I’ve finished putting my Metatopia (November 4-6, Morristown NJ) Designer Schedule together, and am now posting what I submitted here in case you’re going and want some idea of what’s going on with my games. This schedule isn’t final, but I don’t think it will change.

Friday:  8pm – 10pm
Board Game: Yellow Press
Take on the role of a newspaper to manipulate the reputations of your local superheroes. Be an editor like J. Jonah Jameson, or a plucky reporter like Clark Kent. Or both! Decide who is a hero, and who is a menace.

Prefer 4-5 experienced play-testers or board game designers who are interested in “light” narrative board games with euro-inspired elements.

Saturday:  9AM – 11AM
Party Games: Feral Survivors, Rap Battles
Feral Survivors is a journaling party game — think: Lord of the Flies, Lost, and Robinson Crusoe in an Exquisite Corpse format.

Rap Battles is a party game where Wannabe MCs compete to showcase their lyrical prowess using the same verbal ingredients.
Grandmaster Flash Fiction wants to know: are you ready to throw down?

Anyone welcome at any time, party game format means quick rounds of play.

Saturday: 2PM – 4PM
Open Board Game Rules Testing
Help identify confusing rules, unclear language, and where diagrams would be most useful. Various board games available for review.

No limit on number of participants, anyone welcome, including designers interested in rules-testing their own games (bring paper docs)

Saturday: 8PM – 12AM
RPG: Hyperreality
HYPERREALITY is the best and worst of the new wave of reality TV. Chaos, controversy, adrenaline, sex, violence, and even death are just par for the course. It’s time to win big, so put on your game face and take this chance to get anything and everything you ever wanted. In HYPERREALITY, you put your life on the line—on-line. The internet age is over, it’s time for HYPERREALITY.

Prefer 4-6 RPG/StoryGame-Savvy players/designers, 18+

Sunday: 10AM – 12PM
Board Game: Yellow Press
Take on the role of a newspaper to manipulate the reputations of your local superheroes. Be an editor like J. Jonah Jameson, or a plucky reporter like Clark Kent. Or both! Decide who is a hero, and who is a menace.

Prefer 4-5 experienced play-testers or board game designers who are interested in “light” narrative board games with euro-inspired elements.

Sunday: 3PM – 7PM
RPG: Hyperreality
HYPERREALITY is the best and worst of the new wave of reality TV. Chaos, controversy, adrenaline, sex, violence, and even death are just par for the course. It’s time to win big, so put on your game face and take this chance to get anything and everything you ever wanted. In HYPERREALITY, you put your life on the line—on-line. The internet age is over, it’s time for HYPERREALITY.

Prefer 4-6 RPG/StoryGame-Savvy players/designers, 18+

For those of you who may have missed it originally, Brennan Taylor of Galileo Games pushed out Bulldogs! earlier this year through Kickstarter. Bulldogs! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the name) is self-described as “Sci-Fi that Kicks Ass,” and I’m happy to report that boy howdy does it pay off.

The book is a gorgeous hardcover that clocks in at about 120 pages that are crammed full of great information and beautiful illustrations by Jaime Posadas and Kurt Komoda, and I want to give a big hand to the editing crew Amanda Valentine and Ryan Macklin who very much succeeded at making sure that every piece of text contributes to the “Sci-Fi that Kicks Ass” tagline.

Let me start the review of the actual content with an anecdote. I used to run Star Wars, as it was one of the few RPGs I could get my wife to play (sucker!), and after experiencing how troublesome Jedi are to run in the context of a full party, I opted to run mine as an all-scoundrels game (Scoundrels being the DnD Rogue-like character class). Sure, some folks still had some Force-powers in play, but having a crew that was  largely free from the otherwise overriding Jedi vs. Sith / Rebellion vs. Empire constraints was very freeing and we were able to rock some awesome stories of my players being largely on the run, cashing in when they could, and in all ways running a story of “Sci-Fi that Kicks Ass.” In terms of the game mechanics though, it took a metric ton of extra Star Wars sourcebooks and system hacking to push the d20 revised rules set to customize relatively basic things like races, equipment, ships, et al.

I wish to hell that I’d had Bulldogs! for that game. This one single book contains information on how to work the Fate-based system to create entirely customized races / equipment / ships / skills / stunts without any overhead. It seriously blows my mind at how sleek this writing is, compared to how many books I used to have to look through to puzzle out how to morph one of the NPC races into a PC race or how to cost a +1 damage upgrade to someone’s blaster pistol.

The only tricky thing I ran into during my read-through of the book is that Bulldogs! uses a single stress track, which I hadn’t expected; but then I also have relatively limited experience running Fate system games – and looking into it, all of the individual games seem to have evolved their own specifically tailored versions of how Stress is applied.

I’ve grown to really appreciate the way the Fate system helps drive games in terms of the play style, and how much depth it adds to the game for the relatively small amount of actual work you have to put into it. And I think that this is part of what makes Bulldogs! great. Fate’s Aspects versus d20’s neutrality-of-character are something that I find inspiring.

I’m going to be running Bulldogs! for a home campaign in the near future (when I can get people over here), and I’m really looking forward to it. Thanks a ton to Brennan, Brian Engard, and everyone else involved in putting this great game out! Get it at http://galileogames.com/bulldogs-fate/

I’m not sure quite when this happened, but my in-progress superheroes game “Project Planet Bugle” has been renamed to “Yellow Press” for the time being. It went through a great round of playtesting the weekend before last and a lot of interesting things got ironed out.

I have consistently found it more useful to bounce ideas off of a group of people who are actively trying to play the game, than to review things on my own. This game currently aims for 5 players, and during the last playtest I actually got to watch 5 players try to make sense of the game (awesome).

For anyone that has seen it before, you’ll recall that headlines were essentially minor bonuses that individual papers could get on actions. Well, they’ve just gotten a lot more important/interesting.

These are now cards that you can score for any hero, but also score better for your own hero/heel. This does a lot to address the apparent need for more of a narrative in the game. Supervillains will be actually plotting and whether or not the heros foil them will make a difference; papers can make and break reputations; and hopefully the game comes together like an issue or story arc.

I’m also working on improving the design of the cards, which has consistently done well in terms of improving the showing of the game, no matter what. Even my mediocre ability to do visual design scores points in terms of communicating the intent and information that is supposed to be there. See the headline cards above as an example: Start with the tabloid-esque block print words along the left sides. Boom. Newspaper headlines. The “Extra Extra” across the top functions more as a aggregation than anything else, loosely styled after a fancier newspaper like NYT or WAPO (that’s gonna catch some weird spam, I bet). The body font is set in Palatino, a relatively formal serif font that is a little rounder than (and specifically isn’t) Times New Roman. All of this is underlaid on a 10% grey background and faint newspaper column text, clearly identifying the card type.

They’re not even close to “done” and they still kind of embarrass me, but they came out more solidly than I expected.

There are other cards (which I’m not going to show yet) where I am very unhappy with the current state. And part of that trouble is the fact that I’m much more capable with pens/pencils/markers than I am with Illustrator. Using higher-end tools than you’re comfortable with creates a very problematic space to work in, because all of the little issues that you might gloss over in a pencil drawing are now high-resolution vector graphics that clearly show you every minor drawing issue. And sure, clip-art is great but it can only take you so far (unless that’s your goal: See Time & Temp). So for these other cards, I’ve decided that I’m going to literally go back to the drawing board and see if I can’t figure out some attractive and informative way to put them together outside of these tools that highlight my inexperience rather than showcase the good parts of my work.