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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 278 of Effekt Return to the Third Horizon. I'm Matthew.
Dave:And I'm Dave. And we have another action packed show for you today. And in that show
Matthew:Well saved.
Dave:I know. I determined not to say it as you were doing your intro, and then I suddenly found myself saying it. But yes. So we we might have a new patron to welcome to community, which would be great. We've got a few odds and ends to talk about in the world of gaming.
Dave:Some interesting stuff there, some Coriolis flavored stuff there, which as you can tell from the title, we might be talking a little bit about Coriolis today, which is cool. A tiny bit of old West it's not so much news as it's not even gossip.
Matthew:Discussion buzz.
Dave:Yeah. As yeah. I was trying to think of a a better, more exciting word for discussion point, but I can't think of one, so we'll stick with that. And then we have a interview with a lovely fellow called Kevin Hassall who joined us in the Herman and he was talking about community content but specifically Cory Otis of Third Horizon community content and his new Kickstarter. And that was a really interesting conversation.
Dave:So that was a real a real pleasure. Yeah. So that's Yeah.
Matthew:We were a bit squeezed Yeah. Were a bit squeezed for time for that interview. We were. So I I feel there's a bunch of questions and a bunch more conversation we need to have with him at some later point. So he may be back on the show a bit later.
Dave:Which is which is great because it was a real pleasure chatting to him and you will hear later on what a lovely guy he is.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. New patrons. Let's do a new patron.
Matthew:Dave, meet our new patron Peter Taylor and say thank you. Welcome to us.
Dave:Yes. Thank you, Peter, for joining us. It's great to have you on board and hope you enjoy it with us. Join the Discord if you're not there already.
Matthew:I do Yes. Though, we have not seen you on the Discord. So funny enough, I always do a check before we record to see if anybody's turned up in patronage. And we've only just spotted you. You've been around for a week.
Matthew:But yes, do slot your Discord name into the relevant field in your Patreon, and it will automatically bring you into our Patreon exclusive Discord where there is lots of stuff quite apart from the swag that you will also find available for your very generous patron level in in in among the religious called posts.
Dave:Yes. I I do remember years ago, I'm sure having a Peter Taylor with us before. So I don't know if you're a returning patron, Peter. But either way, welcome and great to have you here, and get on the Discord and join the chat. That'd be great.
Matthew:Yeah. That's brilliant. Thank you. And there will be some ex Patron exclusive content coming up very shortly, actually. Well, maybe not very shortly.
Matthew:Maybe after UK Games Expo, but you'll have to wait and see what that is.
Dave:Right.
Matthew:Shall we move on to the world of gaming, Dave?
Dave:Yep. Yep. So what have we got there then today?
Matthew:Right. So I was rather entranced by a headline that I saw on Twitter, but I think it was from Sky News originally. And it said, Saoirse Starmah to deploy Dragon to Cyprus in relation, of course, to the current, shall we say, military operation in Iraq. Iran. Of The US.
Matthew:Yeah. Oh, in Iran even. Yeah. Sorry.
Dave:We've fucked up Iraq, so, you know, we don't need to do any more there, frankly.
Matthew:Yeah. A weird sense of deja vu about all of this. Well, exactly. But deploying a dragon, I thought, reminded of the fictional series that I've never actually read, but the sort of Napoleonic era British navy dragons, which are at you know, in in the modern sense, Kierstable is deploying a ship called Dragon with a dragon admittedly painted on the side of it. A Welsh dragon is going to Cyprus.
Matthew:In the fictional world, the British army or armed forces shall we say, have a fleet wing force of dragons that are ridden. And they're a series of books by, I wanna say Naomi Novak, I think, is the author.
Dave:American Naomi author, I
Matthew:Novak. Novak. Novak. Yeah. And Magpie Games are currently kick starting a the series of books is called Tamarare, which is named after a US, not US, Her Majesty's Navy vessel from the actual time.
Matthew:But I guess maybe the name of a dragon in the fiction. Anyway, they're releasing the Temeraire role playing game.
Dave:Indeed. That's currently on kickstart at the moment, about halfway through, maybe not quite halfway through their their campaign.
Matthew:It's got a free quick start, which I downloaded and had a bit of a flick through. It uses a dice pool system. I think fewer dice than year zero, but more chance of success on each dice. I think five or six is our successes in this game. Right.
Matthew:It's very pretty. It's it's not a genre I particularly that that thrills me, so I'm not feeling the need to kick start it. But but I thought
Dave:Yeah. I mean, it does look nice. Like you, I haven't read any of the books. And it's probably again it's a Napoleonic time as as much as I find it interesting in a historian historical context, I've never really had the ode to role play in that era, so it doesn't immediately grab me, from that point of view. But I mean, yeah, artwork is lovely.
Dave:I guess fans of the book are are going to be drawn into it much more than, you know, the likes of me who who don't have that kind of connection with the background and the setting, and it is doing very well. It's got nearly £300,000 pledged already, nearly 3,000 backers. So it's it's yeah. It's it's succeeding exceedingly well.
Matthew:Yes.
Dave:But I think like you, I won't be back in this one.
Matthew:But we will put a link in the show notes to anybody that wants to do it. And it's probably got, by the time this goes out, a couple more weeks to play. So have a look at it. Download the quick start. The quick start is very nice looking.
Matthew:Yeah. There is a deal. One of the things I quite liked about it is it talks about you may well be at a ball, but what do you want out of this particular dance? So has dancing as a kind of manipulation role or was that. It's got a
Dave:social conflict at a Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah.
Matthew:And the adventure is called, talking of dancing, a minuet of dragons. Oh. Okay. Which feels a bit like a rip off of a dance of dragons from
Dave:It does it
Dave:does a bit, doesn't it? But
Matthew:Maybe it's an homage and a joke.
Dave:So is is that the only difference between sort of a historical Napoleonic era and this one, that there's just dragons in it?
Matthew:Well, one might argue that once you've got dragons in it, a whole bunch of other stuff changes as well. But I don't know. I honestly I know. I haven't read any of the books. I didn't particularly see anything that was obviously different in the late seventeenth sorry, late eighteenth, early nineteenth century period.
Matthew:The French have got dragon as as well, I think.
Dave:Right.
Matthew:So, obviously, they're evil dragons as opposed to our lovely good dragons.
Dave:Are the Portuguese French.
Dave:They're they're they're nasty French dragons as opposed to our good old English bulldog style dragons. Yeah. Okay.
Matthew:These are dragons who probably shrug their wings dismissively every time a nice English dragon comes into combat.
Dave:Fair enough.
Matthew:Yeah. But there's some, you know, nice enough pictures of of ships and dragons. Yeah. Sorry. I I feel I'm sounding really dismissive, actually.
Matthew:What I'm saying is I quite like the look of this quick start. If I had more gaming time in my life, I think I'd definitely run at least this quick start to see how it goes. Yeah. But I can't I've got a bunch of other stuff that calling on my time, not least of which. All the stuff we've got to make.
Dave:Yes. Absolutely.
Matthew:So yeah. So let's let's stop talking about it before I sound too dismissive. It looks really good. What's next on our list? Troudvang.
Matthew:How are we doing on the Troudvang campaign? We talked about this in the last episode,
Dave:but I haven't I haven't checked it, actually.
Matthew:No. Me neither. Let me see if I can quickly call it out.
Dave:It it probably is has it not possibly finished by now?
Matthew:I yeah. It may well have done or it's getting close to finishing if not finished already. That's why I said on the show notes, closing days of Chudhvang. I've got a link here. It should take a bit yeah.
Dave:Oh, eleven eleven days to go.
Matthew:Eleven days to go. So plenty of time to back to Joovang.
Dave:Podcast goal of you and I racing to to look up something we should have looked up before we started recording. Yes. Get in. You you you you our listeners just don't know don't know how good they've got it, do they?
Matthew:Right. Remember we got about 635 backers?
Dave:This year.
Matthew:Yeah. Well, they they've got 635 backers too, plus another 4,000.
Dave:A thousand bastards. I'm I'm I'm delighted. I'm absolutely delighted for them.
Matthew:But how
Dave:the hell are they doing so well? That's not fair.
