Fairy Colours

Colour

This month’s theme is colour and what it can mean in story and games.

Art Produced by Nolan Nasser for Letiman Games upcoming Kickstarter

Fairies’ Colours

Colour is a big part of our world, we use it in many contexts and each colour can have multiple important meanings, so it only makes sense that colour is a big part of the fae world too. Different colours can show what powers the fae may have or what they are linked to within the world. This time I’m going to talk about the small ones with wings, fairies themselves (especially the small pixies), since they can come in all the colours of the rainbow though the most common colours for these little guys are green, blue, white, purple and orange.

This piece talks about how they can be seen within popular culture: stories, books, and games.

They show their colour in a few different ways: skin, wings, clothing, their fairy dust, or their glow. A lot of fairies have peach coloured skin and wear clothing or have wings of one particular colour, this can be any colour, such as pink or yellow or reddish-brown/orange but that colour usually links them to something like a flower or season.

Plant fairies are one example of these nature-linked fae, each fairy is linked a type of plant, most often flowers but those can include the flowers found on trees. They not very powerful and their job is to help their plant grow and spread. The flower fairies that were depicted by Cicely Mary Barker in the 1920s are a form of this type of fairies, the art work is less than a century old but the concept that there are little fairies for plants helping them grow and that live within them is eons old.

Continue reading →

Comments

Concept Cards vs. Online Random Generators

If you’re reading this, you have access to the internet. And if you have access to the internet, you have free access to random generators for anything you can imagine: characterstreasures and much more.

But we feel that Concept Cards offer something uniquely valuable, which is why we make them. So I’d like to take today’s post to explain a few of the things that make Concept Cards special.

They’re Physical

Everyone knows that tabletop roleplayers tend to prefer physical tools to digital ones, but it’s not always obvious why.

Why roll dice when you could use an RNG? Why meet in person when you could roleplay online? Continue reading →

Comments

Concept Cards – Finding Fantasy

I’ve been talking this month about the Modern Range of Concept Cards – but the original ones do still exist, and are still available – indeed they’re slightly more available now as we’ve done some reorganisation.

If you’re interested in them, but unsure, you can check out a sampler deck (with 54 cards) for free.

If that whets your appetite, then you can pick up the full decks digitally on DriveThruRPG or physically on BackerKit. We’ll also be listed soon on Apprentice Games

Be well, and enjoy the Sampler

-Ste

Comments

Modern Concept: First Look

Before I start, I’d like to mention that we’ll be releasing a freebie from Jigsaw Fantasy this Thursday, and every Third Thursday of the month from now on.

We had a meeting today, hoping to iron out our full plans for Modern Concept Cards, but the results were inconclusive, we’ve still got some open questions in the deck designs for the Modern Day Concept Cards – the biggest question of which is how we’ll be launching them. There are two different plans in place, fighting for implementation.

We know that the first deck we’ll be doing is Modern Characters, but we’re not sure what will be going alongside it: Either it will be two split decks (High Flyers and Superheroes, Urban Fantasy and Cyberpunk) or it will be one whole themed deck (likely Urban Fantasy)

If it’s a whole themed deck then it’ll take a little longer to get to the Organisations decks, as we’ll do the other two themes in a separate kickstarter.

Here’s a sample Urban Fantasy Character as it would appear in a full deck:

SampleUrbFanCha

And here’s a sample Cyberpunk Organisation as it would appear in a split deck:

SampleCyberOrg

Let us know your thoughts on Facebook

Be Well

-Ste

Comments

Modern Concepts: Characters and What?

As with last week today’s post is about the upcoming Modern Concept Cards. We’re going to be starting with Characters, as we did with Fantasy Concept Cards, but beyond that the genres are rather different in terms of needs. We could simply do one set of Modern Concept Cards, sticking with Characters only, but that would likely be leaving demand unfilled – so we’ve been planning ahead for what could follow it up.

A deck of modern day Creatures would likely interest no-one, there are only so many different dogs, cats, rats and rabbits one can write about interestingly – and I don’t think we could manage 56.

A deck of modern day Treasures would be odd – modern day campaigns rarely focus on the kind of treasure-gathering adventures often seen in medieval fantasy – but it could be done, and would see some use, with items such as laptops with hidden partitions, diamonds hidden in a matchbox, fake IDs, and suchlike. Still, the expansion sections (Urban Fantasy, Superheroes and Cyberpunk) could all do interesting items, so it might well be worth considering doing in a slightly different split than we have planned for the characters – avoiding the base Modern Day deck entirely.

