Sunday, November 29, 2009

Sometimes The Numbers Don't Work

Sadly, I do not believe that the numbers add up for the viability of getting Magnesium Games up and running at this time.

It's funny how much an individual's situation can change in six months.

When I started work on MgG, I was working 30 hours a week and had almost no financial commitments.

Six months later, I find myself working 40 hours a week and looking at signing up for a mortgage.

Suddenly, the 10 to 15 hours I needed to put in each week to make Magnesium Games work seems like an impossible reach. More and more I find myself only working on the bare minimums - and not always reaching those - and less and less working on the underlying products. Plato's Game, despite its compact size, has more or less stalled in development. And the big project has seen a mere two dozen pages of setting work completed in the last three months.

Financially, where before I found it easy to put aside 5 grand for start-up costs, I now find myself eyeing off that money as essential to buying a house for myself.

Motivationally, I have always derived a lot of my drive from my own gaming group. Unfortunately, it has proved increasingly difficult to organise games (a side-effect of getting jobs, I guess) and the last few campaigns I've run have been... poor, at best.

Still, this is not the end of Magnesium Games. But it does mark a change in approach. The blog will be much quieter for the foreseeable future. I will still post the occasional article, but mostly it will be silent. Until I am much closer to the release dates, the blog simply takes too much time. Especially as I looked at expanding it to include other authors.

I have also decided that it is mostly likely unfeasible to produce a game by myself. Financially, not having a partnered artist is prohibitively expensive. Creatively, not having someone to closely bounce ideas off is not conducive to my best work.

So, Magnesium Games will not be getting its own website in the near future and will be mostly quiet. Work will continue, albeit at a slow pace, on the core projects. And I will once again renew the hunt for a dedicated business partner.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Under the Hood #3 - Social Capital

Welcome to the next instalment of Under the Hood. Today, I’ll be looking briefly at the social traits in gaming.

This is an area where I’ve often found mechanics to be the least helpful. After all, for many groups, the social aspects are always played out in detail role-playing without actually using any mechanics. This can cause difficulties where a player’s ability and a characters ability are widely divergent.

And so, I’ve been looking at alternative systems for representing a character’s social advantages and disadvantages.

There are two alternative systems that I’m looking at employing in our current project. The first is a descriptive set of mechanics that defines your characters personality generally. Each trait would be on a spectrum with a personality type at each end – shy versus outgoing as an example. This helps for two reasons. Firstly, it makes social mechanics a bit more interesting and thus more likely to be played with by those more interested in the game aspect of role-playing (it’s also a tad more realistic, where being outgoing isn’t always an advantage). Secondly, for those Weavers (such as myself) who aren’t inclined to use the mechanics as much, it provides a better framework for the players to map out their characters. The ratings in each social trait help provide a foundation on which to build the character’s personality.

There are many disadvantages to this system. It may get very clunky. It struggles to deal with individual characters having different levels of shyness at different times. It works differently to the character’s other traits, meaning another system has to be learnt and dealt with.

The second system is my current preferred idea, but is still very much in its embryonic stages. Characters will have social traits as normal and, I imagine, these will be largely ignored during sessions. However, character creation will also detail the family, friends, and important acquaintances of the character and the character’s social traits will be used to affect a Weaver-maintained resource pool of trust, favours, and the like. As characters then act within the world, they will expend their social capital by asking for favours and gain more social capital by doing favours. Of course, there will also be other means for social capital to raise and fall. The system will support both individuals and organisations/communities positions on the character and will track a couple of forms of social capital (renown, love, and respect). Most importantly, all the stats for each character will fit on a single side of a character sheet (or a sheet maintained by the Weaver) and the system will be no heavier on the bookkeeping than health systems are for combat.

These ideas are only at the earliest stages of development. They may be discarded entirely or they may change beyond recognition. At this time, they’re being presented here because I’m very keen to get some feedback on how you all think systems of these types (especially the second one) could be of use to you and your gaming groups. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Service Interruptions to Continue...

Apologies for the sudden disappearance for a couple of weeks. A combination of sickness, a heavy load at work, a friend's birthday (and the ensuing hangover) and getting a Google Wave invite meant that I was rather lax in meeting my writing requirements. For various reasons, I've also been emphasising work on the actual projects themselves rather than this blog. Still, that's no excuse for failure to meet a deadline and it's an even poorer excuse for not mentioning that the deadline would be missed.

