They Told Me I Had To Give The Updates Better Titles
over 6 years ago – Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 01:51:55 AM

Weekly update!  

Hey I managed to get this one done before the weekend is over! Ah, let's see what did we do last week?  

New Monsters  

Design of the new monsters, including all the stats for the Gemstone Dragons as well as their psionic abilities is well underway. The dragons are mostly done. I think you could adapt it into a passable psionic character if you were so inclined. Of course I wanted to create a psionics system that was original but even with only vague memories of older systems, many of which I never used psionics in, I'm pretty sure what I ended up with was a mishmash of previous systems. There is nothing new under the sun. Playtesting may push things in more novel directions, we'll see.  

One thing I think I've decided is that Gemstone dragons don't have breath weapons, they have eye blasts. :D  

My friend Jason is the modeler for these and basically acting as my art director for them now, so you may be hearing from him in the future depending on how shy he wants to be. He's one of those guys I really want to get in front of the camera, he's an amazing kitbasher; models, replicas, costuming. Killer stuff.  

MCDM Stuff  

Lots of progress on finding an office. We've picked a place and agreed on rent and everything and now it's a process of making sure we have the right insurance and passing credit checks and whatnot. Want to see the new (proposed, cross your fingers) space?  

Also just a ton of paperwork filled out and phone calls for all the different insurance we need. Health insurance for everyone, but also corporate insurance covering the office, covering workplace incidents, all our products, the livestream. I feel like, if the text of the book is delayed, it's going to be because of all the time I spent on this stuff over the last several weeks. I console myself with the (certain?) knowledge that all this is setup and once it's done I won't be filling out 100 pages of forms every month. And we're almost done, I think health insurance is solved now and the office deal is almost done. Corporate insurance is almost done. I have a call about setting up payroll Monday. Phew!  

We'll certainly be ready to start the first round of playtesting about a week after the Pledge Manager closes. Speaking of which...  

The Pledge Manager Closes May 11th.  

I think somewhere in the actual store it says "May 1st" because that field just asks for a month, not a date, but it's May 11. Then we're gonna take a few days to prep and then we can start rolling out the playtest. Lars and I have talked about it generally, but we'll spend some time this coming week nailing down the specifics. I think generally Lars is going to act like a Firewall between me and the testers. The testers will give feedback, they'll have a discord channel, and there'll be lots of polls judging the tenor of the room so to speak. But I probably won't be jumping in and responding to everyone directly, I just don't have time and when you have this many testers, it's just not feasible.  

The New Campaign  

Hey we've built a pantheon complete with gods and saints! Not bad! Pretty happy with how it's all gone, you can see the current doc here. All this in about a week!

http://squaremans.com/Gods%20and%20Saints%20of%20Rioja.pdf  

The new campaign is (eventually) set in the city of Capital, the City of the Great Game. The greatest city in this or any age, and we started work on the factions and the districts of the city. I don't know if we're going to stream it all, doing it live is fun for a couple of sessions, but it starts to get exasperating. :D  

But this is the prep for the campaign. This is the kind of prep I do when I intend on running a game in a place for a long time. Maybe I spend a couple of months just prepping adventures, maybe I'll design the culture and the map as I'm doing now. But I only do this if I intend on running for months or years in a place, you don't need to do any of this stuff. I've done a total of like three hours of prep for one campaign we played in for months.  

It's only when I set out wanting to run in a place for a long time that I do this kind of prep. It's entirely possible the Chain will all die in the first few sessions but whatever replaces it will probably happen in Capital. The work will pay off, is the point, possibly across multiple campaigns.  

Something that would be fun to do is to run another game on a different night of the week also in Capital. For different players who may someday meet and even team up with the Chain. That's something I've always wanted to do and now that all this is LITERALLY my job it should be possible. :D  

Tried to keep this short as I'm working on the art schedule for the book right now. I've seen the model, or rather the block-in of the model for the Ancient Sapphire Dragon, that thing is going to be a BEAST! Can't wait to show you the final product.  

Everything's moving along well. September still seems doable. If it's not, if we slip our date, it's going to be because of the text probably and we'll know that once playtesting is underway.  

Lars tells me to tell y'all "we are Canada and Australia friendly" meaning folks who live there don't have to worry about duty and import fees.  

That's it, peace out!

