Time is squeezing in on me due to impending Newlet#2 (eta two weeks or less) and also prompted by the fact that its been a year and a month since D101′s first release (Hearts in Glorantha #1) this has triggered some pretty heavy reflection on where I’m at with D101.

I think it can be easily summed up with one phrase “I am the Happy Fun Publisher”.

To expand I’m happiest when this is a fun hobby, when it goes under ther radar with the Boss (the wife Rachel, my not so silent partner ), and there is a genuine joy about what I’m doing.  I recently had a big dose of the ‘must get this done’ grind for HiG#3 and OpenQuest and it sucketh mightily.

I’ve recently had a huge delusion of grandeur where I pump out the books at the going rate of the ‘Industry, what ever badly inflated price that is, and somehow next year I can give up my day job (as a web developer) . In reality I love my job, it suits me down to the ground and I like the people I work with, and now is not the time to go freelance. I also know that if I went full time with D101 at this point in time I would hate it. I’m never going to say never, but if one day it does happen it will be from a much stronger position than I’m currently in. It will will be an inevitable step that flows with the way my life is going.

Nope I’m doing D101 as a hobby, with perhaps a higher dedication and sense of professionalism, in the same way that some people play sports or spend hours playing World of Warcraft.

So what does this mean in practical terms;

• I’m going to carry on with the same scatter gun approach to publishing, announcing books here and there, taking my time to deliver oblivious to deadlines whooshing by and occasionally dumping stuff that didn’t work out.  I’m focusing on the Fun, not something I feel I need to put out (except as a mental kick to get something that has been sitting on the Hard-drive in the nearly done phase for too long).  This allow me to actually carry on a few titles that I was considering dropping due to ‘time constraints’.  Immediate benefit of this is that I’m not planing on dropping my Gloranthan titles, as I was before in my previous serious frame of mind.
• I’m not going to be charging the bizzare prices that RPG publishers seem to be charging these days (this is a rant in itself).  I’ll be charging what I think is a fair price, that people can afford yet still lets me pay out my small costs. RPGing is a social activity, RPG companies or small press should act in a social responsible way and foster a community based on fair play and inclusiveness. To do otherwise in the name for a quick buck means that the Hobby, never mind the so called ‘Industry’, is fucked.  If that means people don’t consider D101 a proper games company, then fuck’ em.  Immediate effect of this is that I’m dropping the print price of OpenQuest to the more reasonable £10.

So that’s where I stand, having fun, releasing what I want, having a laugh with mates and not turning D101 into a joyless must do enterprise.

Hello my name’s Newt and  I am the Happy Fun Publisher.

D101′s Wave 2 (publishing its own games) is firmly here, hitting the shores and reaching the people and with it came a firm realisation (or perhaps the obvious slapping me in the face) of where I’m going with this.

In short ‘Its all about the Story’.

My favourite Roleplaying experiences have always been those where you remember the game play sessions by the stories that people tell afterwards.  Please excuse me if I look bored to high heaven if you wander up to me and tell me about your favourite character and what awesome powers they have or how system X hits the sweet spot for play.  These things don’t do it for me.

These are the three things I’m I looking for in a ‘story-telling’ roleplaying game.

• Flexible and easy to learn. Story telling often requires you be inventive on the fly. I want a game systems that support me as I make things up. I don’t want a large overhead of confused players as we have to roll out a new rule to cover the situation that’s cropped up in play.  I want the system to be straightforward, not necessary rules-lite, so that it can blend into the background and let the fun and the story take over.
  
• Make the best use of the system features. I want to produce games  that encourage and reward story telling and have clever systems that channel, not force, play in this direction.
  