In related news...
Until recently I, personally, had been expecting to move interstate for work later this year. I have recently changed my mind and will be staying in sunny old Adelaide for the time being. This has meant several significant changes to my personal plans for the next several months (and indeed next couple of years). One of the more significant of these changes being that I am now looking at purchasing a house in the immediate future. As a result of this, I have had to review some of the time lines for Magnesium Games and there have been some substantial changes.

Firstly, the weekly schedule for posts will not recommence until 8 November. It is my intention to post a couple of articles between now and then, but there will be no regular structure to them. During this time I will also be working on developing a buffer of articles, which will then help to ensure that service interruptions do not reoccur. If this buffer reaches a sufficient size before November 8, I will reinstate the regularly scheduled articles sooner.

Secondly, the website will be delayed in its introduction. Initially, the intent had been for the website to go live by the end of the year. Financial (buying a house is rather expensive) and logistical considerations mean this is no longer possible. It is now my intent for the website to go live in late March next year. This date is tentative, as I have not yet confirmed any sort of time lines with the potential site developers. I will keep you all up to date with the expected timeline.

Thirdly, the original intent had been to bring additional authors on board as the website went live. I am now looking at bringing one or two authors on in late November, with more to follow after the website goes live.

Fourthly, for those interested in Plato's Game - it will still be released shortly after the website goes live. For various reasons it is simply not feasible to release the game prior to having our own website.


If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the comments below.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

We Proudly Present...


This week was going to be the next instalment of Under the Hood and I was going to save the unveiling of our new logo until the long week-end next week, but some recent illness has impacted my ability to write coherently and I'm just a little bit too excited about the logo to hold off any longer before I show it off to everyone.

So without further ado...



Logo Design by: Tom Buttery

Monday, September 21, 2009

Laying the Foundations #2 - The Importance of Community

Welcome to the second instalment of Laying the Foundations. In this week’s article I’m going to touch on the fundamental unit of our hobby – the gaming group.

In the same way that the family is the building block of society, the group is the building block of our gaming community. Whilst some people do buy gaming books just to read them, the overwhelming majority of us buy the books because we want to play the game – whether or not we do is another question entirely.

Gaming belongs to a network market – the more people that are playing in your area, the easier it is to find other gamers with compatible schedules, and the easier it is to find people who want to play in the kind of games you want to play in. It surprises me that so many gaming companies aim their works at single players rather than the group.

Magnesium Games intends to buck this trend at least somewhat. We’re focussed on the fact that the group is the building block of the community and the community is the key to thriving in the gaming industry. Of course, we also recognise that many individual gamers belong to multiple groups and we’re going to provide for that as well.

There are two main ways we’ll be looking after gaming groups. The first is our website. Whilst at first it will be predominantly a collection of articles and reviews, it will later be expanding to include a selection of gaming tools. These will be designed with a collaborative, group approach in mind. We’ll also be structuring our premium memberships around a group basis as well as an individual basis.

Secondly, our game products will be released in three ways – In the traditional hard copy and e-books, and as boxed sets. The boxed sets will be sold with a range of options so that you can customise it for the members of your group and the size of your group. Depending on the exact set, it might include a hard-copy of the full main book, multiple hard copies of a shortened version of the rules for players, various props, character sheets, maps, tokens, dice, and other goodies.

Of course, all of this is quite a long way away, so why am I talking about it now?

Put simply, I’m talking about it now because the group experience is at the core of all our design and business philosophies at Magnesium Games. With few exceptions, we don’t game by ourselves but as part of a group and we believe that every aspect of the hobby should be designed to cater to the group as well as to the individual.

See you all next week…

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Under the Hood #2 - Multi-Dimensional Mechanics

In this instalment of Under the Hood, I’m going to talk about our second Design Principle, which I’m currently calling Multi-Dimensional Mechanics. Partly because it’s a somewhat apt description, and partly because it sounds kind of amusingly steampunkish.

What do I mean by Multi-Dimensional Mechanics? Well, let’s start with the singular dimensional rules you see in most systems.

Under these rules, a character will have a set of traits which affect their chance of success. They may do this in any number of ways. Some systems have a flat bonus that is added to a die roll and then has to beat a target number. Some systems might change the number of dice you are rolling.

