Kickstarter in Focus: City of Clocks by James Knevitt

As you can probably guess, I’ve been a big fan of RPG stuff on Kickstarter lately. I like that my money can go to  helping new things get created, and I like even more the perks that you can get from backing something new early. I’m extending that support, now, to talking about the Kickstarters that I’m supporting. The first pick: City of Clocks, a systemless setting by James Knevitt.

Christopher Helton was kind enough to set me up with a few chapters of the book, as well as hooking me up directly with James so that I could give him a bit of an interview. What I find interesting about this Kickstarter is that it’s not just about getting new work into the world, it’s about saving existing work. City of Clocks licensed was being at on by a publisher who’d stopped publishing. Without Kickstarter to collect the funds needed, it would have disappeared all together. That’s pretty sad.

The book details a unique steampunk-type world that all focuses around this main city. It has a rich and interesting whole magical history that involves ancient races and ancient magics as well as clockworks. There are even androids and insect people. Oh, and mechs that are powered by, basically, steamed chaos. I have a hard time putting the setting into some sort of genre-specific mold, but it is a unique and interesting world all on it’s own. I highly, highly suggest checking it out.

The Kickstarter has met it’s goals, but there are a number of excellent stretch goals to keep striving for:

For every $1,500 we raise past the primary goal we will release a Field Guide (rules conversions for playing in the City of Clocks for a particularly set of rules) in PDF for free to everyone who pledges at the $60 level and higher. This means:

$6,500 releases a Field Guide for OpenQuest
$8,000 releases a Field Guide for Swords & Wizardry
$9,500 releases a Field Guide for Savage Worlds
$11,000 releases a Field Guide for Pathfinder

These Field Guides have not yet been written, so we are looking at a March release on them. Remember, if we hit all four of these stretch goals your $60 pledge for a PDF will get you not only the PDF of City of Clocks and the appendix that is exclusive to Kickstarter backers but you will also get up to four additional PDFs, depending on how many stretch goals we reach. That will be a lot of bang for your gaming buck. All of these Field Guides will eventually be released to retail channels but they will go out to our Kickstarter backers first!

Keep an eye open, if we go through these goals there might be further announcements to be made.

So go check it out! It’s an awesome world and something I liked enough to put my own money towards.

James was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. Here they are for your reading pleasure:

In a pithy one-liner, how would you best describe City of Clocks?

An industrial cosmopolitan dystopia on the brink of revolution.

What was your original inspiration for the setting?

When I started writing it (2003), I was pretty big in the what would later become the steampunk movement. I was also playing in a friend’s 7th Sea game which also provided me with some vague ideas. Ultimately it was that game and an odd conversation about Barbarella that game me the push to start writing it. I can’t recall much about the latter conversation, unfortunately.

What systems have you playtested City of Clocks with? Do some work better than others? Do you have a favorite?

I’ve used the setting with Dream Pod 9′s Silhouette system, the d20 system, BRP and what would eventually become Savage Worlds (the Deadlands RPG). I’m aware of folks having used the setting with Savage Worlds and FATE as well, but not in any formal capacity. It seems to fit pretty well for all sorts of systems, which I’m happy about. I quite enjoyed using it with BRP.

One of my favorite parts of worlds like this are the ways that technology is imagined. I love the idea of the ice-powered mechs wandering around. Any plans for additional supplements that might extend into more creative technology?

I think that’s certainly a possibility. There’s a strong legacy of what one might call “forgotten technology” in the setting. People are just starting to reverse-engineer technology that was once common to many precursor races, so there’s a lot of room to maneuver when it comes to possible technology that could be discovered by PCs if they happen to be in the right place. I like to think that there’s room for anything folks could dream up.

What kind of stories do you think serve this world best? Stories of intrigue and power? Raw stories of fighting against oppression? Stories with a lot of violence or battle? Or, even, all of the above?

All of the above, certainly. I wrote the setting as a place that teeters on the brink of revolution, but also a place where for the most part people just try to go about their lives. Players using the setting can choose to dial down the revolution aspect and play the setting straight, getting involved in House intrigues of faction infighting. The flip side of that is a full-on civil war that has players choosing sides and fighting in the streets of the city in a wartime setting. Or, naturally, it can fall somewhere in between.

So, it looks like this has been a long time in the making, and the Kickstarter is funded. Can you give my readers a little bit of a timeline?

I started working on the setting in 2003 (with my then- collaborators Nick Pilon and john Buckmaster) when it was going to be picked up by Dream Pod 9. Real life intervened and the project became detached from DP9, and it lay fallow until about 2008, when I decided to finish up the project and to start shopping it around. The setting rights were then purchased by a publisher who for a couple of reasons didn’t work out. I then figured out a deal with Battlefield Press to finally get this thing into print by running a Kickstarter campaign to buy the rights back and pay for art and layout. That about brings us to the present!

