Monthly Archives: March 2008

How Do I Turn My Game Into a Text?

A game is a myserious thing.  It is a toy, an imaginary machine with precets that can be fiddled with, it has rules, procedures, and a life all its own.  It does not exist in the mind of the designer as a fully laid out book; it is an idea, a collection of ideas, each one symbiotically existing in harmony with each other.

So how the hell do you turn that into a book?

A text, is quite the opposite of a game.  It is not a procedure; it is a description of the procedure.  A text is not a game; it is a description and instructions for the game.

As designers, we make a game.  It is often a scattered diaspora of notes, scribblings, playtests and forum posts.  Once we can run the game smoothy, and have enjoyable, functional play, then the game is complete.  But until the game is transformed into a form where someone else can reconstruct the game (or a reasonable fascimile thereof), the game is not a text.

Enough waxing poetic.  Write a damn outline.

An outline is the first step for the writer of a big project.  Figure out what the important bits of your text are going to be.  I’m assuming you’re writing a roleplaying game; find a similar game, or one that served as inspiration, and look at that game’s chapter headings.  What do you have in common?  What will you need to add?  Is there anything extraneous here?

For Awesome Adventures, my outline included the following sections:

Information & Basics

Character Creation

Aspects in Detail

Skills in Detail

Examples of How to Do Stuff

Settings Adaptation

Player Advice

GM Advice

Sample Characters


Some of these sections got renamed or moved around, but they are all there in the final draft.  I found it helpful to make each of these chapters a seperate word file, so I could easily navigate the different portions of my book.

Under each of these chapters I figured out what needed to be in that chapter.  List everything here that you’re going to have to talk about.  If it’s going to get text, put it here.

For example, under Intro & Basics, I have the following:

What the Game is Meant to Be

What You Need to Play

How Dice Work

How Rolls Work

The Skill Ladder

Mention Aspects/Fate Points

And that’s pretty much what’s in the book right now, and almost a line-by-line reading of the first chunk of my table of contents. 

Once you’ve got your chapter headings and subheadings, look and see if anything is missing.  Is there a cool rule that doesn’t show up anywhere?  You’d better find a spot for it.  Does the order of things seem nonintuitive?  Now’s the time to change it.  (You’ve got Character Creation and Battles in different files right?  You can just neatly rearange them on your outline, without fussing through your whole text and trying to cut and paste whole chapters of text.)

Now go in and take those barebones files, and flesh them out.  Start explaining these concepts and your game.  When you finish a section, go to your outline and write ‘complete’ next to the heading.  This will help you keep track of what’s been written and what hasn’t.

Eventually you’ll have a finished text, one that you can read from start to finish, one that maybe has grammar.  One you can show to playtesters, and editors.  Oh, you thought your work was done, did you?

Retail: Garden of the Surreal II


Me:  And your total is $60.




(I wish this had only happened once.)





Kid:  Can I have something for free?

Me:  No.

Kid:  Why not?

Me:  Why should I give you something for free?

Kid:  I dunno.


SotC’s Designers on SotC’s Flaws

Over on Independent Insurgency, Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks talk about Spirit of the Century.

I found it interesting that one of their topics was flaws of SotC.  There are two flaws key they single out:

Spirit of the Century drags in convention games during character creation, due to vast stunt lists.

Combats can drag due to the stress track.

So, anyone play Awesome Adventures?  I had those issues too, and designed a game around solving them.

Fantastic Plattecon Adventure II: Return to Platteville








Round One:

Me- Ascended Cheese

Tim- Lotus Exploding Destroyer (a deck borrowed from me)

Mark- Lotus Hoods (a giveaway demo deck)


Event wins: 1-0


Round Two:

Me- Ascended Cheese

Steve- Bar Brawl

Jim- Jammers




Event wins: 2-0


Me- Ascended Cheese

Jim- Jammers

Tim- Exploding Destroyers


From that Bull Market, and other sources, Jim gets a Funky Monkey, a Gimp, and a Gorrila Fighter.  Funky Monkey prevents me from Biting him.  Tim gets a Destroyer (later toasted by a Rebel without a cause) and an Evil Twin of the Gimp.