A deck of Modern Plots would work fine; jobs, heists, assassinations, political events, etc. it would likely be very useful, just as our fantasy Plot Hooks deck is. But it’s also a very hard deck for us to write – we struggled greatly in writing Plot Hooks – and while the end product is probably worth it we’d need to be absolutely certain we were both prepared and had a significant market before we considered going through that again.

Of the fantasy decks that leaves Locations – the first port of call after Characters because they’re something we so often create for our own games and we can fit so much plot potential within such a deck. But somehow when looking at both Modern Locations and Superhero Locations we found that there was something off about them – in most cases only one suit was truly interesting. Clubs as danger sits badly in the Modern Day decks, outside of the subgenres and wartime the modern world is mostly safe – diamonds as wealth worked okay, but it feels flat – spades as structure was too often simply another standard building – hearts  was where all the interest lay, the inhabitants of the location, who they worked for and with.

So we talked it over and decided that we were looking at things wrong. For medieval fantasy locations are a key feature of the tale as you travel from place to place encountering difficulties along the way – but in modern stories they’re not that important, they’re more like the backdrop. For the second set of Modern Decks we’re looking at focusing on that one suit in locations that mattered – the hearts – and doing a deck of…

Modern Organisations

As a new deck type this required some significant discussion, but we think we’ve worked out how Organisations will work.

So come back next week to see the structure of an example Character and Organisation from the modern deck – the formatting will be far from final, but we’d certainly appreciate your feedback.

Be Well

-Ste

Comments

Concept Cards: Modern Modifications

We’ve done 11 different decks of Concept Cards over the past 6 years, but they’ve all been aimed at the Medieval Fantasy genre of roleplaying. During those projects we’ve had calls for a number of different genres of spinoff, most commonly:

  1. Science Fiction
  2. Superheroes
  3. Lovecraftian Horror
  4. Cyberpunk
  5. Urban Fantasy (e.g. Dresden Files or World of Darkness)
  6. Western

 

The set we’re working on right now, Modern Day, isn’t named on that list, but it is there: both the Superheroes and Urban Fantasy genres are essentially “Modern Day+” – and digging a little deeper Cyberpunk is very similar to modern day too.

So what we’re planning on doing is rolling the ideas together by making a core of Modern Day decks, and then expansions for Cyberpunk, Urban Fantasy and Superheroes specific elements, due to the way those spin off from the centre in different directions

The exact structure of the Kickstarters is somewhat in the air at the moment, likely to be locked down over the next few weeks, but we’re intending to limit ourselves to three decks per project – four, as we did in our last project, is simply too much to allow for a sensible delivery schedule.

That means that we’ll be doing Stretch Goals a little differently – rather than effecting the current project, Stretch Goals will be mostly about what we’re doing *next*.

Unfortunately I’m in poor health this week so I don’t have the energy to write much more, so I’ll be back to talk some more about Modern Concept Cards next week

Be Well

-Ste

 

Comments

Nationals Debrief

From Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd of April we were busily trading at the Student Nationals1)a wargaming and roleplaying convention hosted by UK universities – well, busily some of the time.

Even more so than any other convention we’ve been to, Student Nationals has a very sporadic sort of trading cycle – during the big gaming blocks that take up most of the day there are only a handful of people available to visit the traders hall, while large numbers of customers tend to turn up all at once at lunchtime and in the evenings.

The Hosts

This year’s Nationals was the first ever to be hosted by Nottingham university, and they did an admirable job of organising things – but they also made some significant errors. I’ll stick to stuff related to trade, as I didn’t really get to see any of the rest of the con:

The Good

  • Volunteers from the Nottingham team were willing and able to help unload goods from vehicle to trade hall. (Far from vital but certainly useful)
  • The trade hall itself was in an airy, well-lit room, and had the appropriate number of traders for its size
  • There was relatively little overlap in the set of traders – with what overlap there was being in core aspects of the tabletop hobbies.

 

The Bad

  • The trade hall was prone to overheating – it was structured similarly to a greenhouse, which made running a stall continuously somewhat unhealthy.
  • The organisers failed to account for the human frailty of the traders, planning for the trade hall to be open for 14 hours on Saturday, as well as 7 hours Friday and 10 hours on Sunday.

 

Inspiration

As mentioned above, Nationals unavoidably has long periods of downtime for traders, which means a lot of time just sitting, thinking and chatting – it’s generally not the best idea to pull out a laptop or book while manning a stall – and combined with that we had a couple of two hour car journeys.

During that time we discussed a number of future projects, but there are three things that stand out in my mind:

  • A Mechbuilding Game: combining deckbuilding with worker placement, this game would involve building a mech while also recruiting new crew into your deck with different advantages when played.
  • A game of conquest and betrayal – where the players may co-operate or betray each other, but the victory conditions are different depending on whether the team as a whole wins or loses.
  • Moving the next line of Concept Cards to Modern Day, with Cyberpunk and Supers expansions.
    • As part of this, having stretch goals on the Kickstarter to make future decks – that aren’t rolled into that kickstarter. Instead, stretch goal decks would get their own project, after delivery.

