I’ve been asked what that looked like from time to time, and it happened again yesterday on Twitter. So it’s high time I share the pledge here.

Dresden Files RPG Playtest Disclosure Pledge

I recognize my value as a voice to the public about this game.

Therefore, I will talk about my playtest experiences, in public, whether it’s on my blog, my podcast, the forums I frequent, or with the people I meet and game with.

I recognize my value as a grass-roots word-of-mouth sales-force for this product.

Therefore, when I speak publicly about my playtesting experiences, I will do so mindfully, recognizing that what the public does with what I share may not always be what I intend.  I understand this does not mean I should speak with artificial enthusiasm or acclaim, but I should share my enthusiasm and enjoyments when they happen.  When encountering speed bumps and failures along the way, I will speak fairly, and try to preface my comments with the explicit mention that this is an early playtest and some problems are to be expected.  I am responsible for what I say, but I am not an “internet cop”, here—others may say what they say.  Whenever possible, I will share my “off-list” discussions (actual play reports, thoughts as I read the materials, etc) with Evil Hat Productions so they might keep tabs on them.

I recognize the value of keeping the game texts I read private.

Therefore, I will not share those texts, in whole or in excerpted part, with anyone not authorized by Evil Hat Productions.  I understand that any such authorization must come directly from a member of Evil Hat Productions and must be explicit and written.  I also understand that if I think that sharing an excerpt of the text would enhance my public voice or the grass-roots sales-force effort, I will contact Evil Hat Productions and discuss what I’d like to do!

__________________________________________________________

Signature                                                                                                        Date

Printed Name:

Email Address:

Snail Mail Address:

One pledge per player * Please send all signed pledges to Evil Hat Productions

Like, whoa.

I normally do this over on one social media site or another, but I’m taking it easy with social media for a few weeks at least right now, so I thought I’d try doing a Transparency Tuesday over here on my Deadly Fredly blog.

Concept is simple:

• Ask any question here in the comments
• I’ll give you a short (one to three sentence, ish) answer

The intent is for this to be about all things Evil Hat or related, but feel free to take this in whatever direction you care to.

I’ve found that one or more copies of your book were sold outside of countries where the 70% Royalty Option is currently applicable. The 70% Royalty Option is only applicable for sales to customers in these sales territories:

Andorra
Austria
Belgium
Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Monaco
San Marino
Switzerland
Spain
United Kingdom (including Guernsey, Jersey and Isle of Man)
United States
Vatican City

Sales to customers in other locations will receive a 35% royalty. These sales are recorded separately in your royalty reports at the 35% rate.

At this time, the reports don’t show the specific location where your titles were sold. I’ve shared your request for this feature with our business team for consideration as we make future improvements.

Thanks for using Amazon KDP.

I’m not clear on the exact why’s of the 35% thing (I’m pretty sure one of those sales was to a customer in Japan), but that’s certainly curious, isn’t it?

http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/tctnj/we_are_evil_hat_productions_ask_us_anything_ama/

You can order the ebook bundle now, too, if you want to stay all digital (or are, y’know, international and not wanting to pay shipping costs in excess of its cover price).

We’ll be shipping this one mid-June or so if it all works out (we have to print the books & deliver them to the Kickstarter backers who made this all possible first).

I’ll edit this post with links to other sales locales as they become available, so stay tuned if you prefer using DriveThruFiction, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble!

• DriveThruFiction: Available!
• Amazon: Available!
• Barnes & Noble: Available!

What’s it take for our in-preorder Don’t Read This Book to be profitable? This is going to be based on an approximation of the costs of the writing, editing, cover art, printing, and other line items.

So, approximately:

• 400 sales through our webstore of the Don’t Read This Book softcover, or
• 1200 sales through our webstore of the Don’t Read This Book ebook package, or
• 1850 sales through DriveThruFiction, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble of the respective Don’t Read This Book ebook or ebook package, or
• 900 sales through distribution of the Don’t Read This Book softcover, or
• One of the many possible combinations of the above

At the time of this writing our webstore preorder has got 46 softcovers and 48 ebooks sold, which is a fine start; we’re seeing modest performance in our third party ebook vendors (~60 DriveThru, ~25 Amazon, ~2 B&N). In aggregate that adds up to about 20% of the revenue we need in order to make it into the black.

It’d be tempting to look at the above and think, Oh holy crap, I’d better order through Evil Hat! But that’s not necessarily the right conclusion. Sales through those other venues tend to produce more sales through those venues (as do reviews on those sites & such), whereas sales through our webstore stay largely invisible in terms of the collective perception of demand for the product. So, ideally, I’d love to see a big healthy mix of sales through all of those channels. Ultimately, buy where is convenient for you and ideologically comfortable to do so — but once you buy, if you enjoy, please turn someone else on to the book, whether it’s with a review, a blog post, a tweet, or a (gasp!) face to face conversation.

EDIT: Those eager to proclaim the uselessness of print books should take note: the print sales have the best per-sale shot of getting us into the black even in distribution, and for that matter the initial printing only represents about a third of our cost. Drop to an ebooks-only strategy here, and we’d still need 800-ish direct sales of the e-books to get in the black, or over 1200 through Amazon & the like. The whole “print books cost so much more than ebooks to produce” argument, at least with our print run strategy, is on shaky ground. I’ve elected to price the anthology in ebook format at $5 and the softcover at $15; if I was simply making the ebook the cost of the softcover, minus the proportion of the cost of a print run, it’d come out at more like $10. For Evil Hat, new to fiction, I don’t think that a $10 pricepoint for a 50k word anthology is supportable (rather: I have a gut feeling like we’d see fewer than half the sales we get at $5 if we priced it at $10, so the economics dictate the $5 pricepoint). But I’d sure understand the hell out of a publisher who decided to go that route.

This is an anthology of 13 stories by a boatload of crazily talented authors, set in the world of Don’t Rest Your Head. Seriously, check out that author list: Stephen Blackmoore, Harry Connolly, Rich Dansky, Matt Forbeck, Laura Anne Gilman, Will Hindmarch, Mur Lafferty, Robin D. Laws, Ryan Macklin, C.E. Murphy, Josh Roby, Greg Stolze, and Monica Valentinelli.

And, man, these stories. They really mine all the dark corners of promise from the setting. I’m ridiculously pleased.

It’ll ship by early June, but folks who preorder the softcover now will get to download the anthology as well in a variety of ebook formats (PDF, Kindle, Nook, etc). We’re holding off on selling the ebooks solo until we know we’re shipping out the softcovers, so for folks who want to read now now now, the preorder’s the way to go.

Retailer folk: The distributors may not know about this thing yet, but it’s EHP1002, and available for “instant content preorder” support via Bits & Mortar.

Check out the product page for more details!

EDIT: We’ve put up the “all the ebook formats” version as well, now, given the crazy high costs the site’s quoting for international shipping. Have at!

EDIT #2: We’ve got it up for sale at a variety of ebook vendors. Here:

• DriveThruFiction
• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble

If you’ve enjoyed the book and are inclined to post a review on any of those sites, it would help us out a bunch. Please buy wherever is convenient for you! Don’t Read This Book is already enjoying the #1 hot-spot on DriveThruFiction — purchases and reviews help visibility, always!

Prefer your samples in PDF form? Download this one, here, to get all chapters so far.

Chapter Six

Outside New York City

The dinosaur roared, and the Conqueror Ape roared with it.

The dinosaur in question: a Giganotosaurus, its head lifted high, its wretched scream ululating from its rippling throat.

The Conqueror Ape in question: Gorilla Khan, warlord ape and all-around megalomaniac.

Gorilla Khan wore his best outfit today. This day of true conquest, this day the world was made finally to kneel and see its weakness splayed out before all eyes. Armor made of bones and teeth and painted red-and-gold—red for blood, gold for the color of kings—adorned his broad primate’s chest. And upon his head, a helmet made from the skull of a long-dead saber-toothed cat, the colorful plumage of the similarly long-dead archaeopteryx thrust up from a ring mounted in the top of the hand-made helmet.

Both creatures, the cat and the bird, were ones Gorilla Khan hunted and killed himself.

One should wear his conquests, he said. You do not conceal your gifts.

That was why he sat astride this massive reptilian carnivore. Bit in the beast’s mouth, braided leather reins gathered up in one of Khan’s crushing fists.

Let the world see him upon this most glorious of creatures. A creature that died out millions of years ago. Before mankind and the trappings of so-called “civilization.” Before time itself. Before the meteors came and changed everything.

Ahead of them: the Brooklyn Bridge. Beyond it, the rising spires of Manhattan.