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Mapping Out Krohn

One of the many projects I’ve been working on this weekend is the worldmap for my main campaign, set in this world I’ve tentatively named Krohn. The name’s sticking more and more every day, but it still doesn’t feel’ quite right. I kind of feel like I should keep it, though, because the other day Rob saw the name of the world and said, ‘At some point in time during the game, I reserve the right to stand up and shout ‘Krrrooooohhhhnnnnnn!!!!’. So, now I feel sort of obligated. :)

Anyway, in the last couple of years I’ve indulged in getting nearly every piece of art-making software and hardware that my little, untrained, artistic soul has ever lusted after. Okay, maybe not *everything*, but I actually have a decent drawing pad (a Wacom Intuos4), and pretty much every Adobe program in existence thanks to the Adobe Creative Cloud. I’ve also got, from my last campaign, a huge chunk of the Campaign Cartographer goodies, including Fractal Terrains 3, CC3, CD3, and DD3.

I have this to say about the Campaign Cartographer programs: CAD programs require an enormous learning curve. I don’t know if I’m just more comfortable in Photoshop because I’ve been  using it for the last fifteen years straight (and still consider myself an intermediate user – at best), or if CAD programs really just have that big of a learning curve, but me and the CC programs just don’t get along. Every time I pick up the software again, I end up having to go back and wander through the tutorials again. It’s frustrating and annoying. Plus, there are times – especially in Fractal Terrains – when I want to make very fine touch changes, and either the tool doesn’t work as I expected, or it works far too well, and I can’t get it to ‘undo’ far enough back.

Last night, I vowed to make nicey nice with CC and FT, but it still didn’t work. When it comes to designing cities and dungeons, I like the CC programs a lot, but overworld I just feel like I’m constantly flailing around to get it to do what I want. I had to stop and force myself to admit that the design nerd in me (her name is Julia, and she’s particularly fond of late 19th  century french poster designs, like those created by Jules Chéret) just needed to have a lot more control over every aspect of map creation.

So, I took a deep breath, girded my loins, loaded up Photoshop and unequivocally told myself, ‘You WILL make friends with drawing in Photoshop, and you WILL stop getting frustrated when you have to learn new things.’

Ideally, what I want to do is:

1. Create an overworld map that shows the planet as a whole, or at least a good-sized chunk of said planet. This will be the area that the campaign runs in.
2. Do it in such a way so that I can print out a high fidelity Giclée print of the world at 17″x22″ for the gaming table.
3. Also do it in such a way that I can ‘focus in’ on particular areas of the map and make new maps, also capable of being printed at a high resolution, for each of the areas the players are in at any given time.
4. Make the map ‘skinnable’, at least in part, so that I can show and hide various labels and make changes to the world as the players interact with and, thus, change the world.

This is important to me because I’m a very visual person. When I’m working on prepping for a session or a campaign, I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s ideas and imagery. Any one given ‘thing’ that I’m working on will have graphical influences in my head that come from virtually anywhere. Part of what I’m doing for this game, in fact, is to put together individual player mini-binders so that I can frequently pass out visuals that the players can keep to reference whenever they like. I’ll detail that in a later post.

I decided that the best way to do this would be to create my continents as vectors so that I could scale them however I needed to without losing any fidelity. That means using the pen tool, a tool that I’ve always somehow just barely managed to avoid learning. Last night, though, I decided to dig in and get crunchy with it, promising to allow myself to be patient. With the help of Photoshop’s freeform pen tool, I was able to actually fairly quickly build up some continents, apply a fill layer, and some layer effects.

Here’s what I got after fiddling for about an hour or two last night:

This worked way better than I thought it would. I just tried to let myself relax and draw land masses that looked like land masses. Now that the base shapes are there, I’m going to go back and fine-tune the coastlines. Some of them are a little too ‘soft’ for my taste, others are a little too ‘sharp’. Since I’ve made friends with the pen tool, I should be able to more or less just draw what I want, and then use the tools to fine tune that.

The next steps are going to be harder, I fear. I need to start laying down climates, drawing hills, peaks, and valleys, finding the right textures and layer effects to get the look I want, all while trying to figure out some sort of scale. To that end, I’m going to hop into Illustrator today and see if I can’t make some doodly sort of map icons.

So … so far soo good, but I’m crossing my fingers, hoping this thing doesn’t turn out looking like a 6-year-old created it. :)

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My Impressions of D&D Next

I have impressions of DNDNext! This is ENORMOUS! I never thought I would have impressions of DNDNext until, maybe, DNDNext is released. But now, thanks to Kiel Chenier running playtests over Google+ Hangouts, I have impressions!

