My name is Matthew.And I'm Dave.And as always, we've got a packed show for you today.But The Home Straight, yes, we're in The Home Straight of the Tales of the Old West Kickstarter with four days to go.
But yeah, so we've got a few other things to talk about other than that, though.We have World of Gaming.There's a few other games that have come up on Kickstarter we want to talk about.
and a couple of other little bits and bobs of news we have there.Then we've got a little bit of an update for Tales of the Old West in the Old West News today.
Just a little bit, just a tiny bit.Just a tiny bit.And the main meat of the show, the meat and potatoes of the show today is the Ask Us Anything interview that we did on Thursday this last week, 26th of September.
So if you didn't get a chance to watch that on YouTube, you can hear it all here.So all the questions that were asked and all our lovely answers, we will be talking about those later on.
Yeah, it makes me think that if you're not at all interested in Tales of the Old West, this may not be the episode for you.Sorry, guys.
That is true.The first bit will, hopefully.
World of Gaming.Cut to the World of Gaming.We put links in the thing so you can cut to World of Gaming and hear about some other games that we talk about.But yeah, the rest of the episode is kind of Tales of the Old West heavy, which, you know,
We are days away from the end of a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Sorry, but... So we hope you'll forgive us for being a little bit obsessed by Tales of the Old West this week.He has ruled our life for the last month.Maybe next week we should do something that's not Tales of the Old West.
Oh, I just put you down for talking about nuancing the gun locker.I know, I know.
We've had that conversation.But maybe, maybe we should do something else.
You have to think about that while I'm in Essen.Yes, that is true.Yeah.So I'm assuming, do we have any... We don't have any new patrons.OK, but again, anyway, a big thank you to all of our existing patrons or past and present patrons.
Again, the success we've had with Tales of the Old West would have been nowhere near as good as it's been without the support of all of you.So thank you all so very, very much.We say that a lot, but that's because we really mean it.
It is very true.Yeah.Yes, World of Gaming then.
Yeah, so World of Gaming.First of all, it's not just our success that our patrons should be should feel proud of is the success of the terminal state kickstarter which got fully funded and got some stretch goals as well yeah
having struggled earlier in the campaign, but then they came on the Effect podcast two weeks ago, and then whoosh, they were through.They went through their target and they went through a bunch of stretch goals.So we'll be playing Terminal State.
It'll be a thing that people could actually have.Isn't that brilliant?
Yeah, it is.And I'm really pleased because I think the campaign was pretty much dead in the water, wasn't it?I think when we first saw it.
Well, I mean, obviously it's not just us.We can take some credit, I think.But it's mostly us.Getting the news out there a little bit, possibly.Sorry, Chris, Paul.I think it was struggling.
And actually, I think, you know, like I said before, the conversation we've had with Chris Verma and
who's the creator, really unpacked what the game was about and some of the lovely things that were actually in the game that didn't come out, I don't think, from the Kickstarter page very well.
So I think that made, certainly for me, that made all the difference, because I looked at it and wasn't going to back it, but having spoken to Chris, I did.
Yeah, no, that's very true.While you were speaking to him, in fact, while we were recording.
Exactly.So, yeah, I'm delighted that that's got over the line.And to say, It did unlock a couple of stretch goals.Let's have a little look.What did they get to unlock?
So a random drone generator, tables to randomly roll up a drone, including the type, the mode of conveyance, upgrades, and so on. Random vehicle generator.Okay, interesting.Random weapon generators.
So he obviously likes his random generators, which is cool.
He did.There's a lovely update where he says, you'll notice I've reduced the targets and all these stretch goals.It's because I really like random generators and I want to make sure he gets them.
Yeah and then he's got a couple, some extra art was unlocked.So the one they didn't get to, they didn't reach, they didn't get to solo rules but I don't know whether they might put that in anyway because they're not far off.
But yes, I'm delighted for Chris.I'm really pleased that that got over the line.
And it's a friend of the show Three Skulls Matt that will be writing those solo rules.
Yeah, and he's got a lot of experience because he's done them for a number of three league games, hasn't he?So yeah, that would be good.
I must admit, I had a quick go at making a random weapon on the random weapons table. and I'm just trying to see whether I can see what I made again.
I think I, I thought I'd put it on the... Is that in the quick draw or the quick draw?The quick stuff?
No, that was... So when they hit the random weapons table, Chris published an update with the table.You could just download it.And it's a fun old thing.And I was quite pleased with the random weapon I generated.
I can't find my little write-up for it now.But it was a hand cannon that was both discreet and silenced, but was a flamethrower.
So I thought it's discreet and silence until people are running around screaming, burning.Yeah, you kind of wonder.
A weapon called a hand cannon.
Doesn't sound... No, hand cannon size.Oh, I see.
Discretion doesn't seem to be inherent in that name, does it?
But yeah, I think you can have a whale of fun with the random weapon generator.And indeed, I imagine the other random tables as well.So good on you, Chris.Congratulations on winning.It wasn't all us.
I mean, you did write the game, so you deserve some of the credit.
And then, actually, you know, the Kickstarters don't stop happening, because there's another one that caught my eye, and that is Paragons, which is kind of Year Zero-ish.
I mean, he mentions Year Zero, but it isn't... he's not sticking the Year Zero engine stamp on, because I think he's, um... I say he, they, have, um, you know, have added other elements in as well, but it's a superhero game.
Yeah.So again, I had a quick look at this.Again, it's another one where on the face of it, well, the original bit of artwork that they used to header their page looks lovely, and it's very exciting.And that got me going, ooh, that looks interesting.
I quite like the look of that.But then actually, when I looked at the rest of the page, it was, again, a bit like terminal state. I was less grabbed the more I looked at it.
And as you know, money is not... Money is tighter than it has been in the past, so I'm having to be a bit careful.
This is your personal spending money.Don't start saying how tight money is when we've just got way more money than we were... Personal money is tight.
I don't get to spend any of our Kickstarter money on buying you games for myself.That's very true.
Damn, we should have done that as a stretch goal.Oh, shit.
Yeah.Money just for us.But anyway, so it was one that the more I looked through their page, the less interested I was.So again, it could be one that if we talk to them about it, it might be something that would get a lot
would, again, unpack some of the greatness that's in there, but actually on the... And this comes back to some of the advice that we had and the amount of time we spent trying to get the Kickstarter page right.
Because it's so important to... Because people are going to back you on the basis of that.
What's on the page?A couple of things.
I noticed, after we'd done our interview, that Chris and Paul changed the Terminal State cover illustration, as it were, and they introduced... Obviously, one of the undead characters, I can't quite remember what they're called, the guys that take care of the dead bodies.
They obviously thought, we can do an illustration that is more evocative of the game as a whole.So, that obviously helped that Kickstarter.And I don't want to sound...
The other thing, looking at Terminal State and looking at Paragon's page now, I do want to sound like the old grognard that's done this for years, but having done just one successful Kickstarter, I'm going, ooh, I wouldn't have done that on my Kickstarter page.
I'm an expert now.And I'm not an expert.I'm a Universal expert. But immediately you go, ooh, I'm not sure I'd have said that or done it that way.Yeah, interesting, very interesting.
Yeah, because I think the very first picture that heads the page is very superhero-y and it looks great.But the other ones could be from anything, really.The other pictures could be some kind of cartoony-style cyberpunk game or something.Yeah.
They're kind of missing the vibe, I think, a little bit. Yeah, I mean, this is just a little, you know, first impressions.
You know, they've got things like, you know, there are eight archetypes you can use, a D6 dice pool system, which they don't then explain very much about.60 or more unique abilities.
Yeah, so they mention it's kind of a cross between Yezero and Powered by the Apocalypse and stuff, so... Right.I'm kind of interested in that.I imagine it's probably partial success if you get fives or fours or something.