In the sky above, the setting sun highlit the circling pterodactyls and the first wave of airships: just a fraction of Gorilla Khan’s invasion fleet.

“Status report,” he barked.

One of his lackeys, a simpering white-furred lowland gorilla, bounded up to the beast and clambered up the side. He hung to Khan’s left, offering a placating smile of primate fangs.

“Most excellent, Mighty Khan, most excellent.”

“I abhor your generalities. I demand specifics, Attaché Gonga. Not your mewling glad-handed bulletins.” To confirm his disgust, Gorilla Khan threatened Gonga with the back of his hand—a hand that did not fall but stayed poised to strike.

“Yes! Yes. Of course.” Gonga had this nervous laugh, a kind of wheezing, growling heh, heh, heh. It held little mirth, and whenever he made the sound, a sudden stink of fear rose. A smell that intoxicated the Conqueror Ape. “The invasion is going… ahh, swimmingly. The humans have begun to dispatch, ahhh, soldiers and police, but they are no match for our own warriors and agents, nor can they, ahhh, hold their own against our technology.”

Technology. Yes. Khan longed to test their weapons on unwilling subjects. Hanging to the side of his Giganotosaurus was what looked to be a long wooden spear with a tip made from a gleaming multi-faceted ruby, a ruby as big as a human child’s fist. But of course it was so much more than just a spear…

Well. Playtime would come.

Gonga continued: “The Centurions have been subdued. All the chapter houses have been taken; many burned to the ground. Those eager do-gooding spirits of the Century Club have been… ahh, sidelined and taken away by our, ahhh, new allies. The minds of the heroes are no longer with their, ahh, umm, bodies.”

Their new allies, indeed. The saurian agents. Willing and able to serve with no interest in leading. A powerful force.

“Anything else?” Khan asked his inferior.

“There is, ahhh, one more thing,” Gonga said, his voice lowering and once more offering that nervous huffing laugh. “We have hit a… a snag.”

Khan roared. Bared fangs first to Gonga, then to the sky.

“Explain, Attaché Gonga.”

“Some of the Centurions, a rare few—”

“Some of them what.”

“A rare few remain, ahhh, unaccounted for, though we are sure that—”

Gorilla Khan backhanded the albino ape hard enough to knock the attaché off the side of his mount. The fool hit the ground and scrambled to once more gain his footing.

“Who?” Khan asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, who! Who has escaped our grasp?”

“Ahhh.” Gonga stood, dusting himself off. “Amelia Stone. Mack Silver. Benjamin Hu. Jet Black. Sally Slick. Ahhh. Reports are coming in of others. Just a few! Just a few.”

Khan let go of the reins, and leapt off his mount.

He landed atop Gonga, once more knocking the pink-eyed simian to the ground. He grabbed tufts of white fur and pulled the weakling’s face close to his own.

“What of my son?” Khan said, voice low.

“Ah. Ahhh. Yes. We have agents inbound as we speak.”

“He’s still there? Still at Oxford?”

Gonga nodded, obsequious smile firmly in place.

“Good.” Gorilla Khan snorted. “I hate this place, Gonga. I hate the people. Their pink-cheeked optimism, their ugly utilitarian architecture, their disgust and misunderstanding of the natural world. But most of all I hate what they did to my boy. They… civilized him. Made him weak. I will change that. I will change him back. Awaken in him what has been awakened in me. For he is Son-of-Khan, and I am Khan.”

The Conqueror Ape let his attaché fall back to the ground.

“Now, Gonga. We march.” Gorilla Khan clambered back up into the custom-made saddle riding the ridges of the monster’s back. He grabbed the reins and pulled them tight.

The beast reared back.

Once more the Giganotosaurus and the Conqueror Ape roared in unison.

Details after the cut.

Prefer your samples in PDF form? Download this one, here, to get all chapters so far.

Chapter Five

New York City

It was bad enough being in the crowd above. It was bad enough having to set foot on the streets of the city and feel anchored to the earth in unspectacular fashion. It was bad enough to have to climb down into the city’s secret bowels through a series of doorways and boltholes.

All of that paled in comparison to being chased through those aforementioned bowels by a shrieking albino hell-a-saur bent on ripping them to shreds.

Mack was not happy.

As his footfalls echoed through the tunnel, he couldn’t help but think of flying over some tropical isle, gazing down at waterfalls and crashing surf—in his mind’s eye he imagined the soft leather of Lucy’s controls in his hand, all her buttons and gauges splayed out before him. It’s why he named his plane with a woman’s name—beyond it being the convention, of course; it was nice to have a woman in his hands who did everything he asked. Predictable as the tickity-tock of a Swiss clock.

Unlike, say, Sally Slick.

The three of them were running together, the beast snapping at their heels—when suddenly she and the light she carried were gone, snuffed out in the darkness. As Mack and Jet barely managed to squeeze into a side tunnel, they found themselves without their third.

No Sally.

And, stranger still, no monster.

“Sally,” Jet said, breathless. Then he called out: “Sally!”

“Shhh!” Mack said, clamping a hand over Jet’s fool mouth. He hissed: “You want to draw that thing’s attention?”

Jet wriggled free. “It’s probably chasing her, you dolt.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m sure they each just went their separate ways.”

Mack felt sure the kid was rolling his eyes. He couldn’t see him in the dark, but a gesture like that, you could hear in a person’s words. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me.”

“I don’t know what she sees in you.”

“Wait. What? Sally sees something in me?”

“No. What? Nothing!”

“No, hold on one second, you just said—”

Their conversation was quickly cut short.

Just behind the two of them, the beast roared. With it came the scent of rotten food in its maw, the belching breath of blood and meat and fur. Its tongue slapping against teeth.

Mack did the only thing Mack knew to do in a situation like this:

He winced and cocked a fist.

A fist he never had to throw.

There came a sound of groaning metal, and a shadow moving to the right of the beast—suddenly, a great gout of white steam bloomed in the air, blasting the creature’s head.

The beast screamed—a horrible sound that cut clean to Mack’s marrow. But then it reared its head and wriggled swiftly backward, twisting its body in such a way so that it managed to turn itself around and flee.

As it did, Mack saw something.

At the back of the creature’s head, Mack caught sight of a tiny glowing spot—soft, diffuse, an eerie icy blue something pulsing against the creature’s leathery flesh. And then Mack could no longer see it, for the beast was fast escaping. He tucked that information away, not sure what it was that clung to the creature…

Or what it meant.

Flame erupted—the light from a hand-held torch illuminating Sally’s face. In her hand she held a wrench, and dangling beside her was the pipe breathing great gouts of steam.

“Boys,” she said over the steam-hiss.

In this light, Mack suddenly found her—

—with her brow slick from the steam and almost glowing, really—

No, no, couldn’t be. This wasn’t—

No.

He liked women like Lucy. Soft, comfortable, putty in his hands.

Jet laughed. “Nice moves, Sally.”

“Don’t I know it.” She gave Mack’s shoulder a little punch and the touch sent a thrill grappling up his arms. A thrill that quickly got the kibosh. “What’s wrong, Silver? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I almost just lost my arm in a dinosaur’s mouth. Pardon me for being rattled.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t try to punch angry dinosaurs,” Jet said.

Sally waved them both ahead. “Hush up and come on. That monster is gone now, but it won’t be for long. That blast of steam wasn’t much more than a whack of a rolled-up newspaper on the nose for a monster like that.”

Mack found himself seeing Sally in a new light as he wrestled with new feelings and…

Well. Mack would’ve rather been wrestling with the monster, instead.

* * *

The door rattled on its hinges against Sally’s boot. Rust whispered from old hinges, hinges made that way from their proximity to the water. A second kick, and a third, and finally the door swung open.

The gray light of a day moving from afternoon into evening hit them like a blinding tide, but it wasn’t long before their eyes adjusted…

And they saw just how much trouble they were really in.

The door opened out of a small marine shed and overlooked the Hudson River. The sinking sun was caught in pools of liquid light, plainly and perfectly highlighting Mack’s heavily-modified Boeing-314 clipper—a “boat plane” that needed no runway as long as it had a good stretch of water. One problem, though:

The boat was guarded by the enemy. A dozen saurian agents—once again projecting their smiling human faces—clustered together like an arrangement of humanoid bowling pins by the end of the floating dock, blocking anybody hoping to get close to Lucy.

They didn’t move. They didn’t even stare at one another.

They just… stood there.

Stock still. Staring forward. Fake reptile smile.

“They got Lucy,” Mack growled.

Jet sighed. “We’re going to need to find another way.”

“They got Lucy.”

