| The Drifter's Escape for sale |
[Nov. 21st, 2009|06:17 pm] |
Hi LJ friends. Could you spread this around? That'd be sweet.
After four years in development, the Drifter's Escape is available for purchase. I'm really happy with the book. It's sharp looking, and has both excellent stories and a good game. I'm really happy to be able to offer it for sale. Now all I have to do to is say why you'll want to buy it.
What is it?
The Drifter's Escape is an anthology of short stories and a role-playing game. Like most anthologies, there is a unified theme to the entries: they are all about the role of the American drifter, and his place in the American landscape. The stories and the game do not intersect except thematically. There are seven stories, ranging in length from three pages to nineteen, and they are all written by my brother, Jake Lehman. There is one role-playing game, and it is written by me, Ben Lehman.
Although I am certain that someone will correct me within the next 24 hours, I believe that the Drifter's Escape is the first product of its type: a presentation of prose fiction and a role-playing game as thematic and equal elements of a book, with a strong unity of purpose but without the stories serving as examples of play or the game being a tribute to the story's canon.
About the game
Since I'm posting this in places that are interested in games, it probably behooves me to talk a little more about the game itself. The game is for three or more players (the largest group which I have played it with is 7, although it scales past that) of similar age and maturity.
The game takes 1-3 hours to play to completion, about 20 minutes of which is set-up. If you eat an early dinner, it can be played after dinner and before you go to sleep.
In the game, one player takes the role of the Drifter, someone who is coming into a new place, where they know no one, with the intent to leave rather than settle down. The other players take the role of the forces (The Devil and The Man) trying to get the Drifter to submit to their ownership of his life and soul. At the start of the game, The Devil and The Man control everyone but the Drifter. As the game is played, some people might redeem themselves and leave their control.
A recent player of the game described it as "a very quiet, very powerful experience." My play of the game has felt the same. The stories that the game produces are about ordinary people and their ordinary lives, but despite (or because of) that they are engrossing and often deeply affecting.
How to purchase
The game is right now only available directly from me (although I will be selling it to both bookstores and game stores, and please contact me if you're interested in buying through a local store.) Please allow 4-8 weeks for delivery, longer internationally. Delivery times may run on the longer end: I'm waiting on the final shipment of books to be delivered.
The book costs $13, plus shipping and handling costs ($4 inside the US, $6 internationally.) Alternatively, if you can come by my house in Seattle to pick up your copy, you can waive shipping and handling.
If, due to your country-of-residence, you cannot use paypal, please contact me and we'll work out a payment method.
There are no plans for an eBook version at this time.
Purchase on the game's webpage. |
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| Interesting Sales note |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|07:19 pm] |
Polaris tends to sell to people who have bought indie games before (many Polaris eBook customers already have Forge Bookshelf accounts).
Most Bliss Stage customers, by contrast, do not have Forge Bookshelf accounts: I assume they're less exposed to the community.
As for Journeying West, most customers are Stephen O'Sullivan. |
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| Thinking about ... |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|02:52 pm] |
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I've been thinking about, of all things, game design for boffer LARPs. I think I'm trying to tell myself that I need to work on the more technical aspects of game design. Maybe I should write an Aralis-style class and post it for savaging by the masses. |
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| Problematic Art |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|02:24 pm] |
This is in response to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cucumberseed's recent post on the topic of problematic material, edgy stuff, and art. Which I thought about trying to summarize but I think I'll just link you. To my friends: Please respond here, not there.
I responded and said "Yes and no. Little yes. Big no."
So I think he deserves an unpacking of that, and I thought it might be interesting for other people as well.
So. Yes and no. Little yes. Big no.
The little yes is, well, yes. As in: if you produce a work of art that's crappy and racist and sexist or whatever it is, yes. You have produced a crappy work of art. Going: "but it was the MUUUUSE" is a stupid excuse and you should own up to it and deal. Furthermore, including explicitly problematic material in your work just because you think it makes you edgy and modern is shitty. Don't do it. It just waters down your work and alienates people.
The big no is, well, no. You are not going to produce a piece of wholly non-problematic art, no matter how squishy and liberal and consciousness-raised you are. News flash: you live in a racist and sexist society. More importantly, you produce art in the context of a racist and sexist society. Your art is going to have elements of racism and sexism, as well as a host of other socially problematic bullshit. Attempting to purge these elements from your work will make your work unpleasantly tepid and no less offensive (indeed, it will often make it more problematic, not less.)
