Red Markets Kickstarter is up!

The day has come. Let's see if all this hard work has been worth it. The Red Markets Kickstarter is now up.

If you're here to see what the game is all about, you can find my developer diaries below. Thanks for the support!

RM Update #10: Like Mad Men, but With Much Cheaper Drinks

A couple of weeks ago, that was me back there,
sending up a flare for proofreaders

Ad copy...

So. Much. Ad copy...

If you aren't aware, ad copy is all the writing for the game that has no demonstrable benefit the quality of the game. In order to sell the product, you have to describe the product. And in order to do that, you have to both include enough information that the customer actually knows what they're getting, while simultaneously condensing ideas down into the shortest of possible statements to compensate for the human attention span.

This means you end up writing the same damned thing, over-and-over, bouncing back and forth across a spectrum of drafts that can range from Russian-novel long to something that is no more than screaming the name of the game (RED MARKETS!...so how many can I put you down for?). And you never know where it needs to be cut or where it needs to be expanded...ugh.

Anyway, that's how I'd describe the last few weeks of writing: ugh. I'm very glad I don't have to do advertising every day for a living. It's awful. Combine the impossible task with my tragically Midwestern allergy to self-promotion and makes for a rough month.

But it's over!

The ad copy is done, or as done as it is going to get. I'd rather give Medusa an eye exam than look at those paragraphs again. The trailer has been scripted and recorded. I've got all the art over to Ross, who is kind enough to be making the trailer. As of now, I'm just waiting on the video and some art assets for the text (stretch goal banners, fancier heading, etc). The press list is assembled, and the whole campaign is built. If I didn't mind going up without some fancy visuals, I could launch the campaign today.

Not that I'm eager to get started or anything...

I'm so far along on my end that, aside from building a Facebook page for the game, all that's really left to do is to wait for the calendar to hit May 23rd. So this week I finally got around doing my complete rewrite of the Negotiation rules. What started out being my most dreaded revision from the beta playtest has quickly turned into welcome relief. I forgot how much more enjoyable it was to make a thing instead of describing how you plan to make that thing.

I'm not fooling myself here. I know keeping the word circulating about the Kickstarter will be no easy task, and I know I'll be trading financial anxiety for fulfillment hell if we're lucky enough to fund. But even acknowledging how long the road ahead is going to be, it's a relief to think about a time in the near future when there is nothing to focus on save getting the book done. No more constantly promoting it. No more waiting long, quiet months for more feedback to roll in. No more seeing how much money I can skim off my paycheck next month to pay for art. I might soon have a bank account dedicated to Red Markets, with the funds ready to hire out whatever work I need. All my time not spent on staying alive or on the day job can be solely dedicated to getting the game done.

God, that sounds nice.

So, to sum up, the last few weeks have been all about promotion, but I've finally hacked away enough at it that I can get back to the real task at hand. The pre-KS hasn't been all bad though. I've done a lot really fun podcast interviews lately: Misdirected Mark, Insert Quest Here, and Legends of Tabletop, to name a few. I look forward to the many more I have scheduled.

But talking on a microphone isn't words on the page, and that's the only metric that ultimately matters. I better get back to it then.

Thanks for following along with the updates. I hope to see you on Kickstarter May 23rd!

RM Update #9: The Return of RPPR, So Many Spreadsheets, and a Kickstarter Date

Not shown: The part where the marker runs past the whiteboard
and the figures slowly morph into the yellow sign.

"Are...are you hunting a serial killer?" asks the student.

"No." I reply, taking a swig from my third energy drink with the desperation of a man lost in the desert. "Mr. Stokes is just planning his Kickstarter. I'm fine." I crush the empty can in my fist. "Everything. Is. Fine."

"OOOooookay," she says. "Want me to get some red yarn from Home Ec. so you can string it across the room until the pattern appears?"

"...Yes. Yes I do."

We're all about the spreadsheets here at Hebanon Games of late. I got the last price quote I needed; now it's time to plan the campaign. You lay out all your quotes, scale them down to minimum viable product, scale them up "beyond your wildest dreams," fill in the gaps between, and then decide where the stretch goals go. At least that's what the first couple of hits on Google told me to do.

Don't look at me like that. I'm a professional.