“We heard you—”

“Nobody stands in the way of me and my plane.”

Mack started taking off his boots.

“You think that water’s cold?” he asked.

“Frigid,” Sally said.

“Good. I could use a little wake-me-up. I hope you two can swim.”

And with that, Mack ducked low and bolted toward the water.

Whaaaa?

If you’re lucky, your kickstarter campaign will have a day like our most recent Tuesday.

This is the sort of day that “isn’t supposed to happen” in the normal life-cycle of a main sequence kickstarter. Many kickstarters start out with a big opening-day spike that can play out over about three days, then they level off for most of the campaign, then they see a big spike on the final three days.

While we’ve had a good track record so far of upward movement on our graph, the kind of spike we had on April 3rd — at the start of the third week — is more of a rarity, unless something comes along that really points a lot of traffic your way (celebrity shout-outs, for example, or strong coverage on a popular media site). All in all, it was the second strongest day in our campaign, full stop, even including the first three days.

So what happened here?

Aside from the graph you see to the right, the Kickstarter dashboard does not provide a sort of day-to-day data breakdown, particularly of traffic sources. (I’m tempted to contact them & ask for it, but that might be best done after it’s all over.) You can see, tho, that starting the day before, we were already beginning to see an uptick. Just not one on the scale that occurred.

A few notions of what MIGHT have happened come to mind:

• PAX factor: I’m speaking on the Kickstarter panel at PAX East, and that got us on a nifty promo page on the Kickstarter site of the projects of various participants in the PAX East Kickstarter presence.
• We started showing up on the website’s front page in the fiction category.
• New sample chapter came out, on Tuesday.
• We did our weekly update, on Tuesday, announcing new stretch goals involving Harry Connolly and Stephen Blackmoore. (You can see from the above data that we tend to have an update-day bump.)
• We broke $20,000 on Monday, making C. E. Murphy’s novel a certainty, and improving the value proposition of our $10 tier.
• Folks (Including TV/Film writer John Rogers, of Leverage) backed us and tweeted about it.
• We busted the 600 backer mark (now past 700), so there’s some sheer critical mass of numbers potentially going on.
• Some folks got their paychecks at the end of the month, so they were able to make some financial commitments starting Monday.
• Mild increase of the supply of our higher-dollar-value upper tiers.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s a lot of aggregate factors, and it’s entirely possible that our spike came from all of them rather than any particular one.

Luckily, a few days ago I took a snapshot of our usage data, so I can run a comparison to see where the “deltas” are. Here’s the usage data after our banner Tuesday:

So where were the gains? Here:

Nearly a full third of our source data remains mysterious, due to no referrer information coming along to the party. Another third (at least) of our traffic came from the sum total of all the various ways Kickstarter has provided to drive people to our project. The remainder is a spread of all the various other ways we’ve reached out, both directly and through our talented pool of authors.

Ultimately, this doesn’t answer the question “where’d it come from?” so much as to say, “Yep, it is the aggregation of many smaller streams, and a sort of critical mass of several factors at once.”

I’ll take it!

Prefer your samples in PDF form? Download this one, here, to get all chapters so far.

Chapter Four

Oxford University

Professor Khan threw open the bottom drawer of his deck, lifted the false bottom (with a finger hole cut out for one of his massive ape digits) and withdrew the Televisor Talk Box, a bulging bubble screen with a fat black dial underneath and a series of aluminum conduits forming a metal labyrinth (as if for a very tiny mouse) behind it.

Khan drew the box, extended the antenna, and spun the hand-crank.

The screen flared to life.

A blurry black-and-white image showed a library not unlike his own—but upon further inspection one would see this looked equal parts “war room.” The table in the back lined with a single map and a series of tiny flags gave it away, as did the many weapons—sabers and scimitars and blunderbusses—hanging on the visible walls.

The Century Club. Chapter house, London.

And it was empty.

It was never empty. Not once, not ever. Someone always manned the Televisor—necessary to monitor communications, to keep track of emergencies, to send messages between the chapter houses across the world, from Philadelphia to Mumbai to Paris and back again.

“Sir?” Edwin squeaked.

“What is it, boy?”

“What’s that I’m looking at, Professor?”

But Khan didn’t have time to explain. He turned the dial to one of the 12 tic-mark positions—the image warped like melting candle wax and was, for a moment, supplanted by a series of horizontal lines chasing each other.

Then a new image resolved:

The Philadelphia chapter house.

This one, different: less a library and more a Colonial workshop space, which was apt given that it once belonged to Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s second secret illegitimate son, Barnard, served the Century Club as a hero known only as “The Key.”

What wasn’t different was that it, too, was empty.

Khan turned the dial again.

Shanghai, with its giant fish tank walls and foo dog statues: empty.

Paris, with its mirrors and the back window view of the Eiffel Tower: empty.

So too with Mumbai, Havana, Moscow, Sao Paolo.

And then he turned to Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles chapter house—austere with a Spanish mission vibe—was not empty, and for just a moment, Khan’s massive ape heart leapt light and free in his chest.

But then a hard knot formed in his throat.

“That’s the Projector,” Khan said. Mouth dry.

“Who, Professor?”

On screen, a small man with a massive helmet on his head, a helmet that to Khan looked a little like a kitchen colander with a series of wires sprouting from the top like worms or weeds, backed into the back corner of the room. Hand to the helmet. Projecting his psychic waves as he was wont to do.

Three other men advanced on him. Three eerily similar men—same build, same dark suit, same black glasses. Reaching. Smiling.

Their faces flickered. As if they were themselves projections—images inside images, a screen within a screen where the horizontal hold went kablooey. In the skipping stuttering facial flickers, Khan saw their heads replaced with monstrous reptilian ones—soulless eyes, gnashing knife-like teeth, the flesh forming ridges and scales.

“Projector!” Khan barked into the device—and with that, the small man with the big helmet turned toward the screen.

“Khan!” the Projector struggled to say. “The Century Club…”

The trio of saurian malefactors advanced upon the Projector.

Hissing. Tongues licking the air.

“…is under attack!”

“Run!” Khan said. “Run!”

The Projector suddenly tensed his whole body, shrinking even smaller, elbows tucked to his side, knees bent, as if he were ready to spring forward like a tensed-up jackrabbit. But it was not a physical release he sought—

A psychic blast radiated out from his helmet, an opaque ripple that knocked the three men back and, soon as it struck the Televisor on that end—

It destroyed the signal.

A loud squelch of noise drove deep into Khan’s head like a pin puncturing his eardrum and then the visual was lost, replaced with static.

Edwin staggered back, holding his ears.

“Professor, what’s going on?”

Khan pinched the bridge of his simian nose.

The jungle drums—subtle, quiet, but there just the same—thumped in between his heartbeats. Boom ba ba boom ba ba boom ba ba boom.

He pinched hard enough so that they stopped short.

“The Century Club is under attack,” Khan said, repeating the Projector’s dire warning.

“The Century Club? Those people. The ones you—you sometimes help.” Again Edwin hovered. A bundle of nervous energy in a knee-length sleep-shirt.

“I’m just a Professor,” Khan said, rebuffing a statement that was never made.

“I don’t understand.”

“This isn’t me. This isn’t my place. I’m just—I work behind the scenes. Don’t you see that?” Khan stood up suddenly, the chair beneath him rocketing backwards. “I’m just an intellectual. A thinker. That’s my job, you understand: to think.”

Boom ba ba boom ba ba boom.

“Professor, you seem to be rambling—”

Khan paced, and Edwin trailed after like a frittering terrier.

“So think,” Khan exhorted himself, rapping his ape knuckles against his brow. “Think! What did we see? We saw men who were not men. Whose faces were masks—but no! Not masks. Not in the traditional sense. Projections.”

“They looked like lizards—”

“Lizards. Indeed. Reptilian. Saurian. And what was it we saw outside? Pterosaurs. Flying reptiles. Dinosaurs—ancient, extinct—”

“They didn’t look extinct.”

“No, they did not. But the connection is clear just the same—saurian agents and flying dinosaurs. And all the chapter houses, empty save one. Why the Projector?”

“He has a rather spiffy helmet?”

“No.” Khan snapped his fingers—crack. “But also: yes. It’s not the helmet, it’s what the helmet does—it amplifies. It projects. And what does it project?”

“His voice? Nightlights? Talking pictures?”

“His mind powers. His psychic mind powers. That’s why he was the last Centurion left. Because he was battling them on their own turf.”

“Psychic dinosaurs?”

“Psychosaurs,” Khan corrected, as if that had always been the term.

“Ohhh. That’s really quite clever!” Edwin smiled a smile of teeth so crooked it looked like a picket fence blown down in a bad wind. “You are a clever man.”

