, you can maybe pick up on some elements that make your game just a bit more infectious.

But ultimately, it's not up to just us. It's up to the people who play. A good and interesting game will never be quite up to the power of a talented and enthusiastic Storyteller who is willing to entertain newcomers, or a group that says "hey, come over and try out this neat new thing." So while we may be spending time trying to figure out those magic transmission vectors, we also take time out now and again to appreciate those people who are out there spreading the love for no other reason than just enjoying the hobby. For all of you out there who've ever welcomed a newcomer, or taught a friend, or just answered a few of a stranger's questions about a game — you have our heartfelt thanks. You are what makes the whole idea of a gaming community worthwhile.

And sorry about the whole pathology metaphor. That might've been a bit... yeah.\
--
Ring Name: Jess Mullins
Hails From: Huntsville, Alabama
Angle: Face; the quiet one
Style: Technical
Entrance Music: “Sweet Home Alabama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd
Working the Crowd: Laughs at a private joke
Foreign Object: PDF archive
Finishing Move: APB (“Alternate Press Bomb”; sitout crucifix powerbomb)

Monday Meeting: Ten Minutes of Awesome

2008-06-02T15:18:50Z

This Week's Work (paraphrased from each person's email)

Team Exalted
John: "Lotsa writing and developing."
Brian: "I’m wrapping up art direction on The East today/tomorrow and hopefully wrapping up the layout for Roll2."

Team Vampire
Joe: Joe's still out. I think he's in the final stages of his zombie chrysalis.
Craig: "Working on Mekhet stuffs and anything else that might come up."

Team WoD/VtES
Ethan: "Last week was a lot of "get work done on X projects, finish nothing, really." I hate that. So, there's outlines and contracting for Changeling books. Finishing up an extra thousand or two thousand words' worth of those [terribly mysterious] notes. Those are the priorities, and after that will come other little things."
Aileen: "Okay, HtV screen and character sheets should go to press today."
Chaney: "Witchfinder...."

Team EVE
Russell: "Helping develop Nosferatu. Working on storyline for EVE Online, after The Empyrean Age ships. Glad Daeva’s out, wondering how many of the tiny secrets folks will find. Rereading old sword and sorcery books."

Team AP
Eddy: "Getting Ruins of Ur to Jess, redlining Scion Companion pt. 5, finalizing [AP book outline] with Joe and Russell so I can start hiring writers, and maybe prepping Scion Companion pt. 4 for editing (it came back early)."
Jess: "hopefully finishing daughter of nexus today, Scion companion 2, prologue"

Team Intern
Priscilla: "Mostly PoDing."

Team the matt
the matt: Out ill today. He asked me to handle the meeting today.

matt called me around 9:30 from his ~~deathbed~~ house telling me that he's not coming in due to a large case of the vomits. He asked me to run the meeting. Joe's still out waiting for his spine to knit together or something, and Chaney's trying to get his car fixed. Brian talked about how his knees are aching after matt's daughter kept bashing in his knees with a wooden sword at the Ren Faire. He also went to the drive-in and watched a movie with both Godzilla and Mechagodzilla in it, but it wasn't the same one that he had at home (and my IMDb search turns up a lot of movies with both Godzilla and Mechagodzilla in it). We talked a little about what was going to press this week and the future of the various LJ columns, and we wrapped it up ten minutes after we started.

Today's Reason to Drink: June 2nd is Italy's Festa della Repubblica (Republic Day).

Mail Bag!

2008-05-30T16:45:58Z

Usually our mail is the bi-weekly pay stub, an artist submission or two, or on the lucky days a new Veer.com catalog. But this week we got something pretty slick. This nifty little viral package.

You can track the campaign over here.
It's always good to know that we're on Big Media's radar now and then.

He Knows My MSN Login and Password

2008-05-28T17:37:35Z

Behind the Lines: Yes or No? (#20)

2008-05-28T15:09:42Z

I recently argued this point elsewhere, but it's still fresh in my mind, so I think I'm going to get a little more mileage out of it.

The biggest advantage roleplaying games have over almost any other form of entertainment is the ability to say "yes."