Count towards a different quality of success.But I don't know.I don't know.
Yeah, so again, I think they talk about things like cool points, but then they don't say anything else about it.So it's like, OK, you could have said a couple of lines about cool points to make me go, OK, now I know why they're cool.
And that's a fun concept that I want to try playing.But I think they just don't go into quite enough detail.
In their defense, they do directly link to a couple of YouTube videos.They do.One of which is an actual play and one of which is a kind of how to play thing in the body text.
But, you know, interestingly, again, I don't know whether this is me spouting off stuff.I haven't clicked on those yet.
In fact, I think we can look up the stats and see how many people clicked on our, you know, sort of top video, top of the page video, which
which you know kickstarter recommend you put a video in but i was kind of surprised last time i looked at how few had actually kind of looked at that yeah So right now we've got 1,200 followers on the project.
Almost 700 have actually watched the video.And of that, and it's a short video remember, only about half of them have actually watched it right through to the end.So yeah, interesting stuff.
Yeah.One of their pledge levels is Take charge of the story and write a character to be included as an NPC in your game. So similar to our Magnificent Seven, but they don't add a picture, I think, to that.
They don't have a picture, yeah.
Which is why that looks initially like better value, but it comes without the portrait, so... And that's where the expense is, that's where the cost of that pledge level comes.
But I mean, they're only five days in, they've got 113 backers already, and they are nearly, I guess, two-thirds of the way to their target, so it looks like it's going to do well.
So yeah, that's really good, but you have a look up look up paragons if you're interested potentially in a superhero Not Year Zero Engine, but Year Zero Engine D6-ish.
And talking of Year Zero, I remember one of the questions we didn't get around to, which I feel this may be the point to answer it.So one of the questions we didn't get around to was from our friend Andy on the Q&A interview thing we did.
And it was, what's the best vampire program to watch?
no it wasn't that it was years ago matthew you said you wanted to do a western which honestly i can't remember uh rpg and a superhero rpg so is it superheroes next and for me no it isn't dave um i kind of uh i i'm kind of
Not particularly into superhero RPGs.I did buy Spectaculars, which I still want to run at some point.But, yeah, I'm not... It won't be a superhero RPG next.I think we can be pretty confident of that.
Unless, Dave, you say now that that's what you want to do.
I don't think it's top of my list.I mean, the idea of doing a superhero RPG is a bit tempting.I mean, I look back on the days of Golden Heroes with a lot of love and a lot of warm, warm feelings.
But I think you'd need to do something a little bit different with the genre because it's kind of so done, isn't it?So I would want something more mature and darker, probably, if we were going to do something like that.
But then is that enough to give it an IP or USP that is sufficiently different to actually be worth doing it?So the idea with it is really nice as an intellectual kind of exercise, but no, I agree.
I'm not banging the door down right now to do a superhero role-playing game.
No.Rome Year Zero, that's where we're at at the moment.I think there are some good ideas behind that one.It might be, yeah. Actually we need to talk about that on behalf of our podcast but that's outside this conversation.
Just a quick note to say D&D is not going anywhere because In its first weeks, the Player's Handbook has become the biggest selling ever D&D book.It's only been out a week or two.
This is edition 5.25 or whatever they're calling it.
I like to call it 2024.I think they're going to do it like Windows and Adobe now.There'll probably be a 2025 version as well.
update every year yeah yeah uh yeah so the 2024 version of uh the player's handbook is is is a big hit and i think that's no surprise i imagine no i'm not surprised you know the biggest audience ever uh getting getting a new book and feeling
you know and a whole bunch of new people who've been watching it on youtube or whatever thinking this is the point where i jump on um yeah yeah i mean it's an interesting one so obviously i don't you know i haven't looked into it i don't know what changes they're making from fifth edition um in the the new edition whatever we end up having to call it
But it'll be interesting to see, once it's getting played out there properly and people are really getting into it, what the consensus is as to whether this is a real step up from where 5th edition was, or whether it's a bit, it's not as good, or whether it's basically just more of the same.
It'll be interesting to see.
yeah i have a sneaking suspicion it's more of a tweak um that they're not going to make the mistake they made with for example going from third to fourth edition fourth edition has got a lot of fans behind it but it also birthed really
the whole OGL explosion when Pathfinder, the guys at Paizo said, let's just carry on third edition and we'll call it Pathfinder.
So that was a big fork in the D&D community, which I feel must have been kind of healed over now and that most players are back on D&D again. I mean obviously Pathfinder is still really popular, but it's the biggest selling book ever.
It reminds me of when we were at Comic-Con last year and talking to people there and the most common thing when I said to people, oh you're a role player, what do you play?Was them saying, oh I play both kinds, I play 5th edition and Pathfinder.
All the role-playing games.Guys, guys, I know you love your D&D, but guys, there are other games out there.Anyway.
I still treasure that conversation I had with a bunch of Critical Role cosplayers who turned up, and one of them was a really big fan of Forbidden Lands.That made me so happy.Yeah. Right, what's next on the news?
Oh, this is one that you might be interested in.I just came across by socials recently, and it's the last caravan.It is forged in the dark. But you are traveling along a post-alien invasion American road trip, I think is the best way to describe it.
So it's slightly post-apocalyptic.Humanity is mostly wiped out.I don't know where the aliens have gone, necessarily.But you are, I think you start off in a ruined San Francisco, or you're heading towards a ruined San Francisco.It's a road trip.
You can be a family with a dog.You can play the dog. Yeah, it looked interesting.I'm not sure whether Forged in the Dark has ever been, for me, as successful a game system as it was in the original Blades in the Dark.
Blades in the Dark just worked for me, and Scum and Villainy didn't.And I really want to love the military one.What's it called?
I can't remember, I've got it on my shelf there, but I'm not loving it enough to actually bring it to the table, which I think says a lot. So yeah, Brothers in the Dark, I can't remember.Band of Brothers, Band of Blades, Band of Blades.
Band of Blades, that's it, yeah.
So I'll be interested to see how this plays.It's not kickstarting, I think you can buy it off, we'll put a link in the show notes.I think you can just buy it now.Yep, yep, it's there to be bought.As a cool rule book.
So I think the idea behind it is quite interesting, and having just had a look at the, the purchase page as it were.
I kind of got a Gamma World kind of feel almost of this world that's been, it's a post-alien invasion or maybe not even invasion but alien occupation kind of thing.I really enjoyed the Blades in the Dark that I've played but I
I was still trying to really sort of bed in the way the game works and was still finding it a little bit clunky to get my head around and really enjoy it.I probably didn't play it enough.We played one short campaign, which was a lot of fun.
So I think I need a little bit of convincing To sort of dive into that system.So I'm not going to be buying this.
It does look lovely I like I quite like the premise and I you know, you know me I do like a good post-apocalyptic game But but yeah, I think certainly for now this this won't be for me again if I had loads of money I might I might have pitched in for it, but 30 pounds for the for the core book.
It does look nice and the artwork is The artwork is very nice, even though again for me.It's a tiny little bit cartoony You know, which again, it sets the tone of the game.You know, a post-apocalyptic game.
It says here, post-apocalyptic game is about normal people finding heroism under extraordinary circumstances, relationships tested by a crisis and rediscovering what matters when the world's ending.Does that sound cartoony?
Yeah, I think, Dave, you're just beginning to get old.You've got to remember there's a whole generation that have been brought up on anime now.
And there's an amazing anime that does really gritty stories while still being big eyes, small mouth.So you may be of a generation that have got to let go of the cartoony thing. and welcome it into our hearts.