So while the cogs of game writing have ground to a halt, I've pulled the starting cord on the business engine. It's mathematical smoke, black with overlapping figures and furious cyphering, chokes the atmosphere out of my every waking breath. I can no longer remember what the air tastes like without its stink; I fear I will be poisoned if I leave the cloud's inky embrace.

Caleb: "Sadly, I can't yet afford the rent on a crazy conspiracy bunker.
Assistant! Add it to the list of stretch goals!"
Assistant: ... (assistant still does not exist)
Caleb: "You dissapoint me."

The Kickstarter Cometh

With all this preparation being done, I'm ready to gamble on a Kickstarter announcement: the Red Markets Kickstarter will launch no later the Monday, May 23rd. I'll have been off school a week then, giving me time for last minute troubleshooting. It's theoretically possible we might launch sooner than that: the auspices of Kickstarter statistics suggest that the closer you can get to the beginning of May, the better your chance of success. If we do go a little earlier, it won't be more than a week, and I will be shouting it on every piece of social media I possess.

But going early presumes everyone finishes preparations early, and everything goes perfectly with the timing. This, I doubt.

Any later than the third week in May and we risk closing too soon to GenCon. It's possible to run a successful KS at GenCon, but the probabilities are not on the side of a new IP. So if we delay past that date, we'll have to push the campaign to next school year. But I don't think it will come to that. There's still plenty of wiggle room in the schedule, and I'm about as committed to the May 23rd date as one can be.

RPPR Re-animates

We'll be talking more about the KS planning on RPPR's Game Designer's Workshop. Our most recent episode, dealing with project management for publishers, just dropped yesterday.

If you've been following the site, you may know that RPPR has experienced technical difficulties in the extreme of late. You can listen to an update about the Sisyphean nightmare that is web-hosting here, but suffice it to say the snafu is finally figured out. Now that the site's back up, the RM Kickstarter has it's main promotional platform back and we can move forward. Plus, everyone that's yet to hear the good word can catch up on their APs of The Brutalists campaign.

And So It Begins...

That's where we are at. And now I've got to get back to work. There's no cutting corners or "letting the Market work it out" on this one. The next few weeks will determine whether the last four years of my life were tragedy or comedy, so I'm off to triple check the math and agonize over ad copy. Wish me luck, and thanks for your continued support of Red Markets. Here's hoping to see you on the 23rd!

RM Update #8

Truly, there can be no finer an image to encapsulate
 the concept of economic horror

So...this happened.

In addition to all the work I did last week preparing for playtests that didn't happen (both got cancelled and rescheduled, but time spent in preparation wasn't spent on content creation), this happened at the beginning of the week. Stopped at the light, then quickly found myself being thrown towards it.

I'm fine. It was about as amicable as fender-benders get. Still, it was not what I was looking for in my life right now.

I've spent the last 16 hours dealing with various garages, car rental services, and insurance companies just so I can get back to work and continue one of the busiest work weeks of my life. And my troubles are nothing compared to Ross and RPPR's. The hosting service decided to downgrade and throttle the bandwidth without warning, and now they're trying to hold the site hostage for a higher price. It's not something I have any capability to help with, but Ross is my friend...a friend who happens to run the primary promotional tool for the game I've invested four years of my life in. So...you know...it's stressful, and I feel like a jerk for being stressed about it at all because my anxiety has to be NOTHING compared to the pain this must be in Ross's ass.

(By the way, for the few people that criticize Red Markets for being unfair to big business and unrealistically assuming corporations would not have the best interests of people at heart during a zombie apocalypse...might I direct you to the company currently trying to bilk a one-man small business for more nonexistent money? I mean, I know Ross is quite the fat cat, what with all that RPG podcaster cheddar. Perhaps they couldn't resist their own rational self-interest in the zero-sum game of high-yield podcast brokerage.)

"First we take over RPG Actual Play podcasting, then the model
train miniature sign production industry, and then...THE WORLD"

This is a roundabout way of saying I've gotten nothing done this week. Nada. Fuck all. And it's extremely depressing.

If you freelance write for any amount of time, something happens to your brain. It doesn't happen when you're writing as a hobby or as a side business; I felt stressed when parts of No Security were late, but I still felt like a worthwhile human being. But, the second you start linking your creativity to your very survival, the change is something you can't shake. Even after heading back to the day job, a pillar of your identity remains chained to your productivity.

