Hello, freelancers!

I’ve been wanting to write something about game mechanics, since I’ve gotten a few questions. But I’m also a little wary – Luna City Blues is a different beast than the mainline Mutant Chronicles games, so I’d like to start by doing some expectation management. Pave the road; show you where I’m coming from.

The original Chronicles, 1st edition, was my first TTRPG back in ’97. It’s a pretty simple system, but it was built to facilitate a kind of action-focused, pulpy gameplay. When we ran the sort of detective-story and investigation-focused scenarios I favored, the system was either not used or it felt a little out of place. So when I got the chance to make Luna City Blues – which is a detective-noir-investigation focused spinoff game with its own take on the setting – I decided to build a system that I thought better supported that kind of scenario.

I’m not going to go into details here – I’m saving that for a future post. But I can give you some insight into my design principles and underlying ideas:

• The game favors player skill over character skill, especially when gathering clues and putting them together. You, the player, need to describe what you do to find the clue. Once found, your stats determine how much information you get from it. No “find clue” rolls. Mystery-solving and being clever is the core gameplay.
• Combat is extremely barebones. Not even detailed enough for weapons to have individual stats. And it’s *not balanced*. In OSR circles, they talk about “combat as war” vs “combat as sport”. Luna City Blues favors the latter. If you’re shooting, something has gone terribly wrong. In this game, combat is a fail state.
• Character generation is a lifepath system like the one in 1e, but tweaked for more balance between characters.

This is what I mean when I talk of Luna City Blues as a spinoff rather than a “fourth edition”. It’s bad form to talk about what your game isn’t, but at the same time it feels important that we’re on the same page. I don’t want people to be surprised when LCB isn’t as crunchy or combat-focused as 3e or even 1e. It’s not meant as a replacement.

But I hope you’ll like it anyway =)

Hope you’re having a great summer, freelancers!

Where I am it’s been… hot. Not compared to some places in the world, but enough to keep me inside where the AC can make my life bearable.

While I wait for the printing and distribution deal to be finalized, I’m mostly working on corporation admin (of the IRL kind) and doing some extra work on the game. Making an index, adding cross-references, making sure there are no “see p XX” and so on.

And while I was doing that, I discovered that I was a victim of one of this summer’s big controveries… Apparently the folks at Adobe decided to start adding AI generated alt-texts to all images you place into a document, without asking. You can turn the “feature” off in preferences, but from what I’ve heard I wasn’t the only one dismayed when I found out.

I guess the good part is I discovered this before publication time. It’ll be sweaty work going into all these illustrations and removing the crappy alt-texts. Another good thing is that this serves as a reminder that alt-texts exist and are important – accessibility is dear to my heart.

Anyway, just a quick update to show things are moving forward. =)

Things are moving forward! We are now very close to having a deal in place for printing and distribution, which is one of the last few hurdles before planning the crowdfunder.

This feels very nice – I have seen many crowdfunding campaigns fail or become disappointments because they weren’t really ready. In our case, the game will be pretty much ready to be printed at the start of the campaign. Which means the worst case scenario still means you’ll get something. At the very least a PDF and a partial refund. I’ve been publishing ttrpgs for fifteen years now but this will be my first licensed project and my first international physical release. Am I a little nervous? Yeah. But I’ll try my absolute best to make sure everything works out.

My day job as a gamedev/computer science teacher is also winding down for the summer break; I’ll enter the last few remaining grades for my students this weekend and then there’ll be a week or two of noodling around at work, cleaning and doing admin. In other words, I will have more time to devote to planning the crowdfunder and making sure everything is in place.

There are still a bunch of decisions to be made – hardcover or softcover? Price per book? Stretch goals, reward levels? My instinct is to keep everything simple; underpromise and overdeliver. There won’t be a lot of extra physical bits and bobs for example; those have turned more than one kickstarter into a nightmare for the people involved. We’ll see.

Hello, Freelancers!

Here’s where we are: All comments from the latest batch of proofreaders have been dealt with. The book’s layout is more or less finished, including all but a handful of illustrations – I still need three more chapter illustrations and some other smaller ones. But I’m confident we’ll get there. Before Sunday, I’ll have a decent semi-finished PDF to show off to potential partners.

There’s also a more or less finished convention scenario, to be run at this year’s LinCon (In Linköping, Sweden). The scenario’s readable and playable but visually it’s still a slightly janky bullet point list written entirely in Swedish, so there’ll be a little while before I can offer it to non-Swedes I’m afraid. I’m looking forward to having time to translate and polish it a little bit, to make a proper playtest / demo scenario.

Now, what else… The “finished” PDF means I’ll hopefully be able to secure a partner for handling printing and so on, which is something I really want to have a handle on before launching a Kickstarter. Because that’s what’s next: the crowdfunding campaign! Right now I’m hoping to be able to run it early summer, but I can’t promise anything. I think we’ve all been burned by enough Kickstarter creators making promises they can’t keep

Anyways, I think that’s all for now.

Alright freelancers – happy holidays, merry christmas, happy festivus or whatever you prefer depending on your megacorp, clan or sect.

I’ve mostly been going through comments and improving the text. It’s slowly coming together! Now that I’ve got two weeks off for the holidays, I hope to be able to speed things up a bit. The work continues – on the book, on a playtest package, on a convention scenario, on trying to source illustrations…

Speaking of illustrations I’ve gotten hold of at least some of the pieces I was looking for, so that’s very exciting. Sometimes working on a book like this can feel endless, so it’s nice whenever you can get some concrete milestones done and feel like things are moving along.