I picked up the pregen halfling rogue. I named her Lizbet “Lizzy” Underfoot, and made her a garbanzo bean farmer (her background is commoner, and she has a trade). She’s sneaky (have to be when most of the predators of your crops are bigger than you) and nosy (commoner, small town gossip and all that). I’m not a big fan of halflings, so I screwed around for a little while yesterday until I found a suitable picture:

The Game

Played with:
Keil Chenier (GM)
Ed Hackett (Pudgy Elf Wizard)
Ramanan Sivaranjan (Dwarf Fighter)
Reynaldo Madrinan (Android Cleric)
Randy Marchese (Dwarf Cleric)

Our first task was to figure out where we wanted to go. There were bad lore rolls and plenty of map-based discussion before we started off toward a tower about a day’s hike away. Lizzy’s first reaction to everything is to hide, so, when we came across a pile of bones and spotted some very large cats coming toward said bones, the first thing she did was to drop down into the high grass and … hide. The rest of the party followed suit, then the fighter wrapped a meat ration around a bone, threw it in the opposite direction, and we high-tailed it away from the large kitties (stealthily).

Then, we came across a halfling waymarker in the road made of smooth stones all stacked up to look all godly like. Lizzy, being simple folk, naturally prayed (and gained advantage from her prayer!).

Later that day, back on our way, we came across a fairly large clearing with a horse-drawn carriage in it, a huge dragon skull, and two black-clad guard-like humans. The wizard made his lore roll and told us that they were non-hostile (followers of Bahamut). As the party approached the campsite, Lizzy hid behind the wizard. There was a brief bit of dialog as we discovered that 1) These guys were too dumb to be clerics, and 2) They have orders to kill anyone that got close to them. So … roll initiative!

One of the dwarves got stabbed, there was lots of swinging of weapons around, and the wizard cast pink magic missiles (I forget the correct order, I’ll take notes next time). Everyone was attacking the most aggressive of the two – the female human that was going after one of the dwarves. Lizzy had the best shot at the male human, so she took it, took a shot with her sling and… well, no more male!

The damage everyone else was doing took down the other guy, and before we knew it, combat was over. After searching the bodies of the first set of corpses (the dead people by the fire, remember them?), we found that the dead people were carrying bags of baby clothes and each had a copper ring on their finger. Correctly deducing that there must be a baby sacrifice going on, we all ran down into the dragon’s mouth.

…to find a screaming baby with curled ram’s horns, and a priestess about to dispatch said creepy looking baby. Lizzy was totally ready to beat the shit out of this lady, now, but there was conversation to be had, first, and while the crazy priestess lady was busy trying to tell us all how baby sacrifices were a GOOD thing, one of the clerics took matters into his own hands and decided to go and fetch the baby.

Roll initiative!

Lizzy’s not much for having conversations when babies are in danger. Who cares if it’s potentially a demon baby that will eat our hearts after we leave… it’s a baby, you just don’t sacrifice babies! I roll crappy initiative again. The cleric trying to get the baby gets forcibly pushed back by some magic form the priestess, then the priestess summons this 10′x10′ cube-like gooey thing and sets it on the dwarf that was trying to get the baby. It kinda ends up being in our way, sorta between us and the priestess.

I forget exactly what everyone else did and in what order from here, so this next part may be slightly jumbled, BUT … there was a lot of attacking and trying to get around the oozey, undulating, cube-like thingermerbobber. Lizzy snuck around it to go after the priestess (most everyone stuck on the priestess and let the trapped dwarf end for himself at the moment), and missed at first. The android cleric managed to grab the baby out of some sort of force field, and the undulating cubey oooze went after him. The wizard cast burning hands and singed the other dwarf, who was getting to the priestess from the other direction around the ooze. Lizzy got another bullet off, and it struck home, knocking down the priestess with a grievous wound. The android, before getting trapped by the ooze, threw the baby to the wizard, who caught it with mage hand. Then, the ooze trapped the android, who’s parts started to all sizzle. Luckily, someone reached in, grabbed the android and got him out before we lost him entirely.

Lizzy, now faced with only the ooze as the last remaining combatant, decided to first throw a dagger at it. When she lost that dagger, on the next round, she started just hacking at it – stabbity stab stab stab – between her and everybody else wailing on it, we nearly killed the thing. Then, the priestess woke up just enough to try and control the thing again only to fail and have it come eat her… in front of us… did I mention you could see through the ooze? Both ooze and priestess lady were finished off.

So, now we’re left with a horned baby and a horse and a carriage.