Matthew:Well, I I come on now. I think I think this is an interesting state of affairs
Matthew:It
Matthew:is. Around Dragon bane trade DOD, in that there is a whole generate I think we said this before, but I'm gonna say it There's a whole generation of Swedes and some Americans because there were versions, online versions and printed versions, I think, of Trude Van Chronicle sold in America. I think there's even 5E version, know, D and D 5E version of Troodvang that's been sold. So Troodvang has its fans among a younger of gamers than you and I, for whom Djaka Oktymona is Trudvang. And so I feel
Dave:Yeah. No. No.
Matthew:That's The original Djaka Oktymona reached out maybe to to Swedish fans of our age and obviously a bigger European or And and now this is doing it, but more targeted at a different generation. And that different generation has said, yay.
Dave:The the hardcore kind of thing almost.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah.
Dave:I entirely retract my comment of earlier. Yeah.
Matthew:But, yeah. It
Dave:does look lovely. It does. If I didn't have Drakkar of Demona Dragon Bane sat on my shelf and probably never gonna play it, I would have I would have been tempted by this actually. Yeah. But, yeah.
Dave:So there's a at the time of recording, eleven days to go. So by the time this is out and you're listening to it there might be you know eight or ten days or a week perhaps. They don't need your backing because they've succeeded by a long way but if you wanted to back it, yeah there it is, go and go and do that. It does look lovely, the artwork is super, you'd expect. It does look really nice.
Dave:Some of it has got in some of the fonts they're using, has a one ring feel to it. Well, think I I
Matthew:think you'll find that a lot of the internal illustrations are made by the same artist who did one ring. Yeah. A lot of the black and white stuff. The color stuff, I think, is from the original artist who did the original Fang. I think it's possibly actually from the original Trude Fang, but I think any new black and white line drawn illustration is using the same artist.
Matthew:They're getting a load of coverage on YouTube as well, so this all this all goes to it. But, yeah, you know it looks lovely. It looks lovely. But I think for you and I, not for you and I because we have enough fantasy games to play. And I'm still I'm still stuck in the Forbidden Lands.
Matthew:I love the Forbidden Lands.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Me too. We had so Dean is now running a Forbidden Lands campaign on our Wednesday group.
Dave:We had a session of that a couple of weeks ago, and that was again very much in the we haven't even got to the Forbidden Lands yet, we're still on the bloody journey. But the scenario was very much very much like the I can't remember what they were called. The the little creatures that we came across who
Matthew:The whiners who made gold?
Dave:Had the gold. Yeah. It's a very similar kind of moral question. Although, actually, the the the creature that we were thinking about was probably powerful enough just to kill us all straight away should should it want to. But we had a super, super session.
Dave:It was just such good fun. And, again, like like coming back to Coriolis, coming back to Forbidden Lands, it's just reminding me how good the game is. Yeah. And and how much fun it can be around the table.
Matthew:I feel it's now an underrated game because so, you know, the cap had made so many great fancy games.
Dave:Yes.
Matthew:I'm I'm feeling a little bit like Forbidden Lands is a bit forgotten, but it's still my favorite.
Dave:Indeed.
Matthew:Anyway, we're not talking about Forbidden Lands. We're talking about the next item on our running order, which is
Dave:Pirate Borg Set. Flicking back
Matthew:to the running order.
Dave:Yes, Pirate Borg Starter Set. I'm already there, mate. I'm I'm one step ahead of you. I can sense when we're gonna we're gonna move on.
Matthew:I'm very excited. I did not back Pirate Borg Set. We talked about it when it came out. Down Among the Dead Men is it's or Down Among the Dead, I think Yeah. Is one of the things it was, that it was kick started with.
Matthew:And I've got that too. But I got a parcel from Free League, which includes Down Among the Dead, a lovely GM screen. Well, I say lovely. I haven't even opened a GM screen, but I'm sure it's lovely because everything they make is lovely. But also this, I've gotta say, rather gorgeous Pirate Borg starter set.
Matthew:And I'm really intrigued. The reason I wanted to talk about it is I'm you know, Pirate Borg is what they call a free league workshop production. So, you know, it's it was already published by Limitron Games, I think, once. And then republished by Free League when they said we really love this game. We'd like to help you reach a wider audience.
Matthew:And now in the staff set, if you like, that's almost like the third publication of it.
Dave:Iteration of it. Yeah.
Matthew:And it's now this isn't what in any other day would have been called an indie game. Mhmm. You know, Lymatron is, I think, basically one bloke whose name I've we've met him. We met him at at Dragon Meet, a couple of Dragon Meet.
Dave:Yes. Yes. We did. I've got no idea what his name is.
Matthew:It's gone out of my head entirely. I'm sure his name is in the front of the book. Let me let me just see if I can find his name in the front
Dave:of the book.
Matthew:So Luke Stratton. This is Luke Stratton. You know, writing illustration and layout by Luke Stratton slash Limitron. And so it's an indie game. An indie game which okay.
Matthew:You know, indie companies have made box starter sets before. Mothership's got one. But, you know, this it feels to me that, you know, it's a real move when indie indie producers can make products like this that are full of stuff. Now, I know you're not a big fan of starter sets. You'd rather go straight to the core book.
Dave:On the whole. On the whole. Not always. I I I do accept that some starter sets are very good. Yeah.
Dave:Yeah. Absolutely. So
Matthew:this has got a stripped down version of the rules, but it's Bork Bork. So stripped down
Dave:do you
Dave:strip down?
Matthew:The rules.
Dave:Yeah. Exactly.
Matthew:It's got a great adventure or even is it a campaign booklet? It looks like it it it calls it an adventure, but it's a thick adventure. It's 60 pages of adventure alongside the rule book. Okay. It's got some lovely little sort of glossy laminated not laminated, but beautifully produced laminated.
Matthew:Boy, it sounds tacky to me. But shiny surface, wipe clean surface sort of play sheet where you can keep track of your scores and a couple of, you know, whiteboard style markers that you can wipe off and reuse these these play sheets.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:They've got their little dice rolls and stuff like that. There's one for every player here. And what what is one for every player? We are looking at seven of these. So seven players can get round the table here.
Matthew:It's got a pad of character sheets, blank character sheets because
Dave:I always I always like a pad of character sheets.
Matthew:Yeah. Well, it's got that, you know. It's got the inside of the box is printed with tables and stuff. So the box itself makes a little, if you like, GM screen. If you haven't invested in the other one.
Matthew:It's got a whole bunch of beautifully drawn counters. So you can have ship battles. You've got wind direction indicators. So you are you going with the wind or whatever? You've got battle maps for both sea combat and for land based adventuring.
Matthew:You've got a deck plan of a ship so that if you want have a battle on a ship. Yeah. This is the most piratey pirate game I have ever seen. And, you know, this came out of the blue. It kept it would arrive yesterday, quite late in the evening, and I so want to play Pirate Borg now.
Matthew:Uh-huh. So this is this is a starter set that's done its good. I've had the core rule book for bloody years because, you know, we got a core rule book when they when they when they did the first thing. Oh, it's got a big set of lovely pirate dice, which are, you know, this being Borkborg, it's got all the traditional, you know, shaped dice. Poly polyhedral dice is what I'm saying here.
Matthew:Lovely big numbers on them. Just parity font and white on black. Gorgeous set of dice. Love them. Love them.
Dave:Getting the
Dave:sense you are liking this product, mate. I do have to say from just because so I've got notification, but I haven't had it haven't had the physical product arrived yet. But just looking on the website, the artwork is super. I mean the Down Among the Dead book, the artwork on that is just lovely. And the GM screen, as you said, it's lovely before you'd even opened it.
Dave:It does look absolutely super, really gorgeous. So it's it looks fabulous in in its design and production production.
Matthew:Oh, good. I've just noticed. So the box I'm just I'm just putting the lid back on the box now. And as my as I hold the box lid, my thumbs are going over the the crowd of, I guess, these are player characters on the on the front of the box, and they're bloody embossed. So Okay.
Matthew:The lid is a is a work of sculpture in its own way. I am
Dave:in love. Fallen in love with Yes.
Matthew:Cool. And and and listeners, this isn't some scripted advert. This is literally me saying, oh, I got this yesterday. And then while we were just setting up to record, I I said I'm gonna unwrap this. And yeah.
Matthew:So this is my initial first genuine first impressions, and I am desperate to play. Desperate to play. Almost like we've you and I have got a game lined up with Andy running
Dave:Solomon Kane.
