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A fan podcast celebrating (mostly Swedish) RPGs including, but not limited to: Coriolis; Forbidden Lands; Symbaroum; Tales from the Loop; and, Alien.
Hello, and welcome to episode 241 of Effect, the home straight. My name is Matthew.
Dave:And I'm Dave. And as always, we've got a pack show for you today. But, the home straight, yes. We're in the home straight of the Tales of the Old West Kickstarter with 4 days to go. But yeah.
Dave:So we 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 wanna 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.
Matthew:Just a little bit. Just a tiny bit. Just a
Dave:tiny bit. And the the main the main meat of the show, the the meat and potatoes of the show today is, the the the ask us anything interview that we did on Thursday this last week, 26th September. So if you didn't get a chance to, 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. Is that nice?
Matthew:Yeah. It makes me think that if you if if you're not at all interested in Tales of the Old West, this may not be the episode for you. Sorry, guys.
Dave:That is true. Well, the the the first bit will, hopefully.
Matthew:Yeah. The the yeah.
Dave:World of gaming.
Matthew:Catch to the world of gaming. We put we put links in the, 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
Dave:So so we Yeah. We hope you'll forgive us for being a little bit obsessed by Tales of the Old West this week. Maybe has ruled
Matthew:our life for the last month.
Dave:Maybe next week, we should do something that's not Tales of the Old West. I know we don't Oh,
Matthew:I've just put you down for for talking about Nuance ing the gun law.
Dave:I know. I know. We've had that conversation, but maybe maybe we should do something something else.
Matthew:Right. Okay. Let's have
Dave:a look. You have to think
Matthew:about that while I'm in Essen.
Dave:Yes. That is true. Yeah. So I'm assuming do we have do we have any
Matthew:We don't have any new patrons.
Dave:Okay. But, anyway, a big thank you to all of our, existing patrons or past 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 so very very much. We say that we say that a lot, but that's because we really mean it.
Matthew:But it is true. It is true.
Dave:It is true. Yeah. Yes. What about gaming then?
Matthew:Yeah. So what gaming? First of all, it's not just our success that our patrons should be, should feel proud of. It's the success of the terminal state Kickstarter, which, got fully funded and got some stretch goals as well. Yeah.
Matthew:Having struggled earlier in the campaign, but then they came on the Effect podcast 2 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 we'll be playing terminal state.
Matthew:It'll be a thing that people could actually have.
Dave:Yeah. So that's brilliant. It is. And I'm I'm really pleased because I I think the the the campaign was pretty much dead in the water. Wasn't it?
Dave:I think when we when we first saw it.
Matthew:I like to think so. I like I
Dave:mean I mean, obviously, it's not just us. We can take some credit, I think.
Matthew:But it's mostly us.
Dave:Getting the news out there a little bit, possibly.
Matthew:But, I think
Dave:it was it was I think it was it was it was struggling. And actually, I think, you know, the the the converse I think like I said before, the conversation we've had with Chris Vermeran, 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.
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave: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. Having spoken to Chris, I did. So Yeah.
Matthew:No. That's very true. While while you were speaking to him, in fact. While you were
Dave:Exactly. So, yeah. I'm delighted that that's got over the line. And to say, they did unlock a couple of stretch goals. Let's have a little look.
Dave:What did they 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.
Dave:Random weapon generators. So he obviously likes his random generators, which is cool.
Matthew:Mhmm. He he did. He he there's a lovely update where he says, you'll notice I've reduced the, targets on all these stretch goals. It's because I really like random generators, I wanna make sure we get some.
Dave:Yeah. And then he's got a couple some Sykes 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. Mhmm.
Dave:But yes, I'm delighted for Chris. I'm really pleased that that got over the line. And I think that And
Matthew:it's a friend of the show, 3 skulls match that will be writing those solo rules.
Dave:Yeah. And he's got a lot of experience, because he's done done them for a number of free league games, doesn't he? So
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave:So, yeah. That would be good. Yeah.
Matthew:I must admit, I, I 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,
Dave:Is that in the quick draw or the quick draw? The, yeah, the quick start.
Matthew:No. That was, so when when they when they hit the random weapons table, Chris published an update with the table. You could just download it.
Dave:Okay. Cool.
Matthew:And it and it's a fun old thing, and I was quite quite pleased with the random weapon I generate. I can't I can't find it, my little write up for it now. Okay. But, it was a it was a hand cannon that was both discreet and silenced, but was a flamethrower. Okay.
Matthew:So I thought it's discreet and silenced until people are running around screaming burning.
Dave:Yeah. I you kind of wonder, a weapon called a hand cannon doesn't sound
Matthew:No. Hand cannon's sorry. So it
Dave:Oh, okay.
Matthew:You say, discretion. It's a pistol.
Dave:Discretion doesn't seem to be inherent in that name, does it?
Matthew:Cool. No. Yeah. I I think you can have a whale of fun with the random gen with the random weapon generator. And indeed, I imagine the other random tables as well.
Matthew:So, good on you, Chris. Congratulations
Dave:on winning. Congratulations.
Matthew:It wasn't it wasn't all us. I mean, you did write the game, so you deserve some of the credit.
Dave:Yes. But No. That's good. That's good news.
Matthew:And then, actually, you know, the the Kickstarters don't stop happening because there's another one that caught my eye, and that is Paragon's, which is kind of year 0 ish. I mean, he mentions year 0, but it isn't he's he's not sticking the year 0 engine stamp on. Because I think he's, I say he. They have, you know, have have added other elements in as well. But it's a superhero game.
Dave:Yeah. So, yeah. 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 it's that got me going, oh, that looks interesting.
Dave:I quite like the quite like the look of that. But then actually, when I looked at the rest of the page, it was it was again a bit like terminal state. It it I was less grabbed the more I looked at it. And and as you know, you know, money is is not, you know, money is tight. Money is tighter than it has been for in the past.
Dave:So I'm having to be a bit careful.
Matthew:This is your personal spending money. Don't don't start saying how tight money is when we've just got way more money than we would
Dave:Yeah. In New York on
Matthew:our Kickstarter.
Dave:Personal money is tight. Yeah. So that Yeah. I I don't get to spend any of our Kickstarter money on buying No. Games for myself.
Dave:So No. That's very
Matthew:true. That's very true. Damn, we should have done that as a stretch call.
Dave:Oh, shit. Yeah.
Matthew:33,000. Matthew Matthew
Dave:Money just
Matthew:for by a load of games.
Dave:Money just for us. But anyway, so it was one that the the more I looked through their page, the less interested I was. So again, it it could be one that if if 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 yeah. And this comes back to some of the advice that we had in the amount of time we spent trying to get the the kickstarter page right.
Dave:Mhmm. Because it's so import it is so important to Yeah. Because because, you know, people are gonna back you on the basis of that.
Matthew:What's on the page? There's 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 an, you know, obviously one of the undead cats, I can't quite remember what they're called, the the guys were, you know, taking over dead bodies.
Dave:Right.