Perhaps, yeah.Just with the look and feel, if I was trying to make a game that was gritty and hard-edged, I would go less cartoony in the artwork, personally.
Yeah, well, we'll see how it does.And just a quick note, because we want to keep this recording a bit short, because we've got about an hour of chat.We've got plenty of stuff to come.
afterwards people will be tired of our voices by the end of this podcast that is that is true um uh yeah so i'm but if you're not tired of my voice and indeed want to see me and you happen to be in essen next weekend for essence spiel i'm going to be there working the free league stand so come and have a chat um if you've got any doubts about backing tales of the old west
try and grab me on Thursday before the campaign finishes.
And in the midst of obviously prioritising selling you Free League stuff, I will also try and allay any fears about Tales of the Old West you might have so that you can back it before what will in Germany be four o'clock German time when our campaign ends.
Yeah, cool.Which is a nice segue to the fact that our campaign ends on Thursday. At 1600 British Summertime.No, at 1300 British Summertime.
No, 1600.Four o'clock.Four o'clock.
Oh, why did I think it's three o'clock?I think I've asked the wrong time off with Camel World.Why did I think that?It would be four o'clock, because that's when it started.
Because you're an aged old man whose brain doesn't work very well anymore.
I think I'm just getting all befuddled, yeah.I'll have to check and see what I said to Anna about when I wanted time off.
I'm sure she'll be accommodating with any changes, so, yeah.
I'll have to tell you a thing after the show, actually, about the organising for that, but we'll finish recording first.Yeah, cool.So, Old West News, Dave.Has there been any?
so um we are we are now what two-thirds of our way to our final stretch goal solo rules i was finally had my arm twisted to go with some solo rules.But we're not far off 30,000 now, with four days or three and a half days to go.
That's Sunday, so yeah, four days to go, four and a bit days to go.And yeah, again, I mean, we were discussing the other day, neither of us thought that in our wildest daydreams, we might make 25,000.
I mean, I think we both thought that, you know, in our wildest daydreams, both of us were secretly thinking we might get about 25,000.And here we are, you know, closing in on 30 and a stretch goal that we never imagined having, actually.
You know, a whole bunch of our stretch goals were carefully planned beforehand. But Solo Rules wasn't in the plan until people kept asking for it in the social and on our comments.And it took me some persuading.
And also, obviously, it took us some needing another stretch goal.
Exactly, yeah.So it's gone supremely well.All the stretch goals that we'd considered in advance have been unlocked.
Yeah, I'm just trying to think that obviously we've got quite a lot that we talk about in the Ask Us Anything in a minute, so I don't want to repeat that here.Yeah.But again, I think, you know, a huge thank you.
And then, you know, the hard work starts here, really.
Yes, and it does, and it has already started.So we're finalising getting the dice mould made.I've just sent a bunch of text off to our sensitivity reader, some of which they have seen before. very early on, about four years ago.
They haven't seen this.They will recognize some of the sentences, but there's been quite a big rewrite since they've done that.So we've sent it all to them again.So yeah, work is beginning.
We will need to compose before I go to Germany, the what happens next update for the thing, so that you can press go on that, or I can press go from Germany.That's easy.
and we'll do that so so but thank you everybody who has supported us so far we are actually flabbergasted yes um so so it's brilliant we love you all we love you all and that community so we've got what are we we're looking at almost 550 backers now 540 at the moment of recording and you know that's
I mean, some of that, some of those 542 are a little community that we've known for years, who are patrons and stuff like that, and some of them are listeners, but there's new people in that community as well.
And I'm kind of really excited about nurturing that little community of 550 people. and giving them a game that they really enjoy and, oh, I'm just excited.My heart is beating fast, Dave.
Cool.Yeah, me too, me too.But yes, there's plenty of work to do, but we've got our plans and we'll do our best to stick to them.
But yeah, so I think maybe now we should move on to the session we had the other day then when we invited people to ask us anything.
We are live.It says so on the screen.Hello, everybody.We're live.Hello.And I know we have some viewers because there's people commenting already on our live chat.Hey, Mohammed.Hello, Frank.Hello, Andy and Paul.Hello, everyone.It's probably easier.
I'm not sure we know who you are, but you're welcome.I am Matthew.
Well, I'm a bit slow, but there you go.
Yeah, well, I was kind of expecting you to say something funny or attempted to say something funny like, you know, and he's Dave or something.I don't know.
Anyway.Yeah.I normally do.But then when I say, and he's Dave, you say, and I'm Dave.And then it kind of, so I was giving you space to say, I'm Dave.
But then on the podcast, you can edit that out.Whereas you can't edit that out here.Anyway, good evening, everyone.And thank you very much for coming along to, um, to our question and answer session, Ask Us Anything.
Tales of the Old West has now been going for, what, 23 days, 24 days even, in its Kickstarter campaign.We are blown away by how well it's done and how fabulously everyone has supported it.So thank you right off the bat for that.
But there's a few days left, and we wanted to take the opportunity to put ourselves out there and make ourselves available for any questions that anyone might have.
It doesn't have to be about Tales of the Old West even, but I guess naturally that would make sense.But yeah, so here we are.
We can also solve any problems you want to bring to us like an agony aunt.We're very good at advice.
Now, there are already at least one question in the chat, which we might get to, or even more.
No, it's a stupid question from Andy.
No, I'm not having that one.We are not answering this one just to show everybody.Go away, Andy.Just go away.We have got some questions from Bruce.Maybe we could start off with some of his questions.We've got one from Frank as well.
This is the sort of question we want, Andy.This from Frank.Look at this.This is a sensible question. It is.You must be chuffed with the progress so far.Is there anything that you already know you would do differently in your next Kickstarter?
OK, serious answers only then, because there is obviously the immediate answer is don't do it with Matthew.Not do it again.So yeah, yes, there is one thing.
So I think we've done quite a lot of thinking, quite a lot of work about stretch goals before we started.But what we hadn't really kind of sat down and like scenario through was, what do we do if, you know, what do we do if
We blow through our target in five hours.We hadn't had that conversation, and we probably should have done.
So I think we could have planned the stretch goals for various scenarios much more effectively, because we did find ourselves hastily getting in touch with each other, saying, OK, what's next then?This is on the list.Is that what we want to do?
Where do we want to set it?And so it did become a bit frantic in those moments, and we could have planned that better for sure.
Yeah, of course, there's a thing about planning your stretch goals in that you kind of think you're cursing yourself to failure.You're counting your chickens before they're hatched.
And I think one great bit of advice came from Shep, Dave, when we'd set up our screen, we'd put some stretch goals up, and Shep said, don't put the stretch goals up.It was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that.
So I think the fact that we could be a little bit flexible with the targets of the stretch goals, I mean, not that we changed them very much, but that was really good advice.
And we did at the beginning, we went for our, we knew we wanted that £10,000 stretch goal to let us afford the book that we wanted.But after that, we did a couple of just £1,000 ones.
And we were burning through those so quickly that we went back to 2000 pound ones, and that seemed to be a really good place to be.
If we had that in the stone when we launched the Kickstarter, we'd have been the victims of our own success or failure or whatever, and that would have been a bit of a challenge.
Yeah.I would just like to say a great thank you to Shep, Shep Shepperson, and all the other people who have given us advice about kickstarting. Uh, we, I think we did avoid a lot of, um, school boy errors, frankly, uh, with that advice.
So, uh, you know, that has made the process a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.
Um, but I think, you know, I think Frank, I mean, we, we didn't really have a marketing like plan, but we did have a lot of stuff we wanted to do for marketing.We could possibly, um, be a bit more organized on that next time.
We did have a bit of a plan, actually.It was one of our most planned things.
It just gets to show how badly planned everything else was then, doesn't it?