The thing that all these systems have in common is that there is only one number from the character that affects the roll. So, if you make your character better at something they tend to increase their chances of getting a success of any type and to increase the level of success that they can achieve.

That may sound reasonable but there is an important difference between how easily something comes to a person and how much they can accomplish with it. Some people may find solving a given mathematical problem simplistic, but only be able to do it through a complex and circuitous route that takes them three times as long as someone for whom mathematics comes just as easily but who has a greater knowledge and can thus accomplish much more with it.

Another way to think about it, is the idea of representing the ease with which someone with a high potential manages the simpler tasks in a given field before they’ve learnt enough to even attempt the harder tasks. Both characters may have a rank of 1 in their Computer skill, but the natural talent is going to have a lot easier time with that 1 rank than the person who has struggled to learn it in the first place.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is definitely represented in the overwhelming majority of systems. It’s just that there is no dividing line between the two and generally, to improve one is to improve the other.

In our system, we’re determined to make that line a little bit sharper. As in many systems, to make a roll you combine two different traits. One of these traits – the one that determines how easy a task comes to you – tells you what sort of dice to roll (d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12), and the other- the one that determines how much you can accomplish with a task – tells you how many dice you can roll.

Thus you can create a character with phenomenal potential, but very limited abilities – or one who has toiled for decades to have an in depth understanding of a given topic, but still struggles to apply it to new works.

This system doesn’t divide the two out perfectly, there’s still some overlap. But it is a bit neater than many other systems. It also creates some interesting options to improve our take on the first Design Concept (the Narrative Character), and as you’ll see later – makes it a little easier to do some of the things we want to do with Tokens and Experience.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Laying the Foundations #1 - The Core Principles +2

Welcome to the first Laying the Foundations column. In this series of articles, I’ll be looking at the reasoning behind Magnesium Games’ online presence and what we hope to achieve.

To start things off, I thought I’d talk about the core philosophies which Magnesium Games operates on. For those wondering how this ties in to our online presence - the decision to have an active online presence and to make the online portions of our business the most active and important aspects have their roots in these principles.

Last week I mentioned that we have five underlying principles. I’ll go through each in no particular order.

Openness
Magnesium Games will strive to be as open as is practical. This doesn’t mean that we’ll tell you everything there is to know about everything we do. It does mean that we’ll tell you a lot more than most people would.
We won’t tell you everything for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there are some things that can’t be told for security, privacy, or legal reasons (for example, no one is going to want us to tell everyone all the details we collect when you sign up to our website, password included). Secondly, as every Weaver and the majority of Players know – the right amount of anticipation at the right time can be a vastly enjoyable experience. Thirdly, it’d take a lot of time to tell you everything and that’s less time we’ve got to spend on making games or improving the website.
Oh, and chances are very few people will want to know everything that we’re doing.

Openness also means that we’ll make our products and services as readily available as we can, which means at as a low price and in as many formats as we can, as well as striving to make the best possible use of Creative Commons licences to allow derivative works.

Adaptability
Times change. Markets shift. It’s survival of the fittest, and that generally means those most able to adapt to change. Magnesium Games will strive to be very quick to react to, well, everything. Many organisations seem to take forever to make even simple changes to the way they do things. Often because to get one thing changed you need to get approval from numerous people. I once worked with an organisation that required seven people to sign off on fixing a single typo on a form. It took three months to change. For three months the form read ‘shit to’ instead of ‘ship to’…

Magnesium Games is designing its internal processes with a strong view to keeping them highly flexible and as easy as possible to adapt without compromising on quality or security.

Respect
Respect is the foundation of all human interactions and is the second most important of all the principles (see below for the most important). It’s a fairly simple concept – Magnesium Games will act in a respectful manner towards all those it has dealings with and expects to be treated with respect in return. This will, no doubt, be the cornerstone of our forum rules.

Sustainability
Despite what you may be thinking, this principle is not specifically about being environmentally-friendly. It’s about being viable. The business must operate such that it does not run at a loss and such that it can pay all of its suppliers and employees in a timely fashion. It needs to turn a profit only if it needs to build capital reserves so as to either expand to achieve better economies of scale or to ensure that it has sufficient reserves to survive unexpected events.

