Hey, there’s something coming up that I want to tell you about!
Alan and I met with Sandra on Friday and checked on the alignment of the ducks. There were several duck-vectors to be scrutinized, but in our assessment, those ducks will all be in a row by April 14th.
So that’s when we’re launching the Kickstarter.
For more information on the Planet Mercenary RPG, check our development blog at schlocktroops.com. The image above is available over there as a wallpaper.
My friend Jonathan “Skippy” Schwartz is Kickstarting the expansion to his super-successful Redshirts card game, and I’ll just show you my favorite card now before saying anything else.
Redshirts has a great game mechanic. The object is to kill off your own crew members. If they actually succeed in their missions and return healthy, you’ve clearly done something wrong. It’s fun, it’s funny, and it’s pretty easy to pick up. David Reddick’s art is perfect for it, and I’ve been led to understand that in this expansion I’m not the only creator of things to be garbed in ominous red and sent doomward repeatedly.
I’ll be at LTUE this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the Provo Marriott. I’m doing quite a bit of programming, and I’ll also have a table there. It’s not a huge event, though (between 1500 and 2,000 attendees), so I should be pretty easy to find. That said, here’s my schedule:
I’ve got a full plate this month. Aside from wrapping up the climactic bits of Schlock Mercenary: Delegates and Delegation (the current story online) I need to tackle the bonus story, the cover, and the marginalia for Force Multiplication so that we can send it to print.
Then there’s the substantial task list for the upcoming Schlock Mercenary role-playing game, designed by Alan Bahr, with lots of input from me. The core game stuff is done, and once we’ve got some art to show off we’ll start building a Kickstarter page. That campaign will likely go live sometime in mid-March, and will support the production of a very nice, fully-illustrated rule book, and some odds and ends that will make some of our peculiar (maybe even unique) game mechanics fast, intuitive, and hilarious.
I say “we” with regard to the art. I’ll be doing a few, goofy comic-type things in the book, but most of the artwork will be the sort of thing that you’d expect to see in a wonder-invoking, far-future, science-fiction RPG book. Full-color, fully rendered characters, weapons that look like they’d actually work, and vehicles that are more interesting than the things I dash off with a straight-edge and a circle template. Think of it this way: Schlock Mercenary, the comic strip, is the canonical story, but the comic’s artwork is mere caricature. The RPG book will show you that universe more clearly, and give you and your players much better starting points for your flights of fanciful shared storytelling.
Back to the task list: I’m also featured pretty heavily in the programming of LTUE, the SF&F symposium here in Utah on February 12th, 13th, and 14th (Thurs-Sat.) and at the end of February I’m flying to Chicago to record more Writing Excuses Master Class sessions.
You might get a movie review or two this month. I’ve seen Strange Magic and Into The Woods, and I’ll be seeing Jupiter Ascending, but the real time sink is actually writing them up.
And speaking of writing, I’ve got a bunch of prose fiction on my plate as well, so I should finish writing this, and start in on some actual work.