At the Table Games

This morning saw the launch of the Within the Devil’s Reach Kickstarter! I am very excited and nervous about doing this but I know that with your help these adventures will be amazing!

I am counting on you, my loyal readers, to help me push this project to be all it can be. Talk about it on forums, talk about it in your local game store, post about it on your blog, and talk about it on your podcasts. Share your excitement with others and back the project if you can. If you talk about Within the Devil’s Reach out in public let me know so that I can send more traffic your way.

Your support and enthusiasm about this project so far has made it worth it already! Keep watching here as I post updates about how the project is going and what plans I have in the future to make Within the Devil’s Reach and the Gears of the Worm God even more awesome. Thank you again for being so completely awesome and supportive, I just can’t say that enough.

The Kickstarter for Within the Devil’s Reach is now live!

When I was designing the first adventure for Within the Devil’s Reach, one thing I did to try and fill players in quickly to the backstory and allow them to put their own stamp on the world, was to include three questions. As the project grew to three adventures I went a bit further and created three questions that bound the group together and then three more questions for each adventure. During playtesting these questions proved their worth time and again.

I have tweeked the questions as I’ve gone along so that they do their job even better. During character creation, probably while players are working out their bonds, the GM will ask the player’s why they came to the town of Devil’s Reach, how they caught the attention of the great wizard Alastor, and why they are serving him. When the players answer the question’s the GM is learning a lot of things about how the group sees Alastor and how they see themselves.

By asking the questions in a leading way GMs are able to bypass some of the more bothersome aspects of founding a group based on a common NPC. The adventures assume that the party is working for Alastor of their own free will and so do the questions. The adventures also assume that Alastor likes or admires the characters and so do the questions. By asking these questions at the start of the campaign you are building a shared history that compliments the bonds that the players are creating between their characters’. Before the players answer the questions the GM knows very little about Alastor but by the end of the questions the great wizard should have a solid personality.

The questions at the start of each adventure allow the GM to use the players’ feedback to customize the adventure for them. These questions are subjective which allows the GM to twist the answers and give the players both what they expect and surprises in equal measure.

Part of what makes the questions so much fun is how the player’s will tend to build on each other’s answers. I’ve seen this in all of my playtest’s so far. I had one player introduce that he had come to Devil’s Reach to help with an outbreak of a plague and another player added in that it was rumored that the new stranger in town was a plague carrier. This sort of snowball effect totally changed the town of Devil’s Reach for that group as well as shifting their focus.

My hope is that each version of Alastor and Devil’s Reach will be unique allowing players to replay the adventures with different groups and have a new experience each time. Using questions to customize the adventure and to tie the adventures and the party together is a theme I plan on keeping up with in each of the books in the Gears of the Worm God cycle. The next book has the party traveling across a section of the world that is full of conflict. As relative nobodies the party will be mostly reacting to events that are taking place but in the fourth and fifth books the party will be taking an active roll in world events. The questions in the coming books will make each campain wildly different while at the same time giving every campaign touchstones that are the same and can be shared.

The Kickstarter for Within the Devil’s Reach is now live!

The ideas behind the Gears of the Worm God cycle of adventure books has steadily grown over the last few weeks. Originally I was thinking I would do everything myself, write the adventures, draw some stick-figure art, rough up some maps, and then put out a free PDF. As I started playtesting and realized how awesome these adventures are I wanted to do more with them.

So I contacted Storn Cook, Dyson Logos, and Tom Cadorette about really making this project sing. All of these guys are professionals and I want to pay them for the fantastic work they are doing. The problem is, I am not what you might think of as well off. My family and I are not starving but we have a strict budget that would allow me to pull together the funds to do a project like this in three or four years (barring emergencies) and I wanted to have Within the Devil’s Reach out when the final release of Dungeon World is ready at this year’s Gencon.

The other big reason I decided to do a Kickstarter was to find out from you, my loyal readers, and the gaming world in general if you adventures for Dungeon World are really what you want. I know that I love adventures especially seeing the different ways that different groups take on the same challenges. How many others are as interested in that as I am? That’s what I aim to find out by doing a Kickstarter. It will also give me an idea of how important it is for you to have a physical copy rather than just a PDF. Knowing that will help me decide if I should print more physical copies or just sell the PDF here.

Doing a Kickstarter is about testing the waters. If it is successful, being able to pay great people to do some amazing work so that you who fund this project can have the best adventures I can bring you. It is about finding out what you want so that I can give it to you. I hope that if Within the Devil’s Reach excites you, you get out there and talk it up to your friends. Get them excited about it and tell them to spread the word as well. Even if you are like me and can’t fund every awesome project that you see I hope you do what I do and try and share the news with everyone you can, on twitter, on facebook, on G+, at your game store, at your game night. Share with them your excitement!

Thank you so much for your continued support! I have already had so many people tell me how excited they are about Within the Devil’s Reach and the Gears of the Worm God cycle that I already feel like a success and I haven’t moved one copy yet! You, my loyal readers, you are awesome and I know with your help we will push this project well over the goal line!

The Kickstarter for Within the Devil’s Reach is now live!

Some of you may be wondering why I’m doing three adventures in one book and I will agree, it is an odd choice when you look back on gaming adventures. I originally intended to put out the first two adventures as one big adventure (there is a clue in the first that leads to the second and at the time I was thinking of them as one adventure) but I decided to break off the second half of the first adventure into it’s own thing and expand on it a bit.

Well I had already planned on including that adventure in the book and both of those adventures and the second (now third) adventure takes place in the same town. So I figured, rather than reintroduce the town of Devil’s Reach in three small books, which would really hike up the page count and thus the price to you, I would combine all three adventures into one and make sure that the story that needs to come to light can come to light if any of the three adventures is played by itself and yet they work together to show a more complete picture.

Another reason is cost. Yes, I already mentioned cost when I was talking about page bloat but this cost would have hurt you, my loyal readers, even more. The cost is in art work. I don’t want to skimp on you guys and so I went to one of the most amazing artists I know (I’ll tell you who in a post later on) and he was more than happy to sign on. The interior art was simple enough to work out but full color cover art can get mighty expensive when you are talking about art of this quality. This made my decision very simple. I could either make three smaller books with each book having a higher price or I could combine the three into one larger book which would cost less than two books to you, my loyal readers.

The final factor that helped decide me when it came to doing three adventures in one book was that I liked the precedent it set for the books to come in the Gears Cycle. Book two, tentatively titled Ghosts from the Past, fits nicely into the three adventure mold, as do books four and five. Book three may be interesting. I’m still playing around with ideas for that one, all of it takes place back in Devil’s Reach and all of the impending dooms are pretty dire, but I have some ideas floating around in my head and like all the rest of the books, I would really recommend playing all the adventures to really get the most out of it.

Some of you may still be scratching your heads wondering what I am thinking and thats ok, grab a copy when it comes out. Decide for yourself if this is a crazy idea. I’m sure this won’t be the last crazy thing I do before all is said and done.