Update!
over 6 years ago – Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 02:14:57 AM

I wanted to do an update last Friday, try and get in a weekly cadence, but I was in Utah!

Utah

Our mini's manufacturer is in Salt Lake City, we sent Lars and our Modeler up there to spend a couple of days talking to them about their process and also just working out how best to create models from the art to make the minis easier to produce.

Generally the artist drawing the dragons (and any other beasties we need! See below) doesn't worry about "how is this going to be translated into a three dimensional object?" Anthony Sixto just designs the Gemstone Dragons based on his ideas and our discussions and it's up to the modeler to turn it into a 3D object.

But if someone in the pipeline isn't thinking about the actual process of turning the art into miniatures it becomes A: expensive to print and mold the 3D model and B: it can be a real pain in the butt for you to assemble once it shows up..

With big minis like these dragons, there's going to be some assembly no matter what, but the goal is; the assembly is easy for you to do and cheap for us to produce and that requires a lot of work on the modeler's part. The dragons may need to be reposed to make manufacture and assembly easy, the art may need to be tweaked a little. 

That's what the face-to-face was about, you can do a lot over email, but actually showing our modeler the process in person, so he can see all the steps and talk to the engineers and artists working on this stuff made a huge difference. I flew up there for a couple of hours just to meet them and get a sense of them and give them a sense of us. I want the folks working with us to feel valued and I want to work with good people and I think they do, too! 

One thing we learned is the resin we're using is of a higher quality than we expected, so we can definitely do better texturing on the dragon skin, make them more fun to paint!

It was great getting to meet these guys and see their setup, it's really inspiring actually. They're nerds like us, we all play the same games and they're also engineers, working hard to make high quality art in an affordable way. Also I'm happy we were able to locally source this. The minis will be Made In The U.S.A.!

There were also a lot of questions like...would we like to pay them to clean the models up after printing so there's not flash (plastic that forms where the mold lines are) on them? Yes. Would we like them to cut off the plastic that connected the minis to the sprue? "Use your best judgement," I said. Sometimes there are big pieces of plastic coming off the mini where it was connected to the sprue, and unless you have the right tools it's going to be a pain to cut that plastic off. Some smaller pieces you can easily break off without tools, no big deal.

But I explained that a lot of our backers, this was their first kickstarter and its reasonable to conclude that for a lot of them, these are their first minis! So while all these things cost money...you folks bought a lot of minis! So we can afford to do this stuff.

All in all, while obviously we're not done, we still have a lot to do on the mini's front, the idea of producing our own miniatures has gone from the biggest risk, to the thing we're worried about the least. It certainly seems right now to be a solved problem. Fingers crossed.

The Pledge Manager

All the emails have gone out! If you backed the Kickstarter and haven't received your email, look for an email from s.backerkit.com it might be in your spam folder.

If you still can't find it, go here! 

https://strongholds-and-streaming.backerkit.com/

Changing Your Pledge

MAN I wish Kickstarter supported different header styles. Anyway...

If you want to switch your pledge level (i.e. downgrade to a lower level and then add stuff a la carte, or upgrade to a higher level) do the following;

• Click on link in the pledge manager email that takes you to the pledge manager landing page. 
• Beneath the big green "Get Started!" button is hyperlinked text that says "switch pledge level"; click on this. 
• This will open up a menu of different pledge options for you to choose from. Once you've selected the level you want, make sure to scroll to the bottom of the list and push the "Switch" button to apply your changes. 

Also! If you're at the order page, at the top of the page you'll see text that says "Your Pledge Level" with your selected pledge level below it. If you click on the selected pledge level, you will be given the option to change it.

If you don't want all the rewards in a particular level's bundle, you can select the "$0" pledge level near the top (it comes with no rewards), then proceed to the Add-On "Store" and build your own rewards package essentially. Whatever you've already paid Kickstarter will act like "credit" toward the rewards you pick out but if you go over that amount then you'll need to pay the rest. This all shows up on the right hand panel.

When you change your pledge level, please make sure to see if it says "US Backers Only" or "Non-US Backers Only" and select the appropriate one for your country. Otherwise, we have to go in afterwards and fix stuff manually which isn't any fun :< 

Things seem to be going pretty smoothly thanks to the work of Lars and Anna and Jerry and our friends at Backerkit, but it's not the most straightforward process in the world. Next kickstarter it'll be a lot smoother I think. 