Matthew:Solomon Kane. If Andy's van breaks down again, because we had to cancel our last session because Andy couldn't get to it. But if Andy's van breaks down again, I will just bring Pirate Borg and we will run that wherever.
Dave:Yeah. Okay. Cool.
Matthew:It's a one off.
Dave:Excellent. Sounds good. Cool. Not that I want Andy's van to break down again, but, you know, hang on quite No.
Matthew:No. We yeah. But oh, god. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:I I I'm stunned. So having just said I'm not gonna buy that game because I haven't got enough time to play a game, I now have to add another game to the list that
Dave:I'm going play.
Matthew:And, you know, actually, it's it's well, eighteenth century pirates. So it probably is quite close to Hebreware. It may even have dragons in it. Worth to wait and see.
Dave:Cool. Cool. Cool.
Matthew:Cool. So that is available in all good shops now, I'm guessing, and by mail order. So
Dave:So I think that's
Matthew:we will put a link in the show
Dave:notes. On on the website, it says it's a pre order. So if you include this item in your order, the whole order will be held until the product arrives at our warehouse in March. We're in March, so you probably won't have to wait
Matthew:until arrived at the warehouse and has arrived.
Dave:You were well, obviously, because we're because we're getting copies sent out.
Matthew:Yes.
Dave:Yeah. Cool.
Matthew:Love it. I love it.
Dave:Good start.
Matthew:Genuinely love it.
Dave:So so
Dave:you like it then?
Matthew:Yeah. I haven't played it. I might play like shit.
Dave:I'm kinda getting into
Matthew:This may be. We haven't we haven't made you play Morkborg yet, have we done?
Dave:No. No. No. I haven't played Morkborg yet. Nope.
Matthew:This may be the iteration that actually gets you to roll the 12 on a d 20. We'll wait and see.
Dave:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm certainly up for playing it.
Dave:And the the just looking at it, it looks brilliant. And you're gushing over it means that, you know, you'll be an enthusiastic GM when you run it, which is always gonna be good.
Matthew:Yeah. Cool. Okay. Where are we? So oh, yes.
Matthew:Now this is a thing that we are gonna talk about in a bit more detail later Yep. But it is worth saying that there's another Kickstarter that we will put a link to the show notes in, and that is for The Serpent.
Dave:Indeed. So this is Kevin's current product that's up on Kickstarter, which is a science fiction campaign aimed at traveler in the first instance, or at least compatible with traveler. But you can listen to the to our interview with him a bit later on and find out more about it. I'm not sure what else you wanted to say about it before we talk to Kevin.
Matthew:Well, yeah, we're we're gonna talk to him about it. I think the interesting thing here is he's targeted at Traveller for two reasons, which we will unpack a bit more in the in the interview. So we'll save that discussion for the interview. Except for the fact that I think traveller's having a bit of a revival, you know, because I one of the other things I did, I've given my contract has finished, so finally I have time to myself again. And mid week, maybe Tuesday, I went down to the game shop to just, because I can, go to the game shop in the middle of the week.
Matthew:And this being the game shop in Aldershop where I used to work. And said hi to the boss man there. And I didn't, at this point, say, have you got any work going? Here's the job. I could do that.
Matthew:But I might go back because I have, you know, it may be, it may not have paid me quite as well as by recent contract, but by god, it's the most fun in the world. We'll give it a game shot. And I had a look at all the gaming stuff. And one shelf of their role playing section is black with traveller books. And I haven't seen traveller on a game shop bookshelf for Donkey's years.
Matthew:I mean we may have had when I was working there, there may have been the core book and a couple of others, but this was like a yard and a half of black spine traveller books.
Dave:The traveller stuff. Okay.
Matthew:So I feel maybe traveller's having a bit of renaissance. So it's probably wise to do that that way, but also of course he did that because there isn't currently a Mhmm. Open gaming license for the Third Horizon. No. We are promised one is on its way.
Dave:Indeed. Yeah. So, yeah I mean the serpent on kickstarter is doing well he's passed his goal he's got nineteen days to go the the feel of it is around a palace coup an ancient horror I think that he's he's obviously very very passionate about the third horizon, and the you know the choreo list of the role playing game, and this is clearly, powerfully influenced by that passion. So yeah, go and have a look if you're interested. There's definitely something about making it or Kevin wanting to make it entirely compatible with Coriolis, the third horizon, in due course when the when the open license is is finally
Matthew:Five year arrives.
Dave:Exactly.
Matthew:Talking of that, we have had a bit of gossip as well. We did see on Facebook from our friends at Nordic Skulls an indication that they were prepping for the release of the license. Being Swedish and mates of Free League, they may know more than we do about when that license is due.
Dave:It it does seem likely that they know more than we do on the grounds that they are readying themselves for the for that day. So, yeah, maybe we should get Andreas on the show and see what information we can squeeze out of him.
Matthew:Yeah. We yeah. Maybe yeah. That may be the next show. Who can tell?
Matthew:Should we move on to old west news?
Dave:Well, I just wanted to say one thing. Okay. And this isn't this isn't role playing game based. It's but it is gaming based. And I just wanted to to mark a moment, which this sounds all really grand and it's really not.
Dave:It's really quite boring. But I just have to say it. So last last week, last Wednesday, we didn't have enough people around to run one of our role playing games. So me, Tony, Connor and Cat had a game of Nemesis. Super super board game.
Dave:We've talked about it on the show before. Absolutely brilliant. Really hard. You've got two maps you can use. One is an easy map, one is a hard map.
Dave:So we play on the hard map now because we played it a lot. And we had four characters, all succeeded in their objectives, all survived, and we all won, which is the first time in, I don't know, how many years of playing this game that that has happened. And I just wanted to to to mark the moment as
Matthew:Congratulations.
Dave:A a superb fun game cooperative. We had Connor's character, who was the scientist, in his wheelchair racing across the ship to get to the other end where Tony and Cat were fighting the Queen, only to roll in and with one shot put the Queen down and kill it, which is really difficult. So Connor was like, you know, yeah, you know what you're you're worrying about. But it was it was a super, super game and it was great fun and a very, very rare
Matthew:cross Win for the players.
Dave:Victory. Yeah. Exactly.
Matthew:Anyway Any deaths at
Matthew:all, or did everybody survive?
Dave:No. Everyone survived. Yeah. Wow. There were a few wounds, but every everyone every player won.
Dave:They every player succeeded in their objective, and every player got into the hibernatorium, and the ship didn't blow up when it went into hyperspace.
Matthew:So yeah.
Dave:I know. Brilliant. Was remarkable. Anyway, I just thought I'd I wanted to mark that moment. So, yes, Old West news.
Dave:What have we got to talk about in Old West news today?
Matthew:So interesting thing happens, and I'm not sure how to think about it, and I wanted to just share the thoughts with you and have a bit of a think. So back when we kick started the game, Tales of the Old West, over a year ago now, because we were coming up to the anniversary of when we sent out books to our backers.
Dave:We are, yeah.
Matthew:One of our retail backers was Paladin Games Paladin's Castle Games in California. And so they have been pretty much our only US stockist for some time. A little bit of side news there. There is currently a container full of no. There is a container with some stuff in it, including a pallet of Tales of the Old West heading its way to The States.
Matthew:So we're hoping to get it into more stateside shops very shortly. But at the moment, the only place you can go walk into a shop and buy is in Paladin Games Paladin's Castle Games in Bakersfield, California. Now one of our patrons sent us a link to a TikTok style shape, you know, vertical shape little advert for, tells the Old West that Paladin Games had made. Now I was loving it as I watched, and I've gotta say, I'm gonna sound like an idiot here because everybody else can probably guess what's what's happening here. But it has some lovely shots of the cowboy pulling his boots on, very atmospheric stuff, a kind of a draw y Deep.
Matthew:Deep voice American guy talking about how life in the West is tough and stuff like that. And then I noticed that somebody's filling out their character sheet. And I went, oh, oh, I see Paladin Paladin's Castle Games have designed their own character sheet for this game. That should have been my first clue, but it wasn't.
Dave:Yeah. You were just too busy watching the show, weren't you, to to think about
Matthew:I was watching the show and enjoying it and loving the the stuff. And then there are things like some odd shaped dice. And my favorite is the d six that rolls a 10 at
Dave:one point. Yeah. With a 10 on it.
Matthew:Which is The great big number 10.
Dave:Potentially misleading.
Dave:If anybody's watching it about the game, they go, oh, a 10 on a d six. That's weird.