“Man.” Khan tasted that word. He felt the call of the jungle inside, but quickly tamped it down. “I am a man. Aren’t I, Edwin?”

“That’s what I said, Professor.”

“I am not a beast. It is not the body that makes us but rather the mind—is it not?”

“It… is?”

“It is.”

Khan took a deep breath. He knew his words sounded confident but he only wished what he felt inside radiated that same measure of authority.

No matter.

Khan moved back to the desk, pulled out another item from within the drawer’s secret space. This time: a tube. Opened and unrolled: a map. “We are being invaded, Edwin. First the Centurions are sidelined why? Because they’re the only ones who can stop this cataclysmic intrusion. Take out the guardians and the door becomes unguarded, does it not?”

Khan tapped the map. His finger thumped a location in the Pacific, crinkling against the time-worn blue of a cartographed ocean.

His finger reveaed a series of small islands. A chain of them. Midway between the California coast and Asia. Edwin leaned over and squinted at it through the thick lenses of his glasses.

“The… Hawaiian islands?”

“Indeed, indeed. Location of the Century Club’s most secret chapter house. A fallback position of last resort.”

“How do you know about it?”

Then came a twinkle in Khan’s eye, a gleam of lion’s pride. “Because I helped them choose the location and design it.”

Edwin blinked in apparent awe.

Professor Khan continued: “I’ve never been there, you know? But I think it’s time to change that. Edwin Jasher, do you care to accompany me on an adventure?”

“Me, sir?”

“You heard me, boy.”

Edwin’s face melted into a beacon of unrestrained joy. He said nothing: the look in his eyes was all the answer the erudite ape required.

Khan, meanwhile, felt his own flurry of joy, his own giddy rush—the call to adventure was sounded. But not with a horn, no.

Jungle drums. This call came from the thumping of jungle drums.

We’re coming up on $20,000 with the Dinocalypse Trilogy (and more) Kickstarter campaign, and I wanted to share some data from the dashboard:

When it comes down to it, a Kickstarter campaign doing well (I think I can safely say we’re doing well without that being boasting) is an aggregation of many smaller audiences into a bigger one. You can see, above, how the various means of project discovery on the Kickstarter website helps drive traffic to us as we pick up momentum. You can also see how very potent social media has been for us (which is, itself, an aggregation of many small audiences). What’s left from those is a variety of blog sources, some of which I control directly, some of which represent review sites, community sites, and blogs of the project’s contributing authors. (You’ve heard that we’re offering up novels by Atomic Robo‘s Brian Clevinger and Urban Shaman‘s C. E. Murphy, too, right? And you get them all in e-book for a low backing price? Plus, we’ll announce even more this Tuesday…)

The upshot, then, is that you can’t plan on a “single channel” to bring you success with your kickstarter campaign. You’ve got to think “okay, here’s my one audience … but where are others that I can add into this?” Not a fan of facebook, twitter, G+? Tough — you’ll get another audience if you’re over there, so consider how to establish yourself and gain a following before you launch. Is your project a single creator gig? Well, maybe you should think about how to involve other creatives, too — you’ll get both the fruits of their talents and their audiences when the project launches. Every little bit counts, and it’s only when you start adding all of that up that you can reach for that self-sustaining critical-mass reaction that can really make things fly.

That’s the theory, at least. I’m only 12 days into this thing. Three weeks yet to go, and more kickstarter campaigns beyond this one. We’ll see how well the theory holds up.

Prefer your samples in PDF form? Download this one, here, to get all chapters so far.

Chapter Three

New York City

Mack tuned into the radio on his wrist, dialed to Grey Ghost’s frequency—

And heard only static whispering back: the pops and crackles of dead air.

They thought to follow him, to descend into the sewers to track his radio, but then more of those assassins turned onto the street, all dark suits and black glasses and wide razor mouths. A half-dozen here, another half-dozen marching around the other corner.

The fake-faced killers hadn’t yet spied the Centurions.

Sally pulled them into the lobby of the Empire State Building. Above their heads, the art deco gold leaf relief of the stars and planets in a long line. Beneath them, the cold terrazzo floor.

“They’re coming,” she said.

“They got Ghost?” Jet asked.

“They got Ghost,” Mack said. “What in the name of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is going on? Anybody else feel like those things got in their head?”

“They told me—” Jet began but then decided not to share the whole story. “They told me to go toward the light. I heard it but I didn’t hear it.”

Sally chimed in: “Like they were inside your head.”

Jet nodded. He felt his palms go slick.

“If Flyboy here hadn’t bonked their heads like a pair of island coconuts, those freaks would’ve had me for sure,” Mack said. “Ghost didn’t have a shot.”

“We have to get him back,” Jet said.

“Not yet, kid. We gotta regroup. Get our bearings. See what we’re up against. If they can get in our heads easy as apple pie, then we don’t stand a chance. If this attack really was on us and not on Roosevelt, then it’s time to be extra-cautious.”

Jet felt his face growing red. “Cautious? You? Selfish. That’s what you mean.”

“Hey now! Where’s this coming from, Flyboy?”

“You’re protecting your own hind end, not ours.”

Mack grabbed Jet by his suit. “You’re damn right I am. Somebody has to watch out for A-Number-One. You picking up what I’m laying down?”

“Oh, I’m picking it up,” Jet seethed.

A loud whistle cut through the lobby, echoing. Sally stood there, fingers between her lips. “Everybody listening? Good. Mack’s right, though maybe for the wrong reasons.”

“Hey—” Mack protested, but Sally cut him off with a look.

“We have no defense here. Our only hope is to get to the plane and find our way to another chapter house. Philadelphia, maybe. Regroup. Learn about—”

Outside came screams. Screams of people, yes. But something else, too.

The three of them crept toward the door. Peered out the glass.

Just as a massive winged dinosaur crashed down on a black Buick 41. Denting the car’s hood like it was made of tinfoil.

“That’s a dinosaur,” Mack said.

“It’s not the only one,” Sally said, pointing up. They tilted their heads and glimpsed what little vantage they could—across the sky drifted other winged lizards, darting between massive black dirigibles, blimps lined with strange tribal markings.

“This situation is all wet,” Jet said.

“Not only do we have a bunch of lizard-faced mooks with the ability to get in our heads standing in our way,” Mack said, “but now we got real dinosaurs in our way?”

“And dirigibles of unknown origin,” Jet added.

“Follow me,” Sally said, grabbing the both of them by the crook of their arms and pulling them toward the elevator. She stabbed a button with her wrench.

The elevator dinged.

“My jetpack is long gone,” Jet said, thumbing toward the street. “It’s still out there. We can’t go up. We go up, there’s nowhere else to go.”

“Who said we’re going up?” Sally asked.

She pushed them both inside.

Once in after them, she stabbed the down button.

* * *

Sally explained as she ushered them through the darkened Empire State Building subbasement and toward a locked door marked with a plaque: NO ENTRY.

The Federal government, in all its wisdom and autocracy, decided that it needed a rat’s warren of secret tunnels laced throughout the city’s underground. Hidden evacuation tunnels for government officials, clandestine offices, fake “steam” tunnels and the like.

Using these tunnels, she said, would take them across Manhattan and dump them out at the Hudson—where Lucy sat docked.

The tunnels were twice as dark as night. The air sat still and cold.

“Got it,” Sally said, voice echoing. She fumbled around at the back of her belt, and hanging there she pulled a micro-torch she invented for on-the-go jobs.

Or, of course, to light pitch-black tunnels.

Blue flame erupted in a crackling cone, and as a result, they once again could see.

Mack checked his compass. “We just need to head east.”

Ahead of them, the tunnel was only big enough for one of them—each elbow rubbing along a cement wall. But as they crept along, the space widened and the floor dropped while the ceiling remained the same. It went from being a bog-standard utility tunnel to looking instead like a cathedral that had been buried beneath the earth—the sudden vault of the ceiling and the deco pillars in the wall only helped to complete the illusion.

“How’d you know about these tunnels?” Jet asked.

“Remember the giant rats?” About five years ago, Sally was called to investigate a warren of super-sized rodents beneath the city. She didn’t expect they’d also be super-intelligent. But, so it went—the rats, harmless and actually quite friendly, now had kept to a small island off the coast of Norway. “I had a sandhog show me the way down.”

Mack laughed. “Sandhog.”

“That’s what they’re called.”

“No, no, I know. It’s just—c’mon, doll, that’s funny. Sandhog.”

“I’m not your doll.”

He stiffened. “I know you’re not.”

