Tag: he who laughs last

What I’m Working On

I’ve been a bit silent here lately and not without good reason. Things have been very busy not only with real life but with my writing life as well. So I wanted to take this moment and update my blog on what I’ve been working on…

But first, I wanted to talk a little about real life. Last month I started working at Apple, going back to JIRA administration as a full time job. The most important part of this pertains to how program management and working in a larger role (with more responsibilities) really seemed to sap my energies and take from my abilities to write consistently. With my new job, I certainly work hard, but I have a lot of time at my desk, working, as opposed to spending my days in meetings, getting people to do their jobs. It was a critical change for me to move away from a more intense role and to a position that allowed me to process my work and get things done during the day.

Now I come home and have still have mental energy, so I can wake up refreshed and ready to write. This has been a great change for me and I’m very excited for my new opportunity. Back to my current writing projects…

1. Recently I finished a first draft of a Call of Cthulhu scenario for the upcoming Golden Goblin Press Kickstarter, Tales of the Caribbean. It was a unique honor to be approached by Oscar Rios and asked to submit a proposal for a Caribbean scenario. It was an even greater honor when they accepted my proposal! So I was on the hook, and got to work immediately (this was last fall). But then work got really busy and my mental space got gobbled up (see above) and I put off writing for far too long. There was a convergence in the late spring when I realized I needed to get a new job, partly because I wasn’t writing at all! But the new job came through, and I quickly retooled my lifestyle to get back to writing. So the first draft has been delivered. Lots of work still left, but the big effort is complete.

2. While my scenario He Who Laughs Last was delivered last summer, I still have one remaining stretch goal — a fictionalized version of the scenario.  I have it mostly outlined and some of it written, but still need to just sit down and write the damn thing. If I had been more productive last winter, it would already be done. But I aim to finish it soon because…

3. I am poised to launch my next Kickstarter on July 26th, 2015, for my Cthulhu Dark scenario Sun Spots. This scenario is actually 95% complete already, and there is much history to this project that I started in 2007. Suffice to say that I’m very excited to finally have this see the light of day. You will definitely hear more about this very soon. But even though the writing is done, there is a ton of project management and preparation for this next KS project. I’ve learned a lot from my previous project and aim to make this one even more successful. Stay tuned.

So that’s it — a lot on my plate and I’m really looking forward to moving through it all. I hope you’re as excited as I am about Sun Spots (and the Caribbean scenario as well), and I can’t wait to share more. Soon!

Thanks to my Kickstarter Backers!

As part of my Kickstarter project for He Who Laughs Last, I promised to put a list online of all my backers, which you can now find here.

Nearly a year later, I still look back in amazement at my 385 backers who took a leap of faith in me and my project. Yes, I knew a few of them personally, but most I didn’t know and had not even encountered in the greater online community. Furthermore, I had folks like Shane Ivey and Kevin Kulp, as well as the amazing Oscar Rios, share my project with their own backers, which was a huge boon to our project. All of this help came during the project from people I’ve never met in person.

But that’s what the RPG community is about — we’re all geeks of varying degrees, and our support for everyone here cannot be overstated.

I think that, ultimately, the community is why my project (and others like it) was so successful. I’ve received amazing amounts of support and feedback (both good and bad) for this project, both on Kickstarter and when I’ve run the game at conventions. It makes such a difference to know that people enjoy the game and book, and that they look forward to more work from me and my team.

My next Kickstarter project is already being planned and I hope it is even crazier than the last. I look forward to working with my team again, and interacting with my backers. Thanks to you all.

Delta Green Conversion Notes for He Who Laughs Last

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR HE WHO LAUGHS LAST FOLLOW

REALLY, YOU SHOULDN’T

 

 

The following are notes on converting HWLL to the Delta Green RPG setting…

As a contemporary horror story, He Who Laughs Last can easily be integrated into Delta Green, Pagan Publishing’s modern day RPG setting of conspiracy and terror. The scenario needs very little to be inserted into any DG game, but there are two key components that require discussion: the scenario introduction and the use of a green box to distribute clues.

