Embrace the dream of '90s tabletop roleplaying through the darkness-fueled madness of immortals, werebeasts, car wizards, and more!
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Wheels within wheels forever turning, your dreams are burning / Labyrinthine, forever lost in you
tl;dr: PDF out December 2021 come hell of high water, print run to happen early next year NO MATTER WHAT
Hey y'all! Ryan here. We're waiting on getting edits back from our editor, which should come in this month. We're committed to getting the book out—at least the PDF—by the end of the year, so if for some reason our editor isn't able to come through by Nov 1st, we'll take what we have and put that into layout. While I'm confident it won't come to that, we still have a backup plan in place. :)
Part of why the print won't happen until early 2022 is because with the increased costs of shipping and printing, I'll need my year-end bonus to cover much of that. That's just transparency, no sob story. It's also part of why my "company" has run at a projected loss of a few thousand dollars.. (Thankfully, I can afford to take that hit at this time in my life, and think that's more than fair given how long this project has been in production limbo. I know a lot of creators who can't afford when rates hike, and get in that hard position of asking for more money to cover increased costs. No one loves that.)
Which is a good segue to my designer's diary element.
I talked with Tim about a different sort of "designer's diary" entry this month, to highlight mental health elements of being a publisher and lead creator. (Which is why this is a rare public post.)
Some of you already know this, but I figure now is a decent time to say so: I intend* Katanas & Trenchcoats (the core book and supplements) to be my last RPG project. That's been the case for the last couple years, and in fact if Tim hadn't come on board I don't even know if I'd be completing this project.
That's because I have an executive function disorder that makes it extremely difficult to be my own boss. "Duh, Ryan," some of you might say. And yeah, hindsight is what it is. :) But what's cool about where I am right now is that I can actually talk about this in a way that hopefully helps others in similar situations out before they stumble into a years-late Kickstarter.
For those unfamiliar, in a nutshell executive function is our ability to do stuff like plan, concentrate, make future projections, deal with complex logistics like finances, etc. I mean, it's more than that, but that's enough to start. Those with executive function disorders like ADHD (which is unfortunately named) struggle with having a consistent amount of cognitive energy to keep up with those functions. We get it in huge spurts, then we crash, drift to other things, and find engaging our minds to our tasks to be difficult. It's some really messy neurological stuff that unfortunately gets moralized in our society.
Telling folks with EF disorders to "just sit down and work" is like telling someone with dislocated vertebrae to "walk it off." That's treating the problem as a moral defect rather than a physiological condition—which requires curiosity and understanding, to find out what accommodations or changes need to happen to be consistently successful. (It's easy to be momentarily successful with a burst of energy, but consistent success requires more than "just sit down and work.")
That's where Tim comes in. Tim has a brain I don't, that can handle planning and logistics, and triage what does and doesn't need my focus. Which is to say, Tim's my project manager. He's able to shape organization, to help me focus on what needs to be organized rather than getting lost in a mess and not knowing where to start. And he's taking on the burden of the parts of business I’m even more likely to fail at: physical production, shipping, and sales.
When I started setting up for the KS back in 2016, I did so because I was swept up in the pressure of people continually asking me when I was going to turn my tiny version of K&T into a full thing. And then got swept up in the energy of people who wanted to contribute to it. I wish I’d had Tim on board back then. It would still likely have been late, but maybe only by a year. (It would also suck, honestly, since we hadn’t developed it enough to discover and feature the really great core elements at that point. But it would have been done, which is the more important part.)
Instead, I spent three years floundering before Tim came on, and before I had my EF disorder diagnosis and treatment. I kept trying different ways of creating structures for getting work done: kanban boards, reminders, pomodoro... Some of those worked for a month or two, but not long-term. And because I didn't see myself as neurodivergent, I held onto the bullshit moralizing of "I just need to sit down and work."
The sitting down part is easy. The working, less so… unless I chainsmoked**. Then it was consistently easy. In hindsight, that was self-medicating through stimulants and fidgeting. And it was made more difficult when I moved from a home where I could chainsmoke on my porch with my laptop, to a non-smoking apartment with no balcony.
