"Follow me, follow me / As I trip the darkness"
over 3 years ago – Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 03:46:38 PM

(I didn't have a title in mind, so I sourced a lyric snippet from the Underworld Evolution soundtrack.)

Yea. Third edition. Calling K&T that isn't just a joke, it's become a serious mentality. Taking a terse, concise idea from a quick write-up and fleshing it out to the point where large portions of it aren't stuck in your head; discovering and clarifying mechanics that work and those that don’t, and defining the boundaries of those mechanics; and ensuring that the writing suitably teaches someone else the game is a LOT of work. Work I've watched Ryan do many evenings each week, since we're writing the pre-edit draft in Google Docs.

Today, we’ve got a schedule update and designer diary notes to share.

Schedule Update

In good news, we hit rules-lock on time. During that time-frame we clarified some really important subsystems that needed revision. So at this point that’s mostly finished, aside from some organizational fixes and back-integration. This is part of the plan I mentioned last month, though it’s possible it may be bigger than I had hoped. We’re technically a little bit behind on splats according to schedule, but given that the mechanics are substantially reliant on finished rules, this isn’t a surprise. And when I say “behind,” I am really only referring to a couple hundred words of lore. Also they’re sufficiently isolated from the rest of the rules text that this isn’t holding anything else back.

So, while we do have the meat of the text written, it’s very much being organized and making sure there are no holes left.

• Rules text: …. More or less done on time. Needs now to be reorganized and melded into a completed manuscript.
• Splats: Phantom has been wrapped up, the Hunter splat is in a very rough first draft, and we haven’t gotten to start on the writing of the Vampire splat yet, though we’ve been discussing the details of what it’s about.
  
• Guidance: draft writing is finished, needs to be integrated into the overall manuscript.

Designers Diary: Evolution of "Damage"

I'm (Ryan) writing this while trying to listen to a great virtual conference, so forgive the ramble format. I have around 30 minutes to write some designer's notes. :)

One of the "v2" elements I held onto the longest was how damage worked, because the core gimmick was neat and I didn't have a better idea. That was the Wounds subsystem you can still find in older playtest docs. It had some core problems I was trying to patch, regarding how to in a purely narrative "damage" system make recovery not suck.

I had "recovery scenes" as a concept, which is pretty bog standard in one of the design spaces I live in. If you showed the Darkest Cosmos how getting hurt impacts your life, like with struggle or brooding, you'd recover. It was inoffensive and I thought served the game well enough, as the Darkest Cosmos wants that sort of material from protagonists.

Problem; it suuuuuuuuucked. I realized that having a recovery mechanic tied to interrupting the story flow with micro-scenes crashed the flow. People had to choose between being a more effective protagonist or continuing their investment in the ongoing flow. So I took that element out, and decided that recovery was something that happened elsewhere. Eventually, I settled on recovery being what happens at the start of a session, as part of recapping what happened last session to jog the Darkest Cosmos's memory.

(Side note: You can jog that memory by adding in what the game calls "deleted scenes." Absolutely stolen from later-season Battlestar Galactica. In the game I’ve been playing, we've added some great setups with deleted scenes, fleshing out what was implied or needed to bridge stuff together.)

Alongside this, the idea of damage—called Anguish, because that's a stronger word than "Wounds"—got framed to be much more about how being hurt in one way or another caused, well, anguish. Anguishes themselves are a longer story, but it caused a different design problem: Anguishes were great for moments of big, single-roll conflicts, but terrible when mixed with how to handle big set piece showdowns.

Why? Because my objective with those sorts of long conflicts is not wanting to know exactly how long it'll last. If you know a conflict requires, say, five successes, I find the dramatic tension is flat until you get to the edge. There are no particular high or low moments in the beginning. I'm not a fan of that sort of design. (Some people dig, and that's fine. It's just not where my design interest lies.)

I kept that randomness, but with the other changes, those cool climatic fights were too brutal. Some brutality is great, but too much ruins the enjoyment of what should be apex moments. And it created this really weird sense of disproportionate sense of pain: you might take 1 Anguish when struggling with people you care about being threatened, or like 5 from being stabbed in a fight. None of us enjoyed that.