But yeah, I think having done it once, I might think differently about what we do in that marketing plan.I think I'd make that marketing plan a bit different.Yeah.
yeah yeah there's that and the other thing i think the thing i've learned is um virtual tabletops virtual tabletops what people want it does seem to be so doesn't it yeah and i don't know whether we would have done anything differently
We timed that virtual tabletop one only after we'd had a chat with Paul, who's here in the chat.So that was an accident of timing, but it was possibly also at exactly the right point in the campaign.
It gave us a little boost just as we're hitting the depths of the doldrums.
I mean, it's interesting.If you look at the way the campaign's gone after those first two days, which were really good, we've kind of been running at a a fairly steady rate.We've had our low days and our slightly higher days.
But then if you look at the graph, you've then got the one big step up, which was the day where we announced the VTT and the day that we got the VTT funded.It all happened in less than 24 hours.
Yeah.Yeah.And I think having that mid-campaign was great.But I don't know, maybe I think about doing it earlier in the campaign or even later in the campaign to be a bit of a climactic one.
Yeah, so planning stretch goals might be a different thing we do differently next time.
I think we'd just do it a bit more thoroughly, I think.And we would, because, you know, I think part of the problem was not knowing how well we were going to do.It's very difficult to actually plan the stretch goals.
You know, any plan, you know, becomes useless once you engage with the enemy.Not that our backers are the enemy, of course. Let's rephrase that one.
But we could have kind of exercised out different scenarios and had a clearer plan, so it was slightly less frantic than it might have been.
Yeah.Do we want to do one of Bruce's questions before we move on to some of the other ones on the chat?
Yeah, why not? Which one did you want to go for?
Well, I thought I would go for the one on the list you presented that's at the top of the list.And that is why 1873?
Now, Dave, actually, I want to ask why 1873, because I remember writing categorically in the principles of the game, it was going to be 1880, 1881 or something.And then suddenly it was 1873 and it was you that did it, Dave.Why?
I think there's various reasons, actually.So the timing, I think, is the period of the Wild West, if you want to be a bit categorical about it, is quite short in history.It's only about 40 or 50 years.
So I wanted to get us at the earliest point in that period to allow for campaigns that could run for 20, 30, 40 years.You could have more than one character, maybe. But I wanted it to be far enough away from the Civil War.
So the Civil War wasn't the overriding dominating thing in everybody's minds.And also it gets us a few years past the Emancipation Proclamation of 1873, 73, 63, and then the actual passing that into law after the war finished in 65.
So again, we wouldn't be dealing with the issue of lots of people who were still enslaved.Though all those people are now free, Okay, there's a debate to be had, discussion to be had about what that really means.
But they became playable characters in the way that we would want them to be.So 1873 was, I thought, about as early as we could get away with in that situation.
Yeah and I think that's probably the key reason really that it gives us the longest campaign play we can have but it's far enough removed from the civil war and the impact of the civil war that it's not a civil war game it's a wild west game.
Yeah and I think there's a there's a secret thing that you haven't mentioned there again talking about how
It's possible I've forgotten something, that's for sure.
Concise.Well, I don't know whether this may be an intention of yours that you wanted that you have worded but not necessarily connected to the date.You're very keen to turn this into a generational campaign.
Have the opportunity to do that, yeah.
Yeah.If you start 10 years later on like I wanted, that's a whole generation effectively that you've just missed out on.Yeah.That might be it.
There's definitely something in that, which is kind of like making us giving this much time in the period as possible for the players to develop their campaigns and their characters.
Yeah.OK.And I've got another one for you here, Dave.OK.From Dumpstat Int.Welcome to the chat, Dumpstat Int.Hello.I have a question regarding trouble. With the chart, if you roll a six, you move up a column.
Are you worried that you could possibly scale from a column one to a column four?The curse of Rollmaster.I just, extra point there, Dumpstat, for... Remembering Rollmaster.
Remembering Rollmaster, and indeed one of the curses, one of the many curses of Rollmaster, I'm going to tell you.
I did enjoy Rollmaster, though.That was a good game.I did enjoy it very much back in the day. Okay, so to answer your question specifically, am I worried?No.I will elaborate a little bit though.
So I think the idea that trouble can suddenly build up on you is a fine thing.I think I liked that.We originally had it where you wouldn't, there wasn't the opportunity for a one die of trouble to become two dice of trouble in that sense.
And it felt then that One Die of Trouble actually isn't that much trouble on the whole.We have changed the table a little bit then to make it slightly more inconvenient and a bit worse, but it just felt like it wasn't enough threat.
So in playtesting, players were like, One Die of Trouble, I might as well not worry about it.Yeah, exactly.
And what I wanted was there still to be that little itch of doubt in the back of their mind that I can take this, but actually it could get much worse if I'm unlucky.
So that's the reason why we went for the idea that rolling a six on that column boosts you to the next column.
Yeah, and I am not worried either.I am worried.Yes, it may happen and suddenly one dice becomes four dice, but one of the things we want to encourage people to do is to earn faith and spend faith on their roles.
And that worry, as Dave says, that you might Go from one to four dice worth of trouble with some really bad roles.I think just that little added bit of incentive to say, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to spend that point of faith there to, to do that.
I did have a, uh, I think I've spoken about this on other interviews.I don't want to bore people. But one of my favorite ways of paying faith was every single one would cost you a faith point, and you'd lose your pool really quickly.
I play tested it in one, two sessions.Players really hated that.So we're not doing that again.
Now, in principle, I like that idea as well, I thought.But I was interested to hear your player feedback, hating it as much as they did. Sorry, yeah, go on.
That idea of spending extra faith on buying off your rolls, I think, gives us a little flavor of that bit.
Yeah, and I think that the risk of going from a one to a four is very low, because you could have to roll three sixes.
It's not impossible, of course, but yeah, we've all rolled a lot of trouble, I guess, through the, you know, the year zero dice have a tendency to be difficult, don't they, I guess.
But actually, what it does do is it increases the risks that you get onto the next column, particularly.And those are a little bit worse.
So rather than players, I think, fearing that they're going to go from column one to column four, I think just the fact that it will get that little bit worse is an ever-present one in six chance, in fact.
Cool.Andy's got another one on stretch goals.OK. And I think it's quite an interesting one.Is there a stretch goal that you wanted to do but was too impractical or too expensive to do?
No, we're doing both of the too impractical and too expensive ones.Well, all three actually.Including the GM screen.Yes.
So what we wanted to avoid with stretch goals for stretch goals added complexity particularly complexity to fulfillment so even though it's not massively too expensive and people have bought it so it's paid its dividends already the gm screen.
is an extra bit of faff to deal with in terms of, you know, when we get to distribution, making sure everybody's got the things they wanted and stuff like that.
The really big ones are things like the virtual tabletop, which, you know, particularly for Dave and I, we knew nothing about that. Uh, we hadn't considered it at the beginning of the campaign.
We wouldn't have considered it if the campaign hadn't been going so well.And we definitely would have considered it if we hadn't got Paul, Paul, hi, to guide us through it.
Give us, give us Foundry 101.
Um, and to offer us, you know, a decent rate that we can afford to do it with that stretch goal.So that's good.And the other one is the solo rules.Now people started asking for solo rules and.
I was quite keen, but Dave, you weren't keen at all because of that added complexity.
Yeah, I think, I think we, again, I think this is another lesson learned that because Matthew and I live quite a long way away, communication tends to be over our chat, our Gmail chat stuff.
And that's a really shit way, sorry for the language, if anybody cares, it's a really shit way of actually having those kinds of conversations because you always get the wrong end of the stick, or you don't articulate it quite right.
So it's very easy to end up butting heads.And we have done a couple of times over some of these things.And now that was one of them.So my concern was, neither of us play solo rules.I haven't even read solo rules.
