Category: Company

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State of Play

After some delays, Rascals is being prepped and packaged, ready to post… I have finished all of the ‘One-of-a-Kind’ backer level pieces, which ended up including a lot more of my drawings than I had expected (my humble apologies to everyone who is about to get more of my attempts to ‘art’ than they bargained for)!

For anyone interested, the TableTop Simulator DLC is a great way to play Rascals remotely, and can be found here.

Speaking of the DLC… using the card images I made for TableTop Simulator, and the wonderful art from Juan Ochoa, there is a deck of premium poker cards available print-on-demand from DriveThruRPG, and you can find them here.

Below is a link to survey about the future of Rascals. If you have, or are interested in Rascals I am keen to read what you would like to see next…

What’s next for Rascals?

Heralds

I’ve written about Heralds previously, it was originally the game I had intended to release for ZineQuest 3, but as I worked on it I realised it needed to be a larger game than would fit comfortably in a zine format. Heralds will be the largest game I have produced so far, and I am really excited to see it taking shape!

So what is Heralds?

Some choose the path, some are chosen, others are called. All accept the risk; all know from scar and memory; the path is not easy. Across rock and ice, through canyons deep and valleys strange, under brutal sun and violent storm, on old paths and new, so venture the Heralds.

Heralds is set in the world of Ashmerl, a world where the ebb of magic has had a profound impact. What was once a united empire has been smashed apart, the old low-ways of the World Beneath, which joined the many Enclaves of the World Above are sealed now, too dangerous to travel. Enclaves which once bustled with trade and wealth have been separated, and forced to survive alone as best they could…

The characters are Heralds of their Enclave, daring the hazardous paths over mountain paths and unknown valleys, looking to reconnect what once was whole. But as the world has changed, so too have the people.

In Heralds, the Enclave where the characters grew up is a vital living element of the game. As players make their characters, they will also build their Enclave: map and history. As a group plays, the characters will grow, change, and develop, and so too will the Enclave.

I am hoping that Heralds will hit Kickstarter a little later this year. I won’t say much more than that right now, as development and writing are still ongoing; but I will have more to share over the next couple of months. Until then, here is an early draft of the cover, with art by the supremely talented Andie Lugtu…

 

I had a few people message to ask about physical copies of my RPG of sky ships and floating islands: Corsairs. I am thrilled to say that physical copies of this zine are now back in stock on the  webstore here.

Or, if you’re US based you can get a copy from Spear Witch, here.

Or in Canada, from Monkey’s Paw Games, here.

I think I have said enough this time around, until next time…

Giles.

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Rascals is available now!

It’s been a busy few weeks. The Kickstarter for Rascals finished midway through last month, and since then I have not been idle…

First, and most importantly, Rascals is available now! You can head to the shop and find the Rascals PDF, or preorder the print copy, as well as snag a copy of the adventure module Operation: Bramble.

Rascals is a science fiction role playing game of action and adventure. You play as ex-special forces, operatives, or crooks, who managed to escape their old lives… peace is a reward only briefly tasted, as something terrible is happening in the shadows that pulls you back into your old lives. Rascals uses it’s own game engine, utilising traditional playing cards and poker chips (I’m hoping to have a deck of Rascals themed cards available as a POD soon). You can check out a free DLC for playing Rascals online through TableTop Simulator here.

Operation: Bramble is an adventure module for Rascals, but could equally be used in any science fiction game. It includes a background and operational outline, as well as the backgrounds, plans, and approaches of three potential adversary groups for the player characters to tangle with. Each adversary group is flavoured differently, meaning the adventure has multiple options to suit the different sorts themes, pacing, and styles that your play group might prefer. After a game with an emphasis on fast paced and over the top action? Prefer a high-tech surgical op? Or maybe a more straight-forward military op is the order of the day… Of course, you can mix and match as desired. Operation: Bramble is a 16 page adventure module, which includes a section that can be used as a player handout, and can be downloaded for free.

Rascals

Rascals

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Of course, as well as being available through the Caradoc Games webstore, Rascals is also available through Itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

Get Rascals through Itch.io
Get Rascals through DTRPG

I’ve sent the files for Rascals off to the printer, and ordered a second run of Corsairs, and both will be available as physical copies from the webstore soon.

Speaking of Corsairs, I recently went back and updated the rules file for Corsairs. As well as fixing up a few errors, and making a few minor clarifications, I went through and added a bunch of bookmarks and hyperlinks that should make navigating the book a whole lot easier. If you purchased Corsairs here, through Itch.io, or on DriveThruRPG, you should be able to find the updated files there!