“The hogs built this city,” Sally asserts through clenched teeth. “Sewers? Subway tunnels? Ever hear of something called the Brooklyn Bridge, smart guy?”

Mack chuffed. “All right, okay, everybody settle down—”

A wretched screech echoed through the tunnels. Stopping the three of them in their tracks. Mack whispered: “Don’t suppose that’s one of your rat pals?”

Sally didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

Suddenly, the ground began to shake. Streamers of dust fell from the ceiling as the ground rumbled.

Another screech. Closer this time.

And the floor shook harder.

“Do we need to run?” Mack asked.

“We need to run,” Sally confirmed.

Jet was about to throw his own two cents into the cup—but behind them, a massive beast with pale, scaled flesh crashed through the wall. In the uncertain light of Sally’s torch they saw milky eyes, a head shaped like an iron forge, a lashing tail thick as an elephant’s leg.

Nobody needed to say it, this time:

They ran, the beast in swift pursuit.

And I do, because I get to look at (and spasmodically refresh) this (click to embiggen):

But it’s important — well before this point — to make sure you have your cold shower handy. In essence, you should prepare for your worst-case success scenario, and make sure that’s acceptable to you, because once you cross that green line above, you’re going to have to deliver (short of canceling the project before its conclusion date).

What’s a worst-case success? It’s the one where the greatest possible proportion of the money you’ve received goes toward your costs-to-deliver. These costs to deliver can be manifold, but I’m going to focus solely on the cost of shipping, because it’s something that, once you spend money on it, “just” gets the product to the customer, and doesn’t produce any lingering positive for you as the publisher/creator (aside from, hopefully, a prompt and pleasant delivery experience for your customer). By contrast, money spent on, say, a print run, at least has a likelihood of producing additional, salable inventory for you — a lingering positive, an asset. Not so with shipping (nor, for that matter, the transaction fees and cut for kickstarter.

I’ll use Dinocalypse as an example, focusing on the moment that we hit our $10,000 “deliver the full trilogy” goal.

First, let’s look at our best case: our $10 tier. Here, the backers get three e-book novels for the cost of 2, and the cost to fulfill — to deliver — those to the customer are very close to nil. If we got 1,000 backers all buying in at this level, we’d hit our $10,000 goal, and we’d only lose money to the kickstarter cut (5% — $500) and the transactional cut for amazon, the payments processor (3-5% — $500). So our best case leaves us with 90% of the actual cash folks put towards the project.

Now, our worst case: that’d have to be our $25 tier, as launched. Here, we’ve got a single book with a shipping budget baked in of about $10. We might be able to shave off a couple bucks from that by trading sweat equity for dollars, packing it ourselves instead of using our shipping service, going for media mail, all that, but for right now we’re looking at a sort of rough, UPS-like basic ground shipment cost. Better to slightly overestimate that, especially, because you’re also on the hook for packing materials (padding and structure are as important as postage here; you want folks to get their spiffs in great shape). If we had 400 people buy at $25, that’s our $10k, but $4,000 of that would be marked for shipping costs. Add the $1k in kickstarter and transactional costs, and that’s $5,000 out of our $10,000. Massive! So our worst case is that this is the only tier folks buy in at, and we walk away with only half the cash we’re looking to have.

Knowing your bracket — in my case, 50%-90% being the actual take — gives you context, expectation, and planning. If I absolutely need all my costs covered, I have to look at that worst-case percentage and ask myself: should I be increasing the target to accommodate the cost of delivery? It’s pure algebra at that point, and will give you a more realistic sense of your ability to get what you’ve got to the people who want it. In my case, knowing that worst-case prepares me for how much cost Evil Hat might have to bear, period, in the face of big success. Potent and valuable information there.

Reality is, almost no project sees uniform backing. I ran the numbers — guesstimated and rough — on what things looked like when we hit $10k yesterday. Roughly eyeballed, it looked like it was coming out to about $1,600 in shipping fees incurred so far, so adding in the $1k transactional costs, meant that we were still likely to see about $7,400 of that to go towards our development costs. That certainly doesn’t cover all of the costs we’re looking at to develop the first three novels, but it’s a nice solid chunk that we’ll have taken care of before/as we take the product to market following the kickstarter campaign. Importantly, seeing that 26% of the cash so far was going towards that stuff did not produce a moment of sticker shock for me — instead, it looks a lot more like “at least we get to keep 24% more than we would in the worst case!” And that, for sanity and for financial planning, is worth gold.

To celebrate, we’re releasing another preview chapter from Dinocalypse Now.

Prefer your samples in PDF form? Download this one, here, to get all chapters so far.

Chapter Two

Oxford University

The drums, the drums, the jungle drums. Screaming monkeys, a cacophony in the canopy above. River waters churned. Birds screeched overhead. The drums thumped and pounded faster and faster, a thunderous hoof-rumble of blood pulsing through the ape’s heart and rattling the brain inside his primate cranium—

“Professor Khan?”

The churning river sounds faded. The screeches of monkeys and the hammering drum-beat were suddenly cut short.

The ape blinked.

He was standing at the lectern.

A class of college-age women in gray sweaters and collared shirts stared at him from a half-moon of seats. One of the students—Maggie Gilroy—had her hand to her mouth.

It was she that spoke.

“Are you all right, Professor?”

Maggie. One of the few women comfortable speaking to him. The rest sat timid, as if he might one day pound the lectern to splinters, vault over the rail, and come at them.

“I’m… fine,” he said in crisp accented English. Each word short, but contained within the guttural growl like rocks tumbling in the deep of his throat. “What was I saying?”

“You were saying how dinosaurs could not have gone extinct and left no descendents in the world. You were noting the research of a Doctor Rudolph Ostarhyde—”

“Yes, yes. I remember now.” He adjusted his houndstooth jacket, and continued the lecture. But all the while, he felt the lectern vibrating with the heart-thudding drums.

* * *

“You’re troubled,” Edwin said.

The boy—that’s how the Professor thought of him, even though he was 19 years old, old enough to fight in wars and have a pint and sire children—tended to hover.

And right now, he was hovering. Like a skittish dragonfly over a pond’s surface.

“I’m troubled by the way you perch on my shoulder like a bird,” Khan said.

“Sorry! Sorry.” Edwin took a step to the side, quickly shuffling around to the other side of the table. All around them were shelves upon shelves of books, dusty and bound in tattered leather, some off shelves and in display beneath glass. This was Khan’s space—not an office, not really. Some derisively referred to it as his “lair.” He let that slide, though he felt the term more than a bit crass. “But something else seems to, ahh, be bothering you.”

“It isn’t. Everything is perfectly normal.” A lie.

“One of the girls, ahh, Maggie, she came to me after class and said—”

“That I stopped speaking.”

“You had another episode.”

“I was just collecting my thoughts, Master Edwin. The university and the women’s college has been good enough to let me push past the classical teachings and begin to instruct the students with a proper, more modern education. This is unfamiliar territory and so sometimes I choose to…” Choose to fugue out and become lost in the drums and the jungle sounds, sounds that appear out of nowhere and draw you in the way a honey cup draws flies. “…sometimes I choose to take time to consider my words. Your human language presents occasional difficulty.”

Another lie. Human language was all he knew. He could not communicate as an ape. He’d met gorillas before. Their chuffs and chest thumps, their grunts and snorts—it was to him just mammalian posturing, animalistic gobbledygook.

Thing was, he and Edwin shared a problem. Not that he’d ever tell the gawky tow-headed boy that, ogling at him from behind that pair of prodigious spectacles.

But Edwin was a child of privilege and shelter. He’d come from a cloistered academic family and was expected to remain in Oxford’s vaunted halls. They assigned Edwin as his assistant. The world to the boy was a place not experienced but rather read about in books.

That, too, was Professor Khan’s problem.

He was a highly intelligent ape. Not just the most intelligent ape in the world, but frankly more intelligent and better read than the majority of humans.

But all of it was theoretical. Learned, not experienced.

It was a problem Chaucer struggled with—the Canterbury Tales author reportedly warred with himself. Was it better to live a sheltered life and write of greater things, or was it wiser instead to experience things yourself?

Khan had little choice in the matter. The world didn’t trust him. They saw what he was and imagined him a beast and a brute: yes, yes, he cleaned up quite nice and was very polite and as erudite as any man, but all the same they suspected it to be a ruse.

Once in a while, heroes from the Century Club would come to him. They would consult. It was them, after all, who brought him here, who gave him a place—and in repayment, he helped plan their missions, helped offer academic support whenever called upon.