The Emperor kills a Gorrilla Fighter and intercepts a Gimp to stop an attack.  A Cutting Loose ends destroys Jim’s Black Market Connections.  Jim and Tim beat me down, but I build back up.




John had mostly Jammers but he also had a splash of Dragons- my big competition for their resources, and a decent ammount of Architects.







Hey You! Buy Awesome Adventures!

I got my proof copy today.  There’s some minor layout things I’m going to want to tweak before Forge Midwest and my print run, but it’s awesome enough to be printed for people.  You can be the first one on your block* to own it here.

*Unless you live on my block.  Like Tim.

Game Design on a Budget: Art

I was recently asked about how I went about the whole publishing process of my game by a friend.  While by no means an expert on the subject, I have some experience and am a cheap frugal person, so hopefully, my experiences might be of some insight.

When finding art for your game, you have basically two options- commission it, or find it.

Commisioning art involves finding an artist to draw a specific picture for your game.  This is useful if you have a very specific scene in mind, like “two zeppelins crashing into each other over an exploding volcano, and also there’s a robot riding a dragon,” for example.  You are probably not going to just stumble upon something like this searching the internet, so you need someone to draw it for you.

(That’s technically called finding an Illustrator.  You might commission an artist because you know their work is awesome, and just tell them to draw whatever they want.)

Commisioning is going to cost you money, more likely than not.  Since you want to spend as little money as possible on your first game, you’re probably only going to get friends to work for free.  And they won’t be terribly reliable.

Finding art involves looking at Deviant Art portfolio sites, or public domain files.  For Awesome Adventures, I got in contact with a number of Madison based artists, and Zach introduced me to Caroline Berg, and I had a number of already made art to pick and choose from.  Someone is more likely to let you use their art for free if it doesn’t involve any effort to them, and you let them keep the rights and ownership.  (Also, Caroline was awesome enough to draw some art to specs.)  The downside to all of this is that you’re working with other people’s visions- they might not be drawing the sorts of things you want, but if you have a sufficiently broad vision for what sorts of art you might want, you can figure out what might work.

Public domain art is another good source, but you may find yourself restricted.  There isn’t terribly much public domain fantasy or sci-fi art, but if you are writing a historical game, there’s a wealth of options out there.  John Harper used this to good effect in Agon.  I might look into this for art for Warriors from the Mystic Mountain, but I’ll probably be commisioning quite a bit of art too.

There’s one final way to get cheap art, but not everyone can do it: draw it yourself.  Vincent Baker drew some of the pieces in Dogs in the Vineyard.  You know your vision is going to be there, but not everyone is an artist, and professional quality art may make your game more attractive.

Retail: Garden of the Surreal

Whereas in the hospitality industry I found customers irritating and frustrating, in retail I find that my reaction is one of bizzare wonderment.  Each day my retail megastore is a potential new experience, a look into a dream-washed world of strangeness.  I present these exchanges without further comment:


Two customers, young men, trying to ironically use the credit card machine in Spanish.  They fail.

“I should have been able to do that.  I took Spanish I for four years.”


Customer at check out: “What is this?”

Me: “Bwuh?”

C:  “What is this?”

Me:  “It’s a clock.”

C: “No, I mean, how does it hang on the wall?”

Me, looking at package, reading the directions: “It says it comes with hooks, so probably with those.”

C:  “Oh.  I don’t want that.  How about this?” (Holds cup holder for car.)  “Do you think this will fit in my car?”

Me:  “What?”

C:  “Do you think it will fit in my car?  I have a stick shift.”

Me:  “Well, every car is different, you know?  I drive a station wagon, and it’s pretty big, but I still don’t think there’s enough room up front for that.”

C:  “A station wagon?  What kind?”

Me:  “A Ford Escort.”

C:  “Me too!  What do you mean you think it won’t fit?”

Me:  “Well, there’s the stick and the emergency break and everything…”

C:  “No, not there!  In the back seats!”

Me:  “Oh, yeah, sure, it’ll fit there.”


Customer, really old, writing a check: “What day is it today?”

Me:  “March 6th.”

C: “What’s the ammount?”

Me:  “$75.52”

Customer writes the date on the check as “6-75-52.”  She finishes writing it and looks at it, and then at me:  “Wait, what day is it?”

Me:  “March 6th.”

C:  “But then… wait, this can’t be right.”