GAMING THE SYSTEM
On my previous list I examined board games' untapped potential as rpg properties. Today I consider a media which has been tapped, with mixed success, Video Games. We've seen a D&D Diablo Sourcebook, an Everquest rpg, Dragon Age, and the recent Witcher game. Fallout, as you may know, started as a GURPS adaptation before the companies parted ways. Most TTRPG adaptations of video games have been fan hacks (like the Mass Effect game that briefly had an ENnie nomination). Plenty of rpgs which echo games without naming them (MajiMonsters, Fight! The Fighting Game RPG).

Buck Rogers XXVc  (1990)
I grew up with Buck Rogers as a major, terrible influence. Even as a kid I knew it wasn't good TV, but I still watched the Space Nosferatu episode. The show combined cheap FX and inconsistent world building. The movie is slightly better, with a particularly harrowing scene of Rogers going into the wasteland ruins of Old Chicago. But the post-apocalyptic plot vanished quickly. I'd written off that sequence as a weird choice, but those elements frame the original stories. But you wouldn't know that from the Buck Rogers XXVc rpg which emphasizes space battles, high tech equipment, and a clean design that only slightly harkens back to the original. It mentions a devastated and recovering earth, but that's second fiddle to SPACE!

When this version of Buck R flopped, TSR went back to the well with High Adventure Cliffhangers: The Buck Rogers Adventure Game (1993). That leaned into the original's pulpy look and feel. Where the first rpg borrowed from AD&D, the second took a lighter approach. It returned to the original Buck Rogers premise. Instead of an interplanetary Martian enemy, we have the Han Empire. America has been destroyed and various gangs battle over it. The Han have emerged from Asia to seize control-- full-on Yellow Peril. Again the line flopped; TSR only published the core set and a single supplement. War Against the Han. I like the idea of a pulp post-apocalypse game- with unrealistic depictions of radiation and a dieselpunk aesthetic. That might be worth exploring if you flipped the colonial and racist elements. 

The elephant in the room when talking about Buck Rogers is Lorraine Williams. Williams took over TSR in 1986. You can see discussion of that in "The Ambush at Sheridan Springs" and Designers & Dragons' overview of the company. The important thing to recognize is that Williams personally held the rights to Buck Rogers. That explains the hype for the setting across TSR in the early 1990's, including both board and role-playing games. She pushed the company to publish these products and TSR in turn paid her family royalties.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (1990)
A game ahead of its time...not necessarily in mechanics (it had GDW's trademark crunch), but for its whimsy and subject matter. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs licensed the comic Xenozoic Tales which ran across several publishers from '87 to '96. C&D saw a heavy push across multiple media including trading cards, video games, and a cartoon show. In the future, humanity escapes a ravaged Earth by building underground. After six centuries they return to the surface to find it overrun with once-extinct life forms. Now they must survive in this fallen world with only limited and rudimentary technology. It’s post-apocalypse mixed with pulp and dinosaurs. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs remains one of the brighter and more upbeat apocalypse games published. Survival's still an issue, but there's an equally potent sense of fun. 

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs did badly for several reasons. First, the license built on a thin comic book basis with only a dozen or so issues. Second, GDW never seriously supported the line. Third, while the setting might be light and pulpy, the system isn't. Instead it builds on the tactical mechanics of Twilight 2000-- not the best fit. It's a single 144 page book, but it packs a ton in including a host of rules for multiple combat problems and situations. While the T2K system doesn't kill it, it doesn't help. I suspect even a fast and furious system (like say Savage Worlds) would have had an equally uphill battle grabbing market share with this concept.

Aliens Adventure Game (1991)
Based on the second movie in the franchise from 1986, this rpg focused on tactical combat. That's not surprising as it came from the publisher of Phoenix Command and offered a slightly simplified version of that complex beast. It's difficult to describe Phoenix Command without it seeming like a parody today-- stark layout, masses of charts, lots of pictures of guns. It started as a bolt-on small arms combat system from gun-loving gamers. In the 1980s and '90s the rpg hobby had several weapon fetish and military games, many offering add-ons for existing rpgs (The Armory, Palladium's weapon supplements, Guns Guns Guns, etc.). The evolving Phoenix Command system also powered the company's sci-fi insurrection game, Living Steel. 