For the scenario introduction, there are a few different ways to bring a group of Delta Green investigators into the story:

  • The most straightforward option is to transform Becca’s father, Dale Kingsley, into a DG friendly who reaches out to the party for help, knowing they are capable in these sorts of investigations. Dale can be a doctor/surgeon who has helped DG in the past but now has nowhere else to turn. A simple phone call from Dale outlines the problem – his daughter has died mysteriously and he is desperate for their help. Or this call could come through “proper channels” to have the PCs reach out to Dale, again, as a DG friendly who is in trouble.
  • Perhaps Dale is a friend of one of the agents. Dale contacts his PC friend (they were college roommates or served together in the same branch of military), distraught and overcome with despair. This is just a slight change from the above suggestion – Dale still reaches out to the PCs, panicked and desperate for help.
  • Another option is to have one or more of the PCs be friends with Becca (through family or work) who are directly impacted by her “suicide.” Becca is in her mid-20s, and if any of the party is generally her age, they could have been friends with her either during or after college. Pulling the party together for this might seem like a challenge (to find a justification for all the agents to travel to LA for a funeral of someone they don’t know), but given the size and scale of the larger LA area, it shouldn’t be too hard to justify a handful of agents taking a vacation for a week to help their friend.
  • One last option would is to have Cell A (or whatever infrastructure your campaign uses) assign the DG agents directly to investigate the mystery.  Just Becca’s suicide alone could be enough to get the party involved, or the investigation could be bootstrapped by having a DG friendly point out some of the irregularities coming out of the coroner’s office.

With the introduction covered, there are still a couple of considerations to make this scenario work smoothly in the DG universe. First is that the PCs probably won’t be from the LA area and so won’t have the Hollywood connections that make it a bit easier to navigate the story (as mentioned in The Industry, pg. 12). They can, of course, play up their law enforcement credentials, or just play it straight as they try to uncover the mystery. The PCs will just have to be a bit more thoughtful and creative as they work to make connections with the various NPCs.

Finally, one easy way to get the PCs the information from David Lee (Package from the Coroner, pg. 29) is to provide it in a green box. While there is no specific need to deviate from the narrative, if the PCs ask about a green box or the party doesn’t end up meeting with Lee, send the PCs a key from a small green box located in a Burbank industrial park. You are free to put any additional information there for the PCs, but otherwise you can just substitute the green box for the the package from Lee as the mechanism to deliver the clues. Instead of receiving the package at the front desk, inside the green box they find a number of boxes, smelly and old from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, stacked in the corner, ready to divulge their secrets.

Those are all the elements that should be necessary to convert HWLL to a Delta Green scenario. Please let me know if you have any further questions on this, and I would love to hear if you successfully convert it to DG.

You can buy the scenario at DTRPG.com here.

New HWLL Review

As I prep the hard- and soft-cover books for shipment, I ran across a review of He Who Laughs Last that I’d like to share.

The review is here. My favorite part is, of course, the sentence: “Well presented, well laid out, well written, I put this one in the heavy yes column.”

I will have more posts and thoughts coming up shortly, as I begin the final stage of my Kickstarter project. In the meantime, enjoy your summer gaming!

It Lives!!!

The PDF for He Who Laughs Last is now available on DriveThruRPG.com, for the amazing low price of $8!

You can purchase it here. Over the next few months, the same product page will be updated with the ability to purchase not only soft AND hardcovers, but a whole host of digital clues and supplements for the scenario.

I’ll also be updating the project page here with the list of Kickstarter backers. It’s been an amazing journey and I would not trade the experience for the world. Many thanks to all involved.

A Whole New World

“You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”  ―Obi-Wan Kenobi

Today, six months after making a specific decision to launch today, I pushed Launch for my first Kickstarter project. You may read about it the Kickstarter project page.

It’s been nearly a year since I first ran this game at a convention, when I first considered the whole Kickstarter thing. I’m now sitting here, two beers and a bourbon in, just hours after launching the campaign.

Back in 1999, I was wandering around New Chinatown in San Francisco, which is located on Clement Street between 3rd and 8th avenue. I loved it! The streets were teeming with life and you knew you were in a true city. I heard Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese and even Irish brogue before I heard American English. So many cultures all mashed up. I was single and unemployed, wandering those streets, looking at the sidewalk bins and dodging all the small, old Chinese women. I loved it – I felt home in San Francisco.

Three years later I was living with my wife, right at 5th Ave and Clement. The HUGE fish market was basically in my back yard, and every day I walked past the vendors dumping fish straight from the tanks on the back of the truck right onto the street. It’s how they do it on Clement.

And so I always look back at that moment where I innocently wandered just 20 feet from the apartment I would share with a woman who I had not even met yet, let alone spend the rest of my life with. I see that moment of not knowing — but still understanding — that my life would be impacted by that neighborhood. My wife and I would wander those streets every day, sucking in the life and craziness that is cosmopolitan San Francisco. We would visit the bookstore, the ice cream shop, the Japanese home goods store, and of course the Chinese market. We became part of the life that I had sensed all those years ago.