Matthew:Yeah. And and so and this is right. So it's an AI generated advert. Yeah. And I honestly I don't want to get in the way of how one of our stockists has bought a bunch of books off us and now wants to sell those books.
Matthew:And maybe buy some more of us when they're sold out. Yep. That's great. I love the fact that they're doing that. But do I love the fact they're doing AI stuff?
Matthew:And also do I love the fact that I don't I haven't worked with AI video generation, but how difficult is it to say, oh, yes. Like that. That's all very good. But but can we just have normal d six in there?
Dave:That 10 to a six. Yeah. Exactly.
Matthew:You know, and they've got images of our book. There's a lovely picture of it by a cup of coffee. And then I realised that's probably from, you know, that was probably trained by an image that we put on our Kickstarter page before we'd published the book. I, you know, there's a site called mock up or something where you can wrap an image of your cover around a, you know The background. A book.
Matthew:Yeah. And it it's got this sort of setting. You can choose your settings. And I was one with an enameled cup of coffee there that I thought was quite appropriate for for our things. So have they taken that image and AI AI ed it?
Matthew:Because in this one, it's a moving image, the steam rising off the coffee and stuff like that. So could they not have put a proper character sheet in or, you know, an image of our actual dice? Oh, what am I saying here? I it worries me. You've just said, you know, misleading any casual looker that's looking at it that Yeah.
Matthew:That that you know, they won't get a set of dice with 10 on the side.
Dave:Yeah. Although the game involves a mechanic where you've got a d six with a 10 on it for some reason.
Matthew:Yeah. And I think, you know, there were also some polyhedral ones because the AI knows that you you only play role playing games with polyhedral dice. So at some point, there were some polyhedrals. I'm not gonna say they were d 20 because for all I know, they're d 60 sevens or something. Yeah.
Matthew:That being computing.
Dave:Yeah. It's it's it's an
Dave:interesting one, isn't it? And I haven't like I say, mean, I saw it when it was put up. I haven't had the brain space to think it through and all the implications of it. But I mean, the one hand, you know, I was delighted that they like the book well enough and it's they think it's selling well enough to advertise, which is which is great. That is really good.
Dave:Actually, just watching it and putting aside all the other issues, it was quite a fun watch. They obviously are not just advertising that. This is an advert for them and their store, but it's framed around Tales of the Old West. The ad Yeah. At the end of the ad, it is Paladin Castle Games, you know.
Dave:Because again, I mean, you know, I I wouldn't necessarily want someone to think that we were behind it.
Matthew:No. There is that.
Dave:The issue thing is because I don't think we were good. We we would do any AI sort of advertising because, you know, we don't use AI in any of our work, any of our art, any of our layout, any of our writing. You know, none of it is AI. It's all human. And I wouldn't want somebody thinking, oh, Effekt Publishing, oh, they use all that AI stuff.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. There there is that too. Yeah. And, know, the thing is, I I like you, it took me time to think through the consequences of this.
Matthew:Yeah. So the first thing I did was say on our Discord where I think it was Frank posted it for us. And when Frank posted it, I went brilliant. And the next thing I did was I shared it on our Facebook and disc not Discord. What's the thing I'm Blue Sky accounts as well.
Matthew:Yep. And I said and he by that time, I'd worked out it was AI. So I, you know, I said, oh, this is AI, but I love the commentary. And then somebody came back and said, of course, that commentary's AI too. And I went, oh, shit.
Matthew:It probably is, isn't it?
Dave:Yeah. Almost certainly. Yeah.
Dave:It's yeah. It's a it's a
Dave:difficult one. Because like you say, we we're not in a position to tell Paladin Castle Games how to advertise their stuff. If they want to use AI stuff, that's a matter for them. Does it become a matter for us when they are advertising our stuff with AI? Potentially it does.
Dave:Does that how much should we worry about that? I'm not sure. No. I mean I mean this has come and gone now, so any any any consequences, any impact of it has happened. They obviously didn't ask us whether it was okay to do that.
Dave:And I guess in most cases, you know, a publisher would be happy just with the advertising, which I am. Yeah, it's a tough one. It's a tough one.
Matthew:It's a tough one. It's a it really is a tough one, know, particularly with some lovely guys who supported us from the very beginning when we didn't even have a product. Just had a Absolutely. Kick
Dave:completely. Yeah. And they've, you know, they've, yeah, like you say, they've been very supportive of us. And this is just kind of another example of them continuing to be supportive of us, which is great. I think probably the easiest thing for us is simply to, if it comes up at any point, just to say, you know, we had nothing to do with this.
Dave:This is all Paladin Castle Games initiative. Kind of would say, you know, it's a matter for them, really. Yeah. That might be slightly mealy mouthed way of saying, not doing me, mate. You know, and passing the buck on to somebody
Matthew:else. Well
Dave:But it's I mean, the only other thing we could do would be go to them and say, you know, please ask us in future before you tie our game into a AI thing that you're doing. But then they, you know, that that might be a bit ungrateful.
Dave:You know? Yeah. There's
Dave:there's there's no obvious right there's no obvious right answer here, I don't think. No.
Matthew:I mean, I think the thing is is we could commit to so one that wasn't all. Did you see the other link that Frank I think it was again Frank shared for their kind of tutorial video that they did on tells the Old West?
Dave:No. I didn't see that one.
Matthew:So this is a widescreen one, not a not TikTok shaped. And, yeah, it came so if you if you look on our Discord in the total discussion base, it was friendly. Shared it. And the the really I'm I'm more annoyed by this one than I am by the whole generated AI video.
Dave:Alright. Okay. Yeah. I see it now. Yep.
Matthew:On that one, on the if if you watch the video, it is just pictures of the the the PDF, you know, sort of screenshots with a bloke talking over it who is not an AI generated homeless soldier. It's obviously the bloke who runs it. And the reason I know it is because he's not very good. You know, there's a lot of ums and uhs. I mean, I speak as somebody that makes this podcast, so I know what not very good sounds like.
Dave:Yeah. Exactly. We we we've got we've got some brilliant ums and uhs that I mean, I I I remember, you know, in the days when I used to edit some of this as well, there are times where I cut out like an eight second thing of you going before you say something.
Matthew:I leave that in. It's all part of character. But, yeah, I I what know you're going for there. You know, so, you know, it's an it is, shall I say, a not professionally produced voice over, but a genuine voice over. This is the bloke talking about the game.
Matthew:Yeah. And there are the screenshots are all pages of our game. But then the thumbnail is a picture of the front cover that's been AI ized.
Dave:I'm just about I was just about to say that. Yeah. Because
Matthew:You know, and and and actually, the screen on the video, the pages are against a background that is obviously AI generated as well because it's, you know, it's a kind of a western themed background with a couple of shit shits. Shit six shooters in the that may not be like science fiction guns than actually a six chambered barrel of gun.
Dave:They kind of anglicised it. So that picture, the the Native American looks more looks less Native American and more, I guess, you know, white.
Matthew:Yeah. And an African American fur trader
Dave:Is like a white is looking
Matthew:quite cute and almost, you know, anime style. And then there's a little close-up of us talking about the dice or, you know, some page where it's talking about the dice. That's obviously entirely AI generated because we have no images of dice in our book. Let me just And say these dice are weird, weird four, five, weird shit dice on this thing. And you know, he's got a picture at the front of the book.
Matthew:He could just use the front of the book. Why did he ask AI to generate this cover with a you know, he and of course, he's trained the AI on the cover of our book. It's similar enough to the front cover of our book, but why why not actually just be the front cover of our book?
Dave:Yeah. And it looks shit because actually, you've got the topography all wrong. So the Tales of the Old West actual title is is messed up and if people are looking at that and thinking that that is what we have done then I might not be entirely happy with that.
Matthew:Yeah. Because looks shit
Dave:actually, looking at Yeah.
Matthew:The weird thing is what they get right in that and what they get wrong. So so the the the tails of the bit that that lies between the o and the t is just weirdly set right.
Dave:Yeah. Absolutely.
Matthew:And yet, some of the dirt, the grit that I got my son with his superior Photoshop skills to turn my Pure Text logo into the the gritty, badly printed stuff, which isn't just Threadshop, by the way. He has some printing blocks. He he used he used the dirt from from some letterpress printing blocks to to make the dirt on this as well. Quite clever. Anyway, you know, so that is there.