The Pledge Manager closes May 11th, after which you won't be able to change your order, but you'll still be able to update your shipping until stuff is sent out.

If you need help with any of this, email us at [email protected].

Rules

Work on the text of the book proceeds apace. I think we're gonna need more art than I thought, because I need to make more monsters. :D

Clerics, Warlocks, and Druids (and anyone else, but these are the expected classes) who found a Temple can appeal to the source of their power for aid in battle and be rewarded with a Servitor. These are allies that fight with you. Because they hang out for only a couple of rounds, and because you can only appeal a couple of times before you need to go back to your temple, they can be beefy allies. Not CR 1 or 2, but really cool and useful.

Now, if you're a necromancer or a warlock and you want to summon Undead or Fiends, no problem. There are plenty of those in the core rules. But if you're a druid or a Fey Pact Warlock or just an interesting cleric who wants to summon Fae or Plants or Elementals or a Servant of Ultimate Law then there's not a whole lot of options in the core rules because they don't expect you to fight a lot of those. And, indeed, these are not things you fight, but things that fight WITH you.

Though of course once we have art and stats for all these things, they'll be useful for any DM wanting to send their players to Arcadia or the Plane of Ultimate Law or just a cool forest.

So that's more work, and more art. But also much more utility for the book. Busy busy busy...

MCDM

We're closing in on office space, stuff may happen REALLY fast now, we'll see.

I've retained a firm to handle payroll and tax accountancy and bookkeeping. Huge weight off my shoulders. Insurance is still something I need to finish. Once that's all ironed out, MCDM will have full-time employees!

I'm sure there's stuff I'm leaving out, but if so we'll catch it in the next update. Trying to get these out once a week. Oh!

The Campaign Prep Streams!

Hey we've already done two Campaign Prep streams! Both have been uploaded to YouTube, I think it's going pretty well.

The next campaign is set in Capital! The City of the Great Game! Capital is in Rioja and while everyone, from anywhere, can end up in Capital, the population and culture is mostly Riojan. 

So first I need to build Gods for Rioja and then we'll do a Calendar and we'll start actually mapping out the city! Naming the streets and shops and factions and NPCs and everything.

Right now these streams are not collaborative, I'm trying to fulfill the promise of the Kickstarter by showing you all my process (for whatever it's worth) and obviously my normal process does not include soliciting ideas of hundreds of viewers. :D

But as we get closer to building the actual city I think it WILL become more collaborative and I'll solicit ideas from Chat. Just because otherwise we'd be limited by the amount of detail I can generate alone.

The streams are live Monday/Wednesday/Friday/Saturday (if I can keep up that pace) and go up on YouTube shortly thereafter.

https://www.twitch.tv/mattcolville

 That's it folks, if I don't see you online, I'll see you next week.

Peace! Out!

The Pledge Manager Is Coming!
over 6 years ago – Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 01:17:46 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Update Number I Don't Remember
over 6 years ago – Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 01:27:18 AM

A SECRET REPORT WITHIN THE GUILD. I know I used this reference before, but I like it. 

It's REALLY easy for me, as the MC of MCDM, to get caught up in all the nonsense surrounding running a company and producing various products and forget to make an update. So if time passes, as it does, with no word, PLEASE feel free to reach out to me on twitter, or post in our subreddit, or come by the discord, or email us. I feel like I'm always talking about everything, everywhere, but if this is the only place you get your MCDM info it may seem sparse.

Let's see...what and in what order....

Rules

I spent this week working on the Spell Research system, which I think is the part of the rules that need the most work. The part that heretofore has been little more than a collection of notes and traditions.

The actual spells in the game make no systemic sense, as anyone looking at a list of spells by school can tell. It's an ad hoc collection of effects and abilities that a bunch of players and DMs in the 70s made up, and it shows, and that's the whole point. It's the reason I like it. It doesn't seem like a system, it seems like magic. You want a systemic, plausible, approach to magic that makes literal sense, go play Ars Magica. And invite me please, I love that game.