Think of your cognitive faculties as running off of a battery. Let's say on a given day it starts at full. That's definitely not the inherent norm, but it's a good place to start.
Then you have different things you need to do—which are like different machines in your head, needing some of that energy. Some engines are more energy-hungry than others. There's a baseline in your brain, then you add fluctuations based on your current mood/headspace/physical energy/all sorts of factors.
The brain has ways of prioritizing energy, and not always how the logical parts of us wish it could go. For people like me, that prioritization gets inherently determined by ICNU—interest, challenge, novelty, and urgency. My day job tends to win on urgency, but not always on the other three. K&T is hit and miss on all of those depending on timing, though it's never more urgent than my day job, since K&T doesn't handle my health insurance or rent. (Which is why those who attempt to make things urgent through harassment don't have the effect they seem to want.)
Trying to consciously reshuffle the brain's inherent prioritization can be done! But it's not energy-free. There's a cost in consciously ignoring something that has some gravity to the mind, just like there's cost to making dinner or dealing with tough decisions or whatever.
Thus, we get to K&T. For the years between my divorce and getting Tim on board, the project has been legitimately horrifying to deal with. (It still kinda is, but I have Tim so it's manageable.) It's always had this overhanging urgency just to get it done, but it dropped heavily in priority pretty hard—that can happen when all one gets are trolly-mctrollfucks clogging up comments. The challenge wasn't a desired one, it wasn't an interesting brainspace. And it wasn't novel at all.
And so spending energy on K&T things was very, very expensive. I didn't understand why that was the case until a couple months ago, as I started to write technical talks on a related subject. I have a talk where I use this visual storytelling scheme to explain how to rethink having writers block, and it clicked regarding me and K&T.
So Tim is my ally. Tim takes on some of the cognitive load that is way less expensive for him to do than it is for me to do. He's injected things the project sorely needed to get back on track: interest, challenge, and novelty. And because Tim is someone I consider family, a different form of urgency is at play: respecting his time as he's helping me, because he's doing me a solid in rescuing this project from my inability to project-ify it. And like me, he's taking a loss on the project because he's put in more work that the returns will even compensate for—time and energy he could be putting into things with a far better ROI.
The ADHD meds I take also help, in that they minimize the lossiness of expending mental energy on focusing and honing in on logical priorities. But I only got to start those this year, after having a few months of another medication constantly making me sleepy throughout the day.
There's so much more I could write about this***, but even though I'm waiting on edits to come back, I don't have the time to continue writing this forever. Because...
One reason I'm getting firmly out of games is my side hustle of giving tech talks is picking up. I've presented four different talks in the past few weeks on a framework some colleagues and I drummed up called "empathy advocacy," where we teach people how to think of writing for thousands and millions of people as writing for a breadth of psychological conditions stemming from unknown backgrounds. It's very high-concept, though many of my talks focus on a single lens at a time so it's easier for people to apply.
I'm taking a lot of what I've learned with game design and applying it to this sub-field. This has been part of my profession in some form or another since my first talk in 2017. I might share more about it here later, but first thing's first: when we get the edits back, we get to finish up production of the pre-print book for y'all!
#YOLF
—Ryan
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* This isn't a commitment; I might want to mess around with gaming again a year after a break from all K&T stuff, or 5 years, or 50 years—and just as likely non-commercial as something for sale. But it does mean I'm intentionally making no plans, cuz I'm making room for other, more important things in my life.
** Thus, stressful jobs also make me want to chainsmoke. So I try to avoid continually being in situations where I feel the urge to light up over and over. But late-stage capitalism doesn't cooperate with that, so some days willpower energy goes to not smoking.
*** This post was delayed by a few days because I originally was also drafting up images to go with the text, as visual storytelling. But then that took too much brain-Watts to complete, and I realized I could just publish this without doing what was effectively "bonus" work. Better to spend my energy where it's needed, whether on this book or elsewhere. It might not parse as well as with visual storytelling, but I promised Tim that I'd have this ready no matter today. Still, I might make this concept a tech communication talk in the future, as its own thing!