Matthew:Some of that grit is there, but I I honestly don't know what to think. And it then touches upon something that Magpie Games said Yeah. Where
Dave:Okay. Let let's have a little conversation about this after the show.
Matthew:Okay. So Magpie Games so said we have we we we did a Facebook advert. We We uploaded photos of our product and then Facebook appears to have AI ed them despite us not wanting that. We'd got all the content sorted and Facebook has turned it into an AI generated advert and we're a bit pissed off with that and it was nothing to do with us. So, it's not just us suffering from this and it's not just independent retailers doing this.
Matthew:It looks like Meta are doing it as
Dave:well. Yeah.
Matthew:Fucking AI.
Dave:It's Mhmm. Yeah. I I I think it's it's it's the misrepresentation is
Matthew:the issue.
Dave:And it's it's, it risks reputational damage. Yeah. Because they are representing, or in this case, they're representing stuff that we have done in a way that we haven't done it. And if they if they did a big disclaimer on that saying, this is an AI generated image of it and doesn't represent the original or something then maybe that will be just about acceptable. But as you say why bother doing that when you could just put the fucking cover up on it anyway?
Dave:Because I mean I mind that that's fine you know just Prillier Boots if you want to show a bit of the book on your video that is that is fine, but a lot better actually than than that. Yeah it's an interesting one isn't it? And I suspect it's one that the industry is gonna have to handle more and more often.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave:Okay. Interesting. Anyway, let's move on to more fun stuff.
Matthew:Let's do something that is handmade by real humans. As I said before, we only use the audio out of this, so don't feel like you have to dress up. But if you want to say no, no, actually, can we stop there? We can of course edit or whatever's required. So in the hamam today, have got a pillar of the Coriolis community content.
Matthew:I was going to say the community content community, but let's go with it. We've got a pillar of the content creation community for Coriolis. How many seeds can we fit in there? Kevin, Kevin Hassall, welcome to the show.
Dave:Hi, welcome. Hey.
Kevin Hassall:Great to talk to both of you, Dave, Matthew. And I have to say it's a lovely hamam and relaxing, much better than the last hamam I was in. Last hamam was in Esarira down in Morocco. And I don't know if if people listening have ever had a massage in a hamam. It bloody hurt.
Kevin Hassall:Really was not a comfortable and relaxing experience. Don't know what spices they rubbed into my back,
Dave:but I was uncomfortable for
Kevin Hassall:the rest of the day. Whereas this is absolutely lovely and you've the temperature perfect. So thank you.
Matthew:And we do have oh I can't remember which icon we've got in the fountain there, pitter pattering away, it's the deckhand I remember now. That was the first
Dave:time anyone has complimented our hama'am, so thank you Kevin, that's a first.
Matthew:It is good, yeah. And I will say Kevin you look really good wrapped in that little towel as well. Thank you.
Dave:Okay, my computer's gonna fail again I think in a minute and I'm not gonna be here if this continues to be. As lovely and friendly as it is, it might be a bit much for her. Anyway, yes, let's carry on please.
Matthew:So Kevin, we have a traditional question for all our interviewees the first time they come on the show. We won't ask this if you come on again to talk about something else. And in fact, there may be something else to talk about in a few months that you've mentioned before the interview.
Dave:It's not the question about do you have a ham ham naked? Obviously.
Matthew:No, come on. Come on. That was a quick throwaway joke. Don't draw it out. You'll spoil all the the question we ask to all our new visitors is tell us about your life in gaming, Kevin.
Kevin Hassall:Well, I got into tabletop role playing games probably the same way a lot of people do. Right? I was 13 years old and a friend goes, oh, I've got these cool cool books and there's a dragon on the front and there's these funny shaped dice. And, you know, Dungeons and Dragons or as we called it back then, a d and d because I am that old.
Matthew:Yeah. Absolutely.
Kevin Hassall:And it was kinda like, okay. This is interesting. But then I discovered he could also run Star Wars one, and that was more interesting. And then I started buying games myself. And the first two games I bought were Coriolis and Macharist.
Kevin Hassall:Getting ahead of myself. Were Call of Cthulhu and Traveler. And you can kind of see how Call of Cthulhu and Traveler maybe leads me to x many decades later playing Mhmm. Oreoides. So, yeah, I played far too much as a as a teenager.
Kevin Hassall:You know, I probably spent way more time playing games than I did actually studying for say a levels. Played through university, left university, absolute arrogant ass. Right? I was just an arrogant idiot. And I went, all these tabletop role playing game supplements that I can see in my local game store.
Kevin Hassall:I can write better than that. So I wrote some stuff on specs, sent off to actually Chaosium. And they immediately went, oh, oh, this is good. Can we publish it? It's like, oh, yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Was kinda hoping you were gonna say that. How much are you paying me? And I spent the next two or three years writing full time for White Wolf, Chaosium, MGI, TSR, Palladium, you know, kind of all the obvious big people of the nineties. But, you know, things changed. The Gathering came along.
Kevin Hassall:Dungeons and Dragons ran into trouble. I discovered that, you know, it might be a idea to have a mortgage. Maybe writing role playing games was never gonna support that. And then just spent years playing whatever was around and whatever I could persuade people to play. So very patchy.
Kevin Hassall:Until a few years ago, I found myself with a couple of local regular gaming groups because I moved out of The UK for a while and came back. And it's much easier to get regular face to face groups, which I love. Somebody introduced me to Coriolis. Thank you very much.
Dave:And
Kevin Hassall:yeah. So I find myself playing I've played all sorts of stuff in the last few years, you know, Vesem, Coriolis, Alien, Arms Magica, Traveler, Mithras, etcetera, Mouse Guard, all sorts of stuff. But, of course, one of the ones that I keep coming back to is Coriolis, which I just absolutely love. I'm I'm inclined to think that I mean, obviously, we don't know what's gonna happen in the future or how fans will feel about it. But it feels like one of those settings that should be just a classic, timeless, enduring setting in the way that Glarantha has endured for Runequest.
Dave:Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:It's got that quality. It's got that novelness. It's got that potential depth. And so that brings me here.
Matthew:That's brilliant to hear. And I think that's everything we like about that setting as well. And I think in a way, although it appears younger than Glorantha, it has had a Swedish community behind it, building on it in much the same way that the Rune Quest community built on Glorantha and filled that with so much lore. In fact, there was a point during lockdown, we did an episode of the podcast as a panel show kind of for a virtual version UK Games Expo where we had, oh, who do we have from Top Pods at KLCM? Can't remember.
Matthew:Oh, honestly, he's got that.
Dave:Are you talking about the one with B Dave?
Matthew:Yeah, B Dave Waters was talking about a vampire, but we had oh, I can't remember. I can't remember who it was, but you know, one of the head honchos, the new head honchos are the people that rescued Chaosium. And it was great. We just talked about old settings that have stood the test of time. And the setting you're talking about here is the third horizon rather than the great dark?
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. It feels like there is a philosophical divide between the two of them. I don't just mean that they're a different kind of playing experience, but the Third Horizon is incredibly dense in terms of ideas. And if you flick open the rule book and maybe it falls on the Drakonites as a faction description and you read down that one page and it just throws these little ideas at you. You've got your, you know, the rogue warrior monks.
Kevin Hassall:You've got the the philosophy, you've got the rituals, you've got the secret that they've discovered, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, I've only read three paragraphs. You're throwing all the stuff at me that I can play with. Whereas I get the feeling that with the great dark, they kind of wanted it to be less off putting, less immediately accessible. So it's more about Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Easy
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. So it's almost like the third horizon asks questions and the great dark gives you answers. And I love the questions. I love the mystery.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:And I think we started this podcast in response to exactly the same experience of reading the core book for The Third Horizon. And as you say, every question and every paragraph gives you two things to think about. For example, the Haman we are now in came out of, yeah, but how do they wash when they get into a spaceport? So yeah. So this is great.
Matthew:We love people who love the Third Horizon. You have shown or shared some of that love in creating community content. Do you want to tell us a bit about some of your publications? We will be putting links in the show notes, obviously, to listeners who want to explore these in more detail. But yeah, tell us a bit.
Matthew:What's your favorite of WhatsApp on the Free League workshop at the moment for Coriolis?