Right now, I have 18 backers and am nearing $800 on my first night of my first project. Just two hours in, I’m at 26% funding. My mind boggles. Yes, I have some good friends, but some other folks are starting to creep in, and the next week will be a test of my ability to create some buzz around the project.

What will happen? Will I fund? Will I double my goal? Will I skate by on the skin of my teeth? How will this project reflect on my writing abilities? Will people be interested in this project? Will my $1800 level fund (which would be so awesome) and send me to meet some new cool gamers?

It’s all on the horizon, just past where I can see it. But I have a feeling — a warm feeling that’s not just the bourbon — that I will meet lots of cool people through this project, learn a lot about myself and publishing, and then just have a good time sharing my story with the world.

I hope you can come along.

Standing at the Brink

One week from today I will launch my first Kickstarter for my scenario He Who Laughs Last, for which I have written about 20,000 words. Writing the scenario, which I did in three waves, was mostly enjoyable grunt work. Thinking of fun, crazy horror scenarios is the easy part – the challenge is finding the discipline to get on the computer to write 5 days a week. But once I’m in the groove, scenario writing is really just about putting word after word. Hard work, but very straight-forward.

Last August, right before BigBadCon in Oakland, CA, I made the decision that I would launch my Kickstarter around the beginning of February, to time it with my annual attendance of DunDraCon in San Ramon, which I have been attending since 1984 or so. My reasons for this were two-fold:

  1. If I launched right before DDC, then I could run the game at the con and use that to generate interest for my project. Most projects go through a lull in the middle, and while people don’t generally pledge during cons, I figured if I could get those 12 people who played in the game excited enough to pledge right when they came home, it would be worth it.
  2. More importantly, though, I wasn’t actually ready to run a KS project back in August. When I started researching all the things you need to do to build an online presence, I quickly learned that I really had none of them. No blog, no Twitter account, no place to send people to find out about what I’m working on (aside from my personal FB, which doesn’t count). I needed some time to get all these things together and I needed to start ASAP.

So that’s what I did — I started to build my online presence right after BigBadCon, and now that I’m here in February, I wanted to take a look back at all the work I’ve done, to savor the moment before the madness truly begins. I’m not saying I’ve done everything needed, some of which just takes ongoing contributions and writing. But I know that I’ve done the hard work — the real work, not the fake work of just sitting around and writing a scenario — necessary to make my project a success.

Since the beginning of September, I have taken the following actions in preparation for my Kickstarter:

  • Blog – Well, you’re here, right? I needed an online home that could be both a blog and a project page, and with some help from my awesome friend Wade, Weird8 was born. Back to my original point, though, the main work here is writing and more writing. This year I hope to get into a cadence of regular posts, but for now it’s just whenever I can make time in between prepping for the KS. Still, now I have a home.
  • Twitter – Honestly, I didn’t really want to get a Twitter account, but now that I’m here I finally understand what all the fuss is about. I can see why people get all wrapped up in writing their witty and concise 140 character updates, and how it could fundamentally change how people communicate. And again, it just takes some brute effort to continue communicating in this manner, sending out regular updates and chatting with people from around the world. But though many of my 770 followers are just part of the standard Twitter “I follow you, you follow me” process, I have engaged with at least a dozen new people who are genuinely interested in my project and share many similar interests. This has made it worth it.
  • Collaborators – Early on I realized that I couldn’t (and didn’t want to) run this whole KS project by myself, so I found myself some collaborators. First, the book just wouldn’t be the book with0ut the work of Jake Coolidge, who did an amazing job on the layout, cover, maps and overall look and feel. But then I met Gregory Geiger, who has helped me not only with my KS video and managing my marketing/press, but is also full of amazing ideas and is my go-to guy for just about any question. I love collaboration and this project has truly been the fruits of our collective labors.
  • W8 on FB – Whether or not it’s on the way out, Facebook is still the largest social media platform, and I had to create a space on FB for my content — so I created Dave Sokolowski and Weird8 (so you can search for both). Ultimately I will triangulate content between this blog, my Twitter feed, and my FB page, but for right now it’s sputtering along. Building this up will be a goal of the KS project.
  • FB groups – One of the key places for additional learning have been FB groups, particularly Kickstarter Best Practices and Lessons Learned. It’s a great place to ask questions, get quick and thoughtful answers, and engage people in dialog about the overall KS process. I’ve learned tons about KS here and consider this group to be critical for anyone running a KS project.
  • Industry Expertise – Just as important as that FB group are two key people and their respective homes on the internet: Funding the Dream podcast and Stonemaier Games. These are indispensable resources that I cannot recommend enough – you must check out Richard Bliss’ podcast and Jamie Stegmaier’s page on Kickstarter Lessons. If you aren’t well versed in both of these and you want to launch a KS, I’m not sure how serious you really are.
  • Kickstarter Itself – I have learned more about KS in the past six months than all the previous years combined, and I’ve been pledging there for more than two years. I’ve looked at so many KS projects (especially RPGs) that I can pretty much tell whether a project will succeed in the first few days just by looking at it. I also started backing lots of projects just for $1 so I can be involved in projects that I’m interested in and continue to understand how projects succeed or fail (and I was finally part of two projects that failed). Also, staying in the loop like this keeps me engaged with the community and I have even upped my pledges on a few projects, just because I can see the projects are being run very well and that the end results will be so great.
  • Interviews – I like to interview people and plan to do more of that on this site in the future. As I got nearer to my launch date, I wanted to interview someone with a successful RPG KS project already under their belt. Oscar Rios is the president of Golden Goblin Press, who has just launched his already massively successful second KS project, and was more than welcome to spend some time talking with me about what makes a successful RPG project – and with his project funding in about 24 hours, I think it’s fair to say he knows what he’s talking about. I will be editing the interview and getting it up on this site this week so I can share his insights. Again, it’s just important to keep talking to people and learning.
  • Old Yoggie – Finally, and most importantly, is that I already know where the people who will buy my product hang out online, and I am already part of that greater community. Yog-sothoth.com (or YSDC to us) is the online home of the greater Cthulhu gaming community, of which I’ve been a part of for seven years (as DrummerDave). I’ve writing extensive blogs on RPGs that I’ve run, made friends, and been a part of the overall discussion for long enough that people there know my work and me. It’s critical to know your audience when publishing anything, and I’m quite certain where to find the people who will want to back my project. But it’s not something that I just discovered; I’ve been part of the community for years and will continue to for as long as YSDC is around. Makes this whole thing a lot easier, really.
  • Early Bird – One last thing that I’ve been doing differently: going to bed early and getting up early. I’ve been getting up from between 4:30 and 6am every day for the past month, as well as August to October, which also means I go to bed early. Sleep is so critical on an ongoing basis, but I also need to get up early so I can have some alone time before the rest of the house wakes. Unless you’re lucky enough to have your own office, getting up before everyone else in the house may be the key to finding productive time.

Right now, I’m pretty confident that my Kickstarter will be successful – it’s just a matter of how much money and interest I will raise. I’m only interested in the money so much as I want to produce quality materials that everyone is happy with. I’m really interested in meeting people who find my scenario interesting and want to share this gaming experience with me.

But I feel like I’ve done just about everything I can for someone who is kicking off their writing career with a first KS project. When the project ends, we can look back and see how much impact all these items had on my project’s success. And as they say, nothing good comes easy…

 

Clues in the Dark

Last fall I watched a lot of the TV series Marple with my wife, and there are few better inspirations for writing good mystery than Agatha Christie, who spins quite a ball of yarn only to unravel it with perfect logic just when all seemed lost. It gave me a lot of respect for mystery novelists (a genre I have only a passing interest in, which is strange considering my interest in mysteries), especially good ones who can build layer upon layer of dramatic intrigue and obtuse clues.

There is little difference between writing a mystery novel and writing a good investigative story (whether for the Cthulhu Mythos genre or more specifically for a RPG system like Gumshoe), because, ultimately, you’re building a series of clues for the characters (PCs) to uncover, discuss, and follow to the next scene/clue. Investigative RPGs are my favorite to both write and play because of that clue trail – building an interesting and original set of clues for the PCs to follow is hard, but so ultimately satisfying if done right.

For the longest time, Call of Cthulhu (COC) was my favorite investigative game, though not as a system so much as for the atmosphere and breadth of materials available for it. But over the past few years, multiple new takes on the Mythos investigative game have cropped up, highlighting both the breadth of the market as well as the need for a new take on how RPGs investigations are run.

Cthulhu Dark (a rules-light system by Graham Walmsley) is now my favorite Cthulhu RPG for one simple reason – the rules never get in the way of the story. Ever. I never have to stare down a bad roll and try to figure out how to make it work – it’s all positive creativity. In COC, I am always trying to figure out how to make a bad roll fit into making sure the story moves forward. Even Trail of Cthulhu, which is based on Gumshoe and aims to always make core clues available, can get bogged down in some of the illogical bookkeeping that goes into spending points to expand the clues.