So what's to do? Seems kinda like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Here's my suggestion: Make art that's honest to your own vision, honest to the world you live in, and honest to your audience. And, yes, people are going to be offended. How could they not, if your art is an honest reflection of the offensive society that you both live in? But the important thing is that honest, well-researched, wrestled-with art creates an opportunity to confront and process the problematic material, rather than just dismissing it (as with those who simply brush past issues of, say, racism in their work with 'that's what the muse told me') or sweeping it under the rug (as those who edit all potentially problematic material out of their art do)
To take a game I played recently as an example: Poison'd, which is a game about pirates, includes rape on the list of sins your character may have committed (or might commit in play to particular mechanical effect) and includes rape also in brutalities your character might have suffered. This is really offensive to a fair number of people, it's potentially horribly problematic in play. But it's also honest to the subject matter, to the society and the world that the author and audience live in, and to the themes of the game, which include a lot of cycle-of-abuse and dysfunctional abuse relationships and such.
Check this: To do otherwise (not include rape) would be far worse: it would mean that the game didn't consider rape a sin or a suffering, that a character who blasphemed damaged their Soul in a way that a character who raped did not, that a character who was beaten suffered in a way that a character who was raped did not. That would be way, way worse.
Anyway, that's a few thoughts. |
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| Joshua, you'll like this |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|05:35 pm] |
A fictlet.
"You know, it's funny. I was involved in some early sex-bot trials. Ethically, of course, we needed to motivate them, so we designed AIs that only wanted to have sex, all the time. Anyway, the funny thing was that it didn't work -- they acted just like everyone else." |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|01:40 pm] |
I get unaccountably annoyed when people use the phrase "..., who just happens to be [race], ..."
I realize that this is just a dialectical feature of coastal white American English, which is meant to convey "race isn't important to me, but I feel a need to note it anyway." It's a set phrase, and I shouldn't try to parse it for grammatical meaning, like another sentence. But I do, and thus it annoys me.
Does anyone "just happen" to be their race? Did it "just happen" to them? Like they were walking around, happily white just like everyone else, and they tripped and fell in a puddle of Chinese?
Seriously? That happens?
Because most of the people I know get their race from their biological parents, anything but accidentally. |
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| Current thoughts re: RPG design |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|02:30 pm] |
I realized that there's a strong trend in my latest RPG designs, which is present as sub-text in the previous games, but has become really strong in the designs that I'm presently working on.
I think that the Forge tradition of narrativist design is very strongly focused on what a character decides to do and, by extension, what a player decides to do. There's a great statement of Dogs' premise somewhere, which says something like "the sinner's fate is in your hands. What will you do?" which I think captures the whole thing pretty damned well. It's a pretty great mode of design, and has produced (and will produce) some great games.
There's something which I've been doing lately (and I think is present, but not formally, in Polaris, Breaking the Ice, the Mountain Witch, etc. It's formally present in Spione) which I think is a pretty neat and underexplored area for design. The premise in these games is not based on "what will you do?" That's locked down. It's based on "how will you do it? And why?"
Like, for instance, in HGMO, the two leads are going to have a sexual relationship. The existence of their relationship, and the existence of sex in that relationship, are not on the table. What is on the table is what sort of relationship will they have and how? And that question is wide open, with an infinite number of possible answers, ranging from kidnapping and stockholm syndrome to intense, shameful passion to repressed simmering to open, loving commitment.
There's a similar thing (not with sex) in Clover. Clover is a happy child. Why? How? What does that mean?
I'm really grooving on this design principle right now. It requires a whole new set of techniques and there's a lot of fulfilling stuff there. |
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| Thought for the day |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|12:27 pm] |
From a conv w/ Jonathan last night:
Censors and artists are natural enemies. But censors and big media companies are naturally allies. What does that make artists and big media companies? |
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| Apparently I'm in Nanowrimo |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|10:18 am] |
Or, at least, I did the first day, with two chapters and 2500 words. I figure I'll just see how many days in a row I can top 1500 words.