Not-Being-Evil
This is the most important of the five underlying principles. It’s also the easiest and the hardest to explain. Easiest because it is what it says it is – Magnesium Games will always endeavour to act in a good way. We won’t cook babies. We will help little old ladies cross the road.
Hardest because enumerating exactly what is evil and what is good often gets far blurrier than any of us like to think it does. It’s also a principle we expect to find easy to live by- the gaming industry not being one that is fraught with moral perils (at least, not outside of our games and imaginations).

The Extra Two
There are two other principles that are worthy of mention. Though I’ve not included them in the core five yet, it is likely that they will be included in an eventual revision to them.
The first is the principle of moderation. Extremes tend to be bad. And that holds for seemingly good things as well as for obviously bad things. So it applies to all our principles as well. You can see it in Openness where we promise to protect our member’s privacy despite our commitment to being as open as possible.
The second is a trickier concept to verbalise, but one that will underpin all business ventures I take part in. Unfortunately, I don’t have a single word or short-phrase for it just yet. Suggestions are welcome. Economists have a concept they call externalities. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Wikipedia has a decent explanation. In all the decisions we make, Magnesium Games will endeavour to do so from a Social Benefit and Social Cost point of view rather than a Private Cost and Private Benefit point of view. I could talk on this subject for several pages, but will refrain from doing so here. If you want to know more about what this business model means, drop a note in the comments.

Final Thoughts
The astute amongst you will have noticed that this was not the article that was promised a fortnight ago. I decided that detailing these principles was of far greater importance and far greater benefit to understanding what Magnesium Games hopes to accomplish, than the original topic would have been. The next Laying the Foundations will feature the originally intended “Importance of Community” topic.
Thanks for reading!

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Under the Hood #1 - The Narrative Character

Under The Hood will be a recurring column talking about the design concepts that are underpinning the various systems in development at Magnesium Games.
Before I launch into a discussion of one of the concepts, I want to quickly talk about the Underlying Principles of Magnesium Games. There are five. In no particular order they are Openness, Adaptability, Respect, Sustainability, and Not-Being-Evil. I’ll be talking about these principles and what we mean by them in a later blog post, but for the moment I want to refer to the first two I listed.
We’re talking about the design concepts that are underpinning our current projects for a number of reasons. The most important being Openness – we believe that the more that people can provide feedback and criticism, the better the products that are created and we see no reason why that can’t occur from a very early stage in the design process. This leads in to the Adaptability principle. Whilst the design concepts discussed here form our current bedrock; that does not make them an immovable object. That isn’t to say that I’ll be discarding them all in favour of entirely different ones next week, just that some changes, modifications, and refinements of the concept is not only natural over time, it’s essential if we want to create the highest quality products we can.

The design concepts that will be discussed over the coming weeks were developed for our first major project. Obviously, the design concepts will differ from project to project and their suitability can only really be judged against the objectives of the project. So, it only makes sense to show you the objective of the first major project:
To create a narrative-driven fantasy game with a broad setting and robust system.
Narrative-driven: This role-playing game is about the story. It’s less about playing a game, or creating a life-like situation than about weaving an amazing and interactive story.
A Broad Setting: Amazingly detailed settings often make for compelling reading, but many people (myself especially) find it difficult to run a game in a detailed world. I tend to want to keep what the author has written and yet find myself not having enough room in their world for my players to have a significant impact. The game we are working on at the moment will have a general universe within which many fantasy worlds may reside. Some may have contact with one another and some may not – the first setting we’re producing is a single unconnected world. The general metaphysics of the world will be wholly transplantable between worlds (albeit with a different pantheon), and on the world in question we will be describing the high level details (cultural groups, major nations, etc) but leaving many of the smaller details for individual Weavers to create.
A Robust System: The system will be able to handle the widest possible range of situations and will focus very closely on supporting a narrative-driven approach.

In future articles, I’ll talk some more about the various things we hope to accomplish with this system. For now, I’ll stop holding up the works and move on to the article I promised last week.

In this issue of Under the Hood, we’ll be looking at our first design concept – The Narrative Character.