When I play Cthulhu Dark (CD), though, I can use the die rolls (including my own house rules for skill rolls) to judge the varying degrees of success the PCs face when finding clues. This, in turn, puts the onus on the scenario writer to develop an intriguing set of clues for the PCs to follow, which then makes it easy to turn a die roll (whether high or low, as success is guaranteed) into figuring out the best manner for the story to play out. You can use the randomness to add flavor to the story, not determine whether or not the PCs actually succeed.

I know there are still plenty of old-school COC players who live and die by what the dice tell you, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that providing your players are having fun, which is the ultimate litmus test for a game’s success. But why make interpreting the dice easy (pass/fail) while making interpreting the clues (where do we go next) the hard part? Nothing good comes for free, and the challenge for how to interpret rolls is what makes playing CD fun. The PCs are going to get the clues regardless – what comes next is the degrees of success that follow the roll.

And there’s no reason to make it binary, saying pass or fail – again, make the die rolls interesting and fun to understand. The die rolls are a spectrum to work from, letting you interpret a high, medium, or low roll however the story best needs it, at that moment. Yes, that’s hard, but, again, that’s what makes it fun.

As part of He Who Laughs Last, I’ve written some house rules for using skills in the game. Funnily enough, the rules and skill list mirror the skills listed by Graham in his other book, Stealing Cthulhu (starting page 52 – go get it from the shelf, I’ll wait). In a nutshell, I’ve found that people like the boundaries of having a limited list of skills to choose from. We then use three dice (color coded green, blue, and red) to represent the three types of rolls: general, skills, and insanity. So there’s still some crunch (rules) to the game, but it never gets bogged down in figuring out rules to keep the game going.

Then, if the rules are easy and transparent to the game, the story becomes the platform to run the game, not the other way around. Your job then, as scenario writer, is to write the most interesting, intriguing, and dangerous set of clues your story demands. The trail of clues and how your players follow that trail then becomes the most critical component of your game. Something I’m sure Miss Marple would appreciate.

No Signal – Limitations in Modern Horror Gaming

One of the most compelling and scary components about Lovecraft’s horror is its remoteness. There’s a reason why he set Whisperer in the Darkness in the remote White Mountains – removing yourself from civilization and all its protections is not easy for most people, and certainly must have been unnerving 100 years ago, when still so much of the United States was unexplored.

But finding that level of isolation to use in a modern horror game is a bit challenging. Sure, you can set your game in some actual remote location (mountains or jungle far away from civilization), but not all horror stories take place far removed from people and power lines. And not every critical moment can be born from the device that your character can’t reach someone else, that they don’t have a signal (one of the worst parts of the entire Mission Impossible movie franchise is in MI:III when Tom Cruise is driving around Shanghai trying to get a signal on his phone to make a call – this does not make for good drama).

In fact, I think the more a GM can give PCs access to their everyday technology, the more normal the scenario will feel, at least at the outset. Verisimilitude is a great place to start for modern horror. So what else, besides isolation, can we use to make things scary in modern horror?

Well, a lot of it comes back to all the crazy stuff Philip K Dick wrote about in some of his later works, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly. Well, and pretty much anything he wrote (which is a lot) about identity. One of Dick’s favorite themes is that our reality is not as it seems, that we are not who we think we are. The idea that (SPOILERS HA!) that Deckard and Rachael don’t know that they’re androids, or that Bob’s drug use creates two separate personalities unaware of each other strike at the heart of what identity means. And with identity theft continually rising, and online privacy becoming a larger concern for everyone, we seek more and more to verify that no one is watching, that we are who we think we are, and that our fundamental understanding of who we are has not been compromised. As that gets harder and harder to do identity “theft” (in whatever broad terms) becomes scarier and scarier.

Good art needs limitations, but a good modern horror scenario needs different limitations than our traditional 1920s-30s Lovecraftian story. In today’s world, it’s very difficult to remove all communications and information from people and how they use technology. So one of the things we can do is play with player characters’ identities, and twist their understanding of their world. If you aren’t sure who you are, then suddenly all of your perceptions and perspectives have limitations. This is good gaming material.

One of the main components in He Who Laughs Last is that a PC is not who he seems to be, which is slowly revealed over the course of the scenario. From my playtesting, this sort of twist of identity really freaks people out, which is pretty much the point. But identity can’t be the only component for good horror gaming. What else is there?