Why, hello there Secret Project Update Club. Remember me? No? Well, here are my updates anyway:

1. Codename Charging Unicorn – Made some progress on this. Got an idea of what I want to include, and will get to writing this soon.
2. Codename Backup Dancer – Recent events have compelled me to maybe consider getting back to work on this, and soon. On the other hand, recent events have also given me a good launch date that’s quite a bit down the line. I haven’t fully decided what way I want to take this.
3. Codename Power Struggle – Another adventure idea. Thankfully I’ve got some help with this, so I’ll get an outline together as soon as I have some free time, and they’ll help walk me through it.
4. Codename Atomica – No change.
5. Codename Frequently Beached Whales – No change.
6. Codename Bats Flying Out Of the House – Those few hours it was supposed to take? I never got around to it. My bad.
7. Codename NaNoWriMo – I bet you don’t know what this codename is for. I’m currently at around 20,000 words. I’m trying to stay ahead in the event that at some point, I don’t get the opportunity to stay ahead.

Excuse of the Many, Many Weeks: Uh… LOOK OVER THERE A DISTRACTION!

Alright, it’s NaNoWriMo time, so although I hope to keep allgeektout updated with one or two posts a week, expect to see less coming from me during the month of November.

In the meantime, however, MacHeist has released a great, FREE bundle to (I assume) kick-off MacHeist 4 – although they haven’t actually announced whether that’s what is going on or not. The bundle has some pretty great software, like:

• WriteRoom is absolutely my favorite piece of software in the bundle. This is a fantastic, distraction-free word processor that takes up the entire screen. It’s normally $25, which I think is a justifiable price, but free is an even better price.
• TinyGrab enhances the default Mac screen capture (Shift-Command-4) and gives you some bonus features, like automatic uploading to their servers to make it easier to share with other people. A great piece of software.

Those are two of five (potentially six, if enough people pick up the bundle) apps that are available for free. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t check this out.

Alright, Zach Houghton of RPG Blog II beat me to writing about what makes Epic RPG unique – he has a very nice summary up on his site here, and anything I could have done would pale in comparison. But I did get a chance to ask Kent Davis, a Partner in Dark Matter Studios, a few questions about the Mark II edition of Epic RPG, so I still have something to bring to the table. Here’s what he had to say.

What’s New in the Mark II Edition of Epic RPG

The largest change we’ve made to the book is the addition of a raft of brand new material. Our online forum community is a great part of our creation process and they’ve had some amazing ideas and suggestions to make Epic better. We’ve added a sweet section on action sequences and chase scenes, included the new Drive mechanic which materially rewards players for working towards their aspirations, and also provided more, more, more examples of all manner of gameplay and rules situations. We also added adult life event tables to the character creation section, bumped up ethos and motivation options by a factor of 10, and streamlined the family occupation and class rolls.

With regard to changes to the current ruleset, we vastly simplified the experience system and implemented gameplay masteries and grandmasteries for every specialty in the game. There are also numerous small tweaks meant to improve player experience. My favorite is the “Point of No Return” rule where dying characters have an opportunity to get in a couple of last cracks on their nemeses with one foot stuck in death’s gate.

Why Wasn’t Magic in the 1st Edition?

Actually, the separate model was from our pilot release of the game, and we incorporated magic into the first version of the Game Manual. That said, it’s pretty simple. People loved the game, but didn’t want to buy four books to play it. We thought folks might like a modular approach, but the overwhelming response we got was that customers wanted to sit down and play with one purchase.

The new setting, Audhum.

Ah, yes! Cold, and spear, and shield. The Audhum setting assumes the dawn of organized civilization. Written language is about two hundred years old. City-states are the largest level of social organizations. Technology is on the verge of the Iron Age, but most of what you’ll find is still bronze. The first great monuments are being built. Every city-state has a hero or two, icons of their people and defenders of their homes. Heroes have often ended wars through single combat at the heads of armies. There are no consistent legal codes and you have what you can hold on to at the point of your spear.

The Audhum gameplay experience is rougher and a bit more savage. There are no ancient civilizations with artifacts waiting to be discovered. The setting is centered in the lower, colder, southern hemisphere of the game world. This is the beginning of civilization. We wanted to create a kind of combination between The Iliad and Conan the Barbarian, with some Beowulf thrown in there.

Does Epic RPG make it harder to convert your own setting?

Actually, we have a lot of folks who come to Epic as a ruleset for their homegrown worlds or to port into other settings that they love. I’d say there’s a solid percentage of our fans who have incorporated Epic into their previously existing worlds.

The Game Manual has some excellent resources for porting various fantasy races to the system, as well as a couple of sections for incorporating the idea of character class into a more diversified character occupation model. The really important part of character creation, organizations and professions, is very simple. All GMs have a ton of organizations inside their worlds already – merchant’s cartels, the duke’s guard, secret societies. That imaginationative leap is the hard part. After that, it’s a matter of assigning skills and secret masteries and that’s it. The cool thing about organizations and professions is that they connect characters to settings in a very potent way. Affiliating at the top of the game with, say, a mercenary company gives the character a set of skills, but it also gives them organizational priorities, rival factions, reputation in the community, superiors and so on. For the GM and the player that provides a lot of opportunity for tons of plot and tons of adventure.

Be sure to check out some of the other Small Press articles going on this week!

Barnes and Noble recently had a press event for their Kindle-competitor, the Nook, and it is pretty much my favorite gadget right now. Wanna know why? Here’s why:

Free in-store reading. You’ll be able to take the Nook to any of Barnes & Noble’s gajillion stores and read one ebook, for free, each time—the same way you might wander into the store, pick up a book and read it for an hour or two. Barnes & Noble is really thinking about how people actually read, which is a great sign: This kind of feature makes the Kindle feel like it’s forcing you to change your reading habits rather than adapting to them.

It’s really an obvious feature, one that feels natural for anyone who’s been in a bookstore, but one that no other eReader has thought of before. It’s features like this that’ll cause the Nook to pull ahead of the Kindle if it can make up for time difference in release.

You can read about some of the other features of the Nook (like sharing with friends, which is pretty much the only thing the Zune has that I wish the iPod did) here.

Berin Kinsman (you might know him better as Uncle Bear) has been turning out a lot of cheap PDF RPG supplements on his blog recently. Here’s some of what he has outright now:

• There’s Imagination’s Toybox, which is his system that uses a very simple ranking of 1 through 10 to explain everyone’s abilities; he’s currently offering the playtest of the system for $1, though he’ll eventually be releasing the final version free. I highly advise picking up the playtest though, because he’s also releasing mini-settings to go along with it on the playtest discussion group.
• He also has out Damn Fine Pi, which is a systemless coffee shop for only $2. It has a set of interesting NPCs, as well as a way to import it into any genre, even fantasy. Definitely worth the low price.
• Finally, there’s Five Dragons, which is $5 for five different NPC dragons. This is the only one I haven’t purchased of the three, but it promises three-dimensional characters that have good points to contrast their flaws.

I asked Uncle Bear if I could ask him a few questions about some of his upcoming projects for Small Press Week, and thankfully he said yes. Here’s the interview, below:

You’ve said that originally you didn’t want to publish under the Uncle Bear name because it had all kinds of baggage you didn’t want to deal with. Now that you have anyway, how do you feel about it?

The original issue had to do with another business in Arizona that had “Uncle Bear” as part of its business name. Now that I’m in New Mexico, it’s a non-issue.

I didn’t want to go with Uncle Bear as a publishing company name because people don’t see it as a company name or  website name, they see it as me. Yes, there’s a lot of sweat equity that I’ve invested into the name over the years, and it’s an identifiable “brand”, but it screams “one guy self-publishing”. While that may be true now, I’m hoping it won’t be in the future. I’m afraid it’s limiting. I’m also seen as a blogger, and no offense to any of the RPG bloggers out their who turn out fantastic stuff, bloggers are generally thought of as amateur writers. Bloggers give their stuff away for free. I’m going to have to battle the perception that I’m now charging for stuff I used to give away for free.

[Since I did the interview, Uncle Bear's already rebranded his site as "Berin Kinsman's Uncle Bear Blog". Here's what he had to say about it:

Did I talk to you about my desire to rebrand? That's the compromise: Berin Kinsman's UncleBear Blog. UncleBear will remain the company name. UncleBear is company/blog/website. Berin Kinman is the person who runs those things. The site will soon include things I'm involved with other than gaming. Thus rebranding "Berin Kinsman" over "Uncle Bear".

Thanks for answering the last minute question on Twitter!]

With Imagination’s Toybox, you’ve decided to go an interesting direction – charging for the playtest and giving away the final product for free. Why did you decide to go in this direction?

People kept telling me that my work was worth something, and that I should get paid. Basically, that was a challenge to those people. It was also a feedback filter. I have a hard drive full of free playtest PDFs that I’ve never looked at. They sit on my hard drive. I know Paizo boasts that the Pathfinder beta got over 50,000 downloads, but I have to wonder what percentage of people did more than glance at it and provide any useful feedback. When I buy a PDF, I’m more inclined to read it. I’m invested. That was my goal, that if people spent  buck on something they’d be more inclined to read it and tell me whether they got their dollar’s worth or whether they felt ripped off. It worked, I think, because I’ve received good feedback so far.

If you’re giving Toybox away for free, how are you planning on making money off of the system?

Settings. I’m not interested in writing rules, I’m interested in designing setting and mini-games. One shots and short campaigns. Toybox is being designed as my house system, easy to tweak and adapt, easy for me to write settings for. I can focus on the stuff I like to write, the fluff, and ignore the crunch. I could do this with any number of open systems or license an existing system, but what I’ve seen is that when you link yourself to third party rules your products tend to go along with the ebb and flow of those rules. This week System X is hot, so if you’re publishing for System X you’re on the upswing. Next week it’s not so hot, so your sales are down. If you’re lucky, the core publisher of System X dies and you end up being the primary source for System X material. I’d rather control my own destiny there, and live or die by my own accomplishments. There’s nothing wrong with tying in to open systems, but my creative choice is to have a house system of my own.

So far, the products you’ve released (besides Imagination’s Toybox, of course) have all been systemless. Once you get Toybox out, will that change, or do you plan to continue to release them all systemless?

Future products will be for Toybox, but because Toybox rates things on a scale of 1 to 10 it should be simple to convert to other systems. So they’ll be kind-of systemless.

You recently announced on Twitter that you were going to do a series of systemless adventures called (I think) “Bad Movie Adventures”. What kind of format are these going to take?

BADFILM Adventures. These are one incarnation of those one-shot adventures and mini-campaigns I was talking about. They’ll all be inspired by public domain movies, most of which can be found loitering around the internet for free. The gamemaster can watch for inspiration, but the plots will vary from the movies a bit in case a player has seen the film.

Besides “Bluebird”, what other movies are you planning to adapt?

Bluebeard was the first one. I chose it at random. I hadn’t even seen it before I set out to adapt it, because it was really a test of Toybox’s strengths and weaknesses. Which was good, because I want to get this down to an art form before I start adapting films I really love. Three that I really want to do are The Killer Shrews, Attack of the Giant Leeches, and Carnival of Souls. The last one in particular will be a challenge to turn into a setting and adventure, but I have an angle in mind.

Any other secret plans or upcoming projects you have for Uncle Bear publishing that you want to share?

Toybox is going to have a twist ending. That’s all I want to say.

One last question – Rolpunk. Where on earth did that come from, and what do you think of the way people reacted to it?

I’m tired of the faction wars. You like that game? Good for you, go play it and extol its virtues in an attempt to win over new players, but don’t tear down some other game to do it. You hate that style of play? Fine, don’t play that way, but don’t spend incessant hours bagging on people who enjoy playing that way. People make me nuts. It was me screaming SHUT UP ALREADY to the internet haters. But it was also written as parody, because I took on some of the aspects of the factions I was addressing to do it. The people that got the joke enjoyed it an moved on. A few people have written pieces that take it seriously and are critical of it, which just makes me laugh. It was meant to make a point, but it wasn’t intended to be taken seriously as a movement.

Uncle Bear, if you see this post, thanks for the great interview!

This is coming about a month and a half later than it should, so sorry about the delay in getting this out.

The first RPG book I owned was the 3.5 PHB – it’s up there in the allgeektout banner pic if you look. It was a few years ago, and I had no idea what was going on. I tried flipping through it more than a few times, but I never really figured out how tabletop RPGs worked, besides something about rolling dice.

Now, however, I am much (well, kind of) wiser, and Paizo sent along a copy of Pathfinder, so I figure it’s time to give the 3.x ruleset another whirl. Here are some random thoughts about it that might possibly considered a review to some people.

FIGHTERS ARE DULL, DOMAINS ARE AWESOME

Something I always suspected about 3.x was the whole fighter situation. I already knew that 3.x feats and 4e feats were two completely different animals, but still, a class that grants me additional proficiencies and feats throughout all my levels? I’m a conceptualizer, not an optimizer, so spending a lot of time picking that stuff out isn’t a lot of fun for me. Plus, I really enjoy getting all new abilities as I level up.

Speaking of conceptualizing, how come I didn’t know about domains before now? I always thought of clerics as a fairly boring class, but domains definitely add some more flavor to them. In fact, the first character I made with Pathfinder was a cleric, and as a side project I’m making some gods specifically so I can combine different domains – not because they necessarily synergize well, but because they sound so cool together.

COMBAT MANEUVERS ARE SLICK

I don’t know anything about the terror that was the grapple rules in 3.x, but of course I have heard of them. I like the CMB rules because it makes a move towards a more unified game mechanic – any action you want to do in combat is 1d20 + a modifier (a very inaccurate generalization, I know). Anything to streamline the rules just a little and make it go a bit faster is a good idea in my book.

Combat Maneuver Defense, though? Eh, I’m not too thrilled with it. It just adds another defense to the list, in a sense moving backwards from what they did with CMB. I understand why they did it, but I’m just not a huge fan – I would have rather had the maneuvers be defended against with one of the three standard saves.

SPELLS, SPELLS, SPELLS

One of the only things I really read in-depth in the 3.5 PHB was the spells section, because, boy were they fun to read. Although I didn’t really understand any of the game terms, I planned out vastly complex scenarios where each spell could be useful.

Pathfinder hasn’t changed that for me. Spells are still incredibly entertaining for me to read through, except now I understand what most of the words mean. So I really enjoy that. What can I say? I’m a magic dork.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Confirmation rolls for critical hits? Ugh. I could not imagine something more killjoy than the adrenaline rush of rolling a nat 20, only to then fail the confirmation roll.

I really like the way the races are laid out. In the 3.5 book, it’s all just kind of a mish-mash of fluff alongside features. In Pathfinder, it’s clearly separated – the top of the page is the fluff, and the bottom is all the racial features. It’s very nice.

The art in this book is amazing. In addition to spells, looking at the art was one of my favorite parts of the 3.5 rulebook, and this kicks it up to 11, and then turns it up a bit more. I love these drawings.

Anyway, needless to say, the Pathfinder rulebook has made a much better impression on me than the 3.5 rulebook. Probably because at this point I mostly understand how RPGs work, but also because it is a beautiful, well-produced book. And the rules are nice too, I guess .

Okay, this is just depressing. Not only did I not make any progress on my projects, but I even forgot to do an update last week. But there’s one upside, and a few changes in the list overall.

I’m trying to nail down my genre for NaNoWriMo this year, and right now (amongst about fifteen other, equally undefined ideas), I’m leaning towards a pulp adventure. The problem is, although I have a vague idea in my mind of what pulp is, I don’t really have a good definition of what pulp is. There’s no denying that pulp is a genre, but it isn’t exactly an officially recognized one, since pulp technically refers to the type of magazine these stories were published in. My question is: can you give me a good definition of pulp, or give me links to some resources about pulp stories? I would really appreciate it.

Scrolls of Destiny is a collection of 10 puzzles from Expy Games. They aren’t written with any setting in mind, and although they do have a fantasy slant, they are easily adapted for other settings. It’s available for $15 at http://games.dungeonmastering.com/, or, with the coupon ILOVEREDDRAGONS, only $12.

All of the puzzles are helpfully ranked by difficulty from one to three stars, making it easy to select the right puzzles for your group. After each puzzle is a printout, which is a nice touch, although they’re a little exciting. Also, each puzzle has some advice on customizing it for your campaign setting, and, even cooler, suggestions for how to incorporate them naturally into the game. I have a tendency to think of puzzles as ways to lock a door or entertain a sphinx, but now I also see them as really cool ways to introduce side-quests.

Unfortunately, all of the puzzles are the same type of puzzle – given a set of clues, figure out who did what, when, and where. Although there are some variations on this type of logic game, mostly they are all the same. If there’s a Scrolls of Destiny II, I would like to see a greater variety of puzzles. This might ruin some of the genre flexibility I mentioned earlier, but it would be worth it to have the variety. Also,

Despite these flaws, Scrolls of Destiny continues to show me the quality work that Expy Games turns out. I can’t wait to see what other products they have in the pipeline.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I received a free copy of Scrolls of Destiny to review from Expy Games.

This is really interesting. Apparently, every year some movie industry insiders send in their favorite unproduced scripts and make “The Black List”. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, there are now 112 unproduced scripts (plus the now-produced Inglorious Basterds) available for download here. I haven’t had time to look at many (if any) of them yet, but some of the ones I have looked at look interesting.

If you don’t want to judge a script by its title, you can read what movies are on the Black List, along with a brief summary, here. Be sure to point out anything that looks good!