For our current major project, we are hoping to create a system which makes it easier to create a character rather than a collection of attributes. One of the ways we are attempting to accomplish this is by having the game traits which describe your character take a more narrative approach.
In many, if not most, game systems the traits are essentially a list of things your character can do and how well they can do them. The problem with this approach is that we are often left with moments in game-play where our characters can’t do something that our mental image of them says they should be able to do, or where they can do something superbly that they should only be passable at or even just plain suck at.
My experience is that these moments often break the flow of the narrative and lessen the impact of the story. Whilst they do sometimes lead to funny stories, they are generally just plain annoying.
We think we’ve found a good way to get around this issue. It isn’t foolproof by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly seems to be decreasing the frequency with which these problems arise. I also believe that it helps to simplify character creation, especially for newer players.
In our game the core character traits are based on character ideas rather than hard and fast abilities. The driving reason behind which trait you use becomes less a matter of which physical task are you attempting to perform and more a matter of what dramatic conflict you are attempting to resolve. It also somewhat changes when the Weaver should call for a roll. In this system, you only call for a roll where there is a dramatic conflict to resolve. It’s not a matter of whether or not the character will succeed at a task, it’s whether or not their success or failure is of importance to the story.

In yesterday’s post, I spoke about a minor-project that I’m calling Plato’s Game until it is formally named. The entirety of that game is based around this idea of the Narrative Character, of a set of character traits that describe the character from a dramatic rather than an action perspective.
Plato’s Game is a generic system that can be used in any narrative intensive game. It’s flow reminds me of some dinner games I’ve seen before and as such it tends to be more suited to games that are played over a small number of sessions, or even just in a nights gaming.
The game will be released in pdf format for free! Even better, the rules take up only a single piece of paper! It is a quick and simple system to learn and will likely appeal to some of your non-gamer friends as well.
In addition to the ruleset, the pdf will include an example of play, some story hooks, and a brief guide on running a game using the rules. The game will be released approximately a fortnight after our website. As we are still in the process of designing the website, we can’t say for certain when this will be – but we’ll keep you posted.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Sidebars: Testing the Waters

A bonus update this week!

An essential stage of the development of every game is the play-testing stage. One of Magnesium Games' side projects is just about to reach this stage and very shortly, I'll be looking for some Adelaide-based people to come and play in one or two sessions of the game.

In the mean time, I'm very keen to hear from anyone who is interested in play-testing any or all of our games (whether you're based in Adelaide or elsewhere). Drop me an email at danielobrien0 (at*) gmail.com or leave your details in the comments below.



Plato's Game (working title) will be ready for play-testing in the very, very near future - in tomorrow's weekly update you'll get a small teaser as well!

For those who join the Playtester pool, you'll get some extra updates in the next couple of weeks and an early copy of the rules. And you may get the opportunity to play in one or more of the Playtest sessions!


So, what are you waiting for? Send an email to me, or leave your email in the comments below, to join the Playtester Pool!

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

A Valuable Lesson

On Sunday, as promised, I posted the next entry in this blog. It was a nice description of some of the core concepts behind the character structure.

Though I should say that I *tried* to post the next entry. Because it would seem that what I actually did was delete it. A rather impressive fail on my behalf if I do say so myself.

Unfortunately, that was the only copy I had of that blog post. Rest assured, I will be re-writing it and posting it. Unfortunately, due to other commitments, I won't be able to do so until next Sunday.

In a partial bid to make up for it, I've got a brief outline of what you can expect over the coming weeks.

Sunday 31 August: Under the Hood 1 - The Platonic Ideal
Sunday 6 September: Laying the Foundations 1 - The Importance of Community
Sunday 13 September: Under the Hood 2 - Multi-Dimensional Mechanics
Sunday 20 September: Laying the Foundations 2 - A Meeting of Minds
Sunday 27 September: Under the Hood 3 - Social Capital
Sunday 04 October: Under the Hood 4 - Putting It Together

In Under the Hood, I'll be exploring some of the core concepts I've worked from in building the system that MgG's first game will use.
In Laying the Foundations, I intend to discuss the reasons behind MgG's online presence and how I hope to expand and develop that presence.

Beyond that things get interesting - I'll be bringing on between two and four columnists to help keep the blog regularly updated. The search is currently on for appropriate writers with the hope that the first two will start in mid-October and up to another two before the end of the year. If this option proves viable and popular, we'll start looking at expanding the number and frequency of columns in the first quarter of 2010.
The columns will be on a range of topics. Here's a quick peak at the list that has been considered thus far: World-building guide, Prop-making Tips, Session write-ups, Ongoing fiction, Weaving help, Dealing with problem players, Running Massive Multi-Weaver Games, and Running Gaming Clubs.