You measure your worth in words per day, in pages drafted or revisions made. Zero progress means zero worth. It's not rational, especially when so few have invested in the product, but that connection can be haunting. I can work a sixty-hour week, clean my entire house, take care of my family, and answer a library's worth of email...and I still end up feeling like some useless sloth that's been sitting in front of the TV for a month, naked and covered in Cheeto dust.

I hate wasted weeks like this one. They drive me nuts. It would be enough to make you quit, if another wasted week weren't going to drive you that much more crazy.

Anyway, that's the update...for whatever it's worth. They can't all be winners. Here's hoping next week goes better.

Thanks for reading.

RM #7

Hello!

I apologize for the longer than usual absence. If that looked like the inevitable death of the blog, I understand. I've certainly invited that conclusion in the past.

But I'm still here! Still working! I just had the flu!

But, you know, I REALLY had the flu. To say that production dipped as I fever-dreamed the RPPR group trying to break into my home and kill me would be an understatement. Couple that with the end of the quarter (grades are due) and the 2-3 chapter a week revision cycle seems doomed from the start, in retrospect.

But progress has been made. The only section from the beta release that still needs revision is Negotiation. After that, the entire player section will be ready for the Kickstarter.

I've also been doing some pricing. Between print costs, editing, layout, art, and the variables that effect all those numbers (softcover vs. hardcover, B&W vs. color vs. glossy), there are a ton of estimates to collect and collate. I've just about got all the information I'm going to be able to gather in one place, at which point I'll start planning out the campaign's reward tiers and stretch goals.

Then there's promotion, of course. Ross and I recorded another Game Designer's Workshop about art direction and project management. The APs for The Brutalists -- our flagship playtest campaign -- keep on getting a healthy response. I'll also be running two important playtests for other podcasts this week. As always, time spent running the game means time not writing the game, but I've got to make sure the jobs I put forth show off all the best parts of the game; for these potential new fans, I won't get another chance to pitch Red Markets.

With all these other responsibilities, I'm starting to realize I might not be able to get the game entirely revised before the KS launches. I'm confident I can finish up within the first week of the campaign and still get some setting writing done inbetween answering FAQ's, but I'm going to have to switch into sell mode soon. Writing ad copy takes infinitely longer than games rules despite being a fraction of the length, and that's to say nothing of the research that needs to be put into a promotional plan. It'll be a photo finish as is, and I can't imagine how hopeless the whole thing would seem if I hadn't long ago given up the idea of having the game completely sewn up before launch.

All you can do is keep chiseling away at it. Thanks for following along, dear reader. More updates soon!

RM Update #6

Hello all! It's time for my weekly accountability confession.

I finished revising Character Creation this weekend. I always knew it was going to be the chapter that required the most drastic revisions, but, boy howdy, was it a monster. It's easy to forget how central any character creation system is to the mechanics of the game, but revising, adding, deleting, and proofing 20K words of it was certainly a reminder.

It's understandable. Players need information to make the character they want to play, and that information includes everywhere the character sheet touches the mechanics (spoiler: every mechanic is touched upon...that's why it's the character sheet). You've got to provide a quick reference to all those different rules without burying the text that actually get the process done. Meanwhile, you've to to recognize that the majority of potential players go for the character generation chapter before any other part of the book, so you've got to refer to all these mechanics without sacrificing so much setting information that the rules lose context and make the game seem too crunchy to a random customer.

It's an impossible task, and I will most assuredly fail it in the eyes of many readers (it's almost as if RPG players are opinionated or something). But I've slaved over it for two weeks now, using the playtest feedbacks from hundreds of people. If it doesn't work for someone at this point, it's certainly not for a lack of trying.

The above picture is actually out of date. I burned through the revisions in the Upkeep chapter yesterday inbetween taking a picture of my whiteboard and writing this post. The short section on accounting options was always going to be easiest to revise, but I didn't anticipate it would go that smoothly.

I'm working Casualties and Vectors now. As it involves adding a whole bunch of rules (Abberants weren't ready for the beta playtest, but they need to be there for round 2) in addition to revising, this chapter will probably take about as long as Character Creation did to finish. What's after that? There's not much to change about Humanity, so that will go quickly. But then Negotiation is another monster rewrite.

