While
Relic Worlds has a lot of products associated with it, the one I’m most excited
about right now is the role playing game that I’m developing for it.
What
I’ve always loved about RPGs is the story element of it.Players create characters to run around in
the world generated by a game master.In
this case, those stories can be uploaded onto the website for everyone to read,
and some will be chosen to be canon; part of the Relic Worlds universe.
I’ve
been play testing the system and I think I have the mechanics down.I’ll soon be putting it all into rulebook
form, and later this year, I’ll be sending it out to the world to be play
tested there.
The first weekly episodes of RPG Storytime had to be the classic where it all began: Dungeons & Dragons. And what better adventures to do than some of the early classics from back in the '70s and '80s when I first began playing?
I've taken these adventures from my childhood and adjusted them to fit into my current world of Angepa. I'm hoping to tie it all together as one large world where everything connects.
One of these D&D series is Indiana Jane & the Lost City.
I've been enjoying making RPG Storytime so much that I want to make it portable for people to listen to it. That means doing it as a podcast so people can listen to it in cars on their way to work, and in the office...
Of course, that sort of changed during the time of Covid, when everyone ended up staying at home. But I was told people still listen to podcasts at home, so I launched the channel anyway.
RPG Storytime takes the stories that were generated in role playing games and turns them into narrated stories, much like audio books or radio dramas. The podcast can't use images and has fewer sound effects than the Youtube version, but it provides a sort of atmosphere through its radio feel.
One of my favorite projects to work on is RPG Storytime. It's where I take stories generated out of role playing games and turn them into narrated videos with music, sound effects, illustrations, and miniatures.
The latest campaign is an epic sized Star Wars one where we follow all the characters within a pair of sectors. We use all the Star Wars games made by FFG that involve miniatures.
The webisodes that came out at the end of last year are from my favorite part of this story. In it, a woman named Ellor Sundown is hunting the man who experimented on her, an unnatural Force wielder named Rixar Traln.
I
started my series RPG Storytime on Youtube with the intention on doing one
season of four different shows every year.Each show would have six episodes per season.Star Trek would be in the spring, D&D
would be in the summer, Outbreak Undead would be in the fall, and Star Wars
would be in the winter.
Somewhere
deep down in me I knew this was unrealistic, but I hoped I would rein myself in
enough to make such a schedule possible.
I
didn't.So it's taking longer to make
the videos.But something bigger has
interrupted the schedule.
At
a certain point I found myself writing one series while planning a game for
another series while playing yet another and recording stuff for the
other.Added to that was another future
series I'm planning on doing, and some other games I simply like to play.It was getting confusing!
I
also discovered that the Star Wars game, which I admittedly overdid a bit, has
grown into many storylines, all of which need to be clear to the audience.In fact, they all have multiple storylines,
but the Star Wars one is the most complex.I started realizing that if I told that in 6 episode chunks, no one
would understand it.I didn't even know
what 6 episodes to play with one another.Added to this was the fact that I wanted to get Outbreak Undead out of
the way to make room for Deadlands.
So
the decision was made to run entire series together, rather than 6 episode
chunks over several seasons.Outbreak
Undead is first.Its first episode back
is today.(I figured Halloween is a good
day to do that.)It will be running until
the end of the year.I'll have a couple
other games, then I'll be running my Star Trek series until it reaches the end.
The
one exception I'll have to this is Dungeons & Dragons.I want to have some episodes come out when
Game of Thrones plays, so I'll have a few episodes of it in the spring.Then, once I've put out some other game
videos I've meant to edit for a really long time, I'll begin releasing the huge
epic of Star Wars, which will run until the end of the year, coinciding with
episode 9 in theaters.
I'm
planning on doing a separate channel that is only RPG Storytime which will play
all the videos in order without interruption.I'm not sure when I'll do that, but I won't start shows on that until
the last ones are finished.
If
you'd like to see Outbreak Undead from the beginning, you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpaiVtbtoQQ&list=PLJ55yyr7uUQCa9GdXrvG7dhrEsh30kDV_
One of the most absurd and even comical scares in history was that over Dungeons & Dragons in the early '80s. The game had been released a few years before, and many kids of my generation were fascinated by the imaginative nature of it.
I remember first walking into my cousin's bedroom to find a bunch of pencils and paper and strange looking dice around the floor. I asked where the game was and they said that was it. I didn't get it until about halfway through the game when I started picturing everything in my mind. Our whole party got killed, (that often happened in first edition,) but I was blown away by the possibilities.
Of course, since it became popular, the parents all had to panic over it, especially the religious ones, which was the community my family lived among. I even went to a religious school, and there were outcries for the books to be burned or buried and for kids to stay away from the evil. God forbid any of them should actually do any research and learn what D&D actually was.
There was even a TV movie made about it starring Tom Hanks in his very first ever role where he loses his mind to the game. I was excited to watch it thinking it was going to be a D&D story made into a movie. You know, something productive. But instead it warned about a danger that didn't exist. News specials followed, and warnings to parents. Of course, none of them actually did any research into what was going on.
