New Dangerous Games Stretch Goal!

All right, I give up. I just can’t stop thinking about new stretch goals for the Dangerous Games Kickstarter. I finally figured out one that I thought would be both cool and fun. At $16k, I’ll produce a Dangerous Games playset for Fiasco!

For those that don’t know, Fiasco is Jason Morningstar’s excellent tabletop storytelling game of people with “powerful ambition and poor impulse control.” It’s so good that it won the Diana Jones Award last year (Jason’s second!), and Jason and his friends and fans have done a great job supporting the game with free playsets, short bits that allow you to play the game in different settings and eras.

Since I made my living exclusively as a game designer for many years, it only seemed natural to come up with a game or supplement for the books, and Fiasco fits the bill like a custom dice bag. Jason kindly offered to help me out with it as best our mutual schedules permit, and that sealed it for me.

I haven’t done much tabletop design over the past couple years, so this will be a fun chance to get back to my roots and support the books at the same time. Plus, the fact that Fiasco playsets tend to be short (about 12 pages) means this won’t cut murderously into my 12 for ’12 time.

So, if we reach $16k by the end of the drive – which is Sunday evening, only two days away! – I will produce a Dangerous Games playset for Fiasco. As is the tradition with Fiasco playsets, I’ll release it to the public as a free PDF, but I’ll send it to every one of my backers first! I’ll also slip it into the back of the omnibus print editions at no charge.

If you don’t have Fiasco, I urge you to check it out. It’s only $12 for the PDF, and you can get it bundled with the printed book for only $25. While you’re at it, check out Jason’s own Kickstarter for Durance, a new game in the Fiascovein.

Why am I shooting for $16k? Well, it seems natural after having the last two stretch goals at $12k and $14k. Also, if we break $16k, that would make this the #8 project on the all-time bestselling fiction list on Kickstarter. And that would be something we could all crow about.

2nd Dangerous Games Stretch Goal Unlocked!

We smashed through the second Dangerous Games stretch goal last night. This means that anyone who backs this drive at the $75+ level gets not only the regular reward but free standard ebook editions of the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World and Shotguns & Sorcery trilogies. That’s a total of nine ebooks, plus a printed Dangerous Games omnibus!

Thanks to everyone who made this happen!

I don’t have any other stretch goals planned at the moment, as I’d rather spend the time writing and delivering the books than coming up with other incentives. If a great idea comes my way, I might leap on it, but I haven’t found it yet.

Meanwhile, though, I’m still hoping to get a group of friends to grab those Alpha Gamer rewards, which gets your entire gaming group in the book, so I decided to bump the benefit for them hard. Now each named player in your group (up to 10) gets the Game Designer package, which includes the autographed ebooks, an autographed hardcover omnibus, and early access to the manuscript. I’ll toss in shipping the books to a single address for free.

In addition to all that, I’ve been chatting up the 12 for ’12 plan at various venues. In particular:

  • I wrote my first post for Huffington Post Books, and it’s all about 12 for ’12, of course. It seems to have caught a lot of attention. The HuffPo reach is wide!
  • Check out the Crucible of Realms podcast released yesterday. In it, the hosts and I came up with a science-fantasy setting on the fly. Best of all, we released it under a Creative Commons license so anyone can use it for free.

Anyhow, we still have four days left, so don’t be shy of telling your friends about the great deal the higher packages have now become, and about the pumped-up Alpha Gamer package. Thanks for all your support!

12 for ’12 Record Smashed!

Yesterday evening, the Dangerous Games Kickstarter crossed the $13,276 mark set by the Brave New World trilogy, which officially makes this the best-funded of the three 12 for ’12 drives! We’re still a little shy of the number of backers the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy had, but if we can add another 24 people in the next five days, we’ll snap that tape too.

As I write this, we’re a bit more than $500 away from cracking the $14k stretch goal, which unlocks the second Respect the Streak reward: free copies of the Shotguns & Sorcery ebooks for all backers at $75 or more. That totals up to nine ebooks and a print omnibus of the three Dangerous Games books too.

We have just five days left in this drive. It ends on Father’s Day, June 17, so don’t be shy about spreading the word. And if you have a dad in your life who might like a whole load of good reading, might I suggest a gift?

As always, thanks for your support. My backers are the best!

Dangerous Games Stretch Goal #1 Unlocked!

Yesterday, the Dangerous Games Kickstarter drive smashed through the $12,000 barrier, which unlocks the first Respect the Streak stretch goal! That means all pledges of $50 or more get free ebook copies of the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World trilogy of novels. Since the first one is already out, I’ll send that to all the eligible backers as soon as this Kickstarter drive ends.

We’re already on the road to our second stretch goal at $14,000. At that point, all backers at the $75 or higher level get the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy ebooks for free too. I just added a $75 backer level (Bargain Hunter) to make it easy for you to take advantage of that, should we unlock that goal. With 9 days to go, that looks like a real possibility.

Besides backing the project, the best thing you can do is help me spread the word. If you have a blog/website/podcast, etc., that would like to lend a hand by running an article, post, or interview, that would be fantastic. In the past few weeks:

Meanwhile, please tell your friends and neighbors on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, etc., about the project, and send them my way. That kind of word-of-mouth personal recommendation is the best kind of publicity I could hope for, especially coming from enthusiastic and articulate advocates like you.