Matthew:Yeah. You know, they they obviously thought, oh, we could we could do an illustration that is more evocative of the game as a whole. So, so that obviously helped that Kickstarter. And I don't wanna sound the other thing, looking at terminal state and looking at Paragon's page now, I do wanna sound like the old Grognard that's done this for years. But having done just one successful Kickstarter, I'm going, oh, I wouldn't have done that on my Kickstarter page.
Matthew:I'm an expert now. And I'm not an expert. I don't think either of us are an expert. But but immediately you go, oh, I'm not sure I'd have said that or done it that way. Yeah.
Matthew:Interesting. Very interesting.
Dave:Yeah. Because I I think so the the very first picture that 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, you know, some kind of cartoony style cyberpunk game or something. So they're kind of missing the vibe, I think, a little bit.
Dave:So, yeah. I mean, this is just a little, you know, first impressions. You know, they've got they've got things like, you know, there are 8 archetypes you can use. A d 6 dice pool system, which they don't then explain very much about. 60 or more Yeah.
Matthew:So they mentioned it's kind of a cross between between year 0 and Powered by the Apocalypse and stuff. So Right. I'm kind of interested in that. I I imagine there's probably partial success if you get fives or fours or something. Yeah.
Matthew:Count, towards a different quality of success. But I don't know. I don't know.
Dave:Yeah. So again, I think they they they talk about things like cool points, But then they don't say anything else about it. So it doesn't it's like, okay. You could you could have said could have said a couple of lines about cool points to make me go, okay. Now I know why they're cool.
Dave:And that's that's a fun concept that I wanna try playing. But they don't Yeah. I think they just don't go into it quite enough detail.
Matthew:In their defense, they do, directly link to a couple of YouTube videos. They do. One of which is an actual player, one of which is a, kind of how to play thing in 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.
Matthew:In in fact, I think I think we could look up the stats and see how many people clicked on our, you know, sort of top video, then top top of the page video, which, which, you know, Kickstarter recommend you put a video in. But I was kinda surprised last time I looked at how few had actually kinda looked at that. Yeah. So we know right now, we've got 1200 followers on the project. 6 almost 700 have actually watched the video.
Matthew:Okay. That's that's good. And of that, and it's a short video, remember, only about half of them have actually watched it right through to the end.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:So, yeah. Interesting stuff.
Dave:Yeah. I think one of their, 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 7, but they don't they don't add a picture, I think, to that.
Matthew:They don't have a picture. Yeah. Which is why that looks initially like better value, but it comes without the portrait.
Dave:So That's that's what
Matthew:and and
Dave:well, and that's where the expenses. That's where, you know, that's where that's where the cost of that pledge level comes. Yes. But, I mean, they're only 5 days in. They've got a 113 backers already, and they are nearly, I guess, 2 thirds of the way to their target.
Dave:So it looks like it's gonna do well. So Yeah. That that's really good. But, yeah, have a look up look up Paragon's if you're interested potentially in a superhero, I was gonna Yeah.
Matthew:And that's not year
Dave:zero engine, but year zero engine d 6
Matthew:Ish.
Dave:Yeah. Duals, light spools ish.
Matthew:Until year zero, I remember one of the questions we didn't get around to, which I feel may 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 on the on the q and a interview thing we did.
Dave:And it was what's what's what's the best vampire program to watch?
Matthew:No. It wasn't that. It was years ago, Matthew, you you said you wanted to do a western, which, honestly, I can't remember, RPG and a superhero RPG. So is it Superheroes Next? And for me, no.
Matthew:It isn't, Dave. I kind of, I'm 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'd I'm I'm not it it won't be a superhero RPG next. I think we can be pretty confident of that.
Matthew:Unless, Dave, you say now that that's what you wanna do.
Dave:I don't think it's top of my list. I mean, the the idea of doing a superhero RPG is is a bit tempting. I mean, I I I look back on the days of golden heroes with a lot of, you know, 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 it's it's kind of so done. Isn't it?
Dave:So you know, I would want something more mature and darker probably if we were gonna do something like that. But then is that is that enough to to to to give it an IP that that is, you know, or USP that is sufficiently different to actually, you know, worth doing it. So the idea of it is really nice, you know, as an intellectual kind of exercise. But no, I don't I agree. I'm not banging the door down right now to do a superhero role playing game.
Matthew:No. Rome year 0, that's where we're at. That's where we're at at the moment. I think it's a good idea to find that one.
Dave:It might
Matthew:be. Actually, we need to talk about that on behalf of our podcast, but that's that's outside this conversation. Just a quick note to say D and D is not going anywhere because in its 1st weeks, The Player's Handbook has become the biggest selling ever D and D book.
Dave:Right. It's taken
Matthew:out a week or 2.
Dave:This is this is what edition 5.25 or whatever they're calling you.
Matthew:I like to call it 2024. I think they're gonna do it like Windows and, Adobe now. There'll probably be a 2025 version as well. You're gonna have to update every year.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. So the 2024 version of, the player's handbook is is is a big hit, and I think that's no surprise. I imagine No.
Dave:I'm not surprised.
Matthew:The biggest audience ever, getting getting a new book and feeling you know, and 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. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. I
Dave:mean, it's it's 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 5th edition, 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 what the consensus is as to whether this is a real step up from where 5th edition was or whether it's a bit you know, it's not as good or whether it's basically just more of the same. It'd be interesting to see.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. I have a sneaky suspicion it's more of a tweak, that they're not gonna make the mistake they made with, for example, going from 3rd to 4th edition. 4th 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 let's just carry on 3rd edition and we'll call it Pathfinder. So, that was a big fork in the D and D community, which is I feel must have been kind of healed over now and that most players are back on d, on D and D again rather than, you know, Hy Vee. I mean, obviously, Pathfinder is still really popular.
Dave:Yes. But,
Matthew:but yeah. It's the biggest selling book ever.
Dave:So Yeah. It it reminds me of when we were at, Comic Con last year and talking to people there. And the the the most common thing when I when I said to people, oh, you're a role player. What do you play? Was was was them saying, oh, I play I play both kinds.
Dave:I play 5th edition and Pathfinder.
Matthew:It was like Yeah. All role playing games.
Dave:Guys, guys, I know you love your D and D, but, guys, there are other games out there. Anyway
Matthew:Yeah. I I though I 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. So Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. Right. What's next on the news? Oh, this is one you might be interested in. I just came across my socials recently, and it's the last caravan.
Matthew:It is forged in the dark, but you're traveling along a post alien invasion American road trip, I think, is the best way to describe it. So it's slightly postapocalyptic. 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.
Matthew:It's a road trip. You you can be a family with a dog. You can play the dog. Yeah. It looked interesting.
Matthew:I I'm not sure whether Forge of the Dark has ever been, for me, a successful 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 I really want to love, the the military one. What's it called? I can't remember.
Matthew:I've got it on my shelf there. But I yeah. I'm not loving I'm not 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.
Matthew:I can't remember. Band Band of Brothers. Band of Blades. Band of Blades.
