Deck of Dreams
about 6 years ago – Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 02:17:12 AM

Thanks to a second exceedingly generous backer going for the Narrator pledge level, we broke $18k this morning, which means we reached the stretch goal for the Deck of Dreams, plus we'll be doing a new character type or scenario per that backer's specifications. The next stretch goal came among a lot faster than I was expecting, so I don't have a big long update written up. Let's just get into the matter at hand:

Deck of Dreams

We decided to run with Charles E Miller's suggestion for this. It'll be a 54-card deck of poker-sized cards that you can use as Dream tokens when you play Golden Sky Stories. Clay Gardner is going to bring his impressive graphic design skills to bear to make it really pretty. Presently we’re planning to have it be an add-on item available through the pledge manager, and then make it available as a POD product on DriveThruRPG, in both cases at a price of $10. (Which admittedly is more than I'd prefer to charge people for a deck of cards, but that's the reality of low-volume card printing.) I've bought card games through DTRPG (and even made some games and approximations thereof), and I've generally been pleased with the quality of the resulting tuckboxes (which use an unusual design that doesn't involve any glue) and cards.

Up next is the stretch goal for a Colors of the Sky POD book. This will be a compilation of all of the stretch goal material from both Kickstarters, with some new art (hence the cost), available through DriveThruRPG and Amazon. Since a lot of the material for it isn't even written yet, it's going to be coming out hopefully by the end of the year, but definitely quite a bit later than the actual Twilight Tales book, and backers will receive a discount code to buy it for cheap through DTRPG.

In any case, thank you all so much for all your support!

Future Stuff
about 6 years ago – Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 04:14:09 PM

We hit yet another stretch goal, which means that Rach Shelkey will indeed be designing raccoon henge for us. Up next is the Deck of Dreams, so we can get Clay to make pretty cards you can use as Dream counters.

We also have another stretch goal to announce. It’s perhaps a little late in the game, but it’s a neat idea so I decided to run with it:

$21,000: Magical Girl: Regulars of the town by day, magical girls walk out into the wild and wonderful world of henge and mononoke as avatars of Wonder at night to help bridge the two worlds-so long as they can still get their work done by morning! A new character type by Sean K.I.W. Steele.

Given how much I’ve done with magical girl stuff in RPGs (the big unpublished one being Magical Burst, the big published one being Magical Fury), I kind of wonder why I never thought to make a magical girl character type for GSS. Non-fighty magical girls tend to use their magical powers to help others, which makes them pretty fitting for GSS in a lot of ways. We may be going a little overboard with “people (girls) with magical powers” types, but I legit really like what Sean has shown me so far.

To round out this update, I want to tell you guys about some other GSS-related stuff (to varying degrees) that will be coming at some indeterminate dates in the future.

Daybreak Stories

I haven’t even settled on a title yet (“Daybreak Stories” is the placeholder I’m using for now), but of course I came up with a promising idea for a new GSS supplement when it’s a bit late to try to make it a part of this Kickstarter. This would be another alternate setting, but for a version of present-day Japan where the supernatural has become public knowledge. People and yōkai (since supernatural beings were discovered by a TV crew in Japan, Japanese terms became the standard in much of the world) are learning to coexist openly, and while things are perhaps a little stranger, life rolls on much as before. The Japanese government now has a Ministry of Supernatural Affairs, and the town has an overworked MSA rep who’s trying to help everyone get along, assist yōkai who want to apply for citizenship with the paperwork, and so on.

I just opened a Word doc and started typing up whatever came to mind (I do that a lot), but it’s looking like this book will contain setting info, a guide to the many different types of yōkai (with guidelines for how to create them in GSS terms), new NPCs, a sample town, some new character types, and some new options for existing character types (for example, to let you make a fox henge that can possess people).

Kamiya called Kore Kara no Michi the finale of Golden Sky Stories, and I think this will similarly be a capstone to my own original creations for the game. It’s likely going to address the material in Hitotsuna Komichi and Kore Kara no Michi enough that it’ll have to wait for whenever we launch those, plus it’s going to take me a while to research, write, and playtest what is quickly becoming another fairly ambitious project.

Pix and Powered by Dreams

Another thing I’m working on that’s relevant to GSS fans is a game called Pix.

During the original GSS Kickstarter we did a thing where we let backers vote on one of four possible original settings that we’d do, and then the funding kept rolling in so we ended up doing that a second time, which was kind of bonkers. That’s how I ended up writing and publishing Faerie Skies and Fantasy Friends, which together add up to around 120 pages of new GSS material. One of the ideas we didn’t pursue was “Friendship Time,” which would’ve been loosely based on Adventure Time. I didn’t get very far developing Friendship Time, mostly just coming up with an idea where you’d make a character by mashing together a profession and a type of creature (Human/Hero, Candy/Princess, etc.) and brainstorming some ideas for those. Later on, I discovered Undertale, and it make a pretty big impression on me. It combined with my ideas for Friendship Time, for doing something a little bit inspired by Homestuck, and a bunch of other things, and a new game called Pix emerged from that general stew of influences.

Pix is a little world that’s an odd hybrid of reality, fantasy, and buggy video game, home to all sorts of creatures who are just trying to live their lives and find friendship and hope. It’s a game for heartwarming stories of everyday magic, similar to Golden Sky Stories, but with just a little more tension and adventure. The system marries a simplified variant of GSS to some elements of Powered by the Apocalypse, with the aim of helping you weave heartwarming stories without quite so much fiddling with numbers. Characters get Magic points they can spend on using powers from their Friendships with others, but instead of Feelings, they just roll dice to make checks for Apocalypse World-style moves.

To make a character, you start by combining a Type (the sort of creature you are) and a Job (what you do, whether an actual profession or just a personality archetype). Whenever I get to play it myself, I’m planning to play as Fortran, the Robo-Wizard, combining the Thing type (for robots, golems, etc.) and the Wizard job (and do my best Spintax the Green impression when speaking in character). You then pick some powers and weaknesses from each, and fill in some details to help you work out what your character looks like, where in Pix they live, and so on. Not unlike with mononoke, each Type in Pix can be several different things, so a Spook character could be a skeleton, a ghost, a vampire, etc. The Jobs have some variety too, so your Nerd can variously be a fanboy and/or an inventor, your Healer can be someone who bakes nice pies and/or someone with actual magical healing powers, and so on.

I’ve been doing more with settings in my games in general, and Pix has a fairly specific, defined setting, with different parts of Pix that have highly thematic environments (like the burning hot Burnburg or the always-wet Mizu Machi), and many specific inhabitants that PCs can come to know. I'm inordinately pleased with how the rulers are Queen Vector and King Raster, and they have a son named Prince Voxel.

I’ve taken to calling it the “Powered by Dreams” rules, and I have some ideas for other things to do with it. The big one is a heartwarming superhero game (inspired by titles like The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Hellcat a.k.a. Patsy Walker) called "Helpful Heroes."

Miscellaneous Progress!
about 6 years ago – Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 07:41:05 PM

I don’t have as much to post about this time around, because the stretch goal we just hit is the work of an outside contributor, so I don’t have the ability to write multiple paragraphs about it like if it were my own work. Scenarios aren’t my strength as a game designer—it’s something I want to work on actually—but I think they’re a good tool for both cutting down on how much work the GM has to do and teaching new GMs, so I wanted to do some more, and thankfully TS Luikart and now Richard Kelly have stepped up to the plate. So yeah, Raucous Night At The Tanemura Estate is happening, and we now begin the climb to $17k, when the raccoon henge happens and your dreams of role-playing a magical trash panda come true!

Also, I set up with BackerKit for this Kickstarter, which means we now have a pre-order page up and running, so non-backers will be able to put in pre-orders to get the book when it launches. If you’re already a backer you don’t need to worry about pre-orders, but when surveys go out, backers will have the option to add copies of any of the GSS books (as well as Maid RPG) to their orders. Having an automated way to do that is pretty great, and I’m hoping it’ll make the whole thing smoother for everyone concerned. We were able to get by without a pledge manager last time, but it involved a ginormous Excel file and many, many emails.

Lastly, I’m going to be doing an interview with 91.8 The Fan, a pretty nifty online radio station, on Thursday, March 15th at 2 p.m. (PST)!

Raspberry Sky Stories and More Besides
about 6 years ago – Sat, Mar 03, 2018 at 11:55:50 PM

I hope you guys are having a good weekend so far. I went to get Star Line Publishing’s taxes done and had a flat tire on the way back. I was able to change to the spare and get home fine (albeit nearly an hour later), but on the plus side there’s good news on the Kickstarter front.

First off, it looks like I now have an answer to the question, “Who would drop $600 on getting a new type of henge made?” I talked to the backer in question a bit, and it looks like he’s settled on sheep henge. We’re going to discuss it in more detail after the Kickstarter finishes up, but suffice to say it’s going to be fluffy and adorable.

I’m also in the process of setting up with BackerKit for this Kickstarter, and once it’s ready anyone who would prefer to back through means other than Kickstarter for whatever reason will be able to preorder, plus everyone will be able to add on copies of GSS, Twilight Tales, Faerie Skies, Fantasy Friends, and Maid RPG.

But the biggest thing is that we reached $15,000, which means Raspberry Sky Stories is happening, so let me tell you a bit about that.

Raspberry Sky Stories

As we mentioned on the main page, this one is going to be a Golden Sky Stories themed reskin of my game Raspberry Heaven. (Which by the way is currently on sale as part of DriveThruRPG’s GM’s Day Sale, despite being a GM-less game.) At the risk of boring some people, let me give you a little background, since apparently I’m treating these updates like a blog or something.

Ages ago I was brainstorming possible RPG ideas for a potential publisher who wanted to do short Fudge-based games. Nothing ever came of that, but among the ideas I jotted down was an RPG for heartwarming slice of life stories in the vein of 4-panel manga Azumanga Daioh and Hidamari Sketch, and it stuck with me even though I dropped the part about using Fudge for that particular concept. Making a game like that, one that has so little to do with what RPGs are normally about, is hard, because it runs against the grain of the typical structures of play in RPGs. That’s probably why I went through three unsuccessful iterations (including the idea of the game taking the form of an app, something I want to explore again at some point) before I found the right inspiration.