But then they always left, didn’t they? Armed with the knowledge he’d given them, they’d go back out into the world to battle whatever threat presented itself: time-traveling pirates or the spiderlings from the recently-discovered Pluto or the clanking robot-men of the Steam-Kaiser. Every time, Khan wished he were out there. Throwing fists. Roaring at the enemy.

Grunting. Chuffing. Screaming the ape language rather than the human one.

That, he felt, was what the drumbeat was trying to tell him.

And he feared what happened when he opened his heart to it.

Soon, he imagined, he might not have much choice.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” Edwin said. Smiling nervously, as he was wont to do.

“I’m excellent.”

“Truly.”

“Yes. Truly.”

* * *

Again: screeching. Inside the hollow of his mind.

Professor Khan stirred, lifting his massive head from its pillow—which was, in fact, not a pillow at all but rather a book on Tibetan cryptozoology.

But the dream—and with it, the sound of screeching—did not fade.

Distant, yes. But it did not soften.

Stranger still: it did not seem to be inside his head this time.

He cleared his throat, stood up at his desk, brushed the scone crumbs from his tartan kilt (it was much easier wearing a kilt than trying to shove his gorilla body into a pair of human trousers), and took off his reading glasses.

Then: footsteps. Plodding, clumsy footsteps racing down steps to here, his “lair”—even before the door flung open and he came tumbling in like an open closet of loose broomsticks, Khan already knew the sound belonged to Edwin.

Edwin. Wearing a long gray nightshirt and sleeping cap. Carrying a small oil lamp; Khan wished the university allowed him to experiment with the “free energy” discovered by Nikola Tesla only just last year. Carrying a lamp with a proper bulb that lit up without any connection to the power source was, to some, like magic: but to Khan, it was proper science.

“Professor,” Edwin said, gulping great heaves of breath. “Professor!”

“Spit it out, lad. It’s late.”

“You must come… you must see.”

The boy’s face wore a mask of horror.

Fine. He seemed shaken—probably found a rat under his bed or a bat above it. Khan urged the boy to lead the way, and the massive gorilla trundled after.

It was a surprise then when Edwin took to the stairs but at the top did not head right toward the dormitory. Instead, he turned left.

To the exit. To the courtyard.

Curious.

Outside, the springtime air of Oxford had teeth, but it didn’t bother the Professor, what with his body being covered in a heavy coat of ape-fur.

Above: a screech.

Khan tilted his head skyward, saw a shadow pass over the moon. A shadow shaped like a bird but much, much larger. Narrow head with backward skull crest. Wings more like that of a bat stretched wide.

“Oh my,” Khan said, breathless.

It was a pterosaur. But much bigger than any of the fossils that had since been discovered. Bigger than pterodactylus, to be sure.

And it was not alone. As one shadow passed, so did another, and another.

Then a dirigible drifted into view, hazy running lamps diffuse in the night.

As Khan’s eyes adjusted, he saw the shadows: dozens of them, some were pterosaurs flying, others great dirigibles drifting.

An invasion force.

Heading toward London.

“Inside boy,” Khan chuffed, grabbing the boy’s bony matchstick arm in his epic primate’s grip. “We must discover the truth of this thing. And quickly.”

In his mind, he heard the drums begin anew.

http://thatshowweroll.libsyn.com/webpage/that-s-how-we-roll-season-03-episode-05-kicking-it-with-chuck-wendig

But when it comes down to it, Facebook is not my preferred paradigm (I use Google Plus to link-share and have longer conversations, and Twitter to do the bulk of my broadcasting, which is echoed over to Facebook, giving me a presence there, but a passive one).

It’s not about the privacy issues — though, to be fair, they exist, and are certainly valid for those who avoid FB like the plague due to them. I’m not a very private person, so privacy issues don’t register on my radar very much. It’s simply the aggregation of little things, from bad (for me) interface choices, to baffling functionality, and so on. So riding shotgun as Chris builds up our presence on Facebook has been an education.

Probably in part due to its, ah, colorful perspective on privacy, Facebook offers companies a LOT more in terms of their ability to understand their audience. Learning about this kind of demographically-insightful visualization of the audience has made it super clear to me why so many companies really prefer to make their primary social media presence on Facebook. Here’s a quick comparison of what sort of insight you can get into your audience on three social media sites I use:

This, my friends, is nuts, and it’s why I think the others still have a lot of work to do in order to effectively eat Facebook’s lunch. Not that they haven’t chomped out some big bites! But this kind of deep data tracking, both of the effectiveness of your message and the composition of the audience you’re reaching, is liquid gold for a business. And that, really, is what Facebook is peddling.

Still doesn’t make me a facebook guy, but I sure understand the why of it better.

Prefer your samples in PDF form? Download this one, here.

Want to learn more? Check out dinocalypse.com!

CHAPTER ONE

New York City

Jet Black fell.

The wind whistled around him, the cold breath of the city a cutting edge. Windows whipped by as he plummeted, his jet pack sparking and hissing, crumpled like a soup can in a lion’s mouth—the illusion completed by the series of very real bite marks perforating the metal.

He felt dizzy. No, it was worse than that. He felt empty—like a hollowed out pumpkin.

Beneath him, the crowd gathered, now looking like little more than colored pins stuck in corkboard—but as he tumbled end over end through the air, jet pack boosters bursting with loud ragged coughs of worthless flame, the little people got bigger and bigger.

Soon, he would crash amongst them. Into them. On them.

Thoughts escaped him like slippery snakes and what the assassin did to him—did to his mind—left him lost and confused.

But one word—a name—continued to rise up out of the fog:

Sally.

He was going to crash in the middle of all those people, into all those supporters and dissenters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but worst of all, he was going to fall in front of Sally Slick. That was the heck of it.

Sally!

* * *

He wanted to impress her.

The heroes of the Century Club caught wind of the assassination attempt on FDR’s life just this morning, but that’s how these things always went: life did not afford the hero easy answers or comfortable timelines. Everything was always by the scrape of the teeth, by one’s chinniest of chin hairs—most heroes not only expected it, but learned to thrive on it.

The campaign scheduled Roosevelt to speak outside the brand spanking new Empire State Building, a shining spire of metal and glass and human ingenuity that was like an extension of man’s own reach, reaching for the stars and the heavens beyond. There, Roosevelt planned to outline the tenets of his Second New Deal, bolstered as he was by a supportive Congress.

The message came in scrawled on a ratty slip of fabric—

The president is going to die.

They mobilized fast. Jet, Sally Slick, Mack Silver, and the Grey Ghost—more than enough of a team to take down any cold-blooded assassin.

Little time remained, affording them no chance to scope out the place beforehand. The president had already arrived, had already wheeled himself onto the dais flanked as he was by Eleanor and all his supporters in their dark suits and broad-brimmed hats, shuffling papers in his lap as he was wont to do.

Sally said she’d stick to the stage. Mack would canvass the crowd. Ghost planned to check the tunnels beneath.

Jet’s job? To go up. Observation deck of the Empire State. Mack said it would afford him a powerful vantage point over the crowd—somehow, Mack appointed himself de facto leader of their little squad, even though Jet had been there longer and Mack was always in and out, sometimes disappearing in his plane for months.

To Jet, it felt like—well, it felt like dismissal. Up top, he wasn’t going to be able to see squat. Just people like ants and cars like little bricks and once again he’d be out of the action and set aside like a child, a child who might accidentally knock over somebody’s coffee cup or spill a saucer of milk. Great. Wonderful.

Aces.

But hey, he was a team player. He did what he had to do.

So he took to the skies as FDR began to speak and he did a steady orbit around the circumference of the building, rising in slow spirals as he ascended. The building was a marvelous feat of architecture—6500 windows, each a glimpse into another world. Or would be, if most of the building were occupied. Way Jet heard it, the building couldn’t fill its offices. Lingering effects of the busted economy. Not a lot of desire and so the building sat mostly empty.

So there Jet was, flying circles around the building, gazing into empty office after empty office and—

Movement.

A dark shape, just a shadow, behind one of the windows.

Time to get a closer look.

Jet pivoted his hips, cocked the wings of his jet pack just so, and hovered there in front of the window, peering past the bright gray reflection of the city and sun.

Nothing.

He planted his hands against the glass and eased his way alongside the building, the way a swimmer might pull himself along the edge of a pool.

There!

In another window, a tall shape—black suit, broad-brim hat.

Jet’s heart leapt in his chest like a snake-bit stallion. Could this be the assassin?

He pulled his wrist radio to his mouth, prepared to tune to Sally’s frequency and—yelling over the din of his portable jet engine, an engine that should burn his legs to crispy cinder-black matchsticks but doesn’t thanks to Sally’s own ingenious suit design—tell her about what he’s seeing. But a little voice inside him gave him pause.