 

Trade

We sold a lot of stock at Nationals, both of Concept Cards and of the 3D Total Games products we’ve been stocking (“Escape the Nightmare” and “404: Law Not Found”) but more importantly (in my mind) we met a lot of fans of Concept Cards, people who’d either backed the early Kickstarters or bought a few last year, and now wanted to pick up the rest – it’s always encouraging to know that those who have used some of our decks want the rest.

We also made a significant wholesale deal with another trader there: within the next few days we should have Concept Cards available for purchase on Apprentice Games

Next monday I’ll be back with a little more information on the Modern Day Concept Cards ideas.

Be Well

-Ste

Comments

References   [ + ]

1. a wargaming and roleplaying convention hosted by UK universities

Clash of Blades and Conventions

Sarah of Avandy showing her skills

Sarah of Avandy showing her skills

 

As promised, today I’m talking about Clash of Blades – the eldest of all of Artemis Games projects, though one that is as yet unpublished. If you haven’t read it already, consider taking a look at my first post on the subject.

It’s taken a lot of work to get to a state in which I’m happy with it, but aside from the art it’s finally there. With the example of the Emperor’s Hand Kickstarter we now know that we, as Artemis Games, aren’t ready to source sufficient art, advertising and general graphical quality to run a proper Kickstarter for Clash of Blades, at least not one that will allow it to reach its full potential.

We work best in text, and our social networks are mainly on the roleplaying side of the tabletop gaming hobbies, so we need far more active marketing skills and push to bring a card game to bear, and while we all firmly believe the game is capable of selling itself, in the end that’s not enough – it’s a game that we feel could be great, rather than good, and we fully intend to ensure it is.

To that end, we’ve decided that we’re going to pitch it to publishers, rather than simply crowdfunding it. Depending on what publisher picks it up1)While it’s possible that none will, I believe that to be rather unlikely it may still go through Kickstarter as a way to prove that the demand exists and to promote the game to a wider audience.

In order to sell the game to publishers, I will be attending UK Games Expo – and applying to pitch at both the Wyvern’s Lair and the Meet-the-makers Speed Dating

The earlier deadline is for Wyvern’s Lair – with submissions closing Wednesday – and for that I need to submit a <100 word summary of the game, with at most one image. Here is the current draft:


Clash of Blades is a two player expandable card game that simulates the flow of a swordfight while maintaining a constant level of tactical play; using “time” as its only resource.

Players choose from a hand of five cards an Attack, Defence or Stunt that they wish to perform, and play it onto a time-track, with the two players moves ticking down the track together.

With their deck serving as their life total the players need just two decks and a time-track to play, while the discard-damage mechanic ensures they always have choice in how to act or react.


Student Nationals in Nottingham

Speaking of conventions, we’re going to be trading at one next weekend – (April 21st to 23rd) the Student Nationals, a wargaming and roleplaying convention hosted in a different UK university each year. I’m sure we’ll see some of you there.

I make no promises as to the update for next Monday – we’ll be recovering from the convention – but we hope to have some interesting things to tell you by the Tuesday

Comments

References   [ + ]

1. While it’s possible that none will, I believe that to be rather unlikely

Emperor’s Hand – A Design Story (& Print+Play)

Comple 0.8asmall

Emperor’s Hand is a young game, born this very year. Speaking as someone who’s been working on the same (unreleased) game for over half a decade, that’s a very quick turnaround.

The game is in some ways finished, but in other ways not. The deepest problem with it is that it only truly works in the 3-5 player range, a rather

So, here’s a run-through of how the game came to be. You may want to take a look at the print and play to fully understand the details described.

The Spark of Inspiration

The simple answer to “what inspired this game?” is this contest on TheGameCrafter (which we didn’t enter due to the unfinished state of the game’s artwork) and its linked video on Trick-Taking mechanics, but without context that doesn’t really give the right idea of what happened.

To me, inspiration is about a spark that starts a fire burning inside my mind, illuminating a new idea – It’s a single moment of thought that grows into something more – but it is nothing without fuel.

In this case the fuel was something I’d been pondering for a while – the Wu Xing and the way it connects the five elements in a pair of cycles, perfect for tie-breaking or creating a set of mystical relationships.

That interest came partly from looking at the number of clones of Magic, including some that cloned it all the way down to the colour pie. But that’s another story.

So, the spark landed in potent fuel – what about using the asymmetric relationships to make a trick-taking game where the trump was neither constant nor changing, but was found in the relationship between the suits?