Corsairs

Corsairs

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Lastly, I am slowly building up a list of stockists… a number of stores around the world where you can grab copies of Corsairs (and soon, Rascals). You can find our list of stockists here, and it’s a list that I hope we will continue to grow!

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Rascals is live!

Rascals is live on Kickstarter now! You can check the project page out here.

On the project page I preview some of the wonderful art created by Juan Ochoa, and you can also see my first foray into creating a project video…

I’m really thrilled with how this project has come together, the black and white interior, supported by the sublime artwork of Juan Ochoa, looks really nice (in my very biased opinion). I can’t wait to see how the project goes!

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On the Cards… A Question of Design

You’ve been called back. Back to the life you thought you had escaped. A foul plot is afoot…

Rascals is an action-adventure science fiction role playing game. It was inspired by such movies as Rogue One, Bourne, The Dirty Dozen, and so on.

Rascals uses traditional playing cards as the core engine for resolving skills tests and challenges. Today I want to talk a little about how this works, and some of the design decisions I made when creating this system.

You can find the pre-launch page to Rascals here, hit Notify to follow the project…

Context

Before I delve into why I made the system this way we need to know how the system actually works.

In Rascals each player will have a hand of cards. When a player undertakes a Challenge, or Reacts to something, they will play a card from their hand into the middle of the table (called the Pot). The GM (called the House), will also play a card according to the Difficulty of the Challenge or React.

  • Easy: The House will draw two cards, will discard the higher card face up, and play the lower card face down into the pot.
  • Average: The House will draw and play a card to the pot.
  • Hard: The House will draw two cards, will discard one face up, and play the other one (note that the House can choose which to play).

Discarding a card face up in an Easy or Hard Challenge will give the player some indication of what they need to succeed. The House may choose the card to play in a Hard challenge, because many adversaries have abilities that can be activated when they play a card of a specific suit. Sure the House may play a card thinking they have a good chance of losing the Challenge, but it might mean that the Adversary gets to do something extra, or special…

Players will redraw cards on Reactions, but not for Challenges they undertake. Cards are the characters inspiration, their drive, and their focus. If they get caught in a series of Challenges – a chase, a complicated engineering problem, heated debate, or firefight, their hand will slowly dwindle. Their options will contract…

Why?

Because in the movies this game is inspired by there is always that dramatic narrative, the heroes are challenged, they are set upon, beat down, they escape and struggle, thrown from one bad situation into another, they are running out of options, out of luck…

Until…

They manage to duck into a cafe and avoid pursuit, find that vet’s clinic and patch themselves up, or lay low in a dive-hotel, giving them a chance to reset, draw breath, plan…

This is the drive behind Rascals, the second act, the false victory leading to despair up to the point where all seems lost, but…

The purpose of this system is to have the characters pushed, to stress their hand and their Hustle (that’s another post), encouraging the players to find ways their characters can break the momentum, change the scene, take control, seize the initiative.

When characters find space in a scene they can use a Second Wind to regain cards or heal some, if they escape a scene they can redraw their hand… it’s about movement and momentum. About changing the ground. It’s about the characters, beat down and hurting, relentlessly pursued, struggling as they roll from one encounter to another, and finally managing to find space, time, to catch their breath, to reform…

This momentum swing – in a narrative arc going from the second to third act and back again – is exactly what the card system in Rascals is designed to reflect. Players should start feeling powerful and in control, slowly feel the pressure mounting as the action builds, then feel the drive to force change – a change of momentum, a change in scene, an escape and reprieve…

Rascals is all about that second act, when things start going sideways for our heroes, when, in the movie theatre, we are on the edge of our seats waiting to see how they’ll escape this one… and the relief and excitement when they do, when they pause the tempo, when they manage to find a way to wrest back control.

Did I mention the prelaunch page? It’s here… go hit Notify!

mockups-design.com
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Rascals, in 3, 2, 1…

Rascals is preparing for launch… Find the prelaunch page and follow along here.

Rascals is a science fiction table top role playing game of action and adventure. The game system uses traditional playing cards and poker chips, and is designed to bring the tension, twists of fortune, and calculated gambles of action adventure stories to the fore. Rascals is ideal for 2-5 players, including the GM.

You are Rascals: ex-special forces, spies, or crooks. Hard boiled types who worked together in the hottest zones during the former unpleasantness. You were some of the few who managed to get out, make a new life, but something has changed all that…

Now the old crew is together again, you Rascals who survived the bloody final years of terrible war, have been pulled back. An abominable plot is unfolding in secret… 

From high-tech cityscapes to shattered habitation domes, through the heaving corridors of stations in chaos to empty transfer stations and the broken worlds beyond… Where will your path lead, and what awaits at journey’s end?