So any system of spell research has to accept that the existing spells are an insane amalgamation of traditions and effects, and sit lightly on top of that. It has to be fun to use, I want people who see all the charts to want to use them, and it has to feel like a real reward for spending tens of thousands of gold pieces and several months building a Tower. It has to be amusingly unbalanced while not breaking the game, and not rendering other classes' abilities moot (I'm looking at you, Sorcerer Metamagic).

The current system I think does that, but it will be up to the playtesters to decide it all. I want to go into excruciating detail, but folks payed to be part of the playtest and talking about it all publicly sort of devalues that. Speaking of which.

The Playtest Has Not Started

One of the unintended side effects of the way we did things is that we can't start the playtest until after the pledge manager closes which puts a hitch in our gitalong, but there's nothing for it.

And the pledge manager hasn't opened yet! We're hoping this week, but no promises. It's a complex thing with many moving parts and different partners all of whom have to be coordinated with. It's a colossal amount of work, actually, thank Glob for Lars, Anna, and Jerry. Speaking of which...

The Office

We don't have an office yet, but we made some progress this week. We've narrowed it down to a couple of spaces, one of which is bigger, and cheaper than the other, but has literally nothing inside it. So Jerry worked with a friend of ours who is a legit architect and movie set designer to come up with a plan for the office which we would have to build, and which looks like THIS!

So now we gotta figure out how much it'll cost to build this out, and see how much of it the owners will pay for, and then compare that to the cost of the other place which is ready to move in right now. SUPER looking forward to having our own office space, I think Jerry did a great job with this plan.

What else, what else....

The Adventure

Oh right! I finished the outline for the adventure! It's supposed to be approximately 32 pages of which 1/3rd will be art, and I didn't want to have to worry about writing it AND all the rest of the book, so I reached out to a freelancer and asked if they'd be willing to write it.

It's probably going to be between 15,000 and 20,000 words. The outline is almost 3,000 words. I thought folks might get a kick out of seeing some of the plots and characters and items they've heard about from my game so, spoilers, the adventure is The Siege of Castle Rend. 

Once the writer has signed and returned the contract, I'll announce who it is. Going to need a cartographer too, have some folks in mind I need to reach out to...

Ummm...what else.

The Dragons!

Oh right! The dragons! LOTS of progress on that front I'm happy to say. First, we're well on our way to partnering with someone who I believe can get the jorb done. Lots of companies that might be able to do it, but are sketchy. You know, they don't get back to us in a timely manner, they disappear for a while. We're making a lot of minis, this is going to be a big order, we need a partner who we feel is taking it seriously and I think we're almost there. We're scheduling a trip for three of us to go out and visit their facility, see their process. 

In the meantime, we have a 3D model of another mini, but it's not ready for prime time, yet, needs some revision before I'd feel good about showing it off.

And we have a concept for the final dragon! This is the Adult Amethyst dragon and will be on a 3x3 base like the Ruby. I think she'll be a little taller than the Ruby.

This is literally just the first concept, we'll work to make this one different from her brothers and sisters. But we now have concepts for all five dragons! 

Ok what else what else...

PAX EAST

I will be at Pax East, mostly because I want to see Adam Koebel and Luke Crane's legendary talk on the history of the relationship between D&D and Heavy Metal, so if you're at PAX East and see me, say "Hey aren't you from YouTube?" And I'll look bewildered and run away. :D

I'll be giving a couple of talks, but the audiences for them I think are like 12 people or something. They're real small, put on by Luke in the Kickstarter room. 

MCDM

Less sexy, but real, we're in the process of hiring people and getting everyone health insurance and 401k. We're filing trademark applications, we're getting corporate insurance, a corporate tax attorney and bookkeeper. It's all pretty crazy. Hiring a bunch of friends from the video game business and putting offices in Orange County, CA is...we're gonna be an expensive company to run. But we've raised a lot of money and we have several future revenue streams to look forward to and products we believe in. And it turns out you get taxed on all the money you don't spend. :D Which everyone I talk to refers to the same way. "You're basically burning that money." Better spent than burned!

So who knows what will happen, it's a risk. I'm aware that folks didn't pledge so I could go start a company, but there's no way I can get all this done (a book, minis, merch, a stream) done alone, and we'll do more, and better, with full-time people and these are people I've worked with and trust. 

I made this an "Anyone Can See It" post, I dunno. I like transparency. 

The Kickstarter Is Over, Now The Work Begins
over 6 years ago – Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 12:56:20 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.