Of all things, it was Jonathan Walton’s excellent (and as yet unpublished) zombie game Restless that gave me the ideas I needed to finally bring Raspberry Heaven to fruition. It consists of a set of cards, and you play through one or more chapters written out on cards that outline a situation and provide a sequence of prompts about your characters’ actions and the world around them. Despite the radically different tones, both zombie apocalypse and slice of life schoolgirl stories have a number of recurring scenes that we see in different variations, and providing a set of 12 “scene cards” is one of the major things that makes Raspberry Heaven work. It also has a set of 6 character cards, with premade characters that hit a lot of the major archetypes while having distinct quirks and personalities of their own. You can make new characters and scene cards—there’s even a card with guidelines for doing so—but it’s more writing exercise than game design per se. My friend C. Ellis (who you may remember from the fish henge art in The Colors of the Sky, and who will be doing the art for the witch’s cat) did artwork of each of the playable characters (plus their homeroom teacher), giving the game just the manga look it needed. (Also she was part of the inspiration for Sue in the game.)

Raspberry Heaven has had modest sales, but that’s partly because of its odd form factor (a set of 6”x6” cards or a PDF that is a passable substitute) and quirky subject matter. Mostly I’m just happy that I was able to realize a concept I’d been struggling to figure out how to design, and that I now have a fun little game I can bust out to play when there’s half an hour to kill. I do want to do some more with it—my list of possible expansions and alternate sets includes a Holiday Special set with various seasonal scene cards, a Boys Side set with male characters, and one with pigeons because Hatoful Boyfriend—but I also realized that the framework I’d worked out with Raspberry Heaven could work as an alternate way to experience the world of Golden Sky Stories. There’s even a set of six main characters already there, and it didn’t take long to brainstorm a set of twelve scene cards. In any case, I hope I can make something new that you all can have fun with.

Up Next

Anyway, up next is Richard Kelly’s Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai-inspired scenario. Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai (百物語怪談会) is a parlor game where you light 100 candles, and then everyone takes turns telling spooky stories, blowing out a candle each time a story finishes, so that the room becomes progressively darker as you go along. Richard has done some work on games like Oubliette 2nd Edition, Pathogen: Unclassified, and Heroines of the First Age, and generally came to me with enthusiastic and interesting ideas. In addition to the scenario, he’s going to be contributing some entries to our collection of story seeds.

Then after that comes the raccoon henge, for anyone who wanted to play a magical trash panda!

New Stuff!
about 6 years ago – Thu, Mar 01, 2018 at 07:33:40 PM

It’s been a few days since my last update, but I’ve definitely been keeping busy. I do deal with a lot of stress in my life (and clinical anxiety), but on the plus side the major way I deal with it is by being productive. That’s probably why I’ve already commissioned 7 pieces of art for various stretch goal pieces (from C. Ellis, Kamapon, and Ella Kukri), dumped some layout work on Clay Gardner so we can get Twilight Tales and the Golden Sky Stories reprint going, and done a bunch of writing. I’m also in the process of setting up a pledge manager, which will let you add more copies of various books to your orders and other handy stuff, and hopefully make this whole process a bit easier for all of us.

New Stretch Goals!

After talking to some possible designers and we now have four new stretch goals!

• $16,000: Raucous Night At The Tanemura Estate: In the late summer, when the last traces of dusk have fled the sky, spirits gather in the crumbling old house on the edge of town. They come together to play Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, a game of ghost stories where each storyteller snuffs a candle when their tale is done, inviting more spirits to appear. Of course, these new spirits are quick to join in the festivities, leading to a night of supernatural merriment for all in this Golden Sky Stories scenario from Richard Kelly.
• $17,000: Raccoon Henge: Outsiders from beyond Hitotsuna Town, raccoon henge love to solve problems using their creativity and big city know-how. A new character type by Rach Shelkey.
• $18,000: Deck of Dreams: This will be a 54-card deck of cards you can use as Dream tokens, with appropriately colorful GSS-themed designs. It will be available to backers as an add-on item, and then put up for sale on DriveThruRPG as a POD product.
• $20,000: The Colors of the Sky POD Book: If we hit this stretch goal, we’ll put together a “The Colors of the Sky” Print on Demand book, compiling all of the stretch goal material from both Kickstarters, plus some new art, and provide discount codes to all backers.

We’ve done kind of a lot of new character types—once we do the ones for this Kickstarter I’ll have personally made more than the entire output of the Japanese version—but I found the pitch for raccoon henge interesting both in their own right and as a way to add to the game’s ability to handle stories that take place in Western countries. If you’ve seen raccoons in real life (like the time I was walking to a bus stop at 6 a.m. and saw one just hanging out in a storm drain), the idea that they have magical powers is a little too believable. There are even raccoons in Japan, though they’re not native. Fans of a 1977 anime called Rascal the Raccoon imported 1,500 of them as pets, but enough escaped and thrived that there are now wild raccoons in every single prefecture in Japan.

Anyway, thanks yet again for all your support and enthusiasm!