METAL!

I know, I've been quiet lately, bouncing between game revisions and other non-game things (which therefore don't go on this blog), but I do have one quick bit of news for today:

Neon Knights has hit copper bestseller status on DTRPG!

Cross one off the list

 Neon Knights is now live on DriveThruRPG!!!

That's it, that's the post.  I worked hard over the past couple of weeks, I finished the game, and I posted it. Feeling pretty good about that.  Now I can rest a bit, then back to work on all the other games.

Neon Knights - revisiting the basic stats

Recurring feedback that I've gotten from readers is that, since I'm pitching this game as "heavy metal," they want to feel that in the rules.  And in particular, in the PCs' core stats.  The knightly virtues that I have there right now do the job well enough for covering different kinds of actions but not for conveying the desired tone of the game.  After a lot of back and forth, and a lot of beating my head against various proverbial walls, I've maybe finally solved this one.  Here they are:

You act with ...
Passion when your emotional intensity is front and center
Restraint when you carefully collect information and balance risks and rewards before taking action
Instinct when you go with your gut and don't bother waiting for confirmation
Sleight when you use stealth, subterfuge, or misdirection
Accord when you act on your understanding of others around you
Force when you rely on the raw strength of your body or mind

I don't think it makes to continue calling them Virtues.  I could go back to Approaches, which is the default term from Fate Accelerated, but that also lacks flavor.  Maybe this will be the next big annoying thing for me to resolve?

Allegedly doing some kind of work

I was supposed to have a Neon Knights one-shot (and unofficial playtest) yesterday with a couple of people who had expressed interest in the game.  Spent the week prepping an adventure for them, since our plan was to skip session 0 and get straight into the action.  And then my internet crapped out and we had to cancel (trying to connect to Discord voice chat on my phone was iffy at best, definitely not something we could all tolerate for 2-4 hours).  In the meantime we talked a little about renaming some of the stats to sound more Metal.  I've thought of some terms I could maybe use, and now I'm on the fence between being more thematic vs being easier to understand right away.  I'll get that figured out eventually.

On the other hand, since I couldn't spend my evening running an RPG, I did spend it finally updating Werewolves of London.  In the original playtest only a few of the territories had special abilities, so yesterday I wrote up a bunch more.  And I made sure that some of them overlap or otherwise conflict with each other.  Next step is to redesign the cards so things are easier to see when they're all in your hand instead of neatly laid out on the table.  Hoping to have everything done to be able to run the game again next weekend.

Dolomball: hitting me with the curveball

Dolomball playtest today.  The new "speed" mechanic worked out well - that was the change I made after last time to replace the rock-paper-scissor system for resolving ties.  Cards are still played simultaneously, but now they resolve in speed order instead of simultaneously, so that takes care of figuring out who gets to the ball first, or who can block someone else's movement.  Besides that, the other players today liked the core of the game but felt like it was more complex than it should be for the kind of game that it is, and that scoring is too slow (I'll refrain from making any soccer jokes here).  Also, they both wanted to be able to plan further ahead and be able to make better predictions about opponents' actions.  Suggestions for me to play around with included making the board smaller and separating movement from action cards.  Need some time to decide what I'm actually going to do with that, but I think it is worth exploring.  Let's see what the next few weeks bring...

------------

In other news, this week I started doing layout work for Neon Knights.  It is simultaneously tedious and exciting.  But I think this is going to end with a book that makes me look only 50% amateur instead of 100%.  Maybe even only 25%, especially if I get in-document hyperlinks to work correctly.

Neon Knights update

 Just finished the latest round of revisions (I feel like it's not the first time I've said that).  Biggest thing was fleshing out the setting description.  I got some good advice about that from readers a couple months ago, with things to add to the setting chapter but also ideas about weaving in bits of implied setting into artifact and adversary descriptions, so I did that.  Seems pretty good right now, maybe actually ready to start moving into layout sometime.  Sure would be nice it the flyers I bring to PAX Unplugged this year can say "available on DriveThru" instead of "coming soon."

Finish line? What's a finish line?

The problem with juggling multiple projects is that each individual one can take a lot longer to make progress.  So for the past week or so I've been focusing entirely on Neon Knights and Under a Violet Moon to try to get through that last "10"% or so for each of them.