Thus far, I'm happy I've been alternating super-difficult revision with easy tasks that amount to little more than copy editing. Doing the easy stuff first would make rewrites like the Character Creation seems impossible. Conversely, doing all the crappy work first begs for burnout. It's all a matter of tricking your brain into doing the actual work, and I'm very grateful I had a few book-length projects under my belt before starting this thing.

Ideally, I can get the revisions done before the end of Spring Break. If I can manage that, It'll give me two months to plan the Kickstarter and write the worst part of all: ad copy. That's going to be agony, but schedule and snow days willing, I'll be able to get it done early enough that I can cleanse my palette by writing setting material for a few weeks before my every waking second gets hijacked by begging for retweets and answering backer questions.

Okay! That's all the new fit for print. The first playtest campaign -- The Brutalists -- is still being posted up at RPPR. For more "thrilling," hit me up on Twitter @HebanonGCal.

RM #5

This week's lack of progress is brought to you by Death and Taxes: specifically, because I feel like the former (flu) and had to do the latter.

Taxes are a bit of a nightmare for me. I make wages that could best be described as "rock-bottom middle class." When my freelancing work provides extra income, it typically has to go out the door the instant arrives; as an example of what I'm talking about, go read the entire book I wrote to pay for a single trip to the ER. You can't really setup auto-deduct for 1099-MISC freelancing checks, so you end up having to pay dearly for all that RPG work at the end of the year. This makes taxes really expensive and annoying, as you're scrambling through boxes of receipts so you can deduct your home office and anything else you use to run your "business" of one employee.

Still, I got some writing, podcasting, and art direction done...just not to really warrant an announcement. In the meantime, you should go read Laura B's blog. Laura's the editor of Red Markets ("God knows he needs one" says everyone who read the beta). She's also working on really great projects of her own, novelizing some of RPPR's more popular games. She introduced herself at GenCon by handing me a beautiful self-published edition of Wages of Sin, and now she's into her third draft of a novel based on The Dangers of Fraternization. Go give the lady some traffic. Her work deserves it.

RM Update #4

Howdy y'all.

I've not accomplished much on the revision front this week. If I'm being honest, I never could have kept up my previous level of productivity. Twas always a dream.

Grading ate a bunch of my writing time...and then XCOM 2 came out: a combination which is equivalent to a figure skater taking a lead pipe to the knees of sweet lady productivity.

But it's not a complete loss. I've pledged not to waste anyone's time with the latest RPPR playtest (though we are having fun). I'm always going to come to the table with something fresh to test. This week, it's the playmats.

Playmats for Red Markets are the definition of emergent play. Providing a physical drop sheet for token tracking the character sheet never occurred to me, but then Jace uploaded his to the forums (see above). Within a week, I had three other playtest groups telling me they were using them. It was a demand the mechanics were making that I'd been deaf to, for some reason. The use of physical tokens such as coins or poker chips seems to really help a certain type of player have fun, and the thematic synergy of literally spending coins on your rolls is just too good to pass up. I made up my own prototypes this morning and we'll give them a shot tomorrow.

I've also made some revisions as well. I've got a hard copy of the Character Creation rules full of annotations, but I've only made it to about page five entering the revisions electronically. This chapter was always going to be a nightmare: multiple sections -- tough spots, derived stats, retirement -- have changed completely due to playtest feedback. It's just short of a front-to-back rewrite of biggest mechanics chapter in the book. The only revision task between here and the KS Beta version that's harder is taming the Negotiation chapter, but that's a subject for another time.

Anyway, back to work. Thanks for keeping updated.

RM Update #3

Hello all! Update time.

The Combat chapter is revised and sent off. I'm still working on the Materialism chapter, but the beta-text is revised to fit the newest iteration. I'm also fixing copy errors as I find them (thanks proofreaders!), but I'm probably creating as many new ones as I fix.

Deleting and changing stuff is easy; adding stuff slows the process down. New rules need testing, of course, but increasingly less so as the process goes on and you learn the quirks of your own system. The difficult part is working those new rules into the larger outline: do they fit best under another heading or require their own section. If it's the latter, where does that section fit in the order? How does it fit into the hierarchy of importance that a style guide locks you into?

