PROJECT: Grunt

Yes, this is still happening. Albeit slowly. I’m sure you’ll agree Toby’s art is worth waiting for!

The Pretentious Wine Table

Need a snotty and superior description for a wine (or other drink) in your game? Look no further.

Roll 2d4 and then roll on the following tables that many times to get your wine’s characteristics.

D6: 1-2 column 1, 3-4 column 2, 5-6 column 3.

Don’t forget to categorise these descriptions within the following sort of things: Aftertaste, Aroma/Bouquet/Nose, Body, Definition, Finish, Midpalate, Palate, Structure, Texture, Undertone

Example:

Taken from the Queen’s personal reserve only five bottles of Synotian Melon-wine remain in existence.

(2d4, total 4 characteristics)

Column 1: Charming
Column 2: Lavender
Column 2: Lean
Column 3: Sweet

Description: The Queen’s-Label, Melon-wine, is a charming little wine with a lavender bouquet, a lean flavour on the palate and a sweet finish.

Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
1. Acacia	Egg	Orange
2. Accessible	Elderflower	Orange Blossom
3. Acidic	Elegant	Oxidized
4. Aggressive	Eucalyptus	Passion Fruit
5. Alcoholic	Expansive	Pea
6. Almond	Expressive	Peach
7. Aniseed	Extracted	Peanut
8. Appley	Fallen over	Pear
9. Apple Blossom	Farmyardy	Peardrops
10. Apple Peel	Fat	Pebble
11. Apricot	Feminine	Peppermint
12. Asparagus	Fennel	Peppery
13. Baked.	Fig	Peppery Herbaceous
14. Banana	Finesse	Petrolly
15. Barnyard	Firm	Pine
16. Basil	Flabby	Pineapple
17. Beery	Flat	Plastic
18. Beetroot	Fleshy	Plummy
19. Bell Pepper	Flinty	Polished
20. Big	Floral	Polythene
21. Biscuity	Flowery-Fruity	Popcorn
22. Bite	Foxy	Potato
23. Bitter	Fresh	Powerful
24. Black Pepper	Fruit	Prickly
25. Blackberry	Full	Prune
26. Blackcurrant	Garlic	Quince
27. Blackcurrant Leaf	Gas	Racy
28. Blowzy	Gasoline	Raisin
29. Blue Cheese	Geranium	Raspberry
30. Blueberry	Gingerbread	Redcurrant
31. Brazil Nut	Goat	Reticent.
32. Bread	Gooseberry	Rhubarb
33. Bright	Grapefruit	Rich
34. Broadbean	Grapey	Robust
35. Bubble-Gum	Grassy	Rose Petal
36. Burnt	Green	Rotten Egg
37. Burnt Match	Green Apple	Round
38. Burnt Rubber	Green Pepper	Rubber
39. Buttermilk	Greengage	Sassy
40. Butterscotch	Gutsy	Sauerkraut
41. Buttery	Hard	Sharp
42. Cabbage	Harsh	Sherry-like
43. Camphor	Hay	Short
44. Candle-Wax	Hazelnut	Skunk
45. Candy	Heavy	Smokey
46. Candyfloss	Herbaceous	Smoky-Spicy
47. Capsicum	Herbal	Smoky-Toasty-Burnt
48. Caramel	Hollow	Smooth
49. Carnation	Honey	Soapy
50. Cassis	Horse	Soft
51. Cat-Pee	Hot	Sour
52. Cauliflower	Inky	Soy Sauce
53. Cedarwood	Jammy	Spearmint
54. Celery	Kerosene	Spicy
55. Chalk Dust	Lavender	Stables
56. Charming	Lean	Stalky
57. Cheesy	Leathery	Stemmy
58. Cherry	Lemony	Stewed Apple
59. Chewy	Light-Struck	Stilton
60. Chive	Lilac	Strawberry
61. Chocolaty	Lily Of The Valley	Summer Fruits
62. Cigar-box	Lime	Supple
63. Cinnamon	Lime Tree	Sweaty
64. Citrus.	Linalool	Sweaty Saddles
65. Classic	Liquorice	Sweet
66. Clean	Liveliness	Sweet Pepper
67. Clear	Luscious	Tannic
68. Closed	Lychee	Tar
69. Clove	Macaroon	Tarragon
70. Cloying	Magnolia	Tart
71. Coarse	Malt	Tea
72. Cocoa	Mandarin	Thin
73. Coconut	Manure	Thirst-quenching
74. Coffee	Margarine	Tight
75. Compact	Marsh-Mallow	Toasty
76. Complete	Marzipan	Tobacco
77. Complex	Mature	Toffee
78. Concentrated	Mean	Tomato
79. Concoction	Meaty	Tomato Leaf
80. Connected	Mellow	Tropical Fruit
81. Cooked	Melon	Truffle
82. Corky	Metallic	Unoaked
83. Corn-On-The-Cob	Milky	Upfront
84. Cranberry	Mineraly	Urine
85. Creamy	Mint	Vanilla
86. Crisp	Mothball	Vegetal
87. Crust	Mouldy	Vinegar
88. Cucumber	Mouse	Violet
89. Currant Leaf	Muscat	Vivid
90. Delicate	Mushroom	Voluptuous
91. Depth	Musky	Walnut
92. Dirty	Musty	Warm
93. Dirty Dishcloth	Nail-Polish	Watery
94. Dried Fruit	Nervy	Wax & Honey
95. Dried up	Nutty	Wet Dog
96. Dry	Oaky	White Pepper
97. Dusty	Oily	Yeasty
98. Earthy	Old	Young
99. Easy	Onion	Zesty
100. Edgy	Opulent	Zippy

Wine, meths, Brut, it all ends the same way.

A Shiny Review of Agents of SWING

Waking up to a nice review is always a good booster. It’s especially nice when the reviewer seems to ‘grok’ what you were trying for and to appreciate the way you’ve gone about it.

You can buy Agents of SWING on PDF or Hardcopy

Everyone says my reviews are too long and nobody reads them. So here’s my two paragraph summary first: 

Want to see an amazing game that nails down a very slippery and specific genre and consistently and effectively pursues it? Buy this game.

Want a game that is mechanically well-balanced and won’t lead you into crazy problems? Give it a pass.

Now for the lengthy/verbose/nonsensical analysis.

It seems hard to imagine at this late date, when if you wanted to watch every James Bond movie it would take two uninterrupted days, when the deliberate but tense 1970s Bourne novels have been made into a visceral action series, and when Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy can sucker us in with the professionalism of lying, but there was a time in history when espionage and counter-espionage was just coming into pop culture. Of course The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad was a 19th century venture into the popular spy novel (and modern readers will appreciate terrorism as its central conflict instead of the Cold War), but in the 1950s and 60s, the spy-as-hero jumped into prominence, and a good deal of it was an almost countercultural espionage – the spy not as defender of the stodgy status quo, but the swinger, the con artist, Mr. Suave, the femme fatale, and of course, the only person who could tell that the whole Cold War was a sham, a big crazy lie, man.

To some extent this was because the other arm of visible authority, the police officer, was engaged, quite publicly, in a heart-wrenching shift from primarily being concerned with order to primarily being concerned with law. Cops knew as much as everyone else that when they saw fire hoses turned on voting rights activists in Selma that being a police officer had to change. So in addition to the cop who was in touch with the kids, we gained the spy who didn’t play by any rules. And sometimes these spy stories were lighthearted action romps – fantasies about what we’d do if we were trained to the top of our abilities and turned loose in the world with a gun, a quip and some cool gadget nobody else had. 

It’s hard to remember this now when we can count James Bond’s genuine smiles since 1992 on one hand, but Austin Powers is a parody not of Bond but of the goofy/sexy spies that blossomed at the same time, but did not necessarily survive. (I have no idea why people chose to parody swingin’ 60s spies in 1997. Why not parody balloonist adventure tales or picaresques about travelling to the Mysterious East? Those would be just as relevant. But that’s far afield even for my normal rambling review style.)

It’s this fantasy that Agents of SWING targets, and hits, dead on. Not the parody (though I guess you could use it for that) – this is not a satire game, this is a game about that lighthearted fantasy.

Your characters are in an implausible agency, given implausible covers, and must battle against implausible villains, while bedding their unbelievably attractive and somewhat reluctant lieutenants and sorting out ridiculous gadgets. All of these things are given a thorough once-over. The quick-moving FATE 3.0 system (with some changes, see below) is a great setup for this.

It’s always a matter of walking a tightrope when replicating social attitudes of past times that might interfere with people’s enjoyments – Agents of SWING, I feel, does a pretty decent job of emphasizing that players who are women will have opportunities for fun along with those that aren’t. Because the agents are beyond the straitjacketed moralities of the (crumbling, it’s 1967) square world they protect, they are able to forge their own way. You can even play up the tension by selecting Aspects that will emphasize this conflict – and you gain fate points when they cause problems for you, so you’re actually encouraged to think about the issue and bring it to the table with your own spin on it. This game convinced me that FATE’s Aspects (perhaps along with The Shadow of Yesterday’s Keys) are an excellent mechanic for putting those issues into the hands of the players rather than having them feel imposed-upon by a GM or a group. There are a few examples of women characters who are not well-turned, but even if it’s not a bullseye, this game gets a lot of credit from me for aiming at a difficult target and hitting at least within the first ring (to extend the metaphor.)

The game also replaces the normal FATE 3.0 “Spin” with a third “Swing Die” which you can earn, and then spend in future rolls. (It uses the d6-d6 FATE setup rather than Fate dice.) This is a pretty cool way of putting the application of Spin into the hands of the player and prevents something I’ve seen in other FATE games, which is people scratching their heads trying to figure out how to Spin something that doesn’t really fit so that people don’t feel like it’s wasted. This is a really good solution to that – it shifts the probabilities significantly but doesn’t necessarily make it a slam dunk. (You can put your Swing Die on top of your pile of Fate chips too – a nice stack of your player resources that you have available whenever you’re planning for a roll.)

There are a number of ways this product could be improved:

For example, the stunt list doesn’t hyperlink to the description of each stunt, so the list itself is pretty worthless. 

There’s no real explanation of what the NPCs are for or how you decide what NPC stats should be. The advice is just “try to keep it balanced with the player characters”, which is sort of bad advice given that there’s likely to be 3-4 player characters for each villain, and player characters may have a HUGE swing in their abilities to face off against the villain, since they can buy their skills all the way up to +8 from character creation. This is fine for the somewhat lighthearted/cartoony source material, but can easily lead to one or two characters walking off with the game and leaving others feeling useless without some clear guidance on how to create opposition (or tighter instructions at character creation).

I’m not super thrilled with the handouts. While it’s nice to see them divided up, the monospace font makes it hard to work out/remember where things are. (I guess they’re a good starting point and I’m glad they’re there because all games should have handouts in their PDFs, what are you gonna do, make me go to your website? My mouse only clicks so many times per game, pal.) Also, the stunt section of the character sheet doesn’t really give enough space to explain some of the more complicated stunts.

I actually rated this one a bit lower at first because of the difficulty in getting from the player characters to a workable scenario, but I have to reviewer tilt up one because it chases after something very specific, something rarely seen these days, and comes a lot closer than I thought it might when I first began reading the introduction. All in all, this is a pretty special game and it’s one that I’ve returned to many times.

Score: 4/5

Jason C.

Don’t Fuck it up for the Rest of Us

As an indie writer, game publisher and all-round amazing person I spend a lot of time talking to new writers and artists and – unfortunately – that means I run into a lot of horror stories. There are a lot, a LOT of budding artists, layout people and other freelancers upon whom us indie producers rely who are being put off from ever, ever, ever working with indie producers again. Needless to say, this is a bit of a problem for everyone.

This makes my job a lot harder, it makes forming a trust relationship with other freelancers hard and it reflects very poorly on indie/self publishing as a whole.

You want to publish? GREAT! The bar has never been lower which has its pluses and minuses, but if you’re going to invest money you should first invest a little time.

• Images come in different resolutions, 72 dpi is typical screen/web while 300 dpi is the minimum for print. Make sure you know what you need and send the right files!
• At LEAST read the help documents for the POD and other outlets you plan to use, and the software you use. That’ll give you a basic grounding and there’s plenty of free tutorials for just about anything online. Go look.
• Paying someone to edit? Make sure their English is native to where you consider your main market or style to be. American, English and International English are NOT IDENTICAL! Even grammar varies surprisingly.
• Don’t try and cop work for free. You want money out of this don’t you? Something is better than nothing. Publicity isn’t. The only people who might justifiably work for you for free are students needing to learn how briefs and projects work and they need money more than most!
• Pay early, pay often. Cough up the dough, don’t sit on it. You don’t want people riding you for their bar all the time, it’s stressful as hell. Paying on time is also worth about the same money again in terms of reputation and goodwill. If you’re in a pinch later on, these people are more likely to help you out.
• Be – fuckin’ – communicative. The moment that email pings you need to be ON IT! Even if it’s just to say ‘OK’. Artists and writers can’t get on until they know they’re on the right track and that you’re happy.
• Do you have a deadline? DON’T FUCKING LIE! Yes you do! If you say ‘there’s no rush’ you’d better goddamn mean it because people are going to take you at your word and your project is sliding down the priority list. Make one up even if you don’t really have one! Nothing motivates freelancers like a deadline (other than horsewhips).

MotSP: Character Creation and Gear Alpha Draft

‘ere, download this crap and ‘ave a butchers.

MotSP Character Creation α Draft

MotSP: Gear

I’m currently working on armour, shields and weapons for MotSP.

I’ve decided to take a fairly generic approach, with the ability to add ‘options’ to the various armour suits, weapons etc. If I want to do an equipment book later I can come up with all kinds of specifics and so on but for the main book I think a generic approach is probably the best idea.

So what this means is that you might buy a…

Blaster Pistol – d6 damage.
Options: Sights +1 to hit, high-energy Crit 19-20

Carapace Armour – d8 protection
Fireproof – Double protection, Power frame +1 Melee damage.

…and so on.

Still, let me know if there’s any specific weapons, armour or forcefields from SF and Sci-Fantasy that you think are particularly cool and I’ll try to get them in!