Matthew's point was a good one that we've got a lot of stuff in the game already that probably lends itself to solo rules.But my fear was we're suddenly going to have a few weeks to create solo rules from scratch.
And it was going to be bad because we're going to be rushed.Now that we're going to do it as a PDF and then maybe get it as a hard copy in a future campaign.
that takes some of the pressure off because we've got a bit more time to actually, you know, talk to people who know about doing solo rules, learn a little bit more about it before we then put them together.But that nuance was lost in the text.
So it became, that was why I was very reluctant.
It would be a PDF and it would be delivered potentially after the other deliveries.
I was always thinking that we were intending to put it into the book, which gave us a month to write it.
I mean, it might be lovely to have in the book in an ideal world, but it isn't a thing we'd even considered when we were putting the campaign together and actually budgeting the book and illustrations and things like that.So it can't go in the book.
It just can't.And I think we've been very strict with ourselves on that. And yet, um, you know, um, we're still not there.I'm, I'm kind of guaranteeing that solo rules are here.
They're not yet, but I will point out, maybe this is the right time to point out.I'm just going to put the banner up again for anybody who might be listening.There are four count them for magnificent seven bids, uh, left.
And if, if, if one person, if four people. Bought at that Magnificent level, Magnificent 7 level, that would get us through Solo Rules.So if you really want Solo Rules, you know what you can do.The whole community.
That's why you're called Magnificent.And maybe don't worry about it.You know, we've got another six days to go, so we'll probably get there.
Now, to answer Mohammed's question, Toto cookbook?No, you're absolutely right.There will be no Tales of the Old West cookbook.I did.
I was thinking of suggesting that in one of our chats, Dave.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.But I said that this would never get delivered until we'd become an entirely different, massive company.Yeah.And then we'd bring out a little pumpkin at the end of it just for our Swedish backers.
For those who don't know the story, Free League for the Swedish version of Coriolis had made a stretch goal of Kosta Kostulas writing a Coriolis cookbook and they were laughing about it a bit when we first went to interview them years ago.
And yeah, almost, did you say 2015 that was?2017, yeah.2017, still seven years ago.Yeah, seven years ago, they were laughing about it as a thing that was still waiting to be fulfilled.And I think they have only this last year fulfilled it.
In relation to the Great Dark, thing when we did it across to us.I don't think he thought it was that funny actually.
No, I think it's not been a joke for them for a long time now.But yeah, so free leads experience with things like that was one of the things that again, made us want to keep this as simple as possible.
So we would maximize our chances of fulfilling to the schedule that we are committing ourselves to.Yeah.
Right, I've got another one from Bruce, shall we talk about the second one from Bruce?
So I think Bruce really, so the second and the third, he's being very polite about this, but he said, how do we address the challenge of recreating the 1870s West?
And I think we've talked about this before in comments and stuff like that, but it might be worth verbalizing it again here.
Yeah, the key thing is being honest and true to the history of the time, being respectful of that history, not whitewashing it, not falling into stereotypes that may well have been entrenched over the years through different media, making sure that the opportunity to tell the tales of those people
and those communities in an open and honest way, kind of recognizing how nasty some of the history really was, but also not encouraging people to revel in that history, but trying to encourage people to understand it a little bit better and maybe explore some of those things in the games that they play.
And it's not a black and white history.Let's take, for example, Native Americans and the history of Native Americans.Now, we had one commenter who's saying, you know, Native Americans were the enemy.They did some horrible things.
They were very vicious.And, you know, we're ruling, you know, the plains of the West for a long, long time.And yes, you know, you can't get away from the fact that there was a lot of internecine trouble between different Native American communities.
There was a lot of war, you know, There were killings, there were slaves taken.Pretty grim, pretty nasty stuff.
But the period that we're looking at, the period of the expansion into the West, is a story of that ever-growing pressure from the East displacing and using the imbalance of power to effectively dispossess many, many parts of that community, all of that community over the years.
Okay, so the history is there, you can't escape it, but we want to step away from the whitewash of the myth and look beneath that, the actual stories that are going on.
And so far, I think in the playtesting we've done, where I think there's another question from Raspberry Rhone, which is very much on this theme,
All the, everyone we've had in our play test has come at it with the right kind of respectful attitude, wanting to explore these things and not wanting to revel or joke about them.And it's, it's, it's worked very well.
And in the writing of the book, we are doing our level best to encourage exactly that approach.Um, you know, about all of the, all of the difficult parts of that, of that history. I don't know if you want to add something to that.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, maybe it's worth talking a little bit about Rosby Rowan's question there, because I think that is an interesting one.
Has anybody had issues in playtesting with playing a Native American, Mexican or recently emancipated black slave? In playtesting, I don't think so.
The other group, your local group, I mean, I'm playing a, I don't actually know whether I've been emancipated or whether I was born free, but my character is black in the campaign that you run.
And we have addressed that and we've addressed the civil war and we've addressed a terrible, real historical incident that took place.And Dave wove that story around some of the other player characters and things like that.And we unpacked that.
And that was quite an interesting game, actually, that I quite enjoyed.What I'm not doing, though, as a player, is I'm not particularly playing black.I'm not, you know, I'm not relying on stereotypes about how I see black people behave in movies.
I'm still me.My character, though, is perceived as black in the game world.And I haven't, you know, and I think we do have some advice, particularly on playing Native American Indians, because we started the sensitivity journey early, years ago.
And we talked about in the first bit of text that we sent, this is Jordan, a sensitivity reader who doesn't have any problem with us saying she's part black and part native.And she was saying, you know, there's
I really appreciate that you're trying to get people to play sort of outside the stereotypes and things, but you know, there is a thing like people making up Native American names that sound funny and things like that, that can actually be quite offensive.
And it would be better, she said, lots of Native Americans at the time just adopted Anglic names.
Or I think in more cases were forced to adopt Anglicized names.
Yes, but she was kind of happier that we did that rather than encourage people to, you know, make... Yeah, so I think it's a really important question because
Once somebody's got the game in their hands, what we can't do is stop them fictionalizing a Native American name.If somebody wants to call their character Crazy Horse, we can't stop them.
What we can do, though, and what we have done and spent quite a lot of column inches in the book,
trying to explore is giving them some background about the history, giving some background about where those names come from and the cultural power and how sacred some of those names are, and then encouraging them
to not only try and learn a bit more about it for themselves, but to treat those names respectfully.
So if they want to choose a name that is fictionalizing some of those naming conventions, they should do so, but do so mindfully and respectfully, and not kind of inadvertently disrespect them, almost by ignoring them entirely as well.
So there's a balance to be found there, and hopefully we've struck that right kind of balance. But, you know, I think, you know, Raspberry Roam, it could be a stumbling block for some players.
And I think there are certainly some people we've spoken to in the US for whom the history is a little bit too close to home.And it means for them, this isn't a game they would want to play, which is fine.
I mean, there's a lot of people in the US we've spoken to who are very keen and very interested to get involved and get into the game.But, you know, I think, you know, If it's not for you, it's not for you, absolutely.
If you don't want to explore this history, then you probably don't want to be playing Tales of the Old West.And that's fine, that's great.
But for those people, and I think a lot of people coming to the game might not know quite so in depth some of the history that others know.
Hopefully, by playing the game, we open the door to seeing some of that and might spark an interest that gets them to go off and do some more reading and some more exploration of the real history for themselves.
Yeah, and in fact, in terms of issues that we've had in playtesting, we have had one person who picked up a character that was actually a white character, but they'd done some pretty terrible things in the past, and that was actually the thing they had more of a problem with.
Now, I'd like to think that all our characters were I don't know actually about some of the characters in your playtest, Dave, but we're trying to better ourselves in our group of playtesters.