A lot of my writing time went into rules for selling excess gear (a ubiquitous demand from playtesters) and completely rewriting the rules for Haul and Refresh. I also had to add a section on Weird Damage (suffocation, falling, etc) to Combat before I sent it off. That was strange to write; I'm not sure I've ever used such rules, as written, in any system I've ever run. The stakes are always so high when rules like that come into play, and they're such outliers that stuff like poison damage is always hard to find. I usually just make something up to keep the game moving. I certainly hope players of Red Markets do the same, but you can't put yourself in the book to run games for everyone that buys it. Some folks want a deeper investment in system mastery, I suppose, and the game is crunchy enough to justify it.

I've still got to add in vehicle rules, but that's taking longer than expected. The section needs to be short, but it also can't integrate entirely into the rest of the gear list like I'd initially hoped. That means writing a separate set of conditions for vehicles altogether, but one short enough to prevent a chapter that's already the largest in the book from becoming unwieldy. Couple these concerns with the fact that I've never read a set of vehicle rules I actually liked, and it makes for slow going.

If you're wondering what this struggle looks like, imagine me typing angrily while repeating "I will not remake Autoduel. I will not remake Autoduel. I will not remake Autoduel..."

Wha? NOOOOOOOO!

I'm also busy with the usual logistical stuff: art direction (though a minimum because my artists are on point), licensing, pricing, playtesting, promotion, etc. At the pace I'm going, we'll make the current schedule, but it's going to be a grind. It always is, I guess, but there comes a point where you realize exactly how much is left to do. You feel it in very human terms -- hours spent alone without friends or family, invitations turned down, bleary eyes burned by computer screens, the feeling of looking at your words and hating them -- and that's the point I imagine most people stop. It's a crushing realization, and I'm glad I had it before on other projects. It's easier to overcome once you know you can overcome it.

So that's where we're at. Once the current chapter is done, I'll move to the top of the book and start marching revisions down the page. Then I need to get a website cooking and ready to go once we get some graphic design elements to establish a look. I imagine backers are going to want a better track-out link on the Kickstarter updates besides this janky blog.

I'll keep you updated if you keep my accountable. Thanks for the continued time and attention!

RM Update #2

I've kept a blogging promise exactly one time! Yay!

It was a productive week on the Red Markets front. I wrote a contract for freelance work (not exactly poetry, but necessary), and I gave notes on another piece of incoming art. I finished the gear list that I was working on in time for the start of the new playtest campaign. We stated up a nifty little enclave on Thursday night and made characters. The concepts are all a little "fraggle-rock" right now, but that's how every campaign starts out with the RPPR crew.

I didn't get a chance to revise the entire Materialism chapter like I'd hoped, but other parts of the book got done. I added the rules for enclave creation into the core book by adapting and expanding on the previous "Campaign Playtest Addendum" writing. I also finished the MBA Rules.

MBA Rules will probably be stretch goals, as they are not essential to the core gameplay of Red Markets. Basically, it's the advanced, optional stuff for players that really want to get into the nitty-gritty of the economics rules. Thus far, the chapter contains rules for running a small business, investing (basically playing the stock market in the zombie apocalypse), working a double (two jobs at once), pro bono (doing jobs for free) and loans.  I had rules for everything drafted up except loans. It was bothering me that the section was incomplete, so I finished off MBA instead of diving into the Materialism revisions. That's the haphazard method by which drafts get finished. At least for me.

For this week, Materialism revisions will likely have to wait a little longer. I need to get a chapter laid out and a template established before I can price how much the book will cost per page. I feel silly paying someone to do that with Lorem Ipsum when I could get post-Beta revisions entered into a chapter and have the graphic designer use that instead. The gear chapter is a bad choice for the job (too many stat blocks to be a representative sample, for readers or for my accounting needs). That means I'll have to fast-track another chapter for revision so I have something to give the graphic designers.

Right now, I'm thinking Combat. After the chapter detailing the Profit System, it's the one that's changed the least as a result of playtest feedback. The Profit System explanation is probably too short to constitute the 20-page sample chapter I want done before the KS, so it looks like Combat it is.

We'll see if I can get it done with school starting back up after a week of snow days. It'll be tight. Wish me luck!

New Strategy: Red Markets Progress Updates

My crappy history of blogging is a matter of public record. Let us not belabor the point any longer here.

