Posted December 4, 2014 at 12:48 pm
Edit: ** IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT **
Apparently G:AR "pre-orders" can still be placed on the Evertide Games site. DO *NOT* PRE-ORDER G:AR ON THAT SITE! Evertide Games will not be making any of the merchandise shown on their Goblins: Alternate Realities page, but their ordering system WILL take your money. There is currently nowhere that you can order G:AR from. If you have pre-ordered anything from that page in the last three or four months, see if you can get refunded through your credit card company or Paypal. If you cannot get your money refunded, tweet to me with the hashtag #GARBacker or email me at goblins@dccnet.com (put #GARBacker in the email's title, so I can spot it easily), telling me what you ordered and when. We'll make sure you're on our list of backers (which we will be organizing soon and giving everyone a chance to make sure they're on it with any address changes, etc) and we'll get you hooked up the replacement loot when that day comes. ~Thunt
This is an addition to the blog post entitled Lowtide - Update For Goblins: Alternate Realities. If you haven't read it, click the title or scroll down to read it before reading this. Kickstarter Backers With Questions Someone else suggested that I ask all backers to include a hashtag in any tweets they'd like me to respond to. That'll definitely make it a lot easier for me to answer everyone's questions. So please include #GARBacker in any tweets to me that you'd like a response to. That'll be my Bat Signal that'll bring me swooping in with responses for you. That doesn't mean I will stop responding to tweets without #GARBacker, I just don't want to leave anyone hanging. Once again, here's my Twitter. "I'll stay behind and fight the costs, you save yourself!" Once again, Goblinites are proving themselves to be some of the most paladin-like people on the internet. As expected, the response to my G:AR announcement has been big. What I didn't expect, was for that response to be almost entirely positive, with so many people offering to help in some way. A heart warming number of backers are asking me to remove them from the list of people whom I owe rewards to. The reasoning being that those individuals would rather repay for the game, than add to the financial obstacle that I'm facing. I think we've seen this kind of behaviour before...
So to those people... thank you so much for the offer! However, I really want to return the kind of support that you've shown me and so I've been respectfully declining those offers. I'm sorry, I'm just not going to let you go fight the badguy so I can escape. We've seen this kind of behaviour before, too...
$182,000 Bucks
This has been brought up as being a point of confusion for a few people, so I figured I should just make sure it's clarified without any room for misunderstandings. The Kickstarter money raised for G:AR, went to Evertide Games and not to me. To be fair, EG did pay me for some extra card art and when I was having a financially rough month, even advanced me a bit of what would have been my share of the future profits. So while I did get paid for something, the $182,000 was never mine.
Richard's Not A Bad Guy
I've talked a bit about how Richard is honestly an okay guy who I'm convinced, never intended for this to happen. However, he is getting a lot of hate, so I wanted to emphasize my opinion on this. Every one of his actions leading up to this point showed a commitment and strong drive to make something amazing. My theory is that he just got overwhelmed and possibly ran out of money, leaving him with no way to complete everything. This is of course, pure speculation (by that, I mean undiluted guess work and not the awesome science & fiction festival in Edmonton).
I've Started Reworking G:AR
With my computer dead and my replacement still on its way (it might even arrive today), I can't really draw. So I've been spending most of my time working on G:AR. I'm actually surprised at how much creative freedom I feel when I'm working on a game that's mine and not also someone else's. The difference between "Do you think the game can do this?" and "The game is going to do this." is massive. I feel like I'm DMing again and it's incredibly comfortable. Here's what's tentatively starting to come together...
- Character IME (individual magic effect): I'm working on introducing a mechanic where players choose an IME for each of their characters. This IME would evolve as the character's power grows and it'd play an important roll in the other mechanic I'm working on, which is...
- Character Traits: I've been saying from the beginning, that G:AR is part game and part story creation tool. The more depth the characters have, the more unique and engaging those stories will be. We want to avoid repetition and bland mathematics, as it doesn't tend to create anything enthralling enough to be memorable.
[caption id="attachment_4896" align="aligncenter" width="300"]
"Anyway, to cut a long story short I threw a five and a four which
beat his three and a two, another double six followed by a double four and a double five. After he'd thrown a three and a two I threw a six and a three."[/caption] I'm working on a system that would allow the players to sculpt out personal details as the game progresses. Things like phobias, obsessions, characters forming powerful friendships or even falling in love, gaining nemesis status with each other, etc. The freedom given to the players as to what they could do with this would be pretty much endless. Each positive or negative detail could be applied to basically anything. Kin's crippling fear of someone taking control of her. Kore's obsession with wiping out evil. The brotherhood between Minmax and Forgath. The love triangle between Dies, Saves and Grem (how many people just noticed how the words Dies and Saves reflect the central draw those two characters have toward each other?). These are all plot points that could be initiated by players or situationally created by the game and offer just enough lack of control to present a challenge, while allowing players the freedom to try and embrace, escape or ignore any detail. Each of these character details would also affect the game as functional advantages or disadvantages. One character who considers the other to be a nemesis or enemy, might have combat bonuses against 'em. This might force the player of the other character to either try to keep away from the killer, sporting customized bonuses or start looking for opportunities to pile some hate tokens of their own, right back on the attacker, thereby evening the odds (and creating an epic rivalry in the process). I know, this sounds like way too much to keep track of and way to many details to keep the game moving smoothly and easily. When I started mucking around with it though, I discovered that it can be boiled down to it's simplest/easiest form and still seem really cool.