If you've ever thought of an RPG in terms of "It's like a movie or book, only you can say 'what if things happened differently?'", you already know what I'm talking about. If you've played a video game and said "Man, I wish they'd let me go down this corridor/dynamite this door/jump this hedge/talk to more people", you know what I mean. An RPG is something where, with the right person running the game, there are all kinds of opportunities open to you. You can make your own characters, forge your own entertainment.

This philosophy is something I believe strongly. It showcases the strength of the medium. What's more, it's just plain more fun if your players can expect that you will say "yes" to many a question. If there's a chance they can swing from the chandelier or dynamite the bridge while their mortal enemy's standing atop it, they'll try. Whenever a player asks a question, it is in your best interests as a Storyteller to at least consider the ramifications of saying "yes" before ruling against it.

Now, there's a catch, of course. The whole business of writing settings and rules is, in effect, also a complicated way of saying "no" a lot. However, it's a matter of necessary nos, and each rule is also a variant of saying "yes" to a question. Let's take the rules for firearms, for instance. Merely writing them up and providing them is saying "yes, your vampire/werewolf/whatever can use a gun in a firefight." Establishing rules for them, though, does mean having to say no to things like "can I kill a werewolf in full body armor with a single .22 bullet to the chest?" When a rule gives you a negative, though, it's usually for a reason. For example, the rules for fire damage mean that an ordinary human cannot stand unprotected in fire and not get hurt. That's a necessary "no" for the sake of verisimilitude — and if you want to spin it that way, it's essentially saying "yes" to "does the realistic thing happen when you stand in a fire?" And in many cases, rules are there not to say "yes, you succeed," but "yes, you can try." The permission to attempt something but the chance of failure is what makes the dramatic tension work.

And when it comes to settings, sometimes you have to say no in order to serve an overall theme or mood. If you're trying to do a historical game about the Tokugawa shogunate, you may have to say no to laser pistols, minotaurs and red Kryptonite. The judgment calls get a little closer than that, of course. Is it cool to have vampiric werewolves in the World of Darkness? It depends. One approach makes the setting more cartoonish; another more dynamic. This is where players may disagree with our judgment calls the most, deciding to say yes where we said no. To be honest, that's great. The only thing I tend to ask is for the consideration of checking out why we said "no" in the first place, because that will inform you as to whether our reasoning might be applicable to your group or not. And of course, the more informed the decision, the better a shot at making the game fantastic for all.

So, rules impose some limitations or requirements on your actions or choices, with the intent of serving a particular purpose. That said, the purpose should be the overall strength of the game. Tyrannical Storytellers can enforce rules that suit their purpose more than that of the players. Now in general, the Storyteller shouldn't roll over and allow the players to succeed at everything without trying. Again, you want to give them a realistic shot at trying — and realistic may mean there's next to no chance of you succeeding at a plan, mind. But the Storyteller shouldn't say "no" just to reinforce authority or play a dominance game. That's not fun, and sometimes it isn't even realistic. The ability to try anything, again, is the strength of the medium. You have no idea how much power you get just by being willing to let the players take some of the power and the narrative burden.

While I'm on the subject, I might as well mention the old Golden Rule in terms of this philosophy. Basically, the Golden Rule came under some criticism because it could be used as a copout. You know, the whole "We don't want to provide rules for this, so make your own." In the move to the new Storytelling system, we wanted to avoid that as much as possible. We wanted to make sure if we mentioned options, we'd support them. But when we downplayed the Golden Rule to accept more responsibility ourselves, that should not ever be taken as a statement that it fell out of favor as a principle. The Golden Rule is the ability to say Yes. It's the ability to say "Well, the books don't allow you to have multiple major templates, but what the heck, let's see if we can make it work without making your character so awesome the other players are unhappy." It is the heart and soul of roleplaying — the ability to square up, confident in your ability to make a call, and say "That sounds really interesting. You know what, let's try that."

And what, really, can compare to that?

--
Ring Name: Kelley Barnes-Herrmann
Hails From: Marketing
Angle: Face; People’s Friend
Style: Martial brawler
Entrance Music: “Dancing Queen,” ABBA
Working the Crowd: Tosses shiny giveaways into the crowd
Foreign Object: LARP prop
Finishing Move: Camarilla Thrilla (pronounced “camareeya threeya”; diving leg drop bulldog)

Monday Meeting: Gas-Filled Rooms

2008-05-27T15:42:40Z

This Week's Work (paraphrased from each person's email)

Team Exalted
John: "Wrapping up a project, as well as a few contracts and other such administrate too."
Brian: "Wrapping up the boardgame rulebook and moving on to art directing the East book."