We're all trying to, even the character who was a Confederate soldier is trying to be better than he was.And I like to think that most of our player characters will play like that rather than celebrate the cruelty that their characters might've done
That's the thing as well.I hope people don't take the game.As you say, we can't control the game when it's in other people's hands, but I'm really hoping that they don't use it to celebrate some of that cruelty.
Yeah, and we've gone to some lengths to try and encourage that and try and give some of the background, some of the history, and hopefully we've got the balance right.As you said,
in some of the opening statements we've got, both in the quick draw and in the core book, we're keen to learn.We want to get this right.This is supposed to be fun.And it's also, hopefully, a little bit educational as well.
But that's not the key point.It is a game.
Oh, which reminds me of another question of Bruce's that I think would be a good one.It's not one that you listed.Do we have a reading list?
Yes, we do.We have a very extensive reading list, actually. Yeah, I haven't got it up at the moment.I could pull it up and read you through some of it.But yeah, we've got loads.I mean, I'm a historian by training.I did history at university.
Not the Wild West, frankly, or Rome.For anyone who knows me, I bore them to death on Roman history.But I've had an enduring interest in all of this stuff.And I've been an avid amateur scholar of the Old West for years.
So we have done a lot of work and a lot of research a lot of reading.So again, hopefully, we are amateur scholars, but hopefully we're quite well-informed amateur scholars.
So here's another question.And it's a follow-up question from Raspberry Rowan again, and these are great questions Rowan, so feel free to carry on asking them, but I think it's a good one.
Garbag Games will be playing your game online, and I know there's a Mexican character in there, and in fact I've seen that scenario played before.Oh, that scenario?
No, not necessarily that scenario, I can't remember, but there's a Mexican person there, and I think your question here is They're UK.If playing a Mexican, how can they make that character come alive as if playing yourself as, as Matthew said.
And I think, I think there's some, there's some great stuff actually.I don't know.It's upstairs, but I think I learned a lot about playing people from, from, from other cultures from, uh, Chris Spivey's great book, um, the Cthulhu campaign, um,
which I can call Shadows Over Harlem, but it's not called Shadows Over Harlem.What's it called?Frank, help me.That one.Anyway, he talks a lot about, you know, don't, as I said before, don't stereotype the character.
Don't start speaking, I don't know, like Manuel out of Forty Towers when you're playing the Mexican.For a start, I think, Generally, we're crap at accents, aren't we?And for years, our tables for 30, 40 years have been pretty crap at accents.
So doing accents isn't a thing that we... that we've ever really done and we don't expect people to do.And I think that's one of the things that can go wrong when you're playing somebody from a different culture.
But we've given all of these characters big dreams and backgrounds that I think can be quite compelling.
I think if you play from the point of view of that character, you don't have to put on a silly accent or wear a sombrero to make your Mexican character come alive.
So yeah, I agree.Yeah, I think that makes sense.Obviously, Rosby Rowan will be the one who'll decide whether it really makes sense.
But yeah, and I think it's, again, if somebody sits down and they get a, they either roll up a character who is Mexican or African-American or whatever it might be, or they get a pre-gen character that is that, you know, I hope it makes them a bit curious about, you know, the culture behind that character and where they come from.
And I think that's a good thing.If we can get people curious about that kind of question, then that will definitely help them when they're playing the character to avoid foolish stereotypes, which we want to avoid.
And Andy's come in there with the book's called Harlem Unbound.You're right.You're totally right.
Everyone's come in with Harlem Unbound.
And Frank also said that.But also, more importantly, Frank says that you're running a game tomorrow that's going to be streamed on his channel.
Do you want to tell us a bit about that, Dave?Yeah.So this is a scenario called Biting the Dust in Albuquerque, where the player characters are sort of down on their luck.
people who have ended up at a mining camp under the control of a threatening, intimidating boss.And they are asked to go and do something on his behalf.And as the name suggests, they might end up in Albuquerque.
Or in fact, this scenario might start in Albuquerque.But yeah, so there's, yeah. On Frank's channel tomorrow, 7.30 start.And yeah, it should be good fun, hopefully.
And Frank's channel, we should say, is Raldonash, like his username in the comments.Now,
So I've now pulled up a few of the reading list.So I'll just chuck out a few that I think I particularly enjoyed reading or were particularly helpful.So Impressions of an Indian Childhood by Siddhartha Sar.That was very, very interesting insight.
Black Elk Speaks is an excellent one as well. Very, very good firsthand account of his life and the life of the people that he knew when he was very young.I mean, there's a lot on Native Americans.River of Blood is a good one about American slavery.
Again, it looks at it from the point of view of personal testimony of some of those people.And there's another one, Uncle Tom's Story of His Life, which is by a man called Josiah Henson, who was a slave,
He ran away to Canada in about 1830 and then became a preacher.And again, it's a very, very interesting insight into the slave life that he experienced.
But yeah, so that's just a tiny taste of some of the books that we've been drawing upon and using to inform our decision-making.
And tying in with that, and tying in with Andy's question here, you've obviously done a lot of research on the setting period.What was the most unexpected and surprising thing that I learned?
And I think Cult of Glory, which is another book that we might have in the list.
Is one that totally changed what I thought the Texas Rangers were.I don't want to spoil it for you, but But yeah, it's not a great read.I mean, it's a great read.It is.
The subtitle is The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.And that gives you a sense of what might be included in there.Yeah, I'm not sure for me.I mean, I always knew that the European stroke US approach to the Native Americans was
You know, it was pretty grim.Perhaps when I first started really getting into it, I didn't quite realize quite how grim it actually was.But then, you know, I mean, human history has got a lot of grim stuff.
If you want to read something that's really grim, read a history of the East India Company.
Now that is, I mean, I mean, it's terrible what happened in the West and in, you know, continental North America as a whole, in fact, you know, in the three, three, 400 years before the time we're setting our game.
But the East India Company seem to do be very very talented at doing really shitty things anyway Gonna get everyone really depressed about human history, but That's maybe why if so many people like to play games where they don't have to be human I
Right, OK, here's a good one from Jed.Welcome Jed to the chat.What is a good way to prepare for a campaign as we wait for May 2025 to roll around?
It's a very good question.Well, for me, I'd say research, do some reading.Now, I get the ideas that I get for the playtest campaign that I'm running. A lot of that comes from the reading that I've done.
So the scenario that Matt, you spoke about earlier, which harked back to the Civil War, came out of some research I was doing around the Civil War.And that gave me the idea of this place called Fort Pillow, where some terrible things happened.
And that gave me the idea for the scenario in that particular case.Tied in as well with Andy's character, because his character, was trying to leave all that behind and end up fighting on the wrong side in the war.
Despite being from an abolitionist family, he's always very keen to tell us.
Yes, exactly.But he ended up fighting for the Confederates.So that was great.But that comes from a bit of reading.I think Paul Watson, Paul's comment in the chat is a great one.Watched Edward. Fabulous.
I mean, if you haven't seen it, you probably have already, but watch Deadwood, three seasons of Deadwood and then the movie that topped it off.Yeah, I mean, it's brilliant.
Yeah, I want to sit down and watch it all again myself, but I don't have the time at the moment.
Yeah, no, I think so.And I tell you what, I think I've just had an idea which everybody's hearing for the first time here.We've talked about this reading list that we've created.Obviously, it's going to be in the book. But it's not our words.
I think we should potentially take that excerpt out, put that reading list on our website.
And if people want to follow Judd's example and prepare for the campaign, then they can have a look through some of those books as well.We've just sent that reading list Off text to our sensitivity reader.