Thanks again to each and every one of my backers for your support. I’m stunned, humbled, and happy. With 8 days left in the drive, we’re doing fantastic!

Falling Behind and Catching Up

As you might guess, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, I’m a bit behind. I had that horrible cold at the start of May that laid me out flat for a week, and it also ran through every member of my family. Since I work out of my house, a good bit of the responsibility for taking care of sick children falls to me, and that takes a chunk of writing time out of those days. At the end of May, my wife finally caught the virus too, and she wound up in bed for five out of ten days.

The good news is that she’s on the mend now, armed with a fistful of antibiotics, and the rest of us are too, with just a few lingering coughs circling about the place. To complicate matters, school ended this week, and my quadruplets turned 10 years old. (Which took up a bit of time, but woot!)

So, where does that leave us?

Read More

Kobold Guide Wins Origins Award!

Last night, the winners of the 38th annual Origins Awards were announced. Michael Tresca has a full list, including the nominees, along with a slideshow of the covers of the winners. Arcanis picked up the Best Roleplaying Game nod for my pals at Paradigm Concepts, beating out the Leverage RPG on which I worked. Still, I can console myself with the fact that The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design won the award for Best Game-Related Publication.

Mike Selinker edited the book, and John Kovalic created the cover, and Wolfgang and Shelly Baur of Kobold Quarterly published it. The book includes essays on various elements of game design from Richard Garfield, Steve Jackson, Dale Yu, James Ernest, Lisa Steenson, Rob Daviau, Dave Howell, Richard C. Levy, Andrew Looney, Michelle Nephew, Paul Peterson, Mike Selinker, Jeff Tidball, Teeuwynn Woodruff, and me. I’m proud to call many of those people my friends, and pleased to see their fantastic work get the recognition it deserves.

Congratulations to each and every one of them, and to all of the rest of the Origins Awards winners as well. Also, many thanks to the people at Origins who voted for the Kobold Guide. I’m thrilled to be counted in such fine company.

Stone Skin Stories News

My pal Robin Laws is heading up a new fiction venture called Stone Skin Press, a division of the well-respected game publisher Pelgrane Press, run by another friend, Simon Rogers. Robin asked me to contribute to a couple of his upcoming anthologies, and I jumped at the chance to work with him again. The covers for the two books I’m involved with were just released today.

The first, The New Hero, Volume 2, features my name on the cover, along with Jesse Bullington and my friends Alex Bledsoe and Tobias Buckell. My story is called “Friend Like These,” and it’s the first Shotguns & Sorcery tale I wrote. You can see two of the main characters in the story – Max Gibson and Moira Erdini – slipping out of the building in the center of the cover.

Artist Gene Ha did a fantastic job with the whole piece, representing every major protagonist in the entire anthology and rendering it all in the style of a classic Japanese print. He even managed to slip the Pelgrane Press logo into the curtain that covers the door that Max and Moira step out through.

I’m told the book will arrive in February of 2013. By that time, I should have a full trilogy of Shotguns & Sorcery novels out as part of my 12 for ’12 plan.

The second book is called The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables. I pitched in a short but personal piece for this one that offers not so much a moral as some kind of hope.

The excellent Jim Zubkavich of Skullkickers fame provides the artwork for this cover, and I hear he chipped in a story of his own too. I can’t wait to read it along with the rest of the new fables for our post-modern age. This book, Robin says, should be available by Christmas this year.

Kicking a Kickstarter

I’ve wanted to write something about how the 12 for ’12 Kickstarter drives have been going – and what’s made each of them different – for a while. Then I woke up to find out that Steve Jackson had personally plugged the Dangerous Games Kickstarter in an update for his phenomenally successful Kickstarter for his Ogre Designer’s Edition. Last night, we stood at 84% funded and 196 backers. As I write this, we just ran up to 238 backers and cracked our funding goal!

So, I’ve been spurred. The main point is that social media has made a huge difference for my drives, and this latest drive has highlighted that even stronger than before. Let’s take a look at the funding curves to see what I mean. (Warning, this gets long and involved.)

Read More

Reddit AMA on Sunday

This Sunday, May 27, I’ll be taking part in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit. The thread should be up in the RPG section early Sunday afternoon. Just jump in and start shooting out questions, and I’ll stop by to answer them in between writing sprints on the Leverage novel I’m writing. 

I’ve never done one of these before, but they look like a lot of fun. Thanks to Fred Hicks for pointing me toward this and to Daniel Mckenna for showing me the ropes and getting this set up.

While the thread’s in the RPG section, feel free to ask about my books, 12 for ’12, or whatever else you like. As they say, it’s Ask Me Anything.

Why Do Ebooks Sometimes Cost More?

It seems crazy, but sometimes you can find ebooks on Amazon and other online stores for more than you’d pay for the hardcover. Case in point:  I Am A Pole (And So Can You!), the new kids’ book by Stephen Colbert. As I write this, the price for the ebook is $9.99, yet you can grab the hardcover for $9.59.

So why is that?

Read More