Team Vampire
Joe: Joe's been out with a bad back and doped up on pain meds. Poor guy just can't catch a break.
Craig: "BG Rulebook help. Working on Mekhet Cover and symbols."

Team WoD/VtES
Ethan: "Basically finishing some things that didn’t get finished last week. Outlines and contracts. Incorporating all those notes from the terribly mysterious meeting. Trying to get more fully on the Hansoft habit."
Aileen: "Finishing up screen and character sheets. Should also get a proof of Grim Fears done."
Chaney: "Waiting for final Hunter proofs. Dealing with some artist stuff on a couple of Hunter books. May do AD on [Hunter book 3]. Sketches for new VTES set."

Team EVE
Russell: "I'll be taking a pleasant diversion and getting my Nos on. It'll be fun to get back to cold city nights after the long night in space. I'll also be working with the EVE Story Team on more EVE Story. Missed the Terribly Mysterious Meeting, so I'm looking forward to reading the Terribly Mysterious Notes."

Team AP
Eddy: "Finished Scion Companion pt. 4 redlining last week. Planning to finish up pt. 6 redlining this week, and then prepping pt. 3 for editing. Also, keeping myself open for proofing of Scion Companion pt. 2 and Daughter of Nexus."
Jess: "mostly continuation of last week. daughter of nexus. working on the prologue a little more. scion companion part 2."

Team Intern
Priscilla: She's not in on Tuesdays, but I know she's working on a few AP projects for me.

Team the matt
the matt: "meetings. eve trifold layout. meetings. scion art direction. meetings. proofs."

Joe's at home ill, Russell's flight was overbooked so he had to take a later one and Priscilla isn't usually in on Tuesdays. So, it's a small meeting today.

John talked about throwing a match into a gas-filled room to start a pilot light, shorter after discovering that his in-laws and matt's in-laws know each other. Chad takes offense to our critique of his room-cleaning skills, and is forced to eat a potato chip left in the room over the weekend. matt spent his weekend moving furniture and attacking three-foot-high weeds (and mostly winning). John's lens popped out of his glasses while driving, and Chaney says it's because of the Andromeda Strain. Chris McDonough fell at our Friday BBQ, and had to get seven stitches. Chaney says that green M&Ms make you horny. We talked a little about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, and I personally gave it about a 6.5 (I think it has good acting and cinematography, but the script continually tried to sabotage the actors -- please try to avoid spoilers in the comments below). None of us got a chance to see Prince Caspian, but matt saw Fly Boys and liked it.

Meeting topics covered the status of Hunter: the Vigil, turn-around time for proofing and what was going to press. Developer-type topics (if we were to have any) were shelved due to nearly half of us being out.

Today's Reason to Drink: On May 27, 1939, Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27. In honor of this occasion, try drinking a Batman and tell me if it's any good!

Behind the Lines: Murdering Darlings (#19)

2008-05-21T13:20:27Z

It is a cheap and easy writing trick to open an essay with a cliché familiar to your audience, then proceed to either argue against or offer evidence in support of said cliché. Far be it from me to consider myself above "cheap and easy!" So therefore for your entertainment I submit the following:

"You can't make everybody happy."

Do I argue for or against this premise? Oh, for, definitely. You learn the cold hard truth of this aphorism the moment you actually try to run your first game for as few as two or three friends. Those of us who create game products (or any mass media, really) for an audience measured in the thousands? You learn to handle the criticism right quick. That, or you throw a lot of public tantrums, are eyed suspiciously as one of the crazies of the industry, and either quickly dissolve in a vat of your own vitriol or swear off interaction with your audience forever.

I was kind of tempted to do the latter for a while. It seemed almost like a good idea at the time. (Fun tip: It wasn't.)

That's a bit hyperbolic, but it does kind of speak to the… shall we say, emotionally intense veins that run throughout gamer culture (and all of human culture, to be frank). You care a lot about the quality of your games. So do we. If a cruddy rule or supplement winds up as the potential culprit for an evening of argument, conflict and otherwise spoiled fun, it can be easy to get mad at the people who put that out. After all, we're supposed to be on your side, providing you with cool stuff, right?