Kevin Hassall:My favourite thing is not something that I wrote. Think the thing that anybody who picks up Correolis Third Horizon has to then get is Eric Alm's Veterans of the Horizon. And it's not it's not flashy. It's not over the top. It's not beautiful.
Kevin Hassall:It's not weird. But although the Coriolis call book is inspiring and brilliant, you find that there aren't that many talents available for characters. And if you play a long campaign, especially if you give the XP that are expected by the rules, you can kind of run out of things to spend your XP on. And Veterans Authorizing just makes it feel like a finished game. I've now got way more options for my character in terms of talents and characters start getting more different, but without changing the balance or feel of the game.
Kevin Hassall:So, I mean, I also did Quiet Victories and Combat Elite, which are both up on Cryther RPG. But there is the potential with them that they slightly change the balance. By which I mean, in the rules as written, it's really hard to play a character who is a sniper or a sort of ninja takedown specialist or a diplomat who isn't a privileged, beautiful, seductive diplomat. Right? I mean, how many groups are there out there playing choreoes now where the face character is privileged, seductive, and beautiful?
Kevin Hassall:Right. It's it's like the obvious way to go. So things like combat elite and quiet victories give you more options for character specialization. But as a result, you can end up characters who are quite powerful in narrow ways. Whereas I think the beauty of Eric's work is that it doesn't fundamentally change anything about the game.
Kevin Hassall:And, obviously, I want to encourage everyone to go and get Quiet Victories, particularly Quiet Victories. I think that really opens the game up for diplomat characters and scientists and sneaky characters. But it is worth being aware that it opens up that potential for much more powerful specialist characters. So if you're playing
Matthew:do you think?
Kevin Hassall:Well, I don't think anything is game breaking. But I think one of the feels as you get into Coriolis, particularly with the swede systems, you are kind of it's this amazing, magnificent, inspiring setting that you're kind of the little guy and everything go wrong for you and you can't really trust the dice. Yeah. Whereas, yeah, it's a wheel that turns and we all get crushed under them
Matthew:writing a mez head. Yeah,
Kevin Hassall:quite a victorious definitely gives you that ability to have characters who in quite narrow areas are exceptionally good. I don't think that breaks the game.
Dave:No. And I think in some ways so we've just thinking of one character, particularly when you're talking about snipers, had a had a player character who who who basically made himself a sniper, who was the best sniper in the horizon by the talent he'd taken and and and that. But wasn't any good at any well, wasn't much good at anything else. And that's that's absolutely fine to specialize in that situation, because then he can't overall or, overwhelm every scene because he's a great sniper, which is the risk of having a character that gets too good at everything. I think the other thing that mitigates, certainly in my experience of running a couple of long campaigns, mitigates the risk of getting to the point where you've got everything is that the game is so deadly and you just quite happily let player characters die when the dice say they just die.
Dave:So, you know, it's and and I and again, I love that's a good thing I love about Coriolis is it is so dangerous. None of the characters so we restarted a campaign that we played a few years ago. None of the characters that came out of that campaign either survived or were unmarked by their experience of the first campaign. They were wounded in some way, they were damaged in some way. Again, the deadliness, you know, I love that in choreo, is that, you know, it's a dangerous world out there.
Dave:And as Matthew says, the wheel turns and eventually you're going to get crushed by it. Yeah, great dynamic.
Matthew:So I'm interested, so you've made these games in the Feeling Workshop and Adventures as well?
Kevin Hassall:Yeah, so the first thing that I did which I put up on Drive Thru RPG was Diamond Sans and that was a reaction to another supplement that somebody's done. I can't remember where it was. But you're reading through the descriptions of Kua and the Kua system and there's a luxury resort on the moon of whichever planet it is. Right? And the luxury resort Caladahina, I think it's called.
Kevin Hassall:It's just mentioned as one one line. And you go, oh, what's that like? That sounds so cool. Right? And I think there is a supplement which gives like a four page overview of it.
Kevin Hassall:Whoever wrote it obviously has a different idea. We kind of wanted to do a slightly 1980s, maybe a bit Logan's Run feeling heartless corporations operating behind the law. It's like, well, that's a nice idea for a setting. But where the hell is my where's my luxury resort? So I wrote one.
Kevin Hassall:I just wrote it. So the Diamond Sands doesn't say it's Kalaheema because I didn't want it to contradict anything. But it absolutely works as that. And somebody very kindly when it came out said it was the the supplement that most closely hits the Arabian light in space. But I think it's a cheat because it's easy to get that sense of mystery and opulence when you're dealing with really high status NPCs.
Dave:Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Whereas, I mean, something we might talk about is I've got something sitting in the wings, which is the blood tree where I want to try and get that sense of Arabian, that's the space ness when dealing with the underclass. Right? The beams. The beggars and the beggars sort of thing. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:And and that's that's more of a challenge. And so I did the Dying Sands and
Dave:everyone seemed to really like it.
Kevin Hassall:And then I found myself doing the Gift of the Wind Dragon, which again is set in the Kur System. And it's a very open campaign where you're on the bow, and it starts off with group of archaeologists are in trouble. Can you help? Blah blah blah. And it ends up with small spoiler alert.
Kevin Hassall:You unearth an ancient artifact which has the potential to bring water to part of what's a very parched arid land. But what's interesting about it isn't so much, oh, can I defeat the guardians around the around the treasure? And then, you know, kill the orc and open the crate. It's, well, who do I want to have the power over this water? Oh, yeah.
Kevin Hassall:The corporations will tell you that, you know, it it can be used to drive the economic growth and etcetera etcetera. And the local clans who already are there will say, hang on. This is our land. You know, so you've got various people. It's that sort of moral dilemma that is outside of our experience, which is something Coriolis can do so well.
Kevin Hassall:Absolutely. Course. So I mean, of the one of the beautiful things is that there are no factions in the horizon who are nice, sort of compassionate liberal capitalists because most people in the twenty first century in the West kind of like the idea of liberal capitalism, but also like compassion. That becomes our sort of default. Maybe we back the underdogs, but we accept its capitalist system, blah, blah, blah.
Kevin Hassall:And you look at these factions, they all have radically different ideas. None of them are neat and easy for us. So you can't just go, well, who's the most modern sort of person? I'll give them the power.
Matthew:That's that. Zorocians are the most liberal. They appear to be reactionary bastards, but they are Starfleet.
Kevin Hassall:Well you could come on, well well I think they might pretend
Dave:to do that or at least my reading of them they might pretend to do that where they're
Matthew:not really You're reading wrong Dave, we've talked
Dave:No about no no no. Just because they have a sanitarium on Coriolis doesn't make them good guys.
Kevin Hassall:But that's the wonderful thing you know we could all pick a faction and argue from their point of view. Yeah. A couple of people as an ethic and hegemony are just punchable space nazis but I could put together a really compelling argument for them being the paladins. They are the good guys. They are the closest you have to the heroes.
Matthew:Are still punchable space nazis. They will always be.
Dave:But isn't that wonderful? Isn't that wonderful? They can compellingly argue to
Kevin Hassall:be paladins but they are still punchable space nurses. Awesome. I love this game.
Matthew:Are all the wavelength here. We'll have to pick up some new adventures and weave them into our own campaign. I think we've reviewed, I think we might review Diamond Stands in the past. I'm pretty sure we'll have to to dig that out and see whether we have, we will put links to these in all the show notes, but coming back to this point, you've been doing this in the community content section. Meanwhile, have you been doing stuff for other games or is Correolis the one that you churn out these things for in community content land?
Kevin Hassall:It was. I now find myself with a bit of time on my head because, you know, professionally I've been doing contract work with digital product development and, you know, the job market is a nightmare at the bit. So I'm kind of looking for another contract, but I hate being bored. So it's like, okay, I'm gonna have contracts with that. I'll write something.
Kevin Hassall:And so I find that I've got a load of stuff written for Coriolis. I've got I recently did a Kickstarter for sort of Mithras slash Osmagica slash B and D, which was called the House Of Crescent Sun. And that was sort of thirteenth century burgundy. So very different setting. But again, from what I've been saying, you can imagine that a lot of it is about how the people of the time think and what sort of challenges do we get based on the world rather than our assumptions.
Kevin Hassall:But a lot of what I've got queued up, either things that I've written over the years that I have in note form that I'm just tidying up or things that I'm writing now are choreographies. Right.
Matthew:Okay. And you're kick starting this. So this may be a point to talk about the Kickstarter that is just currently running. It's been going for how long? Three days?