So I've mentioned I play in an ongoing K&T game—not run, but play. But for one session, I grabbed the reins and ran a session to introduce a different way of handling those showdowns. We had a fun fight in a Hell barony. What I introduced was a different way to measure how long one stays in the fight: a separate track called Resolve, and it refreshes for each showdown. That allows for better support for those big struggles. Anguishes cover the fallout from a showdown, not the individual moments. It plays well, and allows players to stress more about the overall conflict rather than sweat every single roll to constantly avoid lasting harm.

There's a lot more to this whole subsystem—like removing some of that damage randomness without making it clear how many successes are needed to triumph. Mechanical consequences touch many pieces of the whole game, so different elements of the game were affected because that's the nature of consequences. But I've gone well over my 500-word goal for this designer's notes bit, so that's it for this update. :)

Next Steps

Aside from the schedule that is detailed above, I (Tim) am going to start running a private game to help  test the guidance chapters and validate that we’re providing a new Herald a stable linkup to the Darkest Cosmos and a great learning experience. One of the weird and difficult parts of design is learning how to approach something as if you’ve never seen it before, to ask questions as if you’re a new user and don’t already have deep detailed knowledge. As one of my former colleagues put it, “how to be the dumbest person in the room.” Wish me luck.

And I (Ryan) am looking to run one-off games with people who haven't played the game before, or haven't played it since the older iteration a couple years back. I'm going to catch how I might be explaining concepts differently vocally than via text, and getting reactions to how people are processing the information load. That'll inform some editing decisions.

#YOLF

July update
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 07:55:24 PM

I wanted to include some cool headline, but in thinking about it, I realized (and am annoyed that) I missed the timing on a "seventh day of the seventh month" joke... So, July update it is.

The deep overhaul continues. We’re currently working on a half-joke that this will be printed as “3rd Edition.” v1 being the original 20 page or so convention game; v2, the January 2019 pre-edit build; and v3 is the current game. It’s getting refined, to the point where it doesn’t feel like a printed copy of a joke game anymore.

We’ve renamed more things. We’re adding tools and advice for running a game that is replete with relationships, conflict, and supernatural badassery. And have been working hard to wrap it all in a package that is easy to use, feels powerful, and effectively supports your storytelling.

Rules Update Details, from Ryan:

So right after the last update, I started going through all the Essences & Domains to make sure they lined up with the other changes. That text was around two years old, I think? But it felt solid from memory, and so I focused on other parts of the book that didn't feel as good.

...then I got to reading over the Domains that no one has used in the past dozen sessions in my ongoing campaign. I had a talk with the group (which includes Tim as of a few sessions ago) about why, and next day whipped up a version that collapses the ones people thought were boring as hell with ones people engaged in. I mean to be totally frank, deciding to ever have "Perceive" as a skill in a game like this was a snoozefest of a choice.

The initial reaction was positive, and it kept being positive in play, so I'd love to share them with you now:

•  Discern: Uncovering exploitable details about people and situations, reveal that which people dare hide from you.
•  Flow: Exercising being unencumbered and unbarred. Make the world part around you, like water parting around a shark made of jet engines.
•  Force: Acts of raw and promised violence. Simply stated, ultimately destructive.
•  Forge: Making and manipulating that which can be crafted—physical, metaphysical, conceptual, technological, animal, vegetable, and mineral.
•  Heist: The great confidence feats of bluffing, misdirection, and accessing where you aren't meant to be.
•  Shroud: Conceal yourself and others—physically, emotionally, socially—and making the most out of that concealment.
•  Sway: Getting others to believe their best interests align with yours, impress people with power, and de-escalate situations.

In renaming each one into sounding cool and consolidating functionality where it made sense, some cool stuff appeared. For instance, in Hide becoming Shroud, it went from feeling passively framed to becoming the Assassin's Creed choice—I even wrote that you can lure people into the tall grass to stab them. (We'll see if that survives editing.)

Anyway, back to Tim. If you have questions about the Domains, feel free to ask in the comments!

# # #

One addendum to Ryan’s writeup on domains: We’ve also removed the “Core domain” requirement that a splat had been locked into. Not every immortal wants to be a combat monster, some are hidden sages. Not all car wizards are clutch drivers, some are unbelievable mechanics and take Forge as a top tier domain instead.