Dave:Band of Blades. That's it. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:So I'll be interested to see how this plays. It's not kick starting. I think you can buy it off off we'll put a link in the show notes. I think you can just buy it now.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's
Matthew:it's cool. The cool
Dave:wall book. So I think I think the idea behind it is is quite interesting. And and having just had to look at the, you know, the the purchase page as it were, I kinda got a a gamma world kind of feel almost of of, you know, 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 to really sort of bed in the, you know, the way the game works. And was still finding it a little bit clunky to get my head around and really enjoy it.
Dave:I think I didn't but I didn't play it enough. We played one short campaign, which is a lot of fun. So I think I think I I need a little bit of convincing to to sort of dive into that system. So I'm not gonna be buying this. It does look lovely.
Dave: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.
Dave:Again, if I had loads of money, I might I might have pitched in for it. But, £30 for the for the core book. It does look nice and the the artwork is is the artwork is very nice. Even though, again, for me it's a tiny little bit cartoony. You know, which
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave: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 does that sound cartoony?
Matthew:Yeah. I think, Dave.
Dave:So I think
Matthew:You're just beginning to get old. You gotta remember, there's a whole generation that have been brought up on anime now.
Dave:That is true.
Matthew:And there's an amazing anime that does really gritty stories while still
Dave:That is true.
Matthew:Being a big guy's small mouth. So Yeah.
Dave:That is very true.
Matthew:You may be of a generation that have gotta let go of the cartoony art. Perhaps. Yeah. And just with the look and feel, if I was trying
Dave:to make
Matthew:a game that was gritty
Dave:and, you know, hard edged, I I would go less cartoony in the artwork, personally.
Matthew:Yeah. So Yeah. Well, we'll we'll see how it does. And just a quick note, because, we wanna keep this recording a bit short, because we've got about an hour of chat.
Dave:We've got
Matthew:plenty of stuff going. Yeah. Afterwards. People will be tired of our voices by the end of this podcast.
Dave:That is that is true.
Matthew: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 Essen spiel, I'm gonna be there working the free league stand, so come and have a chat. If you've got any doubts about backing tales of the old west, try and grab me in on Thursday before the campaign finishes. And in the midst of obviously prioritizing selling you fee league stuff, I will also try and allay any fears about Taz of the Old West you might have so that you can, you can back it before but in Germany, it'd be 4 o'clock German time, when our campaign ends.
Dave:Yep. Cool.
Matthew:Which is a nice segue to the fact that our campaign ends on Thursday.
Dave:At 1600 British summertime?
Matthew:6 no. At, at 1300 something. No.
Dave:6 1600.
Matthew:4 o'clock. 4
Dave:o'clock. Is it? Yes.
Matthew:Oh, why did I think it's 3 o'clock? I think I've also asked for the wrong time off with, Camo World, Esson.
Dave:It's Why
Matthew:did I think that? It would be 4 o'clock. Is that when it started?
Dave:Yes. Yeah. Of course it
Matthew:is. 4 PM BST. Yeah.
Dave:Because you're you're you're you're an aged old man whose brain doesn't work.
Matthew:I think I've just I've just gotten all befuddled. Yeah. I'll I'll have to check and see what I said to, Anna about when I wanted time off.
Dave:I'm sure she'll be accommodating with with any changes. So yeah.
Matthew:I'll I'll tell you a thing after the show, actually, about the organizing for that, but we will finish recording first. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Yeah.
Matthew:So old west news, Dave. Has there been any?
Dave:So, we are we are now, what, 2 thirds of our way to our final stretch goal, solo rules. I was finally have my arm trusted to, to go with to go with some solo rules. So but we're not far off 30,000 now with 4 days or 3 and a half days to go. That's Sunday. So yeah, 4 days to go, 4 and a bit days to go.
Dave:And yeah, again, I mean, we we were discussing the other day. Neither of us, thought that, you know, in our wildest daydreams, we might make 25,000. And it kind of Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we both thought that. Yeah. 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.
Matthew:You know? Yeah. A whole bunch of our stretch goals were carefully planned beforehand, but, solar rules wasn't in the plan until people kept asking for it in in in the social and on our comments. And, it took me some persuading. And, also, obviously, it took us, you know, some needing another stretch goal.
Dave:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So so it's, yeah. So it's gone supremely well.
Dave:Yeah. 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 we we talk about in the ask us anything in a minute. So I don't wanna repeat that here.
Dave:Yeah. But again, I think, you know, a huge thank you. And then, you know, the hard work the hard work starts here, really.
Matthew:Yes. And it does. And it has already started. So we're we're finalizing, getting the dice mould made. We're, I I've just sent a bunch of text off to our sensitivity reader, some of which they have seen before, very early on, about 4 years ago.
Matthew:Or they haven't seen this. They they will recognize some of the sentences, but the you know, there's been quite a big rewrite since they've done that, so we've sent it all to them again. Yeah. So, yeah, work is beginning. We will need to compose before I go to Germany the what happens next update.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. For the
Matthew:thing so that you can press go on that, when or I can just go from there.
Dave:That's easy. Yeah. That's fine. That's no problem.
Matthew:And we'll do that. So so but thank you everybody who has supported us so far. We are actually flabbergasted. Yes. So so it's brilliant.
Matthew: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, 542 backers
Dave:That is
Matthew:at the moment of recording. And the 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, and, and giving them a game that they really enjoy. And Yeah.
Matthew:Oh, I'm just excited. My heart is beating fast, Dave.
Dave:Cool. Yeah. Me too. Me too. But yes.
Dave:So there's plenty of work to do, but we are we've got we've got our plans and we'll do our best to, to stick to them. But, yeah. So I think maybe maybe now we should we should move on to, to the session we had the other day then when we invited people to ask us anything.
Matthew:We are live. It says here on the screen. Hello, everybody. We're live. Hello.
Matthew: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 and Tomstad in whoever you are. I'm not sure we know who you are, but, you're welcome.
Matthew:I am Matthew. And
Dave:I'm Dave.
Matthew:Welcome, Dave. A bit slow, but there you go.
Dave: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 Wow.
Matthew:Yeah. I only do. But then when I say, and he's Dave, you say, and I'm Dave. And then it kinda so I was giving you space to say I'm Dave.
Dave:But then on the podcast, you can edit that out whereas you can't edit that out here. So anyway, good evening, everyone, and thank you very much for coming along to, 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 how fabulously everyone has supported it.
Dave:So thank you right off the off the bat for that. But there's a few days left. We wanted to take the opportunity to, put ourselves out there and make themselves available for any questions that anyone might have. Doesn't have to be about Tales of the Order West even, but, I guess naturally that would make sense. But yeah.
Dave:So here we are.
Matthew:We can also solve any problems you want to bring to us like an agony aren't. We're very good at advice.
Dave:I'm listening.
Matthew:Now
Dave:To quote my favorite
Matthew:already, at least one question in the chat, which we might get to or even more.
Dave:No. It's a stupid question for Andy.
Matthew:No. I'm not having that one. I'm not we are not answering this one just to show everybody. Go away, Andy. Just go away.
Matthew:We have got some questions from Bruce. Maybe we could start off with, some questions.
Dave:All
Matthew:of the this is this is the sort of question we want, Andy. This from Frank. Look at this. This is a sensible question.