If you want to find out which ones make the cut - keep reading this blog...
If you want to write a column (and maybe make yourself a little cash in the process) - drop an email to me at danielobrien0 (*at) gmail.com

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Weaving a Story

In last week’s post, I made an off-hand reference to Players and Weavers and thus inadvertently let slip one of the term’s Magnesium Games will be using across all of its RPG products. Weaver is our take on Game Master, Storyteller, Dungeonmaster, Narrator, and the many other alternatives.

Why not Game Master?

For the simple reason that it makes the GM sound like they are in complete control of the game. Everyone who has played in a game before will know how unlikely that is to actually happen. More importantly, it’s not something that you want. We want an interactive experience, not a master-slave relationshop.

Why not Storyteller?

This harks back to the same lack of interactivity. An RPG is not a story that is being told, it’s a story that is being crafted by a group of individuals. Everyone who is playing is telling a story, it’s not been told by a single individual.

So, Why Weaver?

For me, the idea of weaving best captures the role of the person who’s running the whole universe as their character. Their job is to take the stories that the Players make up and to weave them in to the fabric of their universe and their plot ideas. Weaver seems more interactive, after all there is little that a Weaver can do without the individual Threads that make their Tapestry. Whilst the Weaver may be able to exert influence on and, at times, even control individual Threads, they can never control them completely and thus the Tapestry is created by both the Weaver and the various Threads.

Tapestries and Threads

Having taken the name Weaver and run with it, I expanded the metaphor to look at some of the other regular parts of our hobby. As you’ve already seen this has lead to two other terms I intend to use in Magnesium Games’ products.

A Tapestry is your campaign, chronicle, adventure, or story. It consists of many different Threads of different sorts. The players you weave with, the system you play in, the setting you use as a backdrop, the mood and atmosphere you all set, and the themes you explore. It’s up to you and your troupe to decide which threads to use and how to weave them together. The only certainty is that the players will mess with your original intentions…

The Design Process

Got a better idea? A better set of terms that more accurately describe the narrative experience? One of the many, many things Magnesium Games wants to accomplish with a relatively open design process is lots of feedback and criticism of the ideas we have so that we can make a better game. If you love the terms, let us know in the comments. Or, if you think the whole idea of a Weaver creating a Tapestry from disparate Threads is corny, cuckoo, or just plain crap, then drop a comment below.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Welcome!

Welcome to the first post at Magnesium Games.

This blog will look at the development of a new project - Magnesium Games, henceforth MgG. We'll be making our home here at blogger for the next couple of months until our full website is functional.

MgG has several objectives, the first of which is to produce a not-quite Creative Commons game system for distribution as both a pdf and physical book. No firm release date exists, though I'm optimistically aiming for the second quarter of 2011.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll divulge some more details of this project and the various projects linked to it. To start things off though, I thought I'd talk a little bit more about what I mean by not-quite Creative Commons.


The game system that is currently in development will be just one of several that have been considered and will, luck-willing, be produced following the first product. Currently, MgG envisages releasing the core rules for all of these games under a limited CC-style licence (it's yet to be determined if the CC licences meet our requirements). If we do this properly, it will work the way the OGL should have worked for D&D (albeit on a much, much smaller scale). The core rules will be freely available in pdf format, whilst a hard copy format will be purchasable at as fair a price as is possible. Setting add-ons and other supplements will then be released under a more traditional model. There will also be ongoing and regular support through the MgG website - at this stage, it looks like being a series of regular articles (at least one a week), which will then be compiled in to monthly pdfs and annual hard copies.

One of the key things we want to accomplish across all MgG endeavours is an open, two-way communication with the players and Weavers who use 0ur products. Most importantly for us is a desire to continuously improve on the products. Where possible, we intend to regularly update the various pdf corebooks so that they are essentially living rulebooks.
After all, no amount of in-house playtesting can thrash a system as robustly as your players will...
We'll also be looking to involve the community in product development to a greater extent than has been traditional in the rpg community, but more on that later.


This blog will be updated weekly on Sundays, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates and sneak previews of our forthcoming products.