A Zombie Cinema variant of sorts

I’ve considered writing some sort of sequel for Zombie Cinema for a couple of years now, mostly because I’m personally a bit bored of playing Zombie Cinema and want a bit of variety; it’s a tricky business, considering the number of constraints that I take on in any such design. I’m pretty happy with my latest effort mechanically, it’s just that the game lacks in really functional genre. Here’s how it works:

Back From Gencon

I stepped off the plane yesterday. Got a flu of some sort on the return trip, will probably wait for it to clear up before continuing towards the north. Let’s have some notes and impressions on the trip, meanwhile.

Starting to sell World of Near

Today I updated our English website a bit. You can now order the new book there, for instance. I probably should do some more updating as well this weekend, before leaving for Gencon – for instance, I still don’t have a proper resources section in the Solar System / TSoY pages.

Finally finished!

I haven’t been blogging this summer, as I’ve been writing my new TSoY book. It’s the largest book I’ve ever written (though not the largest I’ve designed), although I did have some help in the form of prior art by Clinton and Josh and other TSoY enthusiasts who allowed me to use their work. Very, very much work, I haven’t pushed this hard since -05.

I deliberated on the name of the book for quite a while, and ultimately ended up calling it The World of Near. The issue here was that I didn’t want to use the same name Clinton had used for his own book, but I wanted to make it clear that this was a TSoY sourcebook. “TSoY” is still on the cover as a sort of brand logo, but the actual name of the book is different. I never cared much about the rpg (and textbook) industry practice of publishing new editions of the same book even where the creators, intent and structure of the work were completely reworked.

Trait Cinema

Busy, busy… but luckily I’m again having a bit of time to develop the English-language Arkenstone webpages. Those have been lying in a somewhat unfinished state through the autumn and winter, as I haven’t had time to create the materials to make them complete. Now I have a bit more time, though, so I’m doing nice things like board variants for Zombie Cinema. I also translated and honed a weird variant of the game that I wrote some time back – it’s a variant to add traits and more dice into Zombie Cinema – because more dice is always better, right?

Writing of War

I’ve managed to get some work done on the new TSoY book I’m supposed to be creating. Difficult to make time for uninterrupted writing, but perhaps I’ll manage now that the holidays went away. Aside from planning the book and writing some chapters, I’ve been planning more campaign frames for playtest. Specifically, I’m figuring out how to run the War in Khale, which is something that is featured pretty prominently in the original TSoY text. Despite being laid out, however, I don’t think the text much concerns itself with the specifics of how to run a campaign around the war – especially resolving mass combats is something people seem to have problems with, if forum threads wondering about it are any indication.

Solar System in PDF

It’s amazing how long it can take to fiddle and tiddle a simple pdf file together and put it up for sale. I must have spent something like 2-3 whole workdays doing it, but now Solar System is available in PDF. It’ll be interesting seeing whether it was worth my while to do this – not that it wasn’t interesting to try to create a screen-optimized layout again after quite a while, but I do have other things I should be doing, too.

Positive Surprises from Gencon

What I’ve been doing for the last few weeks has mostly been reading games we got from Gencon to retail here in Finland. We got about six copies of most titles, but there are something like 40 games I’d never looked into in any detail before. So that took me quite a while, reading and digesting the stuff.

Our Finnish retail thing mostly runs on expertise – I know the stuff I sell and can presumably recommend things; each product gets a short review/recommendation essay from me in our webstore, and the mostly unstated understanding there is that while I don’t actually diss the games we sell, I won’t claim one inch of virtue where there isn’t any. Just try to find the best honest facet to everything I’m stupid enough to invest in.

Anyway, having spent some serious time reading and thinking about these new games (and doing a bit of play, too, for some of them), I thought that pointing out some interesting ones might be in order.

My Gencon report

OK, I’ve wasted enough time sleeping, time to write a bit about Gencon. The convention itself ended on Sunday, but I was back here in Finland late on Tuesday, after which I’ve pretty much spent the days sleeping well for a change. I did manage to mail all the ordered copies of Zombie Cinema and Solar System, though. But, Gencon: was it fun? Who’d I meet? Did we sell? Anything else?

Arkenstone website

Arkenstone Publishing now has an English-language website. I made it in a couple of days while learning to hack WordPress, so it’s not very complex or anything. Hopefully it’s just stable enough to serve while we’re at Gencon. Ideally, I didn’t screw up anything with the Paypal buttons either, so we can start taking in orders on our games.