Dave:It is.
Matthew:You must be chuffed with the progress so far. Is there anything that you that you already know you would do differently in your next Kickstarter?
Dave:Okay. Serious answers only then because there is, it's obviously, you know, the immediate answer is, that
Matthew:you're doing Matthew.
Dave:So I yeah. Yes. There is one thing. So I think we 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 and like scenario through was what do we do if, you know, what do we do if we, you know, we blow through our target in 5 hours? We hadn't, we hadn't had that conversation and we probably should have done.
Dave:So I think we could have planned the stretch goals for various scenarios much more effectively because we did find ourselves like, hastily getting in touch with each other saying, okay. What's next then? Well, this is on the list. Is that what we wanna do? How where do we wanna set it?
Dave:And so we did become a bit frantic in those moments when we could have planned that better for sure.
Matthew:Yeah. Of course, there's a thing about planning your stretch goals in that you you kind of think you're cursing yourself to failure. You're counting your chickens before before they hatch. And I think one great bit of advice came from Shep, Dave, when, you know, we'd we'd set up our screen. We'd we'd put some stretch goals up, and Shep said, don't put the stretch goals up.
Dave:It was like, oh, don't don't don't commit to the price. No. No. No. No.
Dave:No. Don't do that. Yeah.
Matthew:So I think the fact that we could be a little bit flexible with with the targets of the stretch goals I mean, not that we changed them very much. No. But that was really good advice. And we did at the beginning. We went for our we knew we wanted that that £10,000 stretch goal to to let us afford the book that we wanted.
Matthew:Yeah. But, after that, we did a couple of just £1,000 loans, and we were burning through those so quickly that, we, we went back to £2,000 ones, and that seemed to be a really good place to be. If we 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.
Dave:Yeah. I would just like to say a great thank you to to Shep Shep Sheperson, and and, you know, all the other people who've given us advice about strip, about kick starting. We I think we did avoid a lot of, schoolboy errors, frankly, with that advice. So, you know, that has made the process a lot easier than it might otherwise have been. But I think, you know, I mean, 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.
Dave:We could possibly be a bit more organized on that next time. But Oh, you did have a bit of
Matthew:a plan, actually. It was one of our most planned things.
Dave:It just gets to show how badly planned everything else was then, doesn't it?
Matthew:But, but, yeah, I think I think having done it once, I might think differently about what we do in that marketing plan. I'd I think I'd make that marketing plan a bit different.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. There's that. And the other thing, I think the thing I've learned is, virtual tabletops. Virtual tabletops are what people want.
Dave:It does seem to be so, doesn't it? Yeah.
Matthew:And I don't know whether we would have done anything differently. We timed that virtual tabletop on 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. Yeah. Because it gave us a little boost just as we're hitting the depths of the doldrums.
Dave:I mean, it's interesting. If you if you look at the way the campaign's gone, after those first two days, which, you know, were were really good, we've we've claimed have been running at a fairly steady rate. We've had our our low days and our 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. You know, it all happened in in less than 24 hours.
Matthew: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. But, yeah.
Matthew:So planning planning stretch goals might be a a different thing we do differently next.
Dave:I think we just do it a bit more thoroughly, I think. And we would because 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? Yeah.
Dave: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've we could've kind of exercised out different scenarios and had a had a clearer plan, so it was slightly less frantic than it might have been.
Matthew:Yeah. Do we want to do one of Bruce's questions before we move on to some of the other ones on the chat?
Dave:Yeah. Why not? Which one do you wanna go for?
Matthew:Well, I thought I'll go for the one on on on on the list you presented. That's at the top of the list. And that is why 18/73? Now tell you that. I wanna ask why 18/73 because I remember writing categorically in the principles of the game.
Matthew:It was gonna be 18/18, 18/81 or something. And then suddenly it was 18/73, and it was you that did it, Dave. Why?
Dave:I think there's there's various reasons actually. So, the the timing I think is, so the period of the Wild West, if you wanna be a bit, you know, 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 connect campaigns that could run for, you know, 20, 30, 40 years. You can have more than 1 character maybe.
Dave: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, the, emancipation proclamation of 18/73/73/63, 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 are still enslaved. So all those people are now free.
Dave:Okay. There's a debate to be had discussion to be had about what that really means. But they they became playable characters in the way that we would want them to be. So 18/73, which I thought about as early as we could get away with in that situation. It's, yeah.
Dave: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.
Matthew:Yeah. And I think there's a there's a secret thing that you haven't mentioned there. Again, talking about how
Dave:It's possible I've forgotten something. That's for sure.
Matthew:Concise. Well, I don't know what the 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 that to kind of turn this into a generational campaign. And
Dave:Have the opportunity to do that. Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. If you start 10 years later on like I wanted, that, you know, that that's a whole generation effectively that you've just missed out on. Yeah. So, that might be it.
Dave:There's definitely something in that, which is kind of like making us giving as much time in the period as possible for the players to develop, develop their campaigns and their characters.
Matthew:Yeah. Okay. And I've got another one for you here, Dave. Okay. From Dumpstat Int.
Matthew:Welcome to the chat, Dumpstat Int.
Dave:Hello.
Matthew:I have a question regarding trouble. With the chart, if you roll a 6, you move up a column. Are you worried that you could possibly scale from a column 1 to a column 4? The curse Curse of role master. Aye.
Matthew:I just extra point there, dumpster, for, for
Dave:Remembering role master.
Matthew:Remember role master and and indeed one of the curses of one of the many curses of Raw Master I'm gonna tell you.
Dave:I did enjoy Raw Master though. That was a good game. I did enjoy it very much back in the day. Okay. So to to answer your question specifically, am I worried?
Dave:No. I will I will elaborate a little bit though. So I think the idea that trouble can can suddenly build up on you is is is a is a fine thing. I think I liked that. We originally had it where you wouldn't, you know, there wasn't the opportunity to for for a one die of trouble to become 2 dice of trouble in that in that sense.
Dave: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 day of trouble. Yeah. I might as well not
Matthew:worry about it.
Dave:Yeah. Exactly. And what what I wanted was there's still to be that little, you know, itch of doubt in the back of their mind that I could take this, but actually it could get much worse if, you know, if I'm unlucky. So that's the reason why we went for the idea that rolling a 6 on that on that column boosts you to the next column. I hope that
Matthew:answers your question. And I am not worried either. I am worried. Yes. It it may happen, and suddenly one dice becomes 4 dice.
Matthew:But one of the things we want to encourage people to do is to spend is to earn faith and spend faith on their rolls. And that worry, as Dave says, that you might go from 1 to 4 choice worth of trouble with some really bad roles. I think just that little added bit of incentive to say, yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna spend that point of faith there to
Dave:Mhmm.
Matthew:To do that. I did have a a I think I've spoken about this on other interviews. I don't wanna bore people. But one of my favorite ways of Too late. Of of paying faith was every single one would cost you a faith point, and you'd lose your pool really quickly.
