Party Fowl On Kickstarter

Party Fowl is Live!

Well, some parties start a little earlier than others. Caleb got more than a little overzealous and launched Party Fowl early, so here we are! The game you've heard so much about is now live!

Check out the game now!

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 #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!

Kickstarter: No Soul Left Behind

If Hebanon Games has been quiet for awhile, it's because I've been on an employment rollercoaster for the last six months. I've got a new teaching contract for this upcoming year, so after some initial adjustment time, things should be returning to the same production schedule that got No Security out the door. Maybe next up will be Red Markets, or maybe I'll pick another freelancing job at GenCon, but I should be financially stable enough to begin creating with some regularity soon.

I'm eternally grateful to the RPG companies that shoved some work my way during these rough times. Posthuman, as always, is great to work with. The main brunt of my writing force has gone behind a project for Arc Dream called No Soul Left Behind.

NSLB is the first campaign and sourcebook for Greg Stolze's Better Angels. The system setting is a world where supervillains get their power from being possessed by demons. In order to appease the little bastards, players have to perpetrate acts of evil. Go TOO evil, and your soul gets dragged to hell. But if you do acts of meaningless, hollow villainy -- like carving your name in the moon or ransoming a monument -- you keep the demon in check and get to enjoy your superpowers a bit longer by wallowing in the moral grey area.

No Soul Left Behind takes this premise and moves it into an inner-city charter high school. Not only do the players have to figure out the mystery of their powers, they have to appease their hellspawn while trying to keep their struggling community alive. It's my 200+ page magnum opus on educational policy reform, moral conundrums, and absurd social satire.

You can listen to AP's of the whole campaign over at my ever-loyal partner RPPR. The book is crowd-funding on Kickstarter currently, and I'd really appreciate any support the fans of Hebanon could provide. In addition to, you know, helping the thing actually exist and enabling me to get paid, I think the book is easily the best thing I've ever written. It's a campaign quite unlike any other and works with a great game system everyone should try. I'd really love to see it get out into the world and find an audience, so any help y'all could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time. Expect my report from GenCon soon!