My Impressions:

I picked up the playtest rules on Saturday morning, and was well and ready to play by Saturday night without issue… and that was without having any desire, at all, to read them. I wanted to play Diablo 3 and screw around on the internet all day, not read game rules. I know, I know, but I’ve been sick lately, it felt tedious…

However, throughout the day I read bits and pieces here and there until I’d finished pretty darned near the whole thing. I left off anything about spellcasting, as I’m playing a rogue. As a general rule, I don’t play spellcasters anyway, I just tend to prefer more durable characters and wizards to me have always felt fragile (probably from experiences in my AD&D days). I made a mental note to go back and look at the spellcaster stuff later.

The rules were easy to digest and felt very light. I like that. I haven’t played 4e, and I have limited experience with 3.5. I ran a game a few years back that started out in AD&D 2nd, but transitioned to 3.5 partway through because I wanted to try the system (and, really, parts of it made things easier). It was a very DIY game, too, so I ignored or altered a lot of the rules that I came across, usually on the fly. This didn’t matter to the players, none of whom were anywhere near rules lawyer capacity (and most of whom hadn’t even read the book), so for the most part no one knew any better. So that’s my background. Lots of AD&D 2nd, very little after that. Never even touched a 4e book.

This, to me, read a lot like a slightly-better-defined version of the AD&D 2nd Ed rules. There’s not a lot of structure around various types of things that you can do in combat, which I think leaves a lot more room for player imagination (not that I used that much in this particular session). What I really like, though, is the advantage/disadvantage system. I got to roll advantage twice, and disadvantage once. It strikes me as an interesting chance to take when playing. “You could do that, but you’ll be at a disadvantage…” used to mean something along the lines of ‘I’m going to make the DC high, but not tell you what it is until you roll’. Which means you have no idea how much of a disadvantage you really are at. As a DM, sometimes I wouldn’t even have a number in mind, I’d just have them roll, then look at the result and decide whether or not it was good enough. This one is just a straight ‘Hey, you might get lucky’ roll – which I think makes it easier on the DM, who doesn’t have to figure out how hard it would be to do that thing, and easier on the player, who’s just taking a straight chance.

There are only two things that I’d complain about. First, my character seemed overpowered. I’m under 3′ tall, and I’m bludgeoning people to death with my sling right and left. As a rogue, I’m probably supposed to do that much damage, but it seems odd that I’m out-damaging a dwarf with a big-ass axe. Secondly, I wish they’d explained all of the stats at least on the character sheet pregens. I was boggled later when I pulled up the equipment list and saw that the sling was a 1d6 weapon, but on my sheet it states that it’s 1d8.  As well, so far as I can figure out, I should have +3 to attack, but my character sheet shows +5 to attack for both my daggers and my sling. So I’m not sure where the d6 turns into a d8 and where the +2 extra bonus comes from, though at least some of it surely comes from a racial bonus. It just would have been nice if that was at least given a little nod to on the sheet, just for clarity.

Gameplay went smoothly with little interruption, even as rusty as playing as I am, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing via Google+ Hangouts. Enough so that the next morning, I immediately hit up Tabletop Forge’s Kickstarter by backing it (you can see my backed Kickstarters on the sidebar of the blog). Kiel was a fantastic GM, and there were many great jokes and lots of nerdiness going on. I loved it, and am completely hooked. :)

I also have to say that it’s nice to get to *play* the game, rather than just run it, and I think that’s the biggest strength of hangout-based games. I think I may need to make some adjustments to my camera setup because my desk is set up a little differently than most people, and I ordered a better microphone for this, but also so that I can get something decent to record vlogs or podcasts on when I get that ambitious. Ultimately, though, there was very little missing in our virtual table that we would have had in-person, and I think Tabletop Forge goes a long, long way to not only giving you that, but also giving you so much, much more. I can’t wait to see this whole arena of gaming explode. I really feel like it’s going to.

Overall, I give the game and the session an A+. I’ll definitely play again, at least in the playtest. The bigger question… will I buy the game when it comes out? I don’t really know if I have an answer to that just yet. I’ll likely put that as a ‘probably’ answer. Probably because I have reservations over how I feel WotC is or is not pandering to particular groups. That’s really a discussion for another time but, basically, I don’t like products that feel like they were put together for a focus group rather than for an artistic vision. Games straddle the line between art and mass-consumerism constantly, and I enjoy rewarding games that don’t look like they’re trying to be all things to all people. I’m a big fan of everything being spaghetti sauce.

Unfortunately for Hasbro / WotC, they’ve already partially answered that question by pandering (in blog posts at any rate) to a minority of very vocal people who have some very specific ideas on what sort of things are “acceptable” in their games. It doesn’t leave me with a whole lot of desire to buy the game, because I already feel that it’s compromised in that direction.

On the other hand, I’m a DIYer at heart, so a lot of the pandering stuff doesn’t really apply to me. I don’t care what the characters and settings look like in the book because I create my own. I’m also not a fan of hating on something without even so much as trying it, so I’m probably guaranteed to get one or two books just to see what it’s like.

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