Matthew:I playtested it in 1, 2 sessions. Players really hated that, so we're not doing that again. And this So
Dave:in principle, I like that idea as well, I thought. But Yeah. And I was in I was interested to hear your player feedback, hating it as as much as they did.
Matthew:But I think the sorry. Yeah.
Dave:Go on.
Matthew:You know, that that idea of spending extra extra faith on buying off your roles, I think, gives us a little flavor of that bit.
Dave:Yeah. And I think that the risk of going from a 1 to a 4 is very low because you could have to roll 3 sixes. It's not impossible, of course, but, yeah, we've all rolled a lot of trouble, I guess, through the, you know, the the the year 0 dice have a tendency to be difficult, don't they, I guess? But actually it 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 gonna go from column 1 to column 4, I think just the fact that we'll get that little bit worse is is an ever present one in 6 chance, in fact.
Dave:So
Matthew:Cool. Andy's got another one on stretch goals.
Dave:Okay.
Matthew: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? Now we're doing both of the 2 impractical and too expensive ones. Well,
Dave:all 3, actually, but it's including the GM screen. So
Matthew:Yes. So what we wanted to avoid with stretch goals was stretch goals that 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. You know, 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.
Matthew:We haven'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. Hi, Paul. To guide us through it.
Dave:Give us give us Foundry 101. And
Matthew:offer us, you know, a decent rate that we can afford to do it without stretch goal. So that's good. And the other one is the solo rules. Now Mhmm. People started asking for solo rules, and I was quite keen.
Matthew:But, Dave, you weren't keen at all because of that added complexity.
Dave:Yeah. I think I think we again, I think this is another a lesson learned that, because Matthew and I live quite a long way away, communication tends to be over our,
Matthew:you know
Dave:With a 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 kind of conversations because you always get the wrong end of the stick or you don't articulate it quite right.
Dave:So it's very easy to end up butting heads. And we have done a couple of times, over 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.
Dave: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 gonna have a few weeks to to create solo rules from scratch, and it's it was gonna be bad because we're gonna be rushed. Now that we're gonna 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 a that was why I was very reluctant
Matthew:It would be a PDF, and it would be delivered potentially after the other deliveries. I'm curious
Dave:I was always thinking that we were telling to put it into the book, which gave us a month to write it. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:That is true.
Dave:Why I was expecting the idea.
Matthew: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, you know, budgeting the book and and illustrations and things like that. So it can't go in the book. I it just can't. And I think we'd be we, you know, we've been very strict with ourselves on that, and and yet, you know, we're we're still not there. I'm I'm kind of guaranteeing that solo rules are here.
Matthew:They're not yet, but I will point out. Maybe this is the right time to point out. I'm just gonna put the banner up again for anybody who might be listening. There are 4, count them, 4 magnificent 7 bids, left. And if if if one person if if 4 people bought at that magnificent level, magnificent 7 level, that would get us through solo rules.
Matthew:So It would. You really want solo rules, you know what you can do to the whole community. That's why you're
Dave:called back off
Matthew:And maybe don't worry about it. You know, we've got another 6 days to go, so we we'll probably get there.
Dave:No. No. To answer Mohammed's question, Toto Cookbook, no. You're absolutely right. There will be no Tales of the Old West Cookbook.
Matthew:I did I did I was thinking suggesting that in one of our chats, Dave, actually.
Dave:Like a like a chuckwagon book. You know? Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. Exactly. But I but I said that this would never get delivered until we'd we'd become an entirely different massive company. Yeah. And Yeah.
Matthew:And then we'd bring out a little bumpers 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
Dave:A cookbook.
Matthew:Coster Castoolis writing a Coriolis cookbook. And, they were laughing about it a bit when we first went to interview them years ago. Deep.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:And, yeah, almost it's just did you say 2015, that was? 20
Dave:17.
Matthew:17.
Dave:Yeah. 2017. Still 7 years ago.
Matthew:Yeah. 7 years ago, they were laughing about it as a thing that's was still, waiting to be fulfilled, and I think they have only this last year fulfilled it. Yeah. So we've we've taken in relation to the, great dark thing when we when we introduced Costas.
Dave:Yeah. He
Matthew:I don't think he thought it was that funny, actually.
Dave:No. I think it's I think it was it's it's not been a joke for them for a long time now. So but yeah. So that 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.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:Right. I got another one from Bruce. Shall we talk about the second one from Bruce?
Dave:Okay. Yep.
Matthew:So, I think I think Bruce really so the second and the third, he's being very polite about this, but he said he how do we address the challenge of recreating the 18 seventies west? And I think we've talked about this before in in comments and stuff like that, but it might be worth verbalizing it again here.
Dave:Yeah. For sure. Yeah. The key thing is, is being, 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 recognising 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, in the games that they play.
Dave:And it's, you know, it's not a black and white history. It's, you know, let let's take for example, you know, 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.
Dave:And, you know, we're ruling, you know, the plains of the west for for a long, long time. And 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, you know, the period of the expansion into the West is a story of that ever, ever growing pressure from the east displacing and using the imbalance of power to, you know, effectively dispossess many, many parts of that community or, you know, all of all of that community over the years. And again, so the history is there, you can't escape it.
Dave:But we wanna step away from the the the whitewash of the of the myth and look beneath that the actual stories that are that are going on. And so far, I think in the playtesting we've done, where I think there's another question from from Raspberry Roan, which is very much on this, on this theme. All the everyone we've had in our playtest 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, you know, about all of the all of the difficult parts of that of that history.
Dave:I don't know if you want to add something to that.
Matthew:Yeah. Well, I think, you know, maybe it's worth talking a little bit about Ralphie Rowan's question there, because I think that is an interesting one. Has anybody had issues in playtesting with playing Native American, Mexican, or recently emancipated black slave? In playtesting, I don't think so. The the other group, your local group, I mean, I I'm playing a, I don't actually know whether I've been emancipated or whether I was born free, but my character is is black in the campaign that you run.
Matthew:Yep. And we have addressed that, and we've addressed the civil war, and we've addressed, a terrible real historical incident that, 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.
Matthew:What I'm not doing, though, as a player is I'm 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 because we started the sensitivity journey early Yes.
Matthew:Years ago. And, we we talked about in in in the first bit of text that we sent, this is Jordan, a sensitive some sensitivity we do, don't have any problem with us saying, you know, 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 the the stereotypes and and things, but, you know, there is a thing like people making up Native American names that sound funny and things like that that could actually be quite offensive. And it would be better if she said, you know, lots of lots of Native Americans at the time just adopted Anglic names.
Dave:Or or or or I think in more cases, we're forced to adopt Anglicite.
Matthew:Yes. But but she was kind of happier that we did that rather than encourage people to, you know, make Yeah.
Dave:So so I think it's it's a really it's a really important question because what we you know, once somebody's got the game in their hands, what we can't do is stop them fictionalizing a, you know, a native American name. But, you know, if if somebody wants to call their character Crazy Horse, you know, 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 kind of the cultural power and, you know, 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 refer respectfully. So that if they want to choose a name that is fictionalizing some of those naming conventions, you know, they should do so, but do so mindfully and respectfully, and not, you know, not kind of inadvertently, you know, disrespect them almost by ignoring them entirely as well.
