That was a busy year. A very, very, busy year.

At Cubicle 7, I added line management of The One Ring to my portfolio. Releases in that line were lighter than we hoped, but we got Tales from Wilderland and the Laketown Screen out the door, and I wrote the double-headed epic of Heart of the Wild/Darkening of Mirkwood which will be out early next year, all going well. Two Doctor Who supplements came out in 2012, and I’ve another half-dozen in the pipeline. The Primeval rulebook came out, and has a devoted if modest fanbase. And the Laundry continued to hum along; the Mythos Dossiers supplement is one I’m particularly proud of.

For Pelgrane, I worked on the Zalozhniy Quartet, and Cthulhu Apocalypse – Slaves of the Mother. The reader may judge how effectively I channeled Ken or Graham. Over at Mongoose, three of the ten segments of the Pirates of Drinax campaign came out in PDF, I worked on a few minor bits and pieces for Paizo… oh, that little bit of SLA Industries freelancing I did also came out. Overall, though, staying on top of the four lines at Cubicle 7 is close to a full-time job.

May brought the Week of Gigs Unlooked-For, where three brand-new clients contacted me out of the blue (along with an email from Pelgrane). One of them has yet to pan out, but I took the other three. One of them was Cthulhu Apocalypse, one of them was a (now regrettably late) Bulldogs! campaign, and the third was some website content writing for Riverkey Creative. I can, it seems, still work in the real world when I have to, and the pay is good, but you can’t talk about Cthulhu when writing medical advice for a dental practise website.

Last year, my first novel Reality Optional was published by Ultraviolet Books. I wrote more short fiction this year – a Cthulhu story for a charity anthology, a short piece for The Lion and the Aardvark from Stoneskin Press, and a longer horror story for the Dark Harvest setting. My guide to Tolkien for kids also came out from Carlton Books; it’s a mass-market release, and I’ve found copies in book stores. That was a fantastic thrill.

I made to GenCon for the first time as a professional.

I helped run Dragonmeet.

I got nominated for a few awards, mostly for adventure design, and won an Ennie for best rules (for Lorefinder).

Woot on all counts.

Oh, and raised four puppies.

There were mistakes to learn from, too. Rakehell remains unfinished – and if I had pushed harder on that, I could possibly have grabbed some of the wave of enthusiasm for FATE. One Laundry book still languishes in limbo because of a poor outline on my part. Dragon Warriors needs more time too, although there was some progress on that front. My communication took a hit too – apologises if you’re waiting on a email from me!

The teams at C7 & Pelgrane have been wonderful to work with – thanks especially to CEODMT, Jon, Paul, Stuart, Walt, Andy, otherGareth, Simon, Beth, Graham, and the increasingly ampersanded Kenandrobin. Here at Milkyfish, though, my chief collaborator remain my beloved deli. Preparations for our planned release dominated a large chunk of this year, but we made it this far and the finish line/starting point/life-shattering twingeddon is in sight.

But hey – if I can get all that done in 2012, how hard can twins be?

Don’t answer that. I cherish my illusions.

Happy Christmas, good gaming and here’s to next year.

Being interviewed is wonderfully fun, and it’s something I must do more often, assuming I remember to stop talking with my hands. That, or only do video podcasts with puppets. (Actually, there’s a video interview between myself and Jon Hodgson about Tales from Wilderland lurking out there in the wilds of the internet, but that won’t go live until the book hits the shelves. Also, it has no puppets.)

Listening to interviews afterwards makes me cringe, but that’s the Cork accent, like.

There’s a brief Rakehell mention around 41.30 in the Jennisodes podcast, which serves as a public guilt engine for me to get the damnable thing done. Things are progressing in stolen moments between C7, other freelancing and writing. Before the turning of the year, I hope.

It’s based around a standard deck of playing cards. The four suits correspond to situations: Hearts are emotional/social, Clubs are violence/force, Spades are the environment, and Diamonds are intellect/puzzles. A character has four stats, ranging from 3 to 7, and a number of skills -things like Lockpicking, Archery, Hiding… or whatever the player comes up with (player-defined skills).

Here’s the gimmick: when you try to do something, the GM sets a difficulty number to beat. Say you’re trying to pick a lock – that’s a Spades challenge. Your running total starts equal to your matching stat. Each round, you flip the top card of the deck. If it’s a Spade, you add its value to your total.

Depending on the circumstances, the GM may nominate one, two or even three of the other suits as hazards*. If the card matches one of those suits, you’re hindered by some new problem, and the card’s value is subtracted from your total**. For example, flip a Club (violence), and a guard comes around the corner. Flip a Heart (emotion), and you might suddenly doubt your skills, or be distracted by greedily looting a nearby jewelled candlestick. Flip a Diamond, and you discover the lock’s trapped. If your total drops to 0 or less, you fail the challenge and bad stuff happens***.

If you’ve got a skill that fits the current challenge, then you can use it to add non-matching cards to your total, but doing so spends a point from the appropriate stat. Say you’re in the middle of a sword fight (so you need Clubs), and you flip a big Heart. Normally, that would be deducted from your running total – maybe your foe goes into a battle frenzy, maybe you panic, maybe you can’t bring yourself to murder someone, maybe you recognise your lover behind your foe’s mask – but if you’ve got the Swordfighting skill, you can reduce your Hearts skill by 1 to add that Heart to your total.

The nice thing about the mechanic is that it throws in lots of complications and unexpected twists. You don’t just miss an attack if you don’t draw a Club – a flock of startled pigeons flies in front of you, you sudden realise that your target’s a member of a rival crime family and you’ll be targeted for retribution if you kill him, he spots your sniper’s nest in the cathedral tower and ducks into cover.

It feels intuitively like a nice little system, assuming I can get the numbers right. I’m not normally a fan of playing cards as a mechanic, but it suits this setup. Your thoughts?

*: Flipped cards in a suit that’s neither hazardous nor beneficial still do something, I’m just not sure what. Probably hang around as a complication that doesn’t currently impede your task.

**: What about Ace/Jack/Queen/King? I’m tempted to tie them to factions and groups within the game. So, drawing a Jack means the Thieves’ Guild are involved. An Ace represents the city watch, and it’s high or low depending on whether or not they’re on alert or not. Queen and King…not sure yet.

***: Drawing from Hamlet’s Hit Points, I’m thinking of giving a bonus card to a character who loses a contest that can be used in the next struggle.

Not only do you have to come up with the plot and the setting and so forth, but you’ve also got to motivate the characters. Without the GM prodding them to get up and do something, they just lie there, a panoply of apathy. On the rare occasions when the characters do act of their own accord, they run off in unexpected directions instead of following the plot you’d planned for them.

That’s why writing fiction was such a hurdle for me. To borrow from Woody Allen (edit: who borrowed from Groucho Marx, known Commie Mutant Traitor), I didn’t want to play any game that would have me as a player.

When Allen Varney approached me about writing a PARANOIA novel, I accepted in the hope that taking on a deadline would stimulate my guilt gland -

(You don’t have a guilt gland? I do. It’s hyperactive. I take medication for it.)

- and force me to write fiction.

The plan worked… eventually. The outline took longer to write than the book did. Writing a detailed outline for an rpg adventure is anathema – a good adventure leaves the major decisions up to the players, so at most you can have an outline full of conditionals, counterfactuals and loops (if the players choose x, then y. If they’ve already done y, then you can salvage the situation with z.)  In the past, I approached fiction in the same way, which doesn’t work.

So, this time, an outline was necessary.

(The passive voice is much safer.)

The first outline let to the second outline led to the third outline led to an endless death march. Allen & I would send each other mails starting off “I’ve got the homicidal thoughts under control now, so…” The book wandered in the desert for rather more than 40 nights.

My legal team & I are pleased to report that the endless death march did, in fact, pay off in the end and therefore there’s no need to smother anyone with a giant pile of old outlines. Once the final outline came together, the book flowed like The Computer’s own Bouncy Bubble Beverage. It was fun to write. That’s fun in a genuine way, not in an Alpha Complex reactor-shielding-is-fun way.

Some writers can write without an outline (Stephen King’s the best known example.) The big lesson from writing Reality Optional is that I’m not one of them. I need a map to keep me on course. That’s a very valuable insight to take away from the whole experience, and one that I’m going to build on this year.

The map’s not the territory, but it’s the first step to conquering it.

The work continues.

In other news, the Gaelcon scenario blurb is up. It’ll be available for download here after the convention – once I actually write the damn’d thing, of course…

There are similarities between kickstarting and rolling up characters for a new game. Four lessons I’d draw from watching kickstarter

• Buy-In: I keep banging this drum over and over, but the single most important thing in any game is player enthusiasm. System, GMing talent, plot, everything flows from buy-in. Do‘s got 400+ evangelists who will make that game even more popular. Two enthusiastic players can drive a whole campaign.
• Ownership: Players like to have a stake in the game beyond their character sheet. Characters should have connections to the setting; kickstarter supports buy up to rewards that let them have input. The whole gaming patronage model is based around letting the supporters say what they want and using that to guide development.
• Novel Constraints: Kickstarters that work on a ‘pay anything you want’ basis don’t work. If you don’t give players targets to aim for, most will default to a minimum effort. Players need constraints to work with, especially interesting ones. A game where you can create anything you want leads to characters that are simultaneously ‘wacky’ and dull as hell. The game needs to stake out an interesting playfield for the players to inhabit. 
• Community: Enthusiasm is infectious. Kickstarters are public events; people can see the enthusiasm and the groundswell of support and want to get involved. Character creation should be primarily done as a group, so that the players push each other. I suspect private patronage projects get considerably less cash.

The previous scenario, The Highwayman’s Lament (2.4M pdf) has also been tweaked slightly. If you haven’t seen it already, please take a look. Both scenarios include five pregenerated player characters and a brief synopsis of the FATE rules. Having a copy of Spirit of the Century to hand might be helpful, but is not strictly required.

There’ll be another Rakehell game this year, probably at Gaelcon. After that, we’ll push towards actually producing a rulebook. These free downloads are explorations of the Rakehell concept – The Highwayman’s Lament was the proof of concept, and The Chimneys of Whiteham tried something other than highwaymen and hellfire. The third scenario will focus on building campaigns and episodic play, as opposed to the occult blood opera of the two previous games.

(The blood opera has been tremendous fun, though. Every Rakehell game so far has involved murder, passionate arguments, stabbings, damnation and emotional compels by the dozen.)

We’ve also overhauled the look of the site, adding shiny new widgets that will make future updates smoother and (hopefully) more frequent.

Rakehell got another outing at Warpcon – the scenario this time was an experiment in pushing the boundaries of the concept, to see if the game could support something other than highwaymen and running around with pistols. The player characters in the Warpcon scenario, The Chimneys of Whiteham, were a bunch of orphaned chimneysweeps aged between 8 and 15, with not a single flintlock among them. The game worked very well, and got some excellent feedback from players (check out the Adventuring Party podcast, for example – the Rakehell discussion kicks off around the 28:55 mark).

The Whiteham scenario will be made available for download soon.

The biggest of these is Secrets of the Ancients for Mongoose Publishing. The original Secret of the Ancients came out back in 1984, and brought the characters to meet Grandfather himself. While the scope of the adventure is impressive, the early stages lacked conflicts and the climax is basically a long monologue by an all-powerful NPC. The updated version adds more factions, and adds a whole adventure arc after the Great Monologue. There are another five installments in the adventure to come.

Meanwhile, I’m blogging over at TerraSol Games (or, more accurately, I have written blogs for them; posting seems to have stopped for the moment, but there are more in the pipeline). I’ll also be contributing to other T/S books later in the year, as writer and general Traveller guru.

Over at DriveThru, the Traveller main rulebook has finally gone Gold, putting it in the top 0.48% of products. Other third-party publishers are picking up on Traveller, too – there’s a list here. With luck, Milkyfish Press will join them before the end of the year.

The fact that Dragonmeet is still mentally tagged as ‘the new con’ despite being ten years old in its current incarnation is somewhat alarming – where did those ten years go?

I arrived two days early for this year’s event, to the slight surprise of my gracious hosts (“Want anything from the airport?” “Sausages and tea.” “Cool, got them.” “Great, see you tomorrow.” “Er, just landed.”) but the usual hospitality was undiminished. Thursday, I was invited for dinner Chez Wallis, where we discussed gaming, writing and sundry matters, as well as James’ delight in the Most Boring Book Ever. (It’s a book of statistics, from 18something. If you ever want to know how many weavers there were in Antrim, it’s in there. If you ever want to know what eternity feels like, it’s there too.) Friday, I wrote and wandered, and was delighted to find a reprint of The Stress of Her Regard.

Saturday was the con itself. It started excellently with friends old and new, freelance gigs, and shiny shiny copies of The Laundry. I was on the Cubicle 7 panel where we announced my current big project. the Primeval rpg (due out sometime next year). It’s using the same system as Doctor Who, should you wish to pit dinosaurs against UNIT. Well, more or less the same system - for one thing, the cherished DW initiative system really doesn’t hold true in the Primeverse (“I start talking and -” “The Future Predator bites your head off. Next!”)

After lunch and the plotting of future C7 stuff, I was tangentially present for the Pelgrane GUMSHOE Showcase, aka the investigative gaming seminar, where Robin and Ken spoke intelligently about adventure design and I muttered and babbled. I also grabbed a copy of Bookhounds of London – which I might use as the basis of a mooted RPG in the Lonesome October next year, of which more anon. Any free space was filled with a pile of author’s copies and reference books from Mongoose.

I was very good in the auction and didn’t buy anything.

Sunday, I made a flying visit to the Book of the Dead exhibition in the British Museum. Apparently, the Ancient Egyptians believed the afterlife was a dungeon crawl you could rules-lawyer through with the right spells. Actually, it was possibly more like playing Magic: the Gathering for your soul, as rich people could afford custom decks. Anyway, there’s a game in there. The exhibition itself was good, but crowded beyond belief. After that and pancakes, there was the post-con pub meet, where I gave my report on the Irish debt crisis (tl;dr: DOOOOM).

And then home, through snow and tube strikes. Here’s to next year.