The novel is about a Mars colony. The population of the colony leans heavily Chinese (600 Chinese, 100 Euros inc. Congolese and Australians, 100 Americans inc. Ecuadoreans, 100 Brazilians, 100 miscellaneous), so I'm leaning heavily on Chinese friends and former teachers for names. For western names, I'm leaning heavily on my friends list. Let me know if you don't want to be used.
One of the fun things about the novel is the politics. Of course, the political structure as-we-know-it gets blown up in the first few chapters. But politics is like food, shelter, sex and religion: humans just can't cope without it. So watching that align and re-align will definitely be fun.
There is also a degree of blowing shit up. How much I've yet to decide. |
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| Spanish translation bleg |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|12:36 am] |
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So I'm poking around deviantart looking for an artist for HGMO. There's a few particularly good artists I'd like to contact but they're from Mexico and operate their pages Spanish. I was wondering if anyone reading this blog would be able to translate a simple introduction message for me (Hello, here's the project, unfortunately I don't speak Spanish, do you know enough English to feel comfortable working in it, basically.) |
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| HGMO playable draft |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|12:14 am] |
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I have prepared a playable draft of HGMO. Those who expressed an interest in playing should e-mail me at taogames@gmail.com for a copy. |
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| HGMO playtested |
[Oct. 25th, 2009|10:54 pm] |
I playtested HGMO with Joe. The game was fantastic, and the smoothest and best first playtest I've ever had. I'm working on a for-public-consumption draft as we speak.
This game is hot. |
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| Thoughts on UI decay |
[Oct. 23rd, 2009|01:47 pm] |
I am shopping for a new backpack, as my beloved nearly decade-old samsonite which is finally nearing the end of its life.
I am struck by how much *worse* backpack design has gotten over the last decade. Examples: it's harder to reach things, pockets are so deep that they go to my elbow, external pockets are located inaccessibly if they exist at all.
This got me thinking: how did this happen? And it occurs to me that UI decays naturally over time, as features are added.
When a new feature is added, it is generally just grafted on to a pre-existing design. As it gets increasingly "dug-in," it occupies more and more of the design space. And, thus, it basically kills any usability of the pre-existing design. In order to get a usable item again, we have to redesign the thing from scratch, taking into account new usage patterns, etc.
A lot of features have been added to backpacks in the last few years (laptop sleeves, ipod cases, cell phone thinguses, etc.) At the same time, this has made the rest of the pack cluttered, poorly designed, and unusable.
I think that this probably applies to a lot of things. For instance, I bet Jono could talk about it with software. |
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| HGMO |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|07:07 pm] |
I have a playable pile of notes for a yaoi-themed RPG. If anyone local wants to playtest it with me (it takes 2-4 players, and I would like to test at every group size) please let me know.
Yaoi (a Japanese acronym for something like no plot, no morals, no point ...) is a genre of romantic gay pornography (in both soft and hard core) targeted at girls. It features hot, hot men who can't help but express their forbidden feelings for each other. There are a bunch of other genre conventions (tops and bottoms have different personalities, etc.) but you get the idea.
The goal with the game (working title: Hot Guys Making Out, or HGMO) is to make a compact, heavily-genre-themed RPG that can be sold primarily to teenaged girls as the target audience. Basically, I want something to hold up at anime cons and say "this is the yaoi role-playing game."
The game has no GM, a structured narration style, and card-based mechanics. Influences include Bliss Stage, Spione, Misery Bubblegum, Breaking the Ice, and S/Lay w/Me.
Right now it's just a pile of notes that doesn't really work without me there. So only locals (or people who will be around Seattle soon). But as soon as I have a playable draft I will let other people know. Showing enthusiasm doesn't hurt. |
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| Worth watching |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|03:11 pm] |
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This has been around the political blogs today. It's moving and worth watching. |
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| PSA |
[Oct. 16th, 2009|10:28 am] |
An internet forum discussion is not Dogs in the Vineyard. You do not get bonus dice for escalating.
Thank you for your time. |
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| The Free Games by Mail project |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|02:47 pm] |
I'm organizing something I call The Free Games by Mail project. It does what it says on the tin. You might be interested as:
1) A designer, of a tiny game.
2) A supporter, providing donations to get the thing rolling.
3) A customer, getting free games, through the mail. |
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| Old School RPG Theory |
[Oct. 14th, 2009|12:01 pm] |
Doing some old school RPG theory.
Surprisingly comforting. |
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