Dave:So there's a balance to be found then hopefully hopefully, we struck that right kind of balance. But, you know, I think, you know, Raspberry Roan, it could be a stumbling block for some players. And I think there are certainly some people we've spoken to in the, in the US for whom the history is a little bit too close to home. And it it 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 and get into the game.
Dave:But it yeah. 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 know, you you probably don't want to be playing Tales of the Old West. And that's fine.
Dave: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 that, you know, 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.
Matthew:Yeah. And in fact, in terms of issues that we've had in playtesting, we we we have had one one person who picked up a character that was actually a white character, but they've done some pretty terrible things in the past, and that was actually the thing they had more of a problem with.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:Now I'd I'd like to think that of all our characters, we're I don't know actually about some of the characters in your playtest, Dave, but we're trying to better ourselves in in our group of playtesters. We're all trying to even even even the character who was a Confederate soldier soul soldier is trying to be better than he was. And I'd
Dave:love that behind it.
Matthew:Of our player characters will play like that, rather than celebrate the cruelty that their characters might have done.
Dave:Yeah. So
Matthew:that's that's the thing as well. I 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 I'm really hoping that they don't use it to to celebrate some of that quality.
Dave:Yeah. And we've gone to some lengths to try and, you know, 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, you know, in in some of the opening statements we've got both in the quick draw and in the core book, you know, we're keen to learn. You know, we wanna get this right.
Dave:This is supposed to be fun, and it's also, you know, hopefully, a little bit educational as well, but that's not the key point. It is a game and
Matthew:Oh, which reminds me of another question of cruises, I think, would be a good one. Or it's not one that you listed. Do we have a reading list?
Dave:Yes. We do. We have a very extensive reading list, actually. Yeah. I haven't got it up at the moment.
Dave:I could put I could pull it up and read you through some of it. But, yeah, we've got, yeah, loads. I mean, I I was a I'm a historian by by training. I did history at university, not the Wild West, frankly. Oh, Rome, for anyone who knows me though.
Dave:I bore them to death on Roman history. But I've had an enduring, interest in all of this stuff, and I've been in a, you know, a a avid amateur scholar of the the old west for years. So, you know, we have done a lot of work and a lot of research, a lot of reading. So, I mean, again, hopefully, we are, you know, we are amateur scholars, but hopefully, we're quite well informed amateur scholars.
Matthew:So here's here's another question. And I'm, a it's a follow-up question from from Rosby Rowan again. And these are great questions, Rowan. So, so feel free to carry on asking them, but I think it's a good one. Claims will be playing your game online, and I know there's a Mexican character in there.
Matthew:And in fact, I've seen that scenario played before. Oh, that scenario? No. Not necessarily that scenario. I can't remember.
Matthew:But there's a 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. How about no.
Matthew:It's upstairs. But I think I learned a lot about playing people from from from other cultures, from, Chris Spivey's great book, the Cthulhu campaign, which I can't call Shadows Over Harlem. It's not called Shadows Over Harlem. What's it called?
Dave:I won't read those.
Matthew:Help me. That one. Mhmm. Anyway, he talks a lot about, you know, don't, as I said before, don't stereotype the character. Don't don't start speaking, I don't know, like Manuel out of 40 Towers when you're playing the Mexican.
Matthew:For a start, I think
Dave:Hold on, man.
Matthew:We're crap at accents, aren't we? And and for years, our tables for 30, 40 years have been pretty crap at accents. So doing accents isn't a thing that we
Dave:That we do. That we've
Matthew: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.
Dave:So, yeah. So I I I agree. Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes sense.
Dave:Obviously, Raspy Rowan will be the one who'll decide whether it really makes sense. But yeah. And I I think it's, again, if if if somebody sits down and they get a they roll up a character who is 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 and, you know, 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, you know, playing the character to avoid foolish stereotypes, which, which we want to avoid.
Dave:And,
Matthew:Andy's coming there with, the book's called Harlem Unbound. You're right. You're totally right.
Dave:That's Look, everyone's come in with Harlem Unbound. Interesting.
Matthew:And Frank also said that, but it also more importantly, Frank says that you're running a game tomorrow that's gonna be streamed on his channel. Do you
Dave:wanna tell us something about
Matthew:that, Dave?
Dave:Yeah. So this is, 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, at a mining camp under the control of a, yeah, 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.
Dave: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.
Matthew:And Frank's channel, we should say, is Raldanash like his username in the comments? Now, I'm just
Dave:So I've
Matthew:now
Dave:I've so I've now pulled up a few of the, the the reading list. So I'll just check out a few that I I think I particularly enjoyed reading, or were particularly, helpful. So, impressions of an Indian childhood by Sutkala Saar. That was very, very interesting insight. Black Elk Speaks is an excellent one as well.
Dave:Very, very good firsthand account of of of, of his life and the life of the people that he knew when he was very young. And there's a lot on 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 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 who was a slave.
Dave:He ran away to Canada in about 18/30 and then became a a preacher. And again, it's a very, very interesting insight into, into the the slave life that he experienced. And, but yeah. So that's just a tiny taste of of some of the books that we've been drawing upon and and using to inform, inform our decision making.
Matthew:And tying in with that and, tying in with Andy's question here, you've obviously done a lot of research on 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 in in the list
Dave:It's it's on the list. Yeah.
Matthew:Is is one that totally changed what I thought the Texas Rangers were. I don't wanna spoil it for you, but, but, yeah, it it's not a great read. I mean, it's a great read.
Dave:It is. It was a Great. Yeah. The the subtitle is the bold and brutal history of the Texas Rangers. And that gives you a gives you a sense of what might be, what might be included in there.
Dave:Yeah. I'm I'm not sure for me. I mean, I I always knew that the the the the, the European stroke US approach to the Native Americans was, you know, 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.
Dave:If you wanna 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 in the west and in, you know, continental North America as a whole. In fact, you know, in the 33 or 400 years before the time we're setting our game. But the East India Company seemed to do be very, very talented at doing really shitty things. Anyway, don't it's gonna get everyone really depressed about, human history.
Dave:But,
Matthew:that's maybe why so many people like to play games where they don't have to be human. Right. Okay. Here's a good one, from Jed. Welcome, Jed, to the chat.
Matthew:What is a good way to prepare for a campaign as we wait for May 2025 to roll around?
Dave:It's a very good question. Well, for me, I'd say research, do some reading. Now I get, you know, the ideas that I get for the camp the playtest campaign that I'm running, a lot of that comes from from the reading that I've done. So the the sort of scenario that Matt used to spoke about earlier, which had the which harped back to the civil war came out of some research I was doing around the civil war. And that gave me the idea of of this place called Fort Pillow, where some terrible things happened.
Dave:And that gave me the idea for the for the scenario, in in that particular case. Tied in as well with Andy's character because his character was trying to leave all that behind and had ended up fighting on the wrong side in the war. And, it was Despite
Matthew:being from an abolitionist family, he he he's always very keen to tell us.
Dave:Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But he ended up fighting for the Confederates.
Dave:But, so that was great. But that comes from from a bit of reading. I think Paul Watson, Paul's comment in the, in the chat is a great one. Watched Edward. I think it's fabulous.
Dave:I mean, if you haven't seen it, you probably have already, but watch deadwood. 3 seasons of deadwood, and then the movie that topped it off. Yeah. I mean, it's brilliant. I, Yeah.
Dave:I've yeah. I wanna sit down and watch it all again myself, but I don't have the time at the moment. But
Matthew:Yeah. No. I I think so. And I tell you what we 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 we've created.
Matthew:Obviously, it's gonna be in the book, But it it's not our words. I think we should potentially take that excerpt out, put that reading list on our website.
Dave:Yeah. Absolutely.
Matthew:If people wanna follow Jud's example and prepare for the campaign, then then they can have a look through some of those books as well. We've just sent that reading list, off
Dave:In that chat. So yeah.
Matthew:Bunch of other text to our sensitivity reader. Maybe we'll wait, till mid October for her to return that. She might have some other ideas to add to that maybe.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:So maybe maybe mid October, we'll book that reading list out on the website, and people can get tucked in if they want to. And says watch 1883 as well, and I would recommend that very heartily. I thoroughly enjoyed that. Says, are you making a 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.
Matthew:Stick to Deadwood's name on the top of this.
Dave:Well, it's it's funny you should say that. Not that we are about to do that, but I, I haven't been able to go. But there was a there was a licensing convention down in London this week, 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, the idea that crossed my mind that we could do an expansion, which is Deadwood, and then the license it and brand it as Deadwood.
Dave:And then it'll be interesting to see how many more people that would pull in and what yeah. How much interest that would gather.
Matthew:2.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:Maybe. Maybe, Frank.
Dave:Who knows? Space. Yeah.
Matthew:Okay. Here we've got another one. 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 or indeed England.
Matthew:You're right. We're not quite London is what it says on the Kickstarter, but, Dave and I are on opposite sides of London and just outside it.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:But, yeah, I think 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, Roudenash mentioned Lucky Luc, which is a a French comic strip. There's also lieutenant blueberry or lieutenant blueberry, I should say, which, is by Mobius, the same guy, a very famous French comic writer. I think in a way, cowboys can be a bit of a fantasy for Europeans who are, you know, just removed from it by by an ocean and half a continent. It it it takes on a a meaning that maybe doesn't come with necessarily all the baggage of people that are actually there.
Matthew: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 I didn't mean to press that one. Which one am I pressing?
Matthew:Good one. I'm glad
Dave:you're on the way home, Bruce. Excellent.
Matthew:And he writes about what what cowboys mean, I think, for him as an Englishman, and I think that's quite an interesting thing to watch as well.
Dave:Yeah. So I think it comes back to to something you said earlier, Matt, but I'm kind of forgetting what it was now. But
Matthew:You forget a lot of the stuff I say. Like when I said, we wouldn't put the blippin' solo rules in the book.
Dave:Indeed. I think, you know, we we've we've we've always had an enduring interest as I said earlier about the Wild West. More than once, we've tried to get Wild West game together. You know, I I created one once many, many years ago. We played things like, Boot Hill and Aces and Eights, but it never really stuck.
Dave:We're never interested in the supernatural side of dead, Deadlands just wasn't something we were interested in. And it's it's taken a long time to get to the point where, you know, where we've we've we've now created created this game. I think, you know, as as Matthew says that, you know, there are perhaps some people in the in the US who are gonna 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, you know, enjoying the mythology, but wanting to take away the, you know, the the stereotypes that that come with all of that.
Dave:So hopefully, again, as I said before, we try to get the balance right, and, you'll all be the, you know, 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.
Matthew:We're we're coming thick and fast with questions here, but then another one here from Wizards of the Tower, which, I 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?
Dave:They're gonna be very
Matthew:easy and very deadly.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. So, gun yeah. Gunfights tend to be short, as, 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.
Dave:We have mechanics in the game that, you know, your your weapon will have a crit value. 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 wanna put the man down. You wanna stop the guy shooting back at you because one shot can kill you as we found out in in the play tests. So yeah. That, you know, they are deadly.
Dave:They are fast. They we do add some things to try and improve the kind of authenticity of the feel of how they work. So when I went to, Tabletop Scotland, I bought this for a bit of fun, just a prop to to play around with. It's it's really rubbish, but it was brilliant in explaining to people about how single and double action guns work, and we tried to recreate that in the game. Your single action gun takes you longer to use because you've got to prepare it.
Dave:You've got to pull the 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 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.
Matthew:Yeah. 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.
Dave:So there are bonus dice to weapon stats, but it's not gear dice.
Matthew:Yeah. They just
Dave:add your call
Matthew:originally think about using gear dice like they have in Forbidden Lands and and in original, Mutant Year 0. But we quickly wanted to simplify that.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:So, yeah, you you you get extra dice when you shoot with a particular weapon. You might get extra dice when you shoot or hit 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.
Dave:Yeah. So 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 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 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 any guns yet. So you might wanna 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.
Dave:So we've got tactical questions like that for you as a player to decide about what gun your your character wants to use.
Matthew:And a kind of related to that, it's not just guns. Another one from Wizards of the Tower. Will there be melee fist fights, knives, swipes, I'm guessing that is? Or maybe it's it's wipes in the in the in the cinematic sense.
Dave:Yeah. Maybe. Yeah.
Matthew:I'll I'll ask Zoro. 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's set when I don't know.
Dave:I don't know, actually. I Yeah. WIPs, not wipes.
Matthew:WIPs. Yeah.
Dave:But you do have the opportunity to use a WIP. Yes. If you wish. Lassings as well naturally enough. So, yeah, so we so we have your ranged conflict, you have your fighting conflict, and then we also have social conflict.
Dave:So we've tried to make social conflict a bit more involved. You know, 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 wanna use, or you're trying to persuade them or charm them, and you can damage their stats that are relevant to their, like, 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, you know, become very doubtful and, you know, lose the lose the conflict that way.
Dave:So those are the 3 types of conflict, but we're all trying to make them all because because shooting each other is so dangerous. We wanna make the social conflict engaging and fun, and not just one dice roll, because that's gonna happen a bit more regularly if your players are being a bit cautious about drawing their weapons.
Matthew:And wizards, of the tower has, has confirmed Yeah. Is a bit early for our period, 18 forties to 18 fifties. But I think it's also worth saying, and it touched back on an earlier question that I probably can't find now to to put on the board, but somebody said, what are we gonna do next in terms of supplements? I think that was Andy asking that. I can't quite see
Dave:it now.
Matthew: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, geographies and climates and, cultures across the west that could be worth unpacking. And there's things like when we very first the first day or 2 that we started talking about this game, Dave and I were thinking it might be a sort of Oregon Trail sort of game. So all of that is in the mix, and and that means not just other geographies and other parts of the west in the 18 seventies. It may move forward and back in time as well as so I I can envisage that each let us say campaign book. I don't know quite what format we're gonna we're gonna make them.