• Violence is not the only option. I want to cut down on the amount of random violence that occurs in my games due to players exerting their character’s superiority over npcs.  As big a fan as I am of Sword and Sorcery and the Action Movie genres, I getting sick of the ‘toys for the boys’ approach that most RPGs take.    Its not just about having systems that can handle politics or ‘social conflict’ its about presenting a world that actually encourages the players to be more than just walking weapons’ platforms.  Monkey , as much as it is filled with Wacky Kung-fu fighting, is a step in this direction.

How we are going to do it

• Trad systems with Story telling bias  for example OpenQuest.
• New modern Storytelling systems purpose built for story telling, such as Wordplay and HeroQuest.

I put the emphasis on ‘we’ here because D101 is already a collaborative enterprise. Hearts in Glorantha is one big collaboration and so was the production of OpenQuest.  This trend will continue when some of the upcoming projects I have in the pipeline come to light over the coming months.  This is perhaps the final point about D101′s Direction, while I remain the figure head and benevolent dictator for life, D101  has moved away from being my vehicle for self-publication and more of a collective. So if you have an idea for a book, that matches our direction, get in touch (newt@d101games.co.uk).

A quick web comic while we wait for Savage North to get done. Some of John’s art, which shows a manly obsession with Goblin decapitation, put together into a short strip by yours truly.

After nearly two years of development work, OpenQuest is out.  If you missed this the free pdf is available via our new downloads page and the print version is available via our store page.

Go visit d101games.co.uk for both of these.

Since the release on Friday I’ve had about 200 odd downloads and a couple of sales   Feed back has been posistive, with threads over at RPG.net and The Tavern singing its praises.

I post a fuller post mortem of how the game developed when I’ve recovered from my happy state of release burn out.

Now back to fiddling about writing adventures and settings Oh yes and laying out issue 3 of Hearts in Glorantha

Spent the last couple of days in a happy fug after finishing OpenQuest playing about with various projects, considering what to throw my seemingly the boundless energy into next  in a very real get it done and out the door sort of way. Finally after banishing various niggling fears with a big hearty Brian Blessed laugh, I’ve settled on Monkey.

The text is two thirds done, now all have to do is finish the rest. Art is in the bag courtesy of Jon Hodgson (Cover) and lots of lovely public domain pieces for the black and white (and possibly colour) internals.

So time to get it on and finish my own personal Journey to the West.

ETA September.

Finally some movement on the getting things done and out front.

After what seems like an age, OpenQuest was finally finished at the weekend and has gone to proof I’m well happy with the resulting layout and the way that the system is nicely polished to deliver a easy to understand fantasy D100 experience. Despite myself its a complete game, with rules, monsters, a setting and a beginning adventure.  It may not be perfect but I love it warts and all.  Best of all it should be with you mid-July   Kudos to Neil Ford, our chief OQ Evangelist who is running games at both Dragonmeet SW this coming weekend and Furnace 2009 in October.

A huge posistive is that this now frees me up to do some serious writting and get yet more stuff out

Monkey is a prime contender here and I opened my files up last night and mulled over what I need to do. I’m happy with the system, so its mainly getting that down in a form that other people understand and getting the background chapters, The Worlds of Monkey and 101 Immortals. Yes you heard it right I’m going to try and go for an Immortals list of 101 characters. Its a nice goal that will focus my efforts to get to grips with the expansive and vague world of Chinese Mythology. I reckon if I get my head down a Sept/Oct release is not unreasonable, although end of the year is more realistic.

Production of Hearts in Glorantha issue 3 will seriously kick off next month. Its a bumper issue and Sacha is manfully doing proofing at the moment and our team of artists are beavering away. If course its all a worrying Schrodinger cat scenario until we reach 1st July when all the art/proofing will magically turn up in my inbox. Then a brief bit of layout, with skills seriously bolstered by doing OpenQuest, and then its done sometime early August.

John Ossoway, renassiance man of Rpgs, continues to tidy up the text and bang out maps for our first D101 OpenQuest release the adventure book The Savage North. All this and he’s recently become a dad again!  Emphasis will soon move to me doing the setting and tying it all together with an overarching campaign plot with John doing the art.  Out Oct/Nov.