Kevin Hassall:Yeah, bit shame and self promotion. As we're recording this, I put the serpent live yesterday and it was 3,000
Matthew:A day?
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. Sorry. Just a
Matthew:week by the time people hear this actually, we should say this.
Kevin Hassall:Probably. And it'll be interesting to see what the what the total is at at that point because we hit the target within about twenty three hours, twenty two hours. Nice. Which was nice. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:And now we'll just see how many how many stretch goals we can tick off. So I've got that. And I've also got a prelaunch page up for another one called the blood tree. And so between the blood tree and the serpent, serpent is the one we have at the minute, I've got these kind of two Coriolis Coriolis compatible campaigns waiting to go because we don't have the third party license Yeah. No.
Matthew:Because the light for the serpent is a system at war, a palace coup and an ancient horror. This all sounds very Coriolis. Yes. But I scroll down and I find it's a traveler adventure. Tell me more, Kevin.
Matthew:Tell me more.
Dave:Yeah. I mean, you know,
Kevin Hassall:as I said, first first tabletop game I ever bought was Traveler. I've got a long history with Traveler. I remember those two incredibly brittle dice, which three being rolled over many, months ended up chipped and barely rolled properly.
Dave:So
Kevin Hassall:yeah. It's Traveler is a really good basic science fiction sit see system. Sorry. And by basic, I don't mean unpolished. I just mean it gives you that baseline.
Kevin Hassall:So if you wanna do something in an unusual environment or unusual setting, you've got a solid set of rules. Now, Coriolis, I love that Coriolis rules are integrated with the world and they support the world. And you've got like the prayer dynamic and cycle. But if oh, yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Absolutely. But if you're going to do a sort of system agnostic sci fi system or campaign, then Traveler is a good system to do it for. It's got a lot of people play it. A lot of people understand the rules if they don't play it, and it's not it's not doing anything weird. So if I write something that's for traveler, it's easy enough to convert to something else.
Kevin Hassall:And the guys at Mongoose have been really supportive about it. Right? Matt at Mongoose is great. So, yeah, I'm doing that one as a traveler compatible scenario or campaign. But it's based on Persian Persian classic literature.
Kevin Hassall:It's got a very Arabian Nights in Space feel. Suspiciously, the positions and its map quite well
Matthew:to CAF. Very much don't they come out of the core book as well?
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. We we're gonna have to do something about that. The page layouts that are on the Kickstarter environment, they look too choreoous, And we're gonna have
Dave:to redo that. Rather choreo. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. It's oh, I had that conversation with Maria, because, of course, Maria, did the layout for all the stuff and drive through RPG, is working with me on this as well. Right. It's like, right. Okay.
Kevin Hassall:We need to set stuff up for the third party, license when it comes out. So do something that looks like Coriolis, but it's all our own assets. And it's not the same. We don't want to tread on anyone's toes, but we want people to recognize it. So she does that.
Kevin Hassall:It's great. And then it's like, Now we're doing the traveler one. So we want that to look distinct and different. And she really struggled with that. It's like, okay.
Kevin Hassall:Fine. We will come back to this. You know, the the core book comes out for the serpent needs to have a different layout because that looks like it's the the trade dress for Korea. So we need to change that. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:But actually, we will still use that because what I'm gonna do is when we've published the serpent, I'm going to do a set of conversion moats, which I'll make available under whatever licensing agreement is available
Matthew:at the time. License if that's available or or Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Exactly. I can I can put it up as pay pay what you want on drive through? But if we've got a third party license by then, I can do a print version of it as well and make that available. So a third party license will give us a lot more potential. But at the moment, the Serpent is travel compatible, system agnostic, and I will find a way of doing conversion rates for people.
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. Whereas the blood tree has to wait for the third party license because it's so, integrated with existing law about the and so forth, the Zovidian hegemony. So, yeah.
Dave:Are you taking existing law to include the Mercy of the Icons campaign? Are you post I'm not spoilers. Are you post campaign or pre campaign?
Kevin Hassall:Okay. That's the tactful way of putting it, isn't it? It's pre mercy. Can't stop Right.
Dave:Right. Okay.
Kevin Hassall:So, you know, I again, it goes back to glorantha. Right? The whole idea that with glorantha, you've got all this amazing law, but there was still the concept. It's your glorantha. You do what you do with it.
Kevin Hassall:Don't want to make anything dependent upon anything other than the corps rules. Yeah. If somebody says to me what do you consider canon for Coriolis? I will go the corps rules and Eric Arles veterans of the horizon. That's it.
Kevin Hassall:Right? Obviously, of the stuff that I'm doing is consistent with yourself and I try to be respectful of the other things that people have put out. And whether that's mercy of the icons or fate of Shamshir or any of these things, I don't wanna I don't wanna contradict anyone. But Mercy of the Icons is very much its own story. It is trying to do a particular thing within the horizon.
Kevin Hassall:And I, as a GM, wouldn't want to be constrained by that.
Dave:Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:And therefore, when I'm writing stuff, I don't want other GMs to be constrained by either.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm on the same page as you there, frankly. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. And that goes back to what we were saying about the factions. Right? The mercy of the icons has particular interpretations of factions. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Which aren't necessarily the most fulfilling for other types of campaigns.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. And, know, you know, like you say, the canon and the setting that everyone or that we all love is that core work setting. The setting is changed so significantly by Mercy of the Icons that, okay, it's still the same setting, but it's it's a a new chapter completely. And actually, you know, again, no spoilers.
Dave:I I was kind of a bit disappointed that the of the key thrust of the campaign was again, spoilers, but, you know, it was the whole Portal War second second Horizon thing. Yeah. Which I was a bit I just thought, yeah, that's a bit obvious, isn't it, really? Yes. Because there's something more imaginative with that campaign.
Dave:Although we haven't played the third set yet, we've only only two parts through. But
Matthew:I just finished my freelance contract.
Dave:I've got loads of time now, Matthew.
Matthew:Get that going. As soon as I've written the alien thing and our second book for the, you and I have written our second book for the thing. Now talking of writing and jobs and stuff, you talked a bit about devoting your life to writing after university all the
Kevin Hassall:big things.
Dave:Because I was an arrogant idiot when I was 22 years old. Absolutely. Yes. Who isn't though? Mean, frankly,
Matthew:And then you went and got shall we put quotes around a proper job and how do you say the situation now again you're freelancing or consulting but different jobs and you've got more time now to finish some of these things. How do you find community content income and by contrast the Kickstarter income? Obviously you're putting a lot more time, I guess, into the Kickstarter thing.
Kevin Hassall:And there's more potential there because with the community content, you can't do physical books. You're limited in how you can promote it. It pretty well just has to be, you put up a PDF and hope people buy it. And, yeah, you can tell people on the, you know, on the Discord or on Reddit or on Facebook about it. But there's a limited number of people that are gonna find it.
Kevin Hassall:So, you know, everybody wants to present themselves as super super successful, but I'm quite happy to be honest about how that's worked financially, and it's not super successful. So if I publish something on Drive Thru RPG, and most of the stuff I've done, I put up there a couple of years ago now. Each of those PDFs looks as if they will probably make me over their lifetime about a thousand dollars, maybe 1,500. Well, pay Maria, who's a professional editorial designer and for a big book, a thousand dollars goes very fast. So those are things that I put up Really, it's labors of love.
Kevin Hassall:And have I actually made any money on them at all? Yeah. I think they paid for me to go to UK Games Expo a couple of years ago. That was nice. Right?
Kevin Hassall:They paid for my for my Airbnb and my event ticket, but that's it. Right? It's been a month. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Which is a shame because I look at the potential of someone like the Third Horizon and go, if some independently wealthy lunatic decided that they wanted to give me a salary to just write stuff in Korea sorry. What amazing stuff could we come up with? Yeah. Yeah. And and that's where the idea of a third party license becomes more interesting.
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. Because if we can promote more broadly, if we can do physical goods, if maybe we could do digital add ons, you know, I mean, wouldn't it be awesome to be able to do a physical book that also had an online presence as a reference guide for the player characters and maybe some audio? It's like, okay, this could be cool. But you can't do any of that stuff with drive thru RPG.
Matthew:Of the community?