Matthew:But each each campaign book would focus on a particular part of the country, but also potentially a different part of the history.
Dave:Of the period. Yeah.
Matthew:Of the period. Yeah. Yeah. So
Dave:We'll we'll we'll let you know as soon as, as soon as we've we've kind of, you know, nailed down on what it is we wanna be doing next. But, Yeah.
Matthew:I've gotta say if if I were going if we were going to publish a Zorro style, obviously, somebody else has got a license to Zorro. But if we were gonna look at California in the 18 forties or, you know, or in the Spanish bit of the southwest, I'd be looking at getting somebody closer to that culture to write that, and, you know, we'd we'd help them write that and turn it into a great book, actually. I'd yeah. I I'd whereas, whereas I can do the the 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.
Matthew:Yeah. That. So What other questions
Dave:do we have?
Matthew:Yeah. What I now we're having a discussion about Zoho.
Dave:Yeah. So so so I think I think California, by the 18 fifties, was part of the US. I think it was 1848 when it became part of the US after the, US Mexican War, and the, the Treaty of, Guadal Hidalgo. I know that I don't remember it properly. But that that gave swathes of what was Mexican territory, to the to the US after the, after the war.
Matthew:And and just, to having, quoted wizard's questions quite a lot, it's worth pointing out what wizard says. They're a channel. I'm guessing here on YouTube, Wizards of the Town. And you talk RP games, and you love the old western plan on doing, 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.
Matthew: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 they 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 haven't gone down my route because we'd have been beaten to that by Frontier
Dave:Skin scum. Yeah.
Matthew:Did the pasteboard book the way I wanted to do it. So Mhmm. So just as well, we're not doing that. And, yeah, we could be apart. Okay.
Dave:Yes, please. Yeah.
Matthew:We'll we'll we'll we'll look into that. We
Dave:Yeah. That'd be cool. We'll
Matthew: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
Dave:is what you're doing.
Matthew:With the dog the tower. But that's I'll let you guys talk about that. Saul has never heard of Frontier Scum. It it's it's a it's a kind of mork boggy style western book. It looks lovely.
Matthew:Well, it looks lovely to me because it's the book that I wanted to make, but,
Dave:it it's we are making looks lovely. Cool.
Matthew:Right. And the wizards is correcting, it's correcting. And, cool.
Dave:Wizards of the tower role play. Nice.
Matthew:I have
Dave:to look out for that.
Matthew: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.
Dave:Welcome. Yep. Absolutely. Saul was one of our one of our guest writers, which, which again has been great. So we I, I put out a few requests, to some some, know, some people, and they all said yes.
Dave:It's like, okay. 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.
Dave:14, I think, guest writers in the book. So that's fabulous, and it's looking forward to seeing seeing the work that they put together.
Matthew:Well, we've got 2 minutes left. And, another question from Jed that I I think is worth unpacking a little bit. Jed says, are Asian characters covered? Chinese exclusion act was after 18, 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, the people you, you know, that were were closest to West.
Matthew: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 talk 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 if they want to to be able to play Asian characters. Yeah.
Matthew:Again, you know, and it's all about you know, here's a very real part of history in terms of the, you know, the Chinese exclusion act, which is just out and out racism. Yeah. I mean, it's it's 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.
Dave:I think it's an interesting one because, yeah, again, having looked into into the history a little bit, particularly of of Chinese immigrants into into the west. There's I mean, one, there's less source material out there. So there's so, you know, it's a bit harder to get into the to the real meat of the of the history. But again, it's it's the it's a history of prejudice. It's a history of, of jealousy of, you know, or as we have now, people not trusting immigrants because they don't know them and they they they believe that they're coming and doing them harm, in one way or another.
Dave:So so, yeah, we're trying to, again, draw out some of that history in the, you know, in the chapter that talks about all of this stuff to try and give people a better feel for, you know, for where you know, for 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.
Matthew:And, I and people are having a bit of fun with, the tune. We're we're not encouraging people to play ninjas even though that there is historical evidence that there were ninjas in the 18 seventies. I won't say they ever talked to that one, but you can listen to the song that fronted at, at your place.
Dave:For such a long time. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't quite strike the gritty tone for me anymore. But
Matthew:yeah. I did I did think about actually sticking it on the front of this video, Dave, but,
Dave:I'm quite glad
Matthew:you I I saved you that humiliation. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I think it's time to say goodbye to all our friends and, backers and potential backers who might have enjoyed us and even to people that weren't here in the chat but are listening to this later on.
Matthew:If Yep. You are watching this and it's the first time you've heard about this and there's still 7 days and and and in the next 7 days after this
Dave:was done, then October 3rd, 2024 at 1600 British summertime. That is when the campaign ends.
Matthew:And what we, might do is run a I don't know whether we'll get a little livestream there. I'll be in Germany. So if we livestream, I might be livestreaming live from, Mhmm. But we might do something around that
Dave:beer top. Maybe?
Matthew:Maybe. I don't know. Yeah.
Dave:It might be quite nice to mark mark the end, mind it?
Matthew:Mind it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Goodbye.
Dave:Thank you so much everyone for for coming on and asking all the great questions. And, I hope you found it interesting and informative. And, yeah. So anything else for you to say, Matthew?
Matthew:No. But I do just wanna say if you're German and you wanna hear the game played in German, then, there's Frank's running a game in German on Saturday.
Dave:And it might be the first foreign stream. Yes. I think
Matthew:it might be. Will be.
Dave:Well, the first non English language stream anyway. So
Matthew:Okay. And thanks, McGuim. We haven't heard from you before, but it was a real pleasure. And cheers to you too. And goodbye, everybody.
Dave:Goodbye. And, yeah, stay safe. Okay. Well, that was great fun. I really enjoyed that, and we could probably have talked on for for much much longer.
Dave:But, everyone must have been sick to death of of our voices by now. So thank you for listening this far in if you've if you've got this far. So next time. Now we were talking about this. I think actually, we've 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 that is.
Dave:But next time, let's do something different. So,
Matthew:okay.
Dave:You're Essen. There might be some great people that you could possibly talk to at Essen and get some Well,
Matthew:there will definitely be great people. Whether or not Yeah. I'd get a chance to talk to them somewhere quite, so I'd have to record something. But, yeah. I will try, Dave, I will try and record an interview with some of the, other great publishers or
Dave:Great. Excellent.
Matthew:Or maybe a couple of short ones or something like that. We'll
Dave:That sounds a good idea. And if not, then I I will commit to doing something Coriolis. How about that?
Matthew:Hey, back to the old school.
Dave:Exactly. And if we don't do that for next time, I'll do something for Coriolis the time after. So Brilliant. Get back get back to our roots. How about that?
Matthew:Get back to our roots. That's where we started. That's where the Everything's
Dave:been completed. Whole movement started. We we owe Coriolis a great debt of gratitude for being the the springboard that has put us to where we are today. So, yeah. And I still love that game.
Dave:So it's, yes. Okay. Brilliant. Well, without any further Yes. Without without any further ado, it's goodbye for me.
Matthew:And it's goodbye from him.
Dave: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 freely publishing.