Aliens focuses on the simulationist combat play supporting the company's other major endeavor. Leading Edge had an extensive line of miniatures for the game, including a power loader, drop ship, facehuggers, and alien queen. The miniatures got significantly more attention than the rpgs, which only had a set of core rules released. Reviews describe it as a complicated hash, but mention its usefulness as a sourcebook for the setting. 

Amber Diceless Role-Playing (1991)
I run alot of games on The Gauntlet. I'm usually not afraid to post a game and then learn the rules in the week before the first session. I jumped in head first with Orun, Legacy, Forbidden Lands, City of Mist. But I own several games I won't do that with. I've skimmed them, but their weirdness or density makes me unsure I could run them cold. Before I could even run them, I'd need to play them with another GM: Nobilis, Ryutaama, Phoenix Dawn, L5R 5e, Chuubo, and Amber. And I say this as someone who has run multiple LARP-esque Throne Wars using Amber. Those scenarios are easy- a contained, chaotic mess. But to actually run an Amber campaign...I don't know if I could. 

But Amber's an amazing game. It's one of the earliest diceless rpgs, has unique auction mechanics, and has one of the best marriages of mechanics and theme. Designer Erick Wujcik started with Palladium, creating the striking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rpg. As detailed in Designers & Dragons, Wujcik freelanced for West End Games where he discovered they held the license but only wanted to make board games. In the late 1980s, he started work on the game-- eliminating dice when he realized he wasn't actually rolling them when he ran. As a side note-- during this period my friends and I drove up to Detroit and Windsor for gaming cons. Wujcik ran early versions of Amber there, and several of my friends played it, but I never did. While I played in other games with Wujcik, to this day I regret not getting into his Amber sessions. 

Gamers in my area loved Roger Zelazny's Amber series in the '80s and '90s. Its mix of modern, sci-fi, and fantasy drew people in. For wish-fulfillment it also features larger than life super-powered magical folks involved in political chicanery. Amber has some of Tolkien's monarchical bent, but questions it in places. The second Amber series, released during the later half of the 1980's never quite lived up to the promise of the first and left more questions than answers. Wujcik worked hard to parse that material for his Shadow Knight supplement. 
​
Amber Diceless remains an important and influential game-- opening up new territory in systems, writing, and presentation. In 2013, Rite Publishing reworked the core system as Lords of Gossamer & Shadow, stripping out the license. It's decent. It cleans up the mechanics and draws on the experience of vibrant Amber community. However it doesn't have quite the spark of the original game. You can hear a GM Jam episode we did for Play on Target here.  

Wizards (1992)
Ralph Bakshi's Wizards remains an important film for those raised in the 1970's. It contains a mad, psychedelic, and weird mix of fantasy with post-apocalyptic elements no one else has captured. It is part comedy, part sexy-times fairies, part legendary quest, part undead armored Nazis from the future. I dug the movie but I never did more than flip this rpg. Online commenters regard it as a decent, if workmanlike adaptation of the material. Digital Orc has an overview on his blog. 

Whit supported this line with several publications within a year or so. Players got the obligatory character sheets and GM screen supplements, but also Montagar and Scortch. Both are detailed 80-page regional sourcebooks. I'm surprised to see Whit published that much for the line. Like other lost games, I recall the core book sitting on the shelf for years before vanishing, never to be restocked. I heard and saw almost nothing about it in the years which followed. I'd assumed it was a flash in the pan like so many others. 

Wizards the film influenced a lot of early role-playing. You can see elements in early Gamma World. While the movie came out in '77, it had a cult following through VHS tapes and cable presentation. The designers clearly felt that was enough to sustain an rpg fifteen years later. I have a theory- and I may be wrong. Wizards' craziness inspired people. In the early 1980's I saw at least three homebrew campaigns lifting elements from Wizards, Heavy Metal, and other sources (in one case Gor, ugh). By the early 1990s, gamers had already begun to create multi-genre, weird apocalypse games with these elements and ideas. It isn't a reach from there to Rifts or Synnibarr. However by 1992 games had already assimilated these concepts, rendering this less interesting.