Violet Moon - after the playtest a couple weeks ago I've been making small tweaks to try to get the balance just right between the two sides.  Not sure how close I am, but better than last time, I think.  Originally I had worried that the game would be too hard for the villagers so I tried to correct for that, and in recent tests it looks like I might have overdone it a bit.  So now I'm swinging back the other way, but also (hopefully) just a bit.  Raised the threshold for eliminating suspects, changed one of the villagers' special move cards, feeling better about this.  Will show it off again next week, and if that goes well then I think it's time to start pitching to publishers.

Neon Knights - one of the things I've wanted to do before calling it done is to add more example enemies and magic items.  I've been going at a steady pace this week and I think I'm up to a good amount now.  I still need to write a few more example stunts, and I need to reread the whole thing to make sure the style and rules are consistent, and then I think that's it for the writing.  Then I find one or two proofreaders, and if they agree with me then it's time to move on to layout.  And then, someday, posting to DriveThru.

Neon Knights: the Musical

I've been neglecting Neon Knights lately (a symptom of having too many projects at the same time) so I decided to make that my main focus for today.  I feel like I've been making some good progress with beefing up the setting description.  And as I was working on that I came across a note I wrote to myself a while back about seeing if I could come up with an "official" rule for working more music references into the Realm creation system.  What I settled on was a sidebar with two optional rules for doing this.  The one for people who love to lean on random tables and such was to shuffle a playlist and use the songs, in order, to answer the questions in the book.  Well I'm a person who loves to lean on random tables, so I'm going to take a break from the work and have a little fun playing with this myself.  I'll list the song titles and then whatever ideas they give me about how this would work for the game setting.  Let's see what I get...

1) Who is the Lord of the Realm?
Dope Hat - the current Lord of the Realm has some magical talent and is able to work technomagical machinery as well as any specialist around.  However, they also have some health problems and a fair bit of anxiety, maybe some imposter syndrome too.

2) Besides the Knights, what is something or someone else the Lord can count on?
A Secret Place - in response to the anxiety and health problems, the Lord has built themselves a private sanctuary somewhere in or near the palace that is unknown even to their own staff and advisors.

3) What is something everyone knows about the Realm’s history?
Metal Militia - back in the Before times, the pride of Realm's army was a regiment of fully autonomous robots

4) What is something everyone has forgotten about the Realm’s history?
Search and Destroy - the robots going rogue was one of the main contributors to the collapse of the old world

5) What is something from Before that still remains and is known in the Realm?
The Worriment Waltz - at some point, people discovered that one of the Realm's major adversaries (maybe the robots, maybe something else from earlier than that) was unable to comprehend music.  Thus, people developed a system of using music to encode messages.  Some of the specific songs have survived, along with at least a gist of the message they carried, although people might no longer remember why this system was developed.

6) What is a notable landmark or location within the Realm?
Scum of the Earth - there is a cave in an isolated part of the Realm that was once the refuge of notorious outlaws.  They were mutated by their time in the darkness (and exposure to whatever else was down there), and when they returned for vengeance they were barely recognizable as human.  No one lives there anymore, but the cave entrance is still kept guarded.

7) What is a notable landmark or location outside of the Realm?
Torn Apart - a great rift in the earth, said to have been formed when two Titans fought a duel that ultimately killed both of them.

8) How does the Knights’ Code in this Realm differ from the “standard” one?
Hallowed Point - Knights are encouraged to show no mercy to their adversaries

9) What is one thing the Realm needs but is lacking?
Neon Knights - the PCs are the only Knights remaining.

10) Who or what is one of the biggest threats facing the Realm now?
Missing Time - people are vanishing randomly, then reappearing some time later, maybe in a different place, completely disoriented.  Some of them can remember glimpses of what was happening when they were missing, but it'll take some work to put it all together.

11) Who or what is another potential threat?
Rain - someone has been able to put together a working weather control machine using scavenged parts of Before tech.  It's not so good with the fine tuning but it can definitely do some damage.

12) What makes the Realm such a desirable target for either (or both) of these threats?
Pathfinder - whoever these villains are, they are both looking for something within the Realm and have decided that these nefarious means are the way to get it.  Maybe it's something in that cave I mentioned earlier?

Well that was a fun experiment.  Some prompts were easier to work with than others, as is always the case with these things, but I can see how part of it are fitting together in different ways.  So yeah, that's the "playlist shuffle" option for setting creation.  I'm happy with it.

Neon Knights - serious update

Finally made all the official changes I mentioned in the last post.  Approaches (now called "virtues") are updated so there's still that knightly flavor but they correspond more clearly to a given die roll, and you're only using one per roll instead of the mix-and-match thing I was trying earlier.  Not combining stats on a roll means that vehicles and mounts no longer have stats to add, so those now just give you stunts and/or Aspects while you are riding, plus the option to absorb hits that you take, and I also put in a rule for modifying die rolls when it matters that one vehicle or animal is significantly faster than another.  Hopefully this runs a lot smoother in play, with PCs still feeling powerful but not ludicrously overpowered.