At 36 interior pages, with a 4 page cover, Rascals is bigger than my previous game: Corsairs. Inside you will find the rules for character creation and play, as well as rules for vehicles and space ships. A part of the rules includes a system the GM (called the House) can use to generate the problem the characters face, as well as which character or characters is somehow tied to it.

In addition to the physical zine, when Rascals drops after the Kickstarter ends, I will be adding a free DLC to the Table Top Simulator Workshop, which includes cards, chips, editable character sheets, and everything you need to play the game.

A work in progress… And a big shout out to Michael Jamieson who helped put this together!

Rascals is perfect for an action-fueled campaign, follow the prelaunch page to get notified when it launches!

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Announcing: Rascals…

Kickstarter has officially announced Zine Quest (you can find the link to the KS announcement on my Zine Quest page here, along with a bunch of links and articles I hope anyone thinking of undertaking Zine Quest will find useful).

My project this year is Rascals. In Rascals you play ex-special forces, intelligence operatives, or crooks who operated as a team during the final years of the civil war that wrought havoc on the Network of Star Systems now administered by the New Government.

You thought you had left that life behind, when the peace accords of Luyten B were signed and the ink had dried. but something has happened to pull you back in…

In Rascals your character will be one of four archetypes: The Brains, The Face, The Muscle, or The Stick, each tied to a suit of cards. Characters have archetype powers and tricks they can use to manipulate the outcomes of the challenges they face.

Game play is built around cards, with the players sharing a deck, and the GM having a deck of their own. Poker chips are also used to measure character health and energy (called Hustle), ammo that can be spent for extra hits, as well as power and damage to vehicles and ships.

Rascals will be a 40 page zine, including rules for character creation, creation of the problem the characters face, rules for actions, combat, space ships and vehicles. A lot is packed into a small zine!

I’ll be writing more about the rules and the setting in upcoming posts, as well as dropping the link to the prelaunch page for the Kickstarter… until then, strap in and get ready for a wild ride!

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Locked and Loaded

I was unsure what to do for the 2021 Zine Quest, and I wrote last time how my fantasy RPG, Heralds, was approaching a point where the project was too big to fit comfortably into the Zine Quest format. I could have cut it back, but I like the systems, and I felt it would lose too much if it was cut shorter. I bit the bullet and did what any self-respecting Zine Questee would do, I decided to write a different game.

In fairness I had the core of the system already written up, so I wasn’t coming at it from nothing. I knew the genres and themes I wanted to hit, they were baked into the system I had dusted off. So what did I do?

First, I made a few more notes, and left it at that for a week.

In that week I did three things before really delving into the system, setting, and writing. I worked on finding an artist whose style matched my feel for the setting and game, I looked for fonts that would work in a similar vein, and I started developing the layout and look of the zine.

Normally I tend to get writing first, so this was a departure from the established routine for me. Why did I go this route? To be honest, it was the fact that while I had a feel for the game in terms of what I wanted out of the mechanisms and setting, the setting itself was nebulous, it was feelings and emotion, a pace and rhythm, a soundtrack with no lyrics. I felt that getting a good grip on the visuals of the game would help me ground the the rules and setting, provide inspiration and limitation in equal and needed quantities. I’m glad I did.

I found an artist I am really excited to be working with, I won’t say too much just yet (not until there is something to show alongside), but I will say that I think his work is going to make Rascals look absolutely brilliant.

I started working on the layout. With Corsairs the game was originally envisaged to be more of a old-time worn look, faded leather and the like. With Rascals I wanted to make something stridently black and white, something that would fit within the two-tone rules for Zine Quest, and really sit comfortably within that space. I am really happy with how Rascals is looking at the moment, and I think once the art is dropped in, it will really look amazing.

Lastly I looked at fonts… and well. That’s a whole thing. Finding fonts that fit the style you want, but making sure that they are free for commercial use (or that you can get hold of a license for them), is not as easy as it could be. A lot of the fonts that come with Word or whatever program you happen to use might be free for personal use, but not for commercial use. I looked through a whole slew of fonts before settling on two I really liked. One will be used for all the headings, and the other for the body text. The 3D and gradient overlay effects for the title and contents pages were all done in Affinity, and fit the theme and game perfectly in my opinion.

So, a little update on where I am at in the lead up to Zine Quest 2021. I will be back with more on the subject, and back with some reflections on the year past (and hopes for the year ahead) in another post.

Where-ever you are, I hope you and yours had a lovely Christmas/Holiday period (if you celebrate such things), and a smashing new year (again…).

This article is a part of a series about running a Kickstarter campaign for Zine Quest, you can find the other articles in this series here.