Also; I’ve gotten a few messages on the subject of illustrations and illustrators. I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to everyone! I’ll try to rectify that in the coming weeks.

Anyway; I hope you all are well and will have a nice winter holiday season.

See you in the new year!

No, that’s not right. 3e notwithstanding, there’s not a lot of mutants in the Chronicles.

So… Hello Freelancers!

Sorry for the delayed update; things out in my Real Life™ have been a bit crazy for a bit. My day job is being a high school CS teacher, and I love it but – sometimes there’s just a lot to do, and my time for hobby projects (which is what this is, after all) shrinks for a bit.

But here is some news:

• The second round of volunteer proofreading and commenting has finished, and I am currently using what free time I have to go through all the great comments. I am extremely grateful to the people who’ve participated, and the book will be a lot better for their efforts.
• I have gotten permission to use art from the old 1e books. The goal for the final product is to use as much new stuff as possible, but there are a few really nice pieces in 1e that I’d really like to use. And also, this means I can use old art as “placeholders” – to possibly be replaced if the kickstarter goes well. I have created a list of illustrations and the next step will be to source some high-quality scans of the originals.

Speaking of illustrations – I’m thinking of adding one or two more artists to the project; if you’re an artist and you’re interested, drop me a DM and I’ll take a look at your portfolio. It’d be especially nice to get some diversity, so female or non-cis artists are very welcome.

First of all, I’d like to introduce Per Gradin – the excellent artist who’s been doing a lot of work especially on character portraits for the introductory adventure in the book, as well as some other stuff here and there – this, for example, is a prime example of Luna City law enforcement =)

There’s also a PDF! It’s 167 pages long! It’s technically printable! You could print this and it’s be recognizable as a product, as a game. The text will still go through some more iterations of proofreading, editing and corrections but I feel like I can confidently say it’s not a complete disaster. Aside from the above-mentioned Gradin stuff, there’s not much art yet, but there’ll be at least a few more pieces before the kickstarter.

It’s always a nice feeling when a project reaches this stage. There’s a lot more work to be done, but the end is in sight.

The plan right now is to get this PDF signed off on and approved, hopefully with some more art in it. Then use it to finalize deals for printing etc.

And then to start serious planning for the kickstarter, while revising the text and the illustrations.

This is the pre-Kickstarter version. A sort of “minimum viable product”. If we get funded at just the basic level, this is what you’re getting – it’ll be a PDF containing the entire game and as many pieces of art as I can reasonably afford to buy on my teacher’s salary. Better KS result = more illustrations! Among other things.

In other words, this will be a very classic Kickstarter – not a large corporation minimizing risk*, but an indie creator trying to finance some more artwork and a print run.

(* I’m not against large rpg corporations minimizing risk, to be clear. It enables them to do weird stuff they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.)

Sorry for being a bit late; I try to strive for making one of these posts at least once a month. I’ve been a little busy with life outside RPGs – like I said in the last update, in my day job I’m a highschool teacher and the term just ended. Always a stressful, busy time.

But that doesn’t mean work has grinded to a halt by any means – here’s where we are at:

• Layout is on a little bit of a pause as I’m travelling right now. I expect to be home again next week though, and restart work on the preliminary layout.
• I’ve just finished going through all the really nice comments and suggestions I got from the first round of outside readers. All low-hanging fruit has been dealt with; now I’m gearing up to do another pass and handle the more difficult stuff. The comments that require a bit more work.
• When I’m home again I’ll also pick up where I left off in terms of illustrators and illustrations. I don’t have a huge AAA studio budget pre-Kickstarter but I want to make sure to have at least enough pieces to do some kind of version of the game either way. I want to make sure people see this game isn’t just a pipe dream. There’s been far too many projects like that on KS already.
• I’ve GM:ed one group through one of the two scenarios I’ve created so far. It went well, though the characters never did manage to actually solve the mystery. Not completely, at least. But we had fun, and the game seems to do what I want it to. Not that the mechanics come into play very often, but the scenario design works pretty much the way it should. I’m going to GM the same scenario again for a different group this weekend. We’ll see how it goes.

Anyways, that’s all right now I think. Please let me know if you have any questions and if you think something’s missing in these updates. I’m hoping to be able to share some more worldbuilding and details on what the rules look like soon, too

I’ve received the completed version of Bergting’s cover and while it’s going to have to be a little bit under wraps for now I gotta say it’s looking really, really good. As expected, given the artist, but you know. Still.

He’s also expressed an interest in doing more work for this project, and who am I to say no? So yes, life is good.

In other news, the first round of proofreading’s pretty much done and I’ve begun sifting through all the comments and suggestions. Fixing the low-hanging fruit first – imperfect grammar and so on. Next, I’ll work on the more juicy stuff, the comments that might require bigger changes and additions. I’m very grateful to the people involved.

We’ll see how many proofreading passes the text needs – I’d rather do one more pass than release this game half-finished, as it were.

Either way, while working on the text I’m also continuing to work on a preliminary “prototype layout”; a complete-but-not-final PDF to show to various stakeholders and publishers in order to move things forward.

I’m looking forward to summer break – as a high school teacher here in Sweden, the past month or two has been very busy with grading and other tedious parts of that job. The 7-8 weeks until school opens again in the fall will be a good opportunity to work on Luna City Blues…

Still no set date for the kickstarter, I’m afraid – A lot of stuff needs to be in place before I’m comfortable taking peoples money. I’ve seen way too many projects fail post-KS because they didn’t have all their ducks in a row.

Yeah, that’s all for now I think. Please feel free to write any questions you have in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them =)