Designing the Game

The inspiration in place, the game was still somewhat empty – it was a simple rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock scenario, a single mechanic, along with a strong theme.

So I started to delve a little deeper into the theme – yes, every element can be said to trump two of the others (the one that creates it, and the one it destroys) but those two relationships are fundamentally different, and a good game could reflect that fact.

That’s where the idea of having positive and negative elemental modifiers on each card came into play. The first thought that followed this was that it could, potentially, be used so that every card had a unique combination of modifiers (from +5/-0 to +0/-5) ensuring that no card was always superior to any other card – but this resulted in the modifiers having an overwhelming impact, so we decided to go with the simplified +3/-0 to +0/-3 that the cards now have – accepting that a few cards would be strictly superior to their neighbours.

With that in place we had a playable, and somewhat fun, game simply by going round the table playing cards in turns. But it wasn’t great – it was mediocre. So we started looking for ways to improve it, making it both more tactical and (vitally) more fun.

The quickest way to find new tricks for a game is to look at old designs, whether your own or others, and draw from them. If possible, looking for solutions that were both:

1) Aimed at the same problem; &

2) Successful in solving it.

In the case of Emperor’s Hand the most immediate problem was Kingmaking – the last person to play in each hand was the most likely to win, but they always knew whether or not they would win, and if they couldn’t (due to not having the right card) they weren’t just throwing away a worthless card – the modifiers from their card could well tip the balance between the other players, deciding who won. Not a fun situation to be in.

This was a new problem for us – but it belonged to a broader category of problems: People who play later knowing too much. That broader category has a common solution that can almost always be applied in card games – simultaneous (face-down) play – so we applied that solution…

We didn’t even need to playtest the face-down play to realise that it caused a big problem in turn; it removed all the information, meaning that every round the starting environment was identical, with nothing to inform the choice. We needed something to differentiate one round from the next, an element in play before the face-down stage, and there were two elegant ways to do that:

1) Reveal and discard the top card of the deck each round, counting that card’s element as being in play; or

2) Have one of the players play face up, and then the rest play face down – so there’s a first player but no last player.

We’d used the first option before, and it worked, but it didn’t feel quite right for this game, so I decided to try option 2 and, in order to kill two birds with one stone, I made the player who played face up be the player who won the previous hand – thereby making it less likely to have overwhelming victories, even when there’s a significant skill gap.

The last decision we made purely in what I think of as the design phase was creating the dragons. The dragons were a way to add further variety to the game, without significantly increasing the complexity – and they are effectively free in terms of printing costs. 1)A Note on Numbers

Throughout the design process, we often looked at the possibility of using an 88 card deck, due to the positive associations of that number in Chinese culture. It may seem odd, therefore, that we eventually settled on a 54 card deck, as 4 is an unlucky number connected with death. While in part this number of cards was a sacrifice to practicality (88 would be more apt, but it required complicating the game) we did take a look at the aesthetic meanings – while 4 itself is unlucky, 54 isn’t, because 5 has a connection with “no”, making 54 “no death” – not always a good thing, but rarely a bad one

The design on the dragons took a few steps – we had four cards to work with, so using the four cardinal directions (North, South, East and West) seemed obvious, and they correspond neatly to Up, Down, Right and Left. Up and down were trivial – doubling the bonuses and penalties from the elements makes for a significant departure of tactics while accentuating (rather than damaging) the core gameplay.

Right and Left also had immediate connections – the player’s to your right and left – but those were less easily applied. We started with the principle that the cards should never cancel out, so the two had to interact with your neighbours in different ways. Passing cards wasn’t a huge leap, though the first draft passed the cards whole hand – which proved to be somewhat meaningless, so we switched to passing a single card. Playing for another player on the other hand was something unusual, but it’s a trick that often works – making players play to lose is often a fun twist.

DragonEast DragonWest

There’s much more to the game – and still more changes to come before the final version – but these are the elements that I’d count as the original design. I’ll talk about the changes since then later.

Next week, however, will be talking about Jigsaw Fantasy

Until then, Be Well

-Ste

Comments

References   [ + ]

1. A Note on Numbers

Throughout the design process, we often looked at the possibility of using an 88 card deck, due to the positive associations of that number in Chinese culture. It may seem odd, therefore, that we eventually settled on a 54 card deck, as 4 is an unlucky number connected with death. While in part this number of cards was a sacrifice to practicality (88 would be more apt, but it required complicating the game) we did take a look at the aesthetic meanings – while 4 itself is unlucky, 54 isn’t, because 5 has a connection with “no”, making 54 “no death” – not always a good thing, but rarely a bad one