Maybe we'll wait, uh, till mid October for her to return that she might have some other ideas to add to that maybe.Um, so maybe, maybe mid October.We'll put that reading list out on the website and people can get tucked in if they want to.
And rather than I says, watch 1883 as well.And I would recommend that. very heartily.I thoroughly enjoyed that.Bavina says, are you making a licensed Deadwood game next?And at one point I did say to Dave,
Maybe we should just find out who owns the rights to Deadwood and stick Deadwood's name on the top of this.
Well, it's funny you should say that.Um, not that we are about to do that, but I, uh, I haven't been able to go, but there was a, there was a licensing convention down in London this week, um, which is free for people like me to go to.
And if I hadn't have been busy with taking my dog to chemo and other domestic stuff, then I would have gone.But, um, uh, The idea did cross my mind that we could do an expansion, which is Deadwood, and then license it and brand it as Deadwood.
And then it'd be interesting to see how many more people that would pull in and how much interest that would gather.
So maybe, maybe, Frank.Who knows?Watch this space.
OK, here we've got another one. Uh, how is it that some guys in London are making an old West game?Can I, can I be, can I, can I say this?I, I also noticed earlier on, or indeed England, you're right.
We're not quite London is what it says on the Kickstarter, but, uh, Dave and I are on opposite sides of London and just outside it.Um, but, um, Yeah, I think we've got to admit that there is obviously a mythology around the Old West.
that I think maybe Europeans take more to their hearts than Americans do.If you think about spaghetti Westerns, um, Raudanash mentioned Lucky Luke, which is a French comic strip.
There's also Lieutenant Blueberry or Lieutenant Blueberry, I should say, uh, which, uh, is by Mobius, the same guy, a very famous French comic writer.Um, I think in a way.
Cowboys can be a bit of a fantasy for Europeans who are just removed from it by an ocean and half a continent.It takes on a meaning that maybe doesn't come with necessarily all the baggage of people that are actually there.
So I think that's why people from Europe start doing things.And I keep meaning, and I will try and find the link to a brilliant YouTube thing from Hugo Blick, who wrote a great cowboy TV series called The English.
Sorry, I didn't mean to press that one.Which one am I pressing?
Glad you're on the way home, Bruce.
Excellent.And he writes about what cowboys mean, I think, for him as an Englishman.And I think that's quite an interesting thing to watch as well.
Yeah. So I think it comes back to something you said earlier, Matt.But I'm kind of forgetting what it was now.
You forget a lot of stuff, Isaiah.
Like when I said we wouldn't put the Bloomin' Solo rules in the book.Indeed.I think, you know, we've always had an enduring interest, as I said earlier, about the Wild West.More than once, we've tried to get a Wild West game together.
You know, I created one once many, many years ago. We played things like Boothill and Aces and Eights, but it never really stuck.We're never interested in the supernatural side, so Deadlands wasn't something we were interested in.
And it's taken a long time to get to the point where we've now created this game.I think, as Matthew says, there are perhaps some people in the US who are going to be too close to the history to find it either interesting or palatable.
that want to play.So that remove, I think, maybe makes it a bit easier for us to get stuck in, perhaps.
But also, we're coming at it, as I said earlier, with respecting the history, with enjoying the mythology, but wanting to take away the stereotypes that come with all of that.
So hopefully, again, as I said before, we're trying to get the balance right.And you'll all be the arbiters of how well we've done that.But hopefully, we've We've got it right.We've worked quite hard to try and do that.
We're coming thick and fast with questions here, but then another one here from Wizards of the Tower, which I can quote, how easy and how deadly and how easy will the gunfights be?We're quite proud of this, aren't we, Dave?
They're going to be very easy and very deadly.
Yeah.Yeah.So, yeah, gunfights tend to be short. Um, as, uh, you know, as, as you might expect the, the.The trick in the game, if you get into a bit into a gunfight is to put the other guy down as quickly as you can.
Um, we have mechanics in the game that, you know, your, your weapon will have a crit value.Um, that's the number of successes you need after your first, in order to inflict a crit on your enemy.
And people do tend to go for that because you want to put the man down.You want to stop the guy shooting back at you because one shot can kill you. as we found out in the play tests.So yeah, they are deadly.They are fast.
We do add some things to try and improve the authenticity of the feel of how they work.When I went to Tabletop Scotland, I bought this for a bit of fun, just a prop to play around with.
It's really rubbish, but it was brilliant in explaining to people about how single and double action guns work. and we try to recreate that in the game.
Your single-action gun takes you longer to use because you've got to prepare it, you've got to pull the hammer back, but then you get a slight bonus on your attack because then the trigger is really light, so you're not having to pull it really hard like you do with a double-action gun to get the weapon to fire.
So things like that we try and wrap in, but we haven't made it clunky, we haven't made it crunchy, and that seems to work really well.People seem to get the hang of that very quickly.
And an ancillary question from Paul here, and it's an important one because he's building out virtual tabletop, so he needs to know this.Are we planning to add some sort of gear dice to weapon stats?No, we're not.
There are bonus dice to weapon stats, but it's not gear dice.
Yeah.They just add to your pool.We didn't originally think about using gear dice like they have in Forbidden Lands and in original Mutant Year Zero. Um, but we quickly wanted to simplify that.
Um, so yeah, you, you, you get extra dice when you shoot with a particular weapon.You might get extra dice when you shoot on it with a particular weapon, but you're not necessarily singling those dice out.
So the only different dice you have in your pool are the trouble dice that we've previously mentioned.Yeah.
Yeah, so your weapon, particularly pistols, will have an attack bonus, although it might be a negative, possibly, and a draw bonus, or potentially a negative.
And the draw bonus is the bonus you get when you are, as the name suggests, trying to draw your gun in a hurry in the middle of a duel, or a situation that is basically the same as a duel, where you've come across an enemy you both know you're about to shoot each other, but you haven't drawn your guns yet.
So you might want to select your weapon to be quick on the draw and slightly worse in terms of accuracy or accept that you might be a bit slower but know that you'll probably hit the guy more likely.
So we've got tactical questions like that for you as a player to decide about what gun your character wants to use.
And kind of related to that, it's not just guns.Another one from Wizards of the Tower, will there be melee fistfights, knives, swipes, I'm guessing that is.Or maybe it's wipes in the cinematic sense.Yeah, maybe, yeah.A la Zorro.
And yes, there are full melee rules as well.And that can include swords.I think Zorro is a little bit early for our period. I mean, obviously he's an invention of the early 20th century, but he set when, I don't know.
I don't know actually.Whips, not wipes.
You do have the opportunity to use a whip.Yes.If you wish.Lassie as well, naturally enough.Um, so yeah, so we, so we have your ranged conflict, you have your fighting conflict, and then we also have social conflict.
So we've tried to make social conflict a bit more involved.If you're trying to persuade someone, it's not necessarily just making one roll of your dice and then they either go, yes, or they punch you.
There's a mechanic there where you effectively have a combat between you and them whilst you're trying to either intimidate them or browbeat them, depending on the skill you want to use, or you're trying to persuade them or charm them.
And you can damage their stats that are relevant to their mental and social attributes.
So you can break somebody in a social conflict, and if you do that, they'll either get angry and turn the table over and storm out, or they might become very doubtful and lose the conflict that way.
So those are the three types of conflict, but we were trying to make them all, because shooting each other is so dangerous, we want to make the social conflict engaging and fun, and not just one dice roll.
because that's going to happen a bit more regularly if your players are being a bit cautious about drawing their weapons.
Wizards of the Tower has confirmed it is a bit early for our period, 1840s to 1850s, but I think it's also worth saying, and it touched back on an earlier question that
I probably can't find now to put on the board, but somebody said, what are we going to do next in terms of supplements?Um, I think that was Andy asking that I can't quite see it now.