Then on the other side, writers can get a little protective (or over-protective) of their own creations. Usually this has to do with one simple principle: we frequently write what we think is cool. Most game designers or freelancers are at their best when they're inspired or enthusiastic about the subject matter whereof they write. We try to create characters we'd want in our games, or that we'd want to read about, or that we'd love to see perish in horrible fashion — that latter in the hopes that readers will also want said characters to perish in horrible fashion, of course, and therefore take great pleasure in making it happen in their own games.

So naturally, we move to another cliché (and you can blame Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch for this one, even if you never read another word he wrote down): the writer's exhortation to "murder your darlings." Now, in the original context, this meant turns of phrase: a warning not to get too attached to an "exceptionally fine" sentence or paragraph, and therefore to go and delete it in favor of something that communicates intent more clearly and elegantly. It has since also become sort of a rule governing anything a writer is particularly fond of. Some writers take it as a command to kill off particular characters under their care, characters that they are very fond of but ultimately euthanize in the sake of emotional manipulation. (This is a favorite in genre works, of course.) Others note that it can be applied to plot elements, pet phrases, turns of description, pretty much anything that the writer's art can create. It's almost a Buddhist strategy, really: sever attachments in order to better yourself.

But there's a catch, of course. Your darlings are not necessarily your own any more.

If you've enjoyed any measure of success as a writer, then apparently there are things you have created that other people enjoy. This is also true of games, of course. Murdering your darlings becomes a much trickier prospect in this case. You can't kill them all. If you do, not only do you run the risk of losing enthusiasm for the things you're building (sorry, Buddha, attachment is good for the work ethic), but you also run the risk of alienating your audience because you've killed something they were hoping to get some more use out of. As is the case with so many other things involving this job, that means you have to pay careful attention to what you kill and what you don't.

Back to "You can't make everybody happy." A parallel truism to this is "What you think is cool isn't necessarily what your audience thinks is cool." That's why murdering your darlings is absolutely good advice, provided you can correctly isolate the things that you think are just absolutely the best ever yet that your audience is unlikely to care for at all, or that have overstayed their welcome. Maybe it's a character that you think is great but that a major chunk of your audience is really, really tired of. Much like the Storyteller who realizes that his pet Storyteller character is drawing too much attention away from the players' characters and who thus resolves to do the hard thing and put his pet character down, you may have to get that character right out of the setting. The same can be said of almost any game element. Love a particular rule's creativity but find in practice that it slows things down? Fond of a sacred cow that really causes problems? It's time to start prepping for surgery.

But here too there are complications. Every setting element, rule, or even turn of phrase may be somebody's baby. Now the thing is, you can't let that paralyze you from making decisions. If you try to preserve everything that somebody likes, you wind up with stagnation. And you know what happens when you don't cut a toenail, right? Ingrown game system or setting is not much nicer to look at. Sometimes if you remove something popular it will produce something overall healthier, more artistic, and perhaps even wind up being a popular decision in the long run. Yet if you prune the wrong things, you can of course wind up with a product that few people want to buy. And although the game may be something else to look at, that's not the best business possible.

This works even in the game design stage. If you're making a brand-new game, be it a new take on an old favorite like Hunter: The Vigil or even something without precedent like Promethean: The Created, when you go to meetings and start talking about things, you have to be willing to give up your favorite ideas if they just aren't right. Similarly, you may have to include an idea that you're not personally as fond of just because it's good design to do so, and will make the game a lot more enjoyable for most.

That's one of the hardest choices we have to make, i think: figuring out what things that, even as much as you love them, have to go — and what things, even if they don't seem right, are far better off staying. It's a matter of not thinking as a single gamer does, but thinking in terms of a crowd. Again, Storytelling may be a good help for this, as you have to take your players' tastes into account as well as your own (and you do, right?) — game design just works on a much grander scale. Try running a game for an audience measured in "the thousands," you'll see what I mean.

--
Ring Name: Bill Bridges
Hails From: The Scottish Festival
Angle: Tweener; sometimes the good twin, sometimes the evil twin
Style: Unrefined brawling
Entrance Music: “Werewolves of London,” Warren Zevon
Working the Crowd: Rubs his hands together and cackles melodramatically
Foreign Object: Bagpipes
Finishing Move: Hospital Bill (clothesline off the top turnbuckle)