Kevin Hassall:Yeah. Firstly, the limits of the community license and also the limits of the money you're likely to get back. Right? Because it would be cool to do all this stuff, someone's got to pay for that.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:And that's why, you know, obviously, I'm looking forward to the the commune sorry, the third party license, but also with a little bit of trepidation. Because it's been a while and you see people being a bit negative about Coriolis. Something somebody, I think it was on Discord a couple of days ago, referred to Coriolis in the past tense. Coriolis was a great game. Right?
Kevin Hassall:Grange is dead. And I'm like, no. We can't let this thing die. It's too beautiful. But, I mean, there is a there is a danger that people will start losing interest.
Dave:And, you
Kevin Hassall:know, whereas if I do something
Dave:go. No. Sorry, Kiwi. Carry on.
Kevin Hassall:No. No. No. I'm just saying, you know, so what can we do in terms of promotion? Can we reach a bigger audience?
Kevin Hassall:Is the community still there? Are Freely gonna be supportive? You know I mean the difference between obviously if I put something out that's compatible with D and D, nobody responsible for D and D gives a rat's what's it about what I do. Whereas if I do something for us magic or traveller, the guys at Moose are like really enthusiastic and supportive, and that's really helpful. So there's all these things around the third party license.
Kevin Hassall:You know, what are its terms gonna be? What's the community gonna be like at that point? And also what's the support we're gonna get for Free League? Where, you know, I want to be optimistic and I want to go, look, I've got a load of stuff lined up and this could be awesome. But the same part of me goes, dude, you've got to fight food.
Kevin Hassall:Right? What are going
Dave:be able to afford
Matthew:to do?
Dave:Yeah. It's because it's a really interesting question about actually how big was the Coriolis community at its height or you know or in those early days. We were comparing the Kickstarter for Coriolis with our Kickstarter for Tales of the Old West in terms of amount of money raised and the number of backers that it got. And they were similar, and our Kickstarter is a really small Kickstarter. So again, you know, kind of how big is that community?
Dave:How far did it go when it was busy and when everyone was talking about it in the present tense, like you say, rather than the past tense? And I guess then what proportion of that community do you think you get to see through drive thru and through the workshop? Yeah.
Kevin Hassall:Very good. Through drive thru.
Dave:Comes yeah. Comes back to your point, your sort of trepidation point. Cos we've both been talking Matthew and I have been talking about Coriolis as something that we could produce stuff for once get the third party license out there. We'd love to because, again, you know, we've got a similar passion about the game that you you clearly have, as we can see. But, yeah, I mean, commercially, how how how viable is it?
Dave:Can we judge what the community might be? Can we judge how bigger proposition it might be when we, you know, when we all start producing stuff through the third party license?
Kevin Hassall:And, you know, are we going to be in a situation where all the really enthusiastic people are actually the people who are producing stuff. Right? Because you guys have done some really great stuff. And if you wanna do more stuff for Corellis, it will be awesome. Right?
Kevin Hassall:I've done tons of stuff with it. The guys at Nordic Schools are saying that they're working on something that they'll have ready to go live when we get the third party license. Yeah. You know, I suspect someone like Eric Arne will have something. There's probably about half a dozen of us out there going, I'm really keen to do idea.
Dave:I can't wait.
Kevin Hassall:But then are we actually the same half dozen people who
Dave:are hanging around on the free discord, going how great Cornelius is.
Kevin Hassall:It's like, we're just going to, I'm going to sell six copies to you. You're going to sell six copies. You know?
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've
Matthew:got some more copies already on the Kickstarter. The question is, how many of that 104 are actually traveler fans?
Kevin Hassall:Yes. And a lot of them are going to be. Yeah. And, you know, I'll find out when I do the system notes because I'll know how many people download the system notes. Right?
Kevin Hassall:If I put up pre conversion notes on DriveThruRPG and I tell everybody who's backed it, you can go and get the free system notes here. I can measure that.
Dave:Yes.
Kevin Hassall:Yes. If I put my commercial head on rather than my fan head, I fully expect majority will be traveler fans.
Dave:Well,
Matthew:we shall have to do our best. We shall, all of us have to lobby freely to pull that finger out and get that third party license out for us. I have a sneaking suspicion they're delaying it a bit because they want the third party license to really take hold for the great dark first. But that's pure speculation on my side. We need to lobby them to do it.
Matthew:And then you need to come back on the show and promote the blood tree when you do that Kickstarter. And we'll make that one of those million pound kickstarters that everybody goes crazy for.
Dave:As long as that means we get a million pound Kickstarter, yeah, there's a quick ferry cry there, okay?
Matthew:Oh, definitely. Totally.
Dave:It would just be great to see more Coriolis stuff out there and I say, I can't wait to see get the, get the third lie third party third party license out so we can start doing this kind
Kevin Hassall:of stuff.
Dave:Because again, there might be a later community out there just waiting. Just they're just in stasis waiting for you know, to come out the portal into the third party license and then wake themselves up and start playing it again.
Kevin Hassall:Absolutely. You know, the people who who mutter around on Reddit and say, yeah. That's dead. Well, actually, if we can demonstrate it's not dead.
Dave:Yeah, absolutely.
Matthew:So Kevin, it's been brilliant talking to you, but my tea awaits and I'm sure it goes
Dave:to us as well
Matthew:and yours of course. So thank you. You have an open invitation to come back on the show when the next Kickstarters go. We shall watch this one with interest and promote the hell out of it for the next few weeks. Thank you.
Matthew:No,
Kevin Hassall:that's awesome. Thank you very much folks.
Dave:Right. Well, that was that was a real pleasure. It's lovely to to chat to Kevin and you can really see his his passion for for the Corvionis coming through, which is great because, you know, there's there's there are definitely some of us left who
Matthew:And not just Corvallis, we're talking about the Third Horizon, aren't we?
Dave:Oh, exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave:And, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I just I just I'm very much looking forward to the day that the third party license comes out. I mean we're not really in a position to do much with it yet but we've got lots of stuff we could do. So yeah.
Matthew:Yes you know what I was just looking at my now gold bestseller A Coriolis Calendar that me and John Salquist did. Yeah. And I just think, oh, you know, that might look nice in print if we get the opportunity to Yeah.
Dave:Might. Well, I mean, there's quite We a lot we have could we could easily, we were talking about this before. We could easily do a compendium of stuff.
Matthew:A koyo list compendium, couldn't we?
Dave:With with all sorts of things in it. Yeah. Including, you know, including the calendar. Yeah. And we could probably do that quite easily because we've got an awful lot of content.
Dave:And it's something I would very much like to do, you know. I think there's definitely stuff that we could do which would be would be really good. But yeah, so hopefully, I mean, let's let's see what Andreas has got to say. Maybe next week if we can pin him down to to an interview. And then let's see when we're gonna get this this license, and let's go for it to the third horizon.
Matthew:Yeah. After after the other things we've promised our customers, like
Dave:Yes. Yeah. Of course.
Matthew:Solo rules for Toto, Gold Country, then Corvio Lis. Then we'll go for it with Corvio Lis.
Dave:Or then Rome, year zero. Then yeah. I need to stop working again. So I can I can actually do really throw myself
Matthew:We we can't both of us stop working? You know, I I have been keeping you in the manner to which you're accustomed while I've been at work, you've been jollying yourself with your with your little hobby of of writing games. Now it's my turn to have the little hobby of you. Okay. Out to work.
Dave:Well, yeah, and that has definitely happened. I'm definitely out of work. Yes. Cool. Cool.
Dave:Right.
Matthew:Do sound like a married couple, don't we?
Dave:We do sound like an old married couple, which is not good. It's not it's not a good look, really, is it? Anyway, at
Matthew:least most people think are that's smarter the appeal of this podcast.
Dave:You think?
Matthew:Yeah, I think that's what people admire about us. I'm George
Dave:and you're Mildred, is that it?
Matthew:Yes. Because Mildred is the one that always George is the incompetent one.
Dave:No. No. Mildred is the bossy bitch, and George just quietly gets on with it.
Matthew:Anyway, on the really different recollections of that
Kevin Hassall:sitcom, aren't they?
Dave:Let's let's edit out any reference to George and Mildred from this show, please, before we put it out.
Kevin Hassall:I'm not sure.
Dave:I fear that I fear that might be a thing that was gonna run and run.
Matthew:Okay. Right.
Dave:On that note on that note
Matthew:It's goodbye from George.
Dave:And it's goodbye from Mildred.
Kevin Hassall:May the icons bless your