Even 60 Minutes fell for the hype, doing a whole special where they described kids who had been "hooked" to the game that killed themselves. In every instance the kids had other problems, such as substance abuse or child abuse problems, or sometimes poverty or something like that. But no, it's the game that's the problem.
I didn't realize until recently how much of this was a generational gap issue. It took me a long time to accept the fact that the Baby Boomer generation is simply the laziest and most judgmental in a long time. They are absolutely the type of generation that would see something unusual and, rather than learn about it, they just pass judgment on it. Far from the social change generation they pretend to be, they were the generation that expected conformity, and adjusted the change worse than anyone.
The '70s and '80s were a period of fearing the unknown. The Cold War was winding down. Terrorism and the ambiguous war in Vietnam left people uncertain who and what to trust. That mixed with the strong religious ties that generation had made for a mixture of manufactured fears. Additionally, being a pre-internet time, learning the truth, or countering rumors took effort that was hard for anyone to do, especially a generation of entitled people who didn't want to do any research.
And thus, the fear mongering of D&D took hold, giving it the Satanic reputation it had. This video below gives an even better in-depth description of this fear, and of the generation gap that caused it.
My first exposure to miniatures gaming was at Hobby Town in Lincoln, Nebraska where I saw the boxed set for Johnny Reb. I was drawn to the idea of having huge dioramas with miniature figures moving around it. Miniature train sets were big at the time, so I had seen a lot of their fancy setups. The idea of adding a game to that seemed like a load of fun.
I couldn't wait to play, so I cut out a bunch of cardboard squares and began playing with those while I collected and painted miniatures. I played other people's historical games as well, and even eventually invented my own called Command Combat: Civil War.
However, something's happened over the past 20 years that's bad news for people who loved this hobby. With the rise of video games that can accurately show battles and the ease of which it is to play on a computer versus learning tabletop rules, more and more of the young audience have turned away from miniature war gaming, or never trying it to begin with.
This has been aided by the refusal of the old guard of mini wargaming players to adapt. Most of the time you hear complaints from them about how young people are just impatient and stupid rather than trying to understand what they like and reaching out to them. Instead of streamlining the rules or making the games more friendly to new players, they often nitpick on details and turn a cold shoulder to anyone who's not already in the no. Rather than showing off their incredible dioramas online as much as they can, they complain about how the internet is ruining everything. Everything is everyone else's fault, and their hobby is a victim to attention deficit disorder.
But that's not how it has to be. A few companies ARE listening to younger people, and even some older people who never got into the hobby because of complicated rules and expensive minis. They're making games with easier to learn rules based on properties that everyone's familiar with, and they're showing them off in every medium that are being looked at today. Rather than complain about people who are different from them, they're studying what they like and embracing what they learn.
Probably the best example of this is Fantasy Flight Games. Upon releasing miniatures games, they always have enough minis to play with right out of the box. Expansions are sold at reasonable prices, and in logical groupings. For instance, rather than just selling a bag full of overpriced random minis, as was done a lot in the past, or selling seven pieces when eight are needed, as Games Workshop did, Fantasy Flight sells a full unit in a box. So if you need a unit of eight soldiers, the box comes with eight soldiers... already placed on their bases so you don't have to go out and buy balsa wood bases!
The result has been a huge and loyal following, and a renewed interest in miniatures war gaming. Yet strangely, you still see a lot of grumbling from the very people who claim they want to keep their hobby alive. Rather than celebrating the heightened interest, you hear them in their little echo chambers complaining that the young people only want to play their simple games and won't try any "real" games.
Well, they can have their "real" games and miniature war gaming will rebuild with this new audience.
I'll be going to Wondercon again this weekend, and this time I'm doing things a little differently.
Rather than getting a booth and trying to sell books that way, I've got a big table in the gaming area. The main presentation there will, of course, be the Relic Worlds miniatures game, Relic Worlds Showdown. The setup I made for this with the big volcano and everything (Breakup Mountain) always gets the most attention, so it's probably the best thing to grab attention for the series as a whole.
So I'll be putting on the game, but I'll also have flyers, and copies of the books. I probably can't sell them since I don't have a booth, but I learned a while ago that I never make a profit at these conventions; it's about exposure. So the whole point will be to get attention and to hand out flyers to get people into the Relic Worlds series.
Since part 1 of book 3 will have just released, I'm giving out business card sized flyers with a link for readers to download it for free. Book 1 will also be available for free on Amazon Kindle that weekend as well, so there will be flyers for where they can find that as well.
And there will be presentations of the game all day, which recently released, and it more or less premiering at that convention.
If you're there, drop by our presentation in the game area. You won't be able to miss the giant volcano!
This Saturday, February 17th, I'll be running my game Relic Worlds Showdown at the Orccon Game Convention in Santa Monica. This is a miniatures game where players take the role of a faction from Relic Worlds and search for treasure, avoiding traps and fighting monsters as they do.
The game was recently released on Wargame Vault and Drivethru RPG, so this will be the first showing of it since its official release. I'm planning on releasing more for the game as time goes on.
This week is the last webisode of Outbreak Undead for my RPG Storytime series for this season. Star Wars will begin in December, and I'm heavily in the process of finishing that up so it'll be ready. I find myself strangely more excited about working on these than any of my books.