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In a bind…

I’m in a bind. With Zine Quest 3 unofficially officially announced through a number of email responses from Kickstarter posted on Twitter I find myself in the middle of writing and laying out my next project: Heralds.

Heralds is a fantasy role playing game, and it emphasizes home and exploration. A big part of the game is the collective creation of the Enclave (settlement) the characters belong to. This process includes some map making, some populating the Enclave with people, and some generation for the Enclaves network of nearby settlements. Characters are created through a light life-path system, and the creation of the Enclave and the characters happens at the same time. These systems work together to create varied characters, who are uniquely tied to their home, in short, it gives the characters a context. In my various play tests of this system there have always been multiple hooks generated through the creation process, meaning that the first game, games, or even campaign is seeded in the characters and the setting the play group collectively builds. I like how it all works.

I’m in a bind though…

I like how it all works, but the game is going to be bigger than Corsairs, my RPG for the 2020 Zine Quest. Where Corsairs sat at 36 pages front to back cover, I estimate that Heralds will sit closer to 60, and could easily be longer. Yes, it still works as a Zine, and it could work for Zine Quest. However, at that page count it will push the cost of shipping internationally from $8.30 AUD to $13.50. This is not an insignificant jump, and will likely mean that the cost of shipping will be greater than the cost of the game itself (something we who live in Australia are all too familiar with).

Is this too high? I’ll admit that I thought the cost of shipping would push people to opt for the PDF only Backer Level for Corsairs, and you can read here how my expectations on that front were wrong. But is it too much? Am I better off creating a smaller game (I have a few nearly written), and running that game for Zine Quest instead, saving Heralds for a Kickstarter later in 2021, where it wouldn’t be released as a part of the Zine Quest, and would therefore have a little more flexibility in how it could be put together (perfect binding anyone?).

What to do, what to do… I just don’t know where I will go with it right now. Part of me wants to push on with Heralds because I am loving it right now, and part of me wants to take a step back and tell myself to hold off and make it a bigger and better beast that can be released on it’s own two feet later in 2021.

I am at a loss, and yet a decision needs to be made sooner than later so I can focus my attention on getting the Zine Quest project (whatever it is) Zine Quest ready… Hmm…

This article is a part of a series about running a Kickstarter campaign for Zine Quest, you can find the other articles in this series here.

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Done and in the Works…

Speed, Strength, and Wits is complete! Download codes sent to Backers… and with that everything achieved for the Corsairs Kickstarter has been completed and sent.

Corsairs is the core rules book, and includes all the rules for play, character creation, equipment, scoundrels to face off against, and also includes rules for sky ships and sailing.

Smoke and Oakum is the first supplement for Corsairs, and delves into the world of Sky Ships. It includes rules for weather, heights, managing a crew, upgrading a ship, and much more.

Speed, Strength, and Wits is the second supplement for Corsairs, and expands on the rules for characters. Providing 54 new Abilities characters can learn, more nuanced rules for relationships, new conditions, rules for building a refuge, and much more.

All three books are now available to buy, you can find them in the Caradoc Games shop, and also over on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io.

Physical copies of Corsairs are still available, and you can get those through the Caradoc Games shop…

Corsairs

Corsairs

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All three of these books together represents something around 100 pages of content. It started with a Kickstarter during the ZineQuest promotion in February of this year, with the physical copies of the core book having shipped out in August, and the two supplements unlocked as stretch goals have since been released.

The big question for me in regards to Corsairs is where to next? I have a bunch of notes ideas, but I am keen to see what others would like to see from the line. I’m not only interested in seeing what you would like to see released next for Corsairs, but also what format you would like that to take. To that end I have created a survey you can find below…

TAKE THE SURVEY

What else is coming from Caradoc Games?

I have been working on the next game, and at the moment the plan is to launch it via Kickstarter during ZineQuest in 2021. The rules are nearly finished, as is the setting. I just need to start pulling things into a more cohesive whole. I am really excited about this one, and I think it will be a lot of fun. I won’t say more yet, as much as I am itching to do so…

I am also starting to pull some of my shorter games into a different format. I started with Brigands of Sherwood. A silly one-shot about being robbers in Sherwood forest who legitimately want to get rich, but who have to keep giving their loot away thanks to Robin ‘bloody’ Hood. Instead of the A4 layout it’s currently in, I am working on putting it into a brochure format… it’s been fun to play around with Affinity Publisher as I am doing so. I think I will do the same sort of format for Freedom or Toaster, and The Hoppy Pops.

I am hoping that 2021 will be a productive year for Caradoc Games, with lots planned and around the corner, I am quietly excited to see what comes…