EXCEPT... it is looking like Red Markets plans (established previously here) are still on pace for a late March/early June crowdfunding campaign. I find myself in the unenviable position of being caught up on work, while being desperately behind on digital presence to promote aforementioned work. I really don't want to get Red Markets polished only to launch the Kickstarter to silence because I appear online as a digital ghost with all the credibility of a Nigerian prince.

So, since nearly every ounce of my time is thrown at Red Markets, let's make the blog part something easy enough for me to keep up with: short updates on what I'm currently doing for Red Markets.

I figure this fits in well-enough with the our podcast's educational focus that some of you might be interested. And even if you aren't looking into game design yourself, Hebanon Games has always been about radical transparency: showing off my crappy first drafts is about as radical as it gets.

Weekly updates on what I'm furiously typing during my lunch break is what you can expect over the next few months. I'll try to get at least one out a week. But before then, we should probably have a brief recap on what has gone on in the last year since I last blogged.

• We have 16, soon to be 17, completed pieces of art ready to show off in the Kickstarter.
• I'm working on a contract for some talented graphic designers that want to do layout for the book. We should have 20 pages of complete text to show off what the final book will look like if we make the color stretch goal. I'll also be using this layout to plan for the printing costs.
• RPPR has begun posting the playtest campaign we used to get the beta ready for release: The Brutalists. Listen to what the game kind of plays like, excluding those thousands of revisions I'm currently making.
• After four months and over 200 downloads of the beta. I received over 50 playtest reports and about as many hours of recorded audio. Thanks so much for the feedback! Without the help of RPPR fans, I could never hope for so many playtesters for a game as "indie" as Red Markets.
• The changelog I've compiled from the reports just exceeded twenty pages. It is now the itinerary that consumes my every waking moment.
• We've started post-Beta revisions. I've run a couple of one-shots to test major rules changes, and Ross starts a campaign Thursday. I'll actually get to play my own game! We'll use this campaign to hash out some of the more long-term stuff, like advanced "MBA rules" and advancement economies.

What have you done to Red Markets today?

I always begin my iterations of Red Markets on the gear list. I know it seems counter-intuitive to start with items that are so dependent on core mechanics, but I find that a stat block serves as the most condensed rules reference I can make and keeps the focus on the game's theme of materialism. Here are my goals:

• Edit out some old quality tags that snuck in from Alpha iterations
• Add in new quality tags to reflect post-beta rules changes
• Reorganize from alphabetical to alphabetical by type (weapons, armor, tools, etc) to assist in reference
• Respec the stat block to reflect changes on the characters sheet and a vertical orientation for the A4 print layout
• Add upgrades that add utility and depth to character creation and advancement
• Alter prices to alleviate 
• Add in some more near-future equipment to help build setting into the character.
• Add short descriptions of the gear outside the stat block, especially for Red Markets specific equipment. These descriptions will be necessary for players that haven't listened to me ramble on about this shit for the last four years. The text will also be necessary if we can afford to put example art next to each entry (probably a pipe dream, but planning for the best is planning for the worst when it comes to Kickstarter.

Here's an example of what it looks like

This is by no means a complete list. There will probably be a couple of rounds of testing new gear in the current playtest campaign, but I'm trying to finalize a format. My hope is to finish this (currently 30+ pages long) list by Thursday so that we can incorporate the new stuff into the new campaign. I've already made my one-armed, one-legged negotiator, "Half-off," in preparation for the test.

What's Next?

Well, probably this...

That's the length of the beta draft. With the now completed GM chapter and MBA Rules (advanced economic stuff for heavy users), it's probably more like 125K right now. All of that text needs to be revised for the following issues...

• Laura, my brilliant new copy editor, has made effort to curb my capitalization addiction. With a new style guide in hand, I have to reign in some of the inconsistencies that naturally result from writing something over the course of years.
• Rules changes are like stones thrown in the pond. Some very fundamental rules changes resulted from the Beta, and even small alterations have ripple effects across 100K+ words of text. I've got to revise what I know needs to change now, and leave blanks for what I'm still testing.
• Writing be hard y'all. Me words grammers ain't so good maybe times.

After the gear list is done, I'll start revising the Gear chapter (explaining rules related to equipment more in depth) while the changes are still fresh in my mind. From there, I'll start revisions on the core mechanics (Profit System in the beta) and move through the draft from there.

Alright! Update complete! Keep me honest out there, and thanks for your continued interest in Red Markets.