Embrace the dream of '90s tabletop roleplaying through the darkness-fueled madness of immortals, werebeasts, car wizards, and more!
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The Smarter Every Day youtube channel has just released a video showing in delicious detail precisely how a carburetor works. It’s an utterly delightful half hour that goes into comprehensive, comprehensible detail. Highly recommended! Link: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toVfvRhWbj8>
And with that, on to the rest of the update.
Ryan processed the line edits last month, and we're both pumping out the new material our editor told us we needed to create. Among those are long-form examples and a full glossary.
Let's talk a bit about how we're doing each of those, for backers interested in the making of sausage.
Ryan's in charge of the examples, and didn't want to just make it up in his head because the examples would feel too perfect, or too constructed. So we took one of our K&T game sessions that was missing a player, and turned it into a demo we recorded over Zoom. Recording over Zoom is great because the recording comes with an auto-transcript.
With the recordings done, Ryan takes what happened and rewrites the events into a suitable example narrative, showing how dice work, the larger mechanics around showdowns and sequences, and in general the spirit of play (including commentary from the Darkest Cosmos, of course).
<DC> I AM THE ULTIMATE PEANUT GALLERY.
Tim is going through the manuscript in excruciating detail, extracting every word or phrase that we’re using as a game term and sorting/compiling them into a separate document for triage. Our triage considerations will take into account whether or not a given term is wholly unique, how important it is to textual comprehension, and how much value it adds in terms of the space in the book that it will require. For example, Pneuma might be important to define more specifically, while Vampire not so much.
This has started snowballing into a much faster process as Tim makes his way through the manuscript, since by its nature the early portions are extremely dense with uncaptured terms.
We're wrapping up each effort, then handing the work to the other person for development before we integrate them into the book and send it to editing. That said, what we're writing is large enough that we might not have space for all of it in the physical book, so we're evaluating what should go in the book and what should be made into a free PDF supplement. (A decision we're going to rely on our editor to help us make, once she sees all the material.)
-- Crowley, Good Omens
One of the things we don't often talk about in these updates is the state of the books after K&T. We have mentioned before that we keep an ongoing K&T game running, because we enjoy the game and it keeps the game fresh in our heads as we progress on the book. And our most recent game involves playtesting the angel and demon splats!
Angels and demons is the third or fourth book planned for K&T (and is part of what you get as backers). Ryan brought two touchstones to the table: In Nomine (the Steve Jackson Games RPG) and Atomic Blonde (the movie). Tim has been adding elements of Good Omens (book/television), and John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (book/movie). The pitch is that angels and demons are in a cold war, and they have agents on earth doing stuff—not as soldiers, but as spies and illicit operatives. A big part of being a spy is being able to adopt a cover, but it's not easy for celestial beings to adopt a cover of being human, so part of playing an angel or demon in K&T is having to take on a human aspect associated with the other side.
We call that your Angelic Vice or Demonic Virtue. Let's share some of the ones in the manuscript (which is extremely in progress, since we aren't yet devoting time to refining it):
Greed: To pass as a human, you've taken into your very being the human desire for more and more. Pursuing what I want that I certainly don't need is in your Ambit.
Hunger: To pass as human, you've taken into your very being the human desire to fill their void just to feel something. Pursuing detrimental or destructive vices to fill the void is in your Ambit.
Doubt: To pass as human, you've taken into your very being the human desire to sabotage faith. Actions taken when accepting doubt rather than fighting against it is in your Ambit.
Charity: To pass as a human, you've taken into your very being the human desire to care for others. Actions inconvenient to me done with selflessness to aid another in need is in your Ambit.
Change: To pass as a human, you've taken into your very being the human desire to fix the world around them. Choose a lofty goal of human good. Actions inconvenient to me done to concretely pursue my lofty human goal is in your Ambit.
Protect: To pass as a human, you've taken into your very being the human desire to be a shieldwall against those in need. Actions inconvenient to you taken to protect another in harm's way is in your Ambit.
Anyway, that's it for this update! We're also working with an artist for some iconography for the Essences and Domains, which we might be able to share next time! :)
#YOLF
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.