Other stuff that is being fiddled with at the moment:

Wordplay The Fury of the Vikings, a fantasy Viking setting with rules for raiding, invading countries and Ragnorok. Hoping to test out the characters side of things with an adventure I’m writing for the Wordplay core rulebook soon. I’ve got all the art sourced so its a case of when the muse really kicks me in the balls. Optimistically I would like it out end of this year, realistically it will probably be early next.

The Road Less Travelled, a Fantasy Genre Pack for HeroQuest 2. This is taking the art, adventure, setting, monsters and Adventure writing section from OpenQuest and converting it to HQ2.  It came about  because I wanted a fantasy setting to run games in with people who don’t like Glorantha and then realised that I had 75% of a setting that I had become rather fond of already written. Not just a straight conversion, it will have lots of HQ2 specific advice for how to run generic western style Fantasy full of Orcs, Knights and Wizards and expand upon the setting info presented in OpenQuest. Out ??? Again with all the time in the world within the first month of HeroQuest 2′s release, which would be sometime Aug, but I reckon more Sept/Oct even Nov. Moon Designs is putting together a Open HeroQuest Liscene which this Genre Pack will be released under. Basically this is an Open Gaming License which allows people to release non-Gloranthan HQ2 stuff without approval or interference from Moon Designs, who hope that having other companies put out supplements will increase sales of HeroQuest 2. If the Road Less Travelled does well I may release more HQ2 stuff, since I’m rather fond of the system now

Words can not express how much getting OpenQuest finished has bolstered my confidence on all things D101. I’m having a hard time keeping my feet on the ground, but the project has given me a ton of experience to pull on, not least that I shouldn’t set unrealistic deadlines!!  A big thanks to everyone who supported me on this one

I now have a lovely cover for Monkey, done by the ace Jon Hodgson.

Monkey cover by Jon Hodgson

Aiming for a July release.

I’ve updated my website.

The main reason was a migration to WordPress Mu (the multiuser version of WordPress) which will make it easier to update the site. The navigation should be easier now and there are some major content updates. In the next month or so you should be able buy pdf and print versions of our products directly from me via the website.

You can now read the d101 development blog over at http://blog.d101games.co.uk or carry on following it over at Live Journal since posts made there will be automatically shipped over.

New updates on the Website:

• Tales from the Firebird contents and cover preview.
• OpenQuest page updated, now with front cover.
• Details of the OpenQuest adventure packs, The Savage North and Life and Death
• Both our blogs, Development blog and Hearts in Glorantha blog are now hosted locally.

So there I’m looking at a pile of papers and thinking about OpenQuest, mixing liberally with the idea that time is marching on before Newtlet #2 and that I should really be ‘finishing’ rather than ‘starting’.

Then it occurs to me that all the Shattered Lands adventures I’ve written and played are written up with OQ stats ready to go. Just need some sort of Narrative structure to link the adventures together and then 80-100 page book ready to go!

So after its gone through art and editing you should see sometime this year a three adventure mini-campaign (or Saga as we call them in OpenQuest) entitled Life and Death.

Contains
A Travelers Guide to the Shattered Lands – A brief overview of the setting with Cults. Enough for a GM to use the setting without clipping the wings of inspiration.
Dead Pot Country – Enter the ancient ruins of the River Valley Civilization in search of a missing Merchant. (20 pages)
Life and Death – Journey to the tyrannical city of Miraz and stop the plague of Undeath that afflicts it (50 pages)
Tomb of the Last Emperor – Deep in the Badlands under a Meoter brought down by the Gods lies the last Lion Emperor and all his secrets. Dash through his buried palace to get to him before the Scarlet Riders.
+ Eight Pregen characters so you can pick up and play

More old skool D100 action for your gaming pleasure, to go along side John Ossoway’s Savage North adventure pack that is being worked on.