------------

In more general news, I think I have everything ready that I need for PAX Unplugged this year.  I'm looking forward to running Under a Violet Moon in the Unpub room, and meeting with a couple of publishers who didn't immediately shoot me down when I contacted them about pitch meetings.  Now I just have to wait out the next four weeks until we get there.

Neon Knights - approaches, again

Finally got to do that test battle I was hoping for a couple weeks ago.  I had three players, only one of whom had any prior experience with Fate.  From my side of things it went more or less how I expected - while we were using the current rules it felt like I was struggling to determine what approaches the players should roll (even if one was obvious, which second one to add was usually less clear), and when we switched to default FAE approaches it was much easier to decide.  From the players' side, however, that wasn't the consensus (and this is why testing with other people is important, of course).  They didn't feel a big mechanical difference when we switched, but they really preferred the flavorful stat names over the FAE defaults.  Similar to what I had pointed out in my previous post but more emphatically so.  Coming away from that, it felt like my idea of adding a "cardinal virtue" Aspect wouldn't suffice, they really wanted to be rolling against Prudence or Wisdom or whatever every time.  So it seems like the next thing to try will be to tighten up the definitions of the "knightly" approaches to be clearer about which would apply when, and to cover more of the gaps where I feel like none of the current approaches fit as well as I would want.  I will also drop the "combine two" idea, which has not been satisfactory, although this will have some significant ripples that I will need to address right away.  So that'll be the next game update.

Neon Knights: taking a different approach

I have my first in-person playtest of Neon Knights coming up, so I've been getting ready for that over the last few days.  Meanwhile, my play-by-post playtests have led me to become increasingly unhappy with my modified approaches.  So for the in-person test I'm planning to start out with the current system, then switch to baseline Fate Accelerated midway through and see which feels better for everyone.  That means writing two copies of each pre-gen character, one for each version, and that led to an interesting observation.  The stats didn't convert cleanly from one to the other; e.g. just because someone was high in Prowess in my modified format didn't necessarily mean that Forceful made sense as their best stat in baseline FAE (and never mind trying to figure out what Diligence or Empathy maps onto).  And it occurred to me that the two different versions are looking at the characters' actions in different ways.  Baseline FAE approaches essentially describe the action itself - I swing my sword in a Forceful way, or in a Quick way, etc.  But my current modified approaches in NK feel more like they are describing the thought process behind the action - I swing my sword with Courage when I am focused on plunging into a dangerous situation, or I swing my sword with Diligence when I slow down and study my opponent before striking.  Prowess is kind of an outlier here, throwing "thought process" out the window and being all about physical capability.

And as much as I don't love the current system of deciding that my attack this round is based on Courage+Prowess or whatever, I do still like the flavor behind it.  To me, it's a large part of what makes the Knights actually feel like knights and not just action heroes with colorful gear.  So I'm thinking about ways to preserve that flavor if I do end up getting rid of my modified approaches.  Idea #1 right now is to put a "Knights' Code" in the flavor text of the game.  Idea #2, which will have more mechanical impact on the game, is to add a "Cardinal Virtue" Aspect, so my character really leans into Courage while yours really leans into Empathy, and these things affect die rolls and roleplay complications the same way as any other Aspect.  Most likely I'll do both of these things.  Or maybe I'll think of something else.

Anyway, that's it for now, and hopefully I have something cool to say about the test session in a couple of days.

Update: in-person test didn't pan out; too many designers at the meetup and not enough time for everyone's game to hit the table.  I might try again next month if scheduling works out, or I might try to put something else together.  But I will say that the more I think just about the stuff from this post, the more I'm feeling like I should make these changes.