PREVIOUS LISTS
History of Licensed RPGs (Part I 1977-1983)
​History of Licensed RPGs (Part II 1984-1985)
History of Licensed RPGs (Part III 1986-1989)
History of Universal RPGs
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs
History of Steampunk & Victoriana RPGs
History of Cyberpunk RPGs
History of Superhero RPGs
History of Horror RPGs
History of Wild West RPGs
Samurai RPGs
For the full backlog of Age of Ravens posts on Blogger see here. ​​

by Jason Cordova

We haven’t announced our next Patreon goal yet for The Gauntlet, but I wanted to go over it a bit here and get some feedback from folks. It’s called Degoya County and it’s comprised of several components: 1) A horror actual play podcast with a focus on high production values; 2) discussion and debrief episodes in the same podcast feed; and 3) a quarterly zine featuring original fiction set in the same world, as well as supplementary material for the games played on the podcast. I want to briefly describe those three components of the project, as well as say a few things about how and why we are doing this. 

A high quality horror actual play podcast

The centerpiece of the Degoya County project will be an actual play podcast that will feature musical cues, sound effects, and high-quality cast audio. The podcast will be an anthology-style horror joint that will take place in a small, fictional county in New Mexico. Over the course of the series, we’ll use different games to explore major events in the county’s history, anchored by a present-day storyline told with Monsterhearts 2. Some themes I hope to explore with it include Native and colonial history; modern-day Mexican-American culture and urban legends; Satanic cult shit going down in the desert; and looming, throbbing Lovecraftian horror in the background. Each episode will be introduced by Big Man, my well-loved character from Mercy Falls, in a short Log Lady/Cryptkeeper-style vignette. 

Game discussion and series debrief

There will be support episodes of the podcast for each new game series we play: a discussion episode where we talk about the system to be played, and a debrief episode after the game is finished. People love our Mercy Falls series on Pocket-Sized Play, but a regular critique is that there isn’t any surrounding discussion about the AP, either substantive discussion of game mechanics or feedback/debrief sessions from the participants. The reason for that is because Mercy Falls was not originally recorded with the intention of being shared in a podcast format. But with Degoya County, we want to do something different. Some of our strengths in The Gauntlet include deep analysis of game mechanics and a strong, supportive play culture. These auxiliary episodes of Degoya County will give us the space to incorporate those strengths. 

The quarterly zine

The quarterly zine will launch a few months after the podcast and will contain original horror fiction set in Degoya County.  The idea here is to explore and expand upon characters and ideas from the podcast. We will also publish supplementary material for the games featured on the show. At The Gauntlet, we like to feature the work of new and marginalized creators, and the quarterly zine will allow us to do that, while further developing the rural, folk-horror universe of Degoya County. 

Why this project? And why now?

Degoya County represents something of a culmination of everything we’re good at in The Gauntlet. If you look around the community, you can see hints of its various components: we run horror anthology game series like my Mercy Falls and Cat Ramen’s Kingsport; we are very good at putting out high quality discussion podcasts; we have experience publishing stellar zine content with Codex; and we play A LOT of games, meaning we know how to use them to create strong, compelling stories. In some ways, everything I, personally, have been doing in The Gauntlet has been leading to Degoya County. It’s an idea that has been simmering in my head for years, and we’re getting close to being able to realize it. 

Degoya County will be a pretty expensive project if we’re going to do this the right way, and, as such, will be set for a fairly high Patreon goal (probably $5k, but I’m still looking at the numbers). We’ll also have to clear a few things from our plate to make room for it. But if we can do it, it will be something very, very special in ttrpgs—and something only The Gauntlet could pull off. My dream is that Degoya County can be the sort of thing that penetrates into the mainstream. That’s a real moonshot kind of thing, but if we can manage it, it will be great for The Gauntlet, but also great for indie ttrpgs. 

Anyway, this is the early idea. There are still a lot of logistical decisions to make as we approach a possible production schedule, but I’m curious to hear what people think. 

Session Title
Masks: A New Generation: Gauntlet Quarterly S5

Date
1/30/2019

System
Masks: A New Generation

GM
Lowell Francis

Players
Steven desJardins, Jesse Larimer, Chris Newton, Steven Watkins

Session Recap
The team has a moment to take stock of their situation. At a cost they had defeated their classmates Bolt and Grey and those classmates’ villainous adult selves (Overrun and Nightfall). Sarah Sparks let loose her social media bomb on Bolt, destroying his rep and keeping him on the run. At the school itself, where the fight took place, the student body is torn: some applaud taking Bolt down while others feel nervous around kid heroes willing to turn over their peers to the authorities.

When footage of the battle leaks out, speculation runs rampant through the classrooms as to the heroes’ identities. Gabriel, the only member