You don’t know what you’re looking at, pal, Jet thought. Could be anything or anyone. Janitor. Sales agent. One of the Secret Service men keeping an eye on the place.

A trickier voice chimed in, too:

And if this is the assassin, then you can handle it. It’s just one killer. Finally you can show them why you belong on this team. You can show Sally why you matter.

Mack would just kick in the window. That’s how he was: act now, think—and often apologize—later. Damn the consequences. Jet was a good boy. Not the type to break windows (well, there was that one time with the first jet booster prototype, blew out all the barn and farmhouse windows in a five mile radius, but he still says that was Sally’s fault).

He’d go in from the top down. Hit the observation deck. Use a door.

Jet pushed away from the building—and gunned it straight up.

To the 86th floor!

Jet’s boots—padded with shock absorbers so, according to Sally, he didn’t shatter his spine every time he came in for a hard landing—thudded against the observation deck, the city splayed out around him.

He found the door, and shouldered it open.

And came face to face with the man in black.

Pale flesh. Dark-lensed glasses in the shadow of a broad-brimmed hat.

But it was his grin that was the most troubling. A wide, shark’s grin with yellowed needle teeth—teeth plainly not human! —stitched from corner to corner.

Those teeth opened. A slow, gassy hiss emitted.

Then they snapped shut.

Jet moved fast: backpedaling as two .45 pistols descended from spring-loaded arm-holsters and leapt into his grip fast as firesparks.

But where Jet moved fast, his opponent did not—the assassin took a slow and measured step forward, that needle-mouthed grin never wavering.

Guns up. Jet bracing for anything.

“Stop right there, assassin,” Jet commanded.

But the man took another step.

Hissing. Pink tongue playing against razor teeth.

“Fine,” Jet said. “You want to play it that way? I can play it that way.”

Thumbs cocked dual pistols.

But before he could do anything to subdue the malefactor, a sharp pain shot through his forehead like a railroad tie blasting clean through his cerebral cortex—

Ghostly waves, like ripples from a pond after a pebble struck the surface, radiated from the man in the black suit, dissipating as they reached Jet.

A pulsing, booming voice erupted suddenly inside Jet’s head.

YOU ARE WEAK, the voice said.

“No,” Jet said, struggling against the voice. He tried to squeeze the triggers—

DROP YOUR WEAPONS, FOR THEY ARE AS INEFFECTIVE AS YOU.

He tried to say something, but his word came out a strangled squawk.

GIVE UP. GIVE IN. SAY GOODBYE.

A warm flare, soft and comfortable, lit bright inside Jet’s mind—the light and heat became a doorway and he saw a way out, saw a way to leave this place and to shed his weakness the way a snake sheds his skin, and for a moment he smelled heady rains and the lush greenhouse odor of a sodden jungle and it all became so clear, so easy.

Give up. Give in. Say goodbye?

Yes.

No.

Sally.

Sally wouldn’t want him to give up. That wasn’t the Centurion way. He’d never earn her respect if he just curled up like a kicked dog.

Fight back. Break free.

Jet staggered backward, one shuffling step at a time. The razor-grinned man continued to match Jet’s every movement, approaching in perfect tandem.

His muscles burned. Every effort set his body and mind on fire. He managed to raise one of the guns but then it felt like a puppet string tugged hard on his hand and his fingers shot open—the weapon clattered to the deck, with his second gun following seconds later.

Backward, backward, ever backward.

His heel struck something. His jetpack clanged against the fence of the deck.

Fight back. Break free.

For Sally.

It was like moving a boulder with just a pinky finger.

Like crawling up a mountain on your belly.

Like pulling the moon to earth with naught but a ratty fraying rope.

But somehow, he exerted the will.

Jet grabbed the fence behind him and spun around with a grunt, then braced himself and triggered the jet engine’s boosters—two hot plumes of flame shot out like fire from a dragon’s nose. The man shrieked, flailing. Yes. Yes!

That voice, again. Thunder in his mind, rumbling:

YOU HAVE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.

Jet looked over his shoulder.

Turns out, ‘cold-blooded assassin’ was more accurate than he ever imagined.

The man’s face—his human face—was gone, dissipated like the illusion it was. Left in his place was a reptilian thing, a smashed saurian rictus with leathery red flesh and foul green eyes—two knife-slash nose-slits sniffed the air above that same horrible needle-tooth maw.

The monster shrieked.

Jet clambered up the fence—

But jaws closed hard around his jetpack. The saurian shriek gave way to the crunch of metal and the snapping of sparks. Jet hit the boosters one more time, again bathing the beast in the flames of his jetpack. This time, the pack was pointed to the floor—

The momentum lifted Jet above the fence and over the edge of the building.

And then the engines died with a sputtering cough and a rattle-clang.

Jet Black fell.

* * *

“What was our hope in 1932?” FDR asked the gathered crowd, his hands gripping hard the sides of his shortened podium. He leaned forward in the chair and told them: “Above all things, the American people wanted peace. Peace of mind instead of a gnawing fear.”

The crowd applauded. Sally stayed off to the side but couldn’t help feeling taken in by the president’s words: she looked forward to a world that didn’t need the likes of her and the other Centurions, a world that had not forgotten the Great War and its cousin, the Great Depression, but instead had moved past them and instead found greatness in better things.

“Americans sought to escape personal terror. They looked for the peace one feels when they have security in their home, safety in their savings, permanence in their jobs.”

Feeling the power of his words drawing her in, Sally steeled herself: Eyes peeled, remember why you’re here! You can agree with him later, but for now he needs our protection. She spied a glimpse of a leather aviator’s cap moving through the crowd:

Mack Silver, refusing to take the damn thing off even though they stood firmly on the ground and were nowhere near the sky. Admit it, she thought, you like it.

You like him.

She quieted that voice with a mental kick.

FDR continued: “…Americans sought peace with other nations and peoples in this time of upheaval, this time of dread unrest. This nation will not fall again toward…”

He continued speaking, but for Sally, the voice was lost.

Because there, in the sky, she saw something. A glint, a tiny dark figure against the endless windows of the Empire State Building, the body turning end over end—

She spied the wings. The suit. The goggles.

Oh, no.

Jet was in trouble.

Falling. Fast.

Good thing Sally knew things about Jet Black’s jetpack that Jet himself didn’t even know. This wasn’t the first time he’s fallen from the sky like a meteor rocketing to earth—last time she did an upgrade on his equipment, she tucked away a parachute in a secret compartment. A parachute that would release with the hit of a single button, a button on a small radio box that Sally happened to carry for times just like this.

She reached for her leather belt, around which hung an array of critical Sally Slick tools—spanner, ball peen hammer, sonic emitter, net gun—and found the box. She moved to quickly unclip it and extend the two pairs of antenna—

Behind her, a footstep.

And a terrible, terrible hiss.

She wheeled in time to see one of the men in dark suits emerge from the line of FDR’s on-stage supporters.

Sally caught a flash of sharp teeth.

Then her mind seized and she found inside her a warm light and the smell of verdant rainforest. Jet…

GO TOWARD THE LIGHT.

The box dropped from her hand.

* * *

Vile thing, the ground. Mack hated it. Hated stomping around on the—well, which was it? The fundament? The firmament? Whatever you called it, he despised it. On the ground he always felt as good as a boat anchor stuck in the sucking mud. Nothing like soaring up there in the skies in Lucy, his heavily-modified Boeing 314 clipper, with the always-escaping horizon providing proof that adventure waited in the distance—

Jet had the right idea. At least, about that.

It was worse here in the crowd. Shoulders and elbows and feet. Mack wasn’t claustrophobic, but he felt like he might soon be if he didn’t get out of this throng.

Sally: so wide-eyed to hear the president speak. Blah blah blah, leaders of nations, proud men, blah blah blah. Just figureheads yapping. Give Mack the tribal chief of a Micronesian cargo cult any day of the week.

She was—well, she was pretty enough. Eyes had that certain twinkle, that go-get-‘em gleam, that sparkle of sticktoitiveness. Sally Slick was the strongest and cleverest woman Mack knew. Hell, she was stronger and smarter than just about anybody he knew, man or woman.

Why didn’t he go after her, then? That was it exactly. Too strong. Too smart. Mack liked them… softer, sweeter, and more apt to put up with his nonsense. Just easier that way. A woman should feel more comfortable in an evening gown than a pair of dusty overalls.

On the stage, his and Sally’s eyes met—

Still, those eyes did twinkle, sparkle, gleam…

She looked up, suddenly. A panicked tilt of the head like a spooked animal.