RPG Storytime is my Youtube show where I take the stories from role playing games I've been running and turn them into narrative stories complete with sound effects, music, etc. and visually told with images and miniatures.
I feel a bit guilty for being so much more excited about doing videos using toys to tell stories about games rather than writing books. After all, I'm in my 40s and should be striving for something more adult, shouldn't I?
But in thinking through why I enjoy it so much, I've come to realize just why I enjoy it so much. RPG Storytime is a combination of my three favorite things to do,writing, filmmaking,and gaming. I get to create a cooperative story with a group of people playing a game. I then get to write it up into story format. And finally I have to figure out how to tell that story visually.
I do wish more people would see them. I've been discouraged by the small number of viewers, and it sometimes makes me wonder why I'm spending time on this. But I can't help myself. Even now, I'm wanting to get through this blog posting so I can continue to work on Star Wars. It's a thrill I get like no other; probably because it combines everything I enjoy doing.
You can find all of the RPG Storytime webisodes on my channel Bandwagon Games.
Separate
from my writing, (and often taking my time away from it,) I’ve been running a
couple game channels. The first was a
war game channel where I show miniature war games and other things from that
community. I wanted to expand into other
games so I built a channel called Bandwagon Games where we have all sorts of
board games, computer games, miniatures games, etc.
But the one I’m most excited about
is a show called RPG Storytime where I feature role playing games like Dungeons
& Dragons, which is the first one.
The stories are created from games that have been played, and summarized
using miniatures. This particularly
appeals to me because it embodies my three favorite things to do: gaming,
storytelling, and making movies.
It’s also a good tool for
promoting. As I’ve discussed last week, people connect more to video than they do
to words. Despite the fact that I’m a
writer, or perhaps especially because I’m a writer, I have to admit this fact
to myself. Movies connect with multiple
senses, such as sight and sound, while books force us to imagine things. This is, of course, the strength of books,
but it’s also what makes it harder for us to connect with the audience.
RPG Storytime allows me to tell a
story visually and to promote to a new audience, the gamers. This works particularly well for my science
fiction writing as those are two audiences that are closely related. Nonfiction readers aren’t so much into games
as much… Well, they’re sometimes into the war games, especially if they’re into
military history. But for the most part,
this is a promotional opportunity for my sci fi and future fantasy writing.
I plan to eventually turn some of
the stories I’m making through RPG Storytime into books themselves. The hope is that those people who connected
with the videos will want to buy the books as well. There will likely be people who wouldn’t have
given the book a try, but because they got sucked into the Youtube videos,
which were free to watch, they may have that emotional connection to want to
get the books and read more.
Those who found my blog from me being an author probably don't know that I run a Youtube channel that involves wargaming. This would especially come as a surprise to those who know how much I believe in trying to avoid war. It is, truly, the most horrendous thing invented by man.
However, my biggest hobby has been gaming of all sorts, regardless of whether it's miniature gaming, board gaming, or computer gaming. I enjoy relaxing with a game far more than watching something, as it occupies my mind more than any show or movie. It also brings people together and gives them something with which to interact rather than having the same long conversations about the same topics they've gone over time and time again.
I wound up making my channel about war gaming specifically not because they hold a higher spot in my mind than other games, but as a sort of fluke. I invented a miniatures game called Command Combat: Civil War, and I intended to promote it by taping some games and placing them on Youtube to show what it's like. When no one watched, I taped a battle report of Flames of War. Jamie and I recorded it together and treated it like a football game. The episode got picked up by the makers of Flames of War, and pretty soon we were getting tons of views, and the show was becoming successful.
So I continued it and stayed with the theme. Over the last few years I've refined it, and found that I'm really onto something. This year I'm going to have seven shows, one for each day of the week, for three months. It will cover board games, miniature games, computer games, how to videos, reenactments using miniatures, and even a live action show with historians doing gladiator combat, (with dulled weapons, of course.)
This is the one year I'm going to do this. I need to find out if this is going to work as a series. If it gets enough views, or if the show gets picked up by something like Geek & Sundry or Wargames Illustrated, then I can continue. But if it only gets a few views per video, I just won't have the time for it anymore. I'm off to start taping these games,so let's hope for the best.
I'll be at Orccon this weekend putting on three games. The first two will be on Saturday, and they both involve Relic Worlds. The miniatures game between the pirates and the Dark Agents will be from 10 am to 2 pm, and the role playing game will be from 8 pm to midnight. The results of both games will be counted as part of the ongoing story, and I will be recording them as a story to place onto the website.
On Sunday I'll be hosting a game of Command Combat: Civil War. Even though the 1864 expansion has not come out yet, this will be the first public appearance of the game, and will serve as sort of a trial run for the campaign system. The scenario will be the Overland campaign between Lee and Grant.
Jamie Ball and Rachel Gunnerson will be helping me with the first game on Saturday, and we're all going to be in costume. Dress up like your favorite adventurer and swing on by!
The convention is held at the Hilton Los Angeles, near LAX, and you can read about it here:
