Author Archives: Jeremy Keller - Page 3

Technoir Cover Art

Posted by on May 9, 2011 9 comments

On Friday, I received the cover art for Technoir from the amazing Malcolm McClinton. Feast your eyes on this:

I end up finding myself just staring at this for long periods of time, imagining being in that world. Which is exactly what I wanted the cover to do. I hope it has a similar effect on others.

I’ve done a logo redesign that fits this in with this artwork better which you’ll see soon. I’m also working on the tag lines and back cover stuff. The cover might be my favorite part of the publishing process (if you consider that a separate element from designing, playing, and writing).

Conventional

Posted by on May 4, 2011 5 comments

It’s actually been nice out the last couple days. There was snow falling as recently as Sunday and now there’s sunshine and I can walk around the lake in a t-shirt. And so I am reminded that summer convention season approaches.

It looks like I’ll be at both Origins and Gen Con this year.
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Generation

Posted by on May 2, 2011 21 comments

Audience participation time! I could use your help. While I’m hard at work finishing the first draft of Technoir, I’m wondering how well the overview in the Player’s Guide works for making protagonists. You’ll also need the Twin Cities Metroplex Transmission which has some Connections you’ll need to complete this process. So I’m hoping you can download both documents, make a protag or two, and give me some feedback on the following:

  • Is everything covered by the Player’s Guide? Does it feel like an essential step is missing?
  • Is everything explained clearly? Do certain parts of the process need to be elaborated on?
  • Can you make the protag you want to make? Is something preventing you from creating a character concept that should exist in a cyberpunk setting

Please post your protagonists stats and your feedback in the comments here. And let me know anything else interesting that comes up in the process.

Thanks!

Transmission: Twin Cities Metroplex

Posted by on April 29, 2011 15 comments

So, people are already starting to playtest Technoir, even without the playtest document out yet! That’s amazingly awesome. Between the video I posted, the rules summaries in the Player’s Guide, and questions I’ve been answering in the comments here and on RPGnet, people are able to get a pretty good sense of the game.

So here’s one more piece of the puzzle: the Twin Cities Metroplex Transmission. It has Connections you will need for making a protagonist and a bunch of other plot nodes and stat blocks to make sure you have some content for the game.
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Technoir Dice Mechanics

Posted by on April 27, 2011 10 comments

I wanted to post something about the core mechanic for Technoir. But instead of simply using text, I thought it might make things a bit more fun if I showed you how it works. So here’s a little video demo of the game in action.

Sorry if it’s a bit shaky. Bit difficult to hold an iPhone steady while talking.

That Will Be Money Dollars Please

Posted by on April 25, 2011 2 comments

There’s a trend in games on the lighter end of the spectrum to ditch currency in leu of a game mechanic that simply tells you whether or not you can afford something. And for the record, this is a trend I agree with. I don’t want to keep track of my dollars and pennies for most games. Especially in ones in which equipment is low on the totem pole of character competency. I used this kind of mechanic in Chronica Feudalis, in fact, with its purse system.

But Technoir is different. I wanted it to have that gear-porn element. The gun with the scope needs to be more expensive than one without. I wanted to make sure that the choice of what you buy, at any level, is meaningful. Technology is cheap in the future, but there’s still a cost when everyone is nearly broke. If you’re criminals and thieves, money matters. There comes a point where abstracting all of that becomes more trouble than it’s worth. Read more »

Starting Out

Posted by on April 20, 2011 2 comments

My first ideas when starting a new game design have the biggest impact on the whole process. It’s something to be careful of and respectful of.

Let’s say I get this cool idea for a dice mechanic. Say, step dice attributes + dice pool skills. There’s a lot of assumptions in that little formula. The first is that there are dice at all. The second is that we’re going to have attributes and skills. That means that, if this is our core mechanic, we’re testing competency more than anything else. That probably  means this is an adventure game rather than a story game.[1] So we’re already on the road towards legacy GM/player roles.
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  1. [1] Going by Ryan Macklin’s definitions found here ↩

What Doesn’t Kill You…

Posted by on April 18, 2011 9 comments

I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett off and on over the last few years. I’m a big fan of Hammett-inspired films like Miller’s Crossing and Brick. This is hardboiled fiction at its best as far as I’m concerned. One of the elements that defines a hardboiled protagonist—besides the cynical attitude—is a willingness to face danger. To get hurt, beat up, or even worse in order to do the job. Generally they get punched in the face a lot.

Hardboiled is an influence on cyberpunk, but it is something I am emphasizing even more so in Technoir. In cyberpunk RPGs there is a tendency to spend a couple hours planning in order to get in and out unseen, unscathed. Hardboiled protagonists walk in the front door. They make their presence known. They make people nervous. They shake the tree and see what falls out. The best way to infiltrate enemy headquarters is to walk up to one of their goons, get tasered unconscious, and taken prisoner.
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Kickstart My Heart

Posted by on April 15, 2011 No comments

It’s payday for me today, and I’m going to head over to kickstarter.com to support a couple of projects I’m interested in. Kickstarter seems to be a pretty solid model for funding independent or small-press creators. I’ve never actually backed anything before, so I figure today is a good day to start.

Unless you read my blog through some vector that miraculously doesn’t intersect with any of the Evil Hat crew, you already know about Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I’ve been watching this game’s development for over a year through Daniel Solis’s blog. It looks like it’s going to be nothing short of gorgeous. Daniel used Kickstarter previously to great success with Happy Birthday, Robot! and Do is already well over its goal. For the various milestones it has passed, Daniel and Evil Hat have been adding to the goodies you get at different backing levels. What’s also super cool about this particular kickstarter is that Evil Hat has found a way to allow retailers to get in on the action as well.

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Player’s Guide

Posted by on April 13, 2011 9 comments

In my previous post about hack points, I mentioned a Player’s Guide for Technoir. The Player’s Guide is a 16-page booklet that contains barebones rules for protagonist generation, inflicting Adjectives on other characters, and recovering from those Adjectives. It also has a list of Training Programs, descriptions of the nine Verbs, many Adjective examples, an overview of the favors that Connections can perform, and an Object catalog with a glossary of all the Object tags.

You can likely glean most of how to play the game from this document alone. What it is lacking is information for how everything flows together: how the protagonists, through their Connections, link to the node map and the plot; how the plot nodes relate to each other and how the node map is generated; how inflicting Adjectives can be sequenced into the conflict resolution system; how the Push economy plays. These will all be dealt with in the core book (which is essentially the GM’s guide). Read more »