He moved to follow her gaze, but someone bumped into him. Hard.

“Hey, watch it, Pally!”

Another body shouldered against him from the other direction.

Mack turned, fingers curling into rock-hard fists.

“Push me again and you’re gonna get a taste of—”

Wide eyes. Razor teeth.

BREATHE DEEP AND SURRENDER.

Mack’s breath caught in his chest—he smelled something like tilled earth and heard the rustle of leaves inside the cavern of his mind.

His jaw went slack, his eyes rolled toward the back of his head.

* * *

Sally felt the tidal pull on her own consciousness, drawing her mind deeper and deeper toward that rainforest smell, toward the warm radiating light.

But the crowd knew something was going on, now—they started to murmur and yell, to wake up to the fracas, and it was just enough to pull her back.

Sally dropped to one knee. Her hand darted to the stage, feeling around until it found the box—

Jet!

But again her body seized! Rigid against the psychic assault, her muscles frozen in place.

The assassin stood above her. Grin stretching too wide, teeth like knitting needles. A terrible thought struck her: they’re not going after Roosevelt, they’re coming after us.

But as that struck her, something else struck her assailant:

A mic stand. The stand and microphone—a Volu-Tone mic, square as a brick and just as heavy—cracked the attacker in the side of the head. As the assassin stumbled sideways, Sally caught a deep breath and saw Roosevelt himself sitting there in his chair, wielding the microphone stand as if it were a baseball bat and this was Yankee Stadium.

“Sometimes,” FDR said, “on the road to peace you have to break a few heads.”

Sally’s smiled, swooned, but then realized—

Jet was falling.

Only a few more seconds and that’d be it for him and the crowd.

Sally grabbed the box, stabbed the button and—

* * *

Jet heard a pang of metal behind him; his body jerked hard as a silken parachute blasted out from its secret back panel and caught air with the heads of the crowd staring up at him from less than a hundred feet beneath him.

He waved his hands wildly about—”Clear the way! I’m coming in hard!”

The crowd parted, opening a circle, and Jet’s boots pounded the asphalt. He tucked into a low roll and was already up again, popping the buckles on his pack and letting it thunk against the street. Already the crowd had come alive, not yet caught in the full grip of panic but still hovering about, curiosity still holding them fast.

There!

Jet caught sight of Mack Silver, with his eyes unfocused and mouth hanging agape, caught in the grip of two more assassins—they dragged him through the crowd, heels scraping against pavement.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jet said, sliding through the agitated crowd and coming up behind the two interlopers—just as they turned to hiss at him he grabbed the side of each of their heads and slammed them together. As he did, their costumes—costumes that weren’t real, masks that were just illusions, projections putting forth a false human face—fell away like running water…

Revealing their snarling saurian features.

The one opened its toothy maw and screeched at Jet—

A screech cut short as Mack’s fist fired up from underneath like a breaching whale.

The second of the pair lunged—not with a pair of human hands but rather, a trio of gleaming, black claws—and Jet narrowly ducked out of the way and used the creature’s momentum to further fling the beast into the crowd.

Mack grabbed Jet in a headlock, kissed him on the top of his helmet. “Thanks, kid.”

“We’re the same age,” Jet said, squirming from his grip.

“Sure, sure, I’m just more mature,” Mack said with a wink. “C’mon, Flyboy. Time to regroup. Let’s find Sally and Ghost.”

* * *

She could barely find her voice long enough to say thank you before the Secret Service men were already whisking Roosevelt away, wheeling him to the street and into a car and peeling rubber before disappearing.

At Sally’s feet, her attacker curled up on his side.

But his face was gone. Replaced by a foul reptilian visage. A clear membranous lid slid open and closed over the creature’s eyes, jaw working like the mouth of an oxygen-starved fish. A slow wheeze like the leak in a tire whispered from his puckered scale lips.

He was coming to.

Then: a shadow fell over her.

Sally whipped around, threw a hard fist—

Which Mack caught like a fastball. Even he seemed surprised by its speed and power.

“Whoa, Slick, pull back the reins,” he said. “You’re gonna work up a froth.”

“This wasn’t an attack on the president,” she said.

“What?” Jet asked.

“Nah,” Mack added. “She’s right. It was an attack on us.”

Jet seemed to consider this. “A trap.”

The other two nodded, and in unison said: “A trap.”

Beneath them, the saurian stirred.

“We need to find Ghost and get to Lucy,” Mack said. “And fast.”

Our facebook page, here: https://www.facebook.com/EvilHatProductions

800+ Likes: UNLOCKED: Race to Adventure front box cover
900+ Likes: LOCKED: Stay tuned…
1000+ Likes: LOCKED: Race to Adventure back box cover
1100+ Likes: LOCKED: Stay tuned..
1200+ Likes: LOCKED: Stay tuned..

Watch the skies.

(Link)

So, that’s awesome. But why have we done it? Why have we created a “A Spirit of the Century™ Feature” for a role-playing game that’s six years old?

In a way, the answer’s simple: That’s not what we’ve done.

Here’s what I’m getting at: while Spirit of the Century, the roleplaying game, is six years old (or thereabouts), we’re taking the world of that RPG and turning it into a brand — a proper one, that we’re extending into other areas.

In the coming months you’ll see us ask, via kickstarter, for your help in launching a fiction line under the Evil Hat banner — the first novel, Dinocalypse Now, will be set in the Spirit of the Century universe. Soon after, we’ll be pushing into the strange and wonderful land of board and card games, with Race to Adventure! and Zeppelin Armada. And, yeah, we’ve got a RPG project or two in mind in that mix, too.

So ultimately, while the RPG and its title is six years old, the real establishment of the Spirit of the Century™ brand, trademark symbol included, begins today.

We hope you’ll join us as we take to the skies!

What’s probably been most interesting about this process is the exploration of what it means to take an established brand, and suddenly give it a personality. Animating your logo does that, in spades. Supposed we’d had the Evil Hat laugh; are people going to respond well to that, or are they going to feel laughed at? Suppose we’d gone for a dark, hard-rock, edgy vibe — that certainly might fit one way of thinking about our stuff, but we’re also the company that does Spirit of the Century and Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. We’ve got a light-hearted side that undercuts the “evil”.

So part of what we had to do here was quantify the brand’s personality. What we wanted to zero in on was the kind of “evil” that entertains us — as games do. A sly, co-conspiratorial hat. One that invites you under its brim. From the music selection to the specific choices in the animation, that’s where we aimed and, I think, where we’ve landed.

It’s very exciting. Makes things feel like a “real company” all of a sudden, in a new way.

That’s not to say Jeremy didn’t try some other excellent choices. Here’s two earlier drafts that we passed on, either because something about the animation felt off, or because it narrowed or changed the brand message in a way we didn’t like. That’s not to say these aren’t awesome — because they are — so much as to say there’s more to animating your logo, to ascribing a persona to your brand, than simply “be awesome”.

Jeremy’s available for work, by the by.

Assuming they’re already working on a game, I’m usually tempted to say, “Congratulations, you have,” and leave it there.

But to dig in just a little, I have some short, sweet, and super brief answers to the usual questions lurking in my brain, and the latest such inquiry to cross my door did me the great courtesy of asking nearly all of the usual questions. So here is my not very detailed, super opinionated FAQ. Call it a quick dash of Dear Deadly, if you like.

How do I start?

Small. Do stuff for free. Get it on a blog. Playtest it. Get others to playtest it without you in the room. Hook into design communities where you can, on forums (story-games, the forge, RPG.net) and social media. Go to your local regional conventions, and run slots of your game there. If you can make it to New Jersey in November, above all, bring your design to Metatopia for some tough, needed love from experts.

Where do I start?

See above.

How do I publish?

See above. But also consider platforms like Lulu and DriveThruRPG. Invest very little up front; until you’ve proven yourself, and importantly, until you’ve found an audience willing to buy your point of view, it’s not worth losing a ton of money.

Do I need to start up a company first?

You could, but it’s not a requirement.

Where can I advertise my RPG?

Ads are an iffy bet. You’ll do better to build strong word of mouth buzz through actual play experiences. That involves going to lots of conventions, or getting fans who’ll do it for you.

Should I go to cons and run games of it to entice people?

Yes.

Expect it to take years.

And be ready to hate your game at some point — all designers go through it, me included. Push past it. Step away from it. Work on another thing. Come back around and rediscover what was good about it. Use the distance to get clarity on what’s broken, and fix it.

Communicate with your public at every possible turn. Do not shie away from it. Let them see behind the curtain. You do not have secret private information that must be kept in the dark. Folks will appreciate the trust.