Um, and I think, you know, we have discussed focusing on other, so we've got new, new Mexico in the core book. But obviously there's loads of other, um, geographies and climates and cultures across the West that could be worth unpacking.
Uh, and there's things like when we very first, the first day or two that we started talking about this game, Dave and I were thinking it might be a sort of Oregon trail sort of game.Um,
So all of that is in the mix and that means not just other geographies and other parts of the West in the 1870s, it may move forward and back in time as well.So I can envisage that each
let us say campaign book, I don't know quite what format we're going to make them, but each campaign book would focus on a particular part of the country, but also potentially a different part of the history.
We'll let you know as soon as we've nailed down on what it is we want to be doing next.
I've got to say, if we were going to publish a Zorro style, obviously somebody else has got a license for Zorro, but if we were going to look at California in the 1840s or the Spanish bit of the Southwest, I'd be looking at getting somebody closer to that culture to write that and we'd help them write that and turn it into a great book actually.
Whereas I can do the Anglic colonist experience because we are English.I think there, there's some interesting stuff that I'd like to encourage other voices getting.Yes.Yeah.Writing that.So.
What other questions do we have?
Oh, now we're having a discussion about Zorro.
So I think California, by the 1850s, was part of the US.I think it was 1848 when it became part of the US after the US-Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadal-Hidalgo.
Oh, I know that I don't remember it properly, but that gave swathes of what was Mexican territory to the to the US after the after the war.
And just to having quoted Wizards questions quite a lot, it's worth pointing out what Wizard says.They're a channel.I'm guessing you're on YouTube.And you talk RP games.
you love the old west and plan on doing an episode based on several old west games like aces and eights boot hill and frontier scum i've got frontier scum and a little secret here dave wasn't keen on the idea but i was keen on making the book feel a bit like an old west artifact and in fact they dave wanted a big fancy you know a proper role-playing book and
I went along with him.And I was quite pleased then that we hadn't gone down my route because we'd have been beaten to that by frontier scum.
In the pasteboard book, the way I wanted to do it.So, so just as well, we're not doing that.Um, and, uh, yeah, we can be apart.Okay.Uh, yes, please.Yeah.We'll, we'll, we'll look into that.We, maybe we'll,
We'll seek you out and have a conversation about that.I don't know what that's about.Sorry, I'm getting... You're just slamming the chat now, is all you're doing.Wizards of the Tower.But I'll let you guys talk about that.
Saul has never heard of Frontier Scum.It's a kind of Morkborg-y style Western book. It looks lovely.Well, it looks lovely to me because it's the book that I wanted to make.
The book that we are making looks lovely.
Cool.Right.And the Wizards is correcting.
Wizards of the Tower.Roleplay.Nice.I'll have to look out for that.
Saul, I have to say, has written one of our campaign tales.He was one of our stretch goals earlier on, or part of one of our stretch goals.So it's good to see you, Saul.
Welcome.Absolutely.Saul is one of our guest writers, which, again, has been great.So I put out a few requests to some people, and they all said yes.It's like, OK. I didn't expect, I expected half of them to go a bit busy, sorry.
But no, they all went yes.And so we've got, I'm not sure what the total is now, 14, I think, guest writers in the book.So that's fabulous.And it's looking forward to seeing the work that they put together.
Well, we've got two minutes left.And another question from Jed that I think is worth unpacking a little bit.Jed says, are Asian characters covered? Um, Chinese exclusion act was after 18, uh, 73.
And yes, in fact, what we've tried to do, particularly in our life path couch generation system is create a system where there's a chance.I mean, it's, it's weighted towards, uh, the people you.
that were closest to the West, but there is a chance you could be encouraged to play somebody from literally anywhere else on the globe.Now, we're not forcing people into a particular culture with any of these things.
We're talking about this is the place you came from, and then we give you some backgrounds and things like that, that you could be living in that place.
But yeah, definitely we want to encourage people, if they want to, to be able to play Asian characters. Again, here's a very real part of history in terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is just out and out racism.
Yeah, I mean, it's not looking for player characters to be victims of that sort of prejudice, because as we say, by sheer dint of the fact that you're a player character in a role playing game, you're extraordinary.
So you rise above the limitations that might be being placed on you by by other cultures.
Hmm.It's an interesting one, because, again, having looked into into the history a little bit, particularly of Chinese immigrants into into the West, I mean, one, there's less source material out there.
So it's a bit harder to get into the real meat of the history.But again, it's a history of prejudice.It's a history of jealousy, as we have now.
People not trusting immigrants because they don't know them and they believe that they're coming and doing them harm in one way or another.
So we're trying to, again, draw out some of that history in the chapter that talks about all of this stuff to try and give people a better feel for the actual story of the people who really lived those lives back in the West and hopefully try to expose some of that and help play some of that.
And people are having A bit of fun with the tune.We're not encouraging people to play ninjas, even though there is historical evidence that there were ninjas in the 1870s.
I won't say they were taught to that one, but you can listen to the song that fronted our podcast playlist.
Our actual playlist for such a long time, yeah.It doesn't quite strike the gritty tone for me anymore, but yeah.
Um, I did, I did think about actually sticking on the front of this video, Dave, but, um, I saved you that humiliation.Right.And I think it's time to say goodbye to all our friends and, uh, backers and potential backers who might've enjoyed us.
And even to people that weren't here in the chat, but are listening to this later on.Um, if.
you are watching this and it's the first time you've heard about this and there's still seven days and and and in the next seven days after this was done then October the 3rd 2024 at 1600 British summer time that is when the campaign ends and what we might do is um
run a, uh, I don't know whether we'll get a little live stream there.I'll be in Germany.So if we live stream, I might be live streaming live from, uh, we might do something around that.
Maybe, maybe, I don't know.Yeah.It might be quite nice to mark, mark the end of it.
Yeah.Thank you so much everyone for, for coming on and asking all the great questions. And, um, I hope you found it interesting and informative.Uh, and, um, yeah.So anything else for you to say, Matthew?
No, but I do just want to say if you're German and you want to hear the game played in German, then, um, there's, Frank's running a game in German on Saturday.
And it might be the first foreign stream.Yes.Well, the first non-English language stream anyway.So.
Okay and thanks McGlynn, we haven't heard from you before but it was a real pleasure and cheers to you too.And goodbye everybody.Goodbye and yeah, stay safe.
Okay well that was great fun, I really enjoyed that and we could probably have talked on for much much longer but everyone must be sick to death of our voices by now so thank you for listening this far in if you've got this far.
So next time, now we were talking about this I think actually we've done so much Tales of the Old West and we've been kind of obsessed by that lately which You know, I hope people understand why that is.But next time, let's do something different.
So, you're at Essend.There might be some great people that you could possibly talk to at Essend and get some- Well, there will definitely be great people.
Whether or not I get a chance to talk to them somewhere, quite honestly, I'll have to record something.But yeah, I will try, Dave, I will try and record an interview with some of the other great publishers that are there.
Or maybe a couple of short ones or something like that.
That sounds like a good idea.And if not, then I will commit to doing something Coriolis.How about that?Hey, back to the old school.Exactly.And if we don't do that for next time, I'll do something for Coriolis a time after. So, get back to our roots.
Get back to our roots.That's where we started.That's where this whole thing started.
We owe Coriolis a great debt of gratitude for being the springboard that has put us to where we are today.So, yeah.And I still love that game.So, it's... Yes.Okay.Brilliant.Well, without any further ado, it's goodbye from me.
And it's goodbye from him. And may the icons bless your adventures.You have been listening to the Effect Podcast, presented by Fiction Suit and the RPG Gods.Music stars on a black sea, used with permission of Free League Publishing.
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