Neon Knights - revised draft available

I finally put in revisions for some (but not all) of the feedback I've gotten.  Took considerably longer than I expected, which is probably a surprise to no one who has done this kind of thing before.  I know I said something in a recent post about working on new adversaries and magic items, but those need to be polished up more so only one of those actually made it into the current revision.

https://www.scribd.com/document/621295097/Neon-Knights-Playtest-Doc

5/28/23 - various updates

One of the design groups I'm in, Indie Game Lab, runs occasional live streams of games designed by the group members (which then get archived on YouTube).  They haven't done one in a while, but yesterday we brought it back with Dwarven Guild of Engineers.  It was fun, though scheduling issues meant we only had three players, so not as fun as it could have been with a larger group.  And I got some feedback on more things I can improve in my game that I thought was already pretty polished up.  They're not wrong though; I probably could find some sillier Bases and Modifiers, and I could probably find more opportunities for players to mess around with each others' inventions (this wasn't feedback that I got before but it really resonated with the other players yesterday, and I'm sure I could at least put something in as an optional rule).  So I've got that to ponder for a little while.  And they did say they'd like to do another episode of DGE in a month or so once I've updated it, so that's cool.

Update - the DGE video is here

In other news, I've been working on adding more content to Neon Knights - test players so far have suggested that example stunts and aspects would be helpful, and now that I've passed the threshold of "good enough for some basic alpha playtesting" I also want to put in more example adversaries and magic items (especially if I'm going to feel justified in charging actual money for this and not just pay-what-you-want).  I don't think I have a specific target for how much I want in there, although doubling what I had before would be a good start at least.  Most likely it'll be a few months of "this song title or lyric is awesome, how have I not turned into something for the game yet?"  Which, for instance, is why the most recent cartridge I added was Ride the Sky, which starts out just giving you super-jumping but can be unlocked to grant full flight and air control powers.

Neon Knights cover illustration

Neon Knights has officially jumped into being a full-blown vanity project - I commissioned some artwork for it.  One piece, for the eventual book cover, drawn by the very talented Nicoleta Stavarache.  Here it is with my stupid text added to it:

I'm very happy with the tone this sets.  Now I just need testing to verify that the gameplay actually matches, or at least show me how I can adjust to make that happen.

Neon Knights - ready for playtest

Here we are, end of the weekend and I have just uploaded the playtest draft for Neon Knights.  With as long as it took me to write about 25 pages of content, I have a whole new respect for authors who are putting out 2-300 page RPGs.  But I'm happy with what I have here.

Next steps - run test games, fix it up as needed, commission some art, spend way too much time learning Scribus, make this thing look like the kind of book a person would be willing to pay money for, and then post it to DriveThru.  Any bets on whether this will take more or less than one year from today?

Neon Knights - almost there...

 Had a really productive weekend as far as this draft goes.  Biggest single thing is that, after my previous second guessing about stats, I went ahead and changed it.  Instead of the default approaches from FAE, Neon Knights has these approaches:

• Courage - use this when you act in the face of danger, knowingly putting yourself at risk to achieve your goal
• Diligence - use this when you act with patience and steady focus rather than rapid action
• Wisdom - use this when you act according to your knowledge and understanding of the world
• Empathy - use this when you act according to your understanding and care for other people
• Prudence - use this when you act to minimize harm to yourself or others, even if it means giving up an opportunity
• Prowess - use this when you act by way of raw physical ability

 Not sure yet how that will actually work out in play, but I like the themed stats in general, and I feel like this fits better with a game about knights than if I had kept the original Flashy, Clever, and so on.  Honestly I was hoping I could just lift this from the list of virtues in Pendragon but those didn't feel like a good fit either, so I had to work out my own list and here it is.  I do still need to go back to Pendragon though and see what else it does to differentiate characters who are all essentially the same "class."

Besides that, I finished writing up the current rules for vehicles, including providing stats for a few generic examples, and I also wrote up some sample artifacts (I talked before about cartridges, which are the main loot in this game to fill the role of "magic items" in other games, but they're not the only cool treasure that exists).  At this point the draft is really close to where I want it in order to start playtesting.  I have a couple more rough spots that I want to clean up beforehand, and I need to stat out a couple of sample enemies in the unlikely event that someone else tries to run this game on their own while it's still in alpha, and then I think that's it.  With a little luck (and effort) it might be ready to go by the end of next weekend.

...and the other holiday weekend

 New Year's weekend was busier than I expected.  Nevertheless, I was able to finish what I wanted to do for the setting chapter and the equipment section for Neon Knights - I don't know if they're done necessarily, but it's at least enough for a playtest draft.  Now I just need to get the other chapters up to that same level and I can actually start running this game.

In the meantime, I'm back to questioning whether I want to stick with the standard approaches from Fate Accelerated, or a custom list based on knightly virtues (very likely to be stolen from inspired by Pendragon).  This had been my original idea for the game but then it went off in a direction that wound up feeling like I was trying too hard to be clever and losing game clarity as a result.  So for the moment I'm using the FAE terms, but maybe I'll change it up after all, if I can put together a list of 6-9 virtues that all sound like they would serve the same function as game stats.