As of right now, we’ve got one final piece of testing that we want to accomplish before we lock the mechanics and commit to not making any more changes to that aspect of the game.

And so there are two more things I want to talk about: 

Splats

First, I’d like to share with you some first-draft splats. As I mentioned last time, we planned to start with the Immortal, do some deep deconstruction and in that process we have rebuilt it from the ground up. So far, we’ve finished first passes on the Immortal, Car Wizard, and Werebeast, and made some solid progress on the Phantom and we’re very happy with how they’ve turned out so far. (Download links valid until 7/16). The last of the core splats (Hunter and Vampire) are slated to be in a first draft state by the end of July.

Please note, these are very much NOT finished. Many of the things that Ryan mentions with regards to rules revisions directly affected the splats and while we’ve gone through and backported some of the changes, they’re definitely not done yet.

Please feel free to ask questions about anything unfamiliar!

Schedule update

Our schedule is approaching a major milestone point. We’re aiming to have the meat of the book wrapped up by the end of the month, with rules-lock happening on Sunday. The manuscript assembly and editorial processes will then take over, and honestly, it’s in so many parts and portions (I seriously meant it when I said deconstruct) that I’m not entirely sure exactly how much there will be to edit. So, right now I’m planning for the first editorial process to be at least a month. From there, layout, line edits, and the other goodies of production.

-Tim

Black Lives Matter
almost 4 years ago – Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 08:30:11 PM

We believe in racial equality. We acknowledge our shortcomings and biases. And we strive to be better.

...It’s honestly trivial to write these words. Words like this are a low value-add that caters to a crowd and is often (rightfully) flagged as virtue signaling. So yea. Here’s that flag. 🚩

Here’s the part that’s not.

This book represents an explicitly inclusive philosophy of including marginalized voices. Ryan hired more than 50 contributors with that in mind specifically. Is it de facto enough? Hah. No, because we don’t solve racism by hiring people to make a game. But we express our values by including variety of black, latinx, women, queer, etc. voices whenever we reasonably can.

It is not a cop’s job to fucking murder people. Is that so hard?

Also, here’s an update on the work we’ve been doing.

Since the last update, Ryan and I meet at least twice a week to keep momentum up towards a completed manuscript. We have a lot of text written. We have a lot of art. We have a layout template. But that doesn’t make a book yet, and it certainly doesn’t make a game worth waiting four years for. We’re meeting (again) tonight to continue to hammer on and validate the choices we’re making on this front. As part of that, this is the latest functional version of the character sheet.

https://www.dropbox.com/t/fHjdRk2rh6ygl1lW

Compare (if you like) to the Delta build character sheet (linked next). The v2 character sheet, which was in use around the time the “Pre-Edit Build” dropped in January 2019, hits a lot of “good enough” notes. It’s playable, it was certainly used for convention play, but things had not always sat right. So it got a dedicated playtest group that has been running since last September. And it ran into stumbling blocks. And more stumbling blocks. Things that didn’t quite work, or sing, or were exposed as ill-fitting puzzle pieces that were there…why?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cg8f7zt2p9i9iho/K%26T%20Delta%20Character%20Sheet%20v2.pdf?dl=0

So a good chunk of this last month has been me triaging the crap out of the state of things and planning the next sequence of attack. We've also been deep diving on a few specific topics:

We have changed a lot of terms.  Names of character sheet elements did not quite work and pieces of placeholder text settled into “well, I’ve been calling it this forever so…..” Things like changing the name of Wounds.  Wounds are sorta hit-pointy, and it's narratively incoherent to take a “wound” to your “deep yearning.” Imperfections starts getting into sketchy/shitty performative disability or my own personal memories of point-maxing in Mind's Eye Theater games. Knowledges became experiences (and then everything was named with an E which also sucked) and eventually became “Histrionic Backstories” that are used to know about things and pull interesting narrative threads. Garbage-named rules like “Reduced Pneuma dice cost” became a character's “Ambit” (can you tell we like digging through thesauruses?) and in that process we made it into a cool lever that Edges could play with. And here's the thing about renaming things: When you name things correctly, you spend less time writing explanations around terrible names. Part of that is using ostentatious names to dispel expectations built into the medium of RPGs. For example, the amount of energy Ryan wrote about "okay here's what Wounds -aren't-" got replaced with just talking about what Anguishes are.   

We've worked to make each of the splats unique and interesting and in doing so, tripled the length of each of them.  We steered away from gaudy obvious ripoffs (they're still obvious, but less gaudy). And in turn we've made the character creation process more streamlined and badass and more coherently serve the (immortal) soul of the game. Speaking of which, we’re currently finalizing the Immortal Splat (as the most iconic) with the new and well-tested rules. From there, we’re going to expand to the Werebeast and Car Wizard splats to make sure everything holds up before moving out to the rest. We’re also dividing up the work a little bit — I’m doing a first pass on the splats, while Ryan focuses on massaging the rest of the text into a relaxed ready-to-go state.

-Tim.  AMA. 

Announcing partnership with Galileo Games
almost 4 years ago – Tue, May 05, 2020 at 10:31:59 PM

tl;dr Galileo Games will be publishing Katanas & Trenchcoats, taking the manuscript from Ryan in early July to get it into production, with the book due out by Christmas 2020.

From Tim Rodriguez of Galileo Games

When you look to the stars, sometimes, the darkest cosmos looks back. A few among us have seen the Darkest Cosmos and survived. To fulfill those hungering dark desires, Galileo Games shall publish the Tome known as Katanas & Trenchcoats and fulfill it to thoust’ loving embrace. The burden of responsibility shall be shifted hither, and you shall scrape your knees in subservience to its humours.

All of which to say, Galileo is taking responsibility for the ascendance of the K&T Manuscript. We’ve prepared the rites and the planets shall be in alignment by the Winter Solstice in order to bring to you a DARKEST CHRISTMAS.

From Ryan Macklin

I started working with Tim Rodriguez (of then Brooklyn Indie Games) in 2014 with my Backstory Cards product line. If you've enjoyed Backstory Cards, it's 50% because of a bunch of ideas I made work, and 50% because Tim got me to finish it. And that's likely giving Tim too little credit.

It's no surprise at this point that I'm terrible at finishing long projects. In October of last year, I had a long conversation with Tim that could be boiled down to:

Me: I'm garbage at finishing projects, I'm burnt out, and turns out I don't actually want to be a publisher.

Tim: Tell me something I don't know.

Me: Can you help me get K&T out the door?

Tim: Yes, but we can't jump on that immediately. We'll get you in our pipeline.

Enter Galileo Games. I'm excited to work with Tim and the rest of the Galileo team. I'm excited to have people with strong backgrounds in post-production and post-publication handle what I'm not good at and have no passion for, leaving me to focus on the content and move onto the supplements.

There are few people I trust to understand what I want to achieve with my silly-but-not-silly game inspired by the '90s, and Tim's one of them. I mean, he wrote the damn theme song for the game back in 2016. And clearly from what Tim wrote in his part above, he has the spirit of K&T down. That's crucial in my mind, when handing off a work and abdicating a lot of decision-making.

We'll have the PDF out by (as Tim put it) Darkest Christmas 2020, and plan for the print release once we understand what the world is like that far into the pandemic.

If you want a sense of internal timeline, I'm due to hand Galileo the manuscript in early July—they're focused on their excellent Thousand Arrows project, and K&T comes after that. Tim and I have met roughly weekly since earlier this year to talk about the pre-turnover process, and the revisions he suggests I make in the interim.

From the Darkest Cosmos

Tim and Ryan invited me to this press release. Ryan's been saying for years that I'm the actual antagonist of the setting, the embodiment of '90s genre metatextuality, so here I am. I'm psyched to the max for all this as well, because my voice will finally be heard.

Except that now I'm completely distracted, overhearing Tim and Ryan talk about how because the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have katanas (well, one) and trenchcoats, they're technically immortals. And that cartoon Shredder is a car wizard. I thought you should know that. This is my glorious life.

Get back to it, you two. This book isn't going to darkestly birth itself. <3

#YOLF

Enlisting help to finish this Darkest Cosmos
over 4 years ago – Mon, Jan 06, 2020 at 08:44:06 PM

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