Where the love at?

OK, true believers, I have a tale of mystery and intrigue for you. Once upon a time, there was a game released - one that really fired up a bunch of fans and converted others from their dark and misguided ways to the light of True d20 Goodness. It was known by many names - "The One Game," "The First 3rd Generation d20 Game," "Shamelessly d20," "The Best Thing at Gencon Indy 2005," "Spycraft 2.0." The game was well designed, affordable, flexible, and enervated those who looked upon It with a desire to run a Great Homebrew Campaign.

But this game's tale was one of woe, for even though many realized the greatness of this product, they didn't speak with one another, nor spread Its Holy Word across the great and blighted land of the contemporary gaming market. Not a review was found in any of the great halls of RPG.net, GamingReport, d20 Magazine Rack, or EnWorld.

And the Creators were confused as to why this was - how could their game, which excited a base downtrodden by a rough market, succeed so quietly? Why were the fans not at least trying to tell others of the joy that the game brought them? How could the word of mouth remain constrained only to the insular whisperings of the forums rather than the reviews section? If they could write reviews themselves, the Creators most certainly would - but that would be deceitful. So they asked the People so inclined to go forth and spread the Word to draw new faithful to the bosom of Spycraft 2.0 - not for their own profit but for the benefit of the community, the players, and the Game which they loved so.

Seriously. I'll give a cookie and a big wet sloppy kiss to the first person to post a thorough review of 2.0 out there somewhere. It really, REALLY would help us out...

CriMeDB: Bunta Sugawara

Author's note: this is my send-up of IMDB's "Meet So-n-So Actor" feature they use on their front page regularly. I will use CriMeDB - pronounced Cry-em-dee-bee - as a way to introduce you to my favorite little-known stars of crime noir cinema from time to time.




Meet Bunta Sugawara. He is the star of the classic Japanese crime series Battles Without Honor or Humanity (you know, the namesake of that cool song from Kill Bill Vol. 1?), as well as other gritty Yakuza eigas such as Street Gangster and Graveyard of Honor. He is also, as you can see, a total badass. Sugawara was a revolutionary actor in that he led the charge for a new wave in the yakuza-sponsored films that filled Japanese cinema during the 50's and 60's (portraying them as almost honor-bound folk heros) - a new wave of gritty, bloody, brutal, and very honest looks at the savage insular world of the Japanese underground.

Sugawara is a powerhouse actor, and as Shozo in the 5-film Yakuza Papersseries, we follow his spiritual and ethical decay as he sinks from idealistic gangster and loyal comrade to nihilistic thug careening toward self-destruction. He's the Clint Eastwood of his generation, and along with director Kinji Fukasaku, paved the way for a new generation of fantastic tough guy actors and directors such as "Beat" Takashi and Takashi Mike. If you ever have a chance to get a hold of the Yakuza Papers (Battles without Honor or Humanity, Deadly Battle in Hiroshima, Proxy War, Police Tactics and Final Episode), particularly the 2004 DVD set, do it. You shan't regret it.

Good Suggestion

A resident of New Orleans gives Mr. Cheney a helpful tip. Red Staters, hold onto your bibles ;)

The Market

As I mentioned in my earlier post on Gencon, there's still a palpable gloom over the production end of our hobby. I have friends quitting the industry, talked endlessly with publishers and full time professionals about what's gone wrong, see companies spiraling down the drain, 4 guys on horses spotted riding through the game stores...well, not the last one, but there's no denying the RPG industry's taking it on the chin. A 10 year chain of fad games is broken and there's no new developments like CCGs or Clix or Pokemon to bail out a retail industry that has built its structure around the newest, hottest thing. This sends fear out in all directions - down the chain to consumers, who see their fave LGS's closing, and up to publishers, who see sales drop and designers, who see their jobs end or be shored up to save costs. Combine this with the issue that the "industry" is not run with the same level of margins or accounting accuracy as other more traditional ones and there's a lot of doubt to feed and fuel that fear.

Morrus over at EnWorld highlighted a thread on whether the market is dying that I found quite interesting. The thread itself is a monster and full of mis-/dis-/non-information but his summary is quite good. I'd suggest giving it a read.

As for me, well, I still believe that a good game will still find the way. While the RPG market is not necessarily a growth one - often, I think it works at cross purposes to its own growth in many ways - I know there will always be gamers, and they will always be attracted to new, solid, interesting ideas. I have no intention of not releasing Ten Thousand Bullets as a print product, nor to abandon my ambitions to design and print other projects like C:S and it's spinoff product, or many of the other stories I have to tell. For me, it's about reigning in what "success" means. As an independant, small developer, I can call a book that makes $1 after costs a success; in the end, I have set myself up to make another book. I may have to modify my means - frex, using direct sales, PDFs or print on demand options instead of more traditional routes - but I can still succeed there. It's evolve or die time - companies are going to either scale back their expectations, take the tough actions that will keep their doors open, discover new or better ways of doing what they've been doing for the last 10 years, or get the hell out of the way.

Not Too Shabby

Surprisingly accurate, these:

ESTP - "Promotor". Action! When present, things begin to happen. Fiercely competitive. Entrepreneur. Often uses shock effect to get attention. Negotiator par excellence. 4.3% of total population.

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Ain't That the Truth

Your Fortune Is

He who fishes in another man's well often catches crab.

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Snow Crash

After purchasing the book twice over the course of three years, and starting reading it no less than 5 times, I finally finished Neal Stephenson's wonderful cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. His prose is simply electric, his sense of humor offbeat, and his use of slant analogies sublime ("He thrashed weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc," or when describing the damage done to a pirate ship by a minigun "as if Tinkerbell had come by sprinkling hypersonic tungsten shards across the hull"). It's the first book I laughed out loud at since reading Jon Stewart's America: The Book. Highly, highly recommended - long live the Deliverator.