Progress report from the long holiday weekend

 I swore that I would get some game writing done over the long weekend, and I actually did.  Nothing exciting, but I made some progress fleshing out a few sections of Neon Knights to get it closer to my minimum threshold to put out a playtest draft.  I think all that's left at this point is to beef up the chapter on setting description, clean up a few rule discrepancies, and stat up some sample bad guys.  There's still a lot more to go before the book is complete, but those three things would be enough for me to be satisfied that I can start running playtests and publicly sharing this draft.

There was one other design-related thing I did over the weekend.  For a while I've been pondering how to write a game around a certain IP, and this weekend I got an outline together for how it might be doable.  I don't want to say more until I contact the IP creator and get the green light to move forward with it, and I'm not going to do that until after New Year's at the very least.  But since part of the reason for this blog existing is to keep myself accountable, I have to at least acknowledge that this is where a chunk of my time went.

Magic items for Neon Knights

 I'm still around, I promise!  Just busy with other things the past few weeks, rather than game stuff.

In theory I'm supposed to have been working on getting The Grand Expedition ported over to Screentop.gg, but that's going very slowly while I learn their system.  So today I focused instead on Neon Knights, which I haven't touched in a little bit.  Had a pretty good day of it too.  I was specifically focusing on the chapter which would be "magic items" in a traditional fantasy game.  Instead, for NK it's "technomagic," i.e. things that look like '80s sci-fi or cyberpunk but work through a combination of magic and lost technology.  These are all lost treasures of a golden age that ended long before the NK time period, and which cannot be recreated at present.

The biggest category, which is what I wrote up today, is cartridges.  Yes, like in your old video game console, but a different size so you can plug it into the hilt of your sword if you want to.  An item has to have a port for you to plug the cartridge into, but if it does, then the cartridge gives it magical bonuses.  And the same cartridge can be plugged into different kinds of items, with the bonus changing depending on the specific item, but keeping with the theme represented by its title.

Earthdawn has a cool system where significant magic items have "key knowledges," bits of significant information about the item (e.g. who created it, what epic battle it was used in, etc), and if a PC learns one of these facts and invests some xp into it they unlock new powers for that item, or upgrade existing powers.  I'm doing the same thing here with cartridges.  I haven't thought of a good in-game term for it yet ("key knowledge" doesn't feel right, and "unlock" sounds too much like modern software rather than 1980s), but the idea is still there.  And it's not just learning facts either - that might be part of it, but you also have to do some sort of action which affects the magic inside the cartridge.  Here's the example that I wrote for the rulebook:

A cartridge called "Lightning Arc" would initially let you spend a fate point to invoke the Lightning Arc Aspect.  Some possible upgrades, and their requirements, include:

• Three free invokes per day - this requires the cartridge (and the item it is plugged into) to be left in the branches of the iron tree at the peak of Demon’s Worry Mountain
• Another Aspect, called Blinding Flash - this requires the user to speak a particular incantation while holding the cartridge up toward the sun at its highest point
• Once per day, the ability to teleport instantly to any spot the user can see, up to a hundred yards away - this requires the cartridge to be plugged into a specific machine that was used by its creator in the Before times, and which might still be found in the ruins of their factory

So, just like in Earthdawn, upgrading your magic items isn't just a matter of leveling up or spending enough gold, it can be serious adventure fodder itself.

That's where I am for now.  I still need to write something about other technomagic items, and I've got a few ideas for that, but I think that what's left will be less than half of the chapter overall.

Whatever I'm rolling, it certainly isn't Quick

 Well I said I was using this blog to document whatever work I'm doing on my games, so I guess I might as well document the little bit that I did today.  Main thing was copying over the milestone rules from FAE and translating them into my prose and tone.  I was hoping that would turn into momentum for more of the stuff I'm actually coming up with myself, but no luck - only other thing I managed to add before I ran out of steam was a short paragraph about Steeds, and a note to myself to maybe add an option for a Steed bonus of some sort when you hit milestones.  At least I'm more or less done with the part that's getting copied from FAE, except that I still haven't decided if I'm keeping the approaches from that book or coming up with my own.  I'd like to do my own for this but I'm having a hell of a time thinking of anything that isn't covered better by the basic six in FAE.  Maybe I'll get some 11th-hour inspiration for that.  In the meantime I'll keep plugging away with what I have so far.  Right now I'm thinking the next part will be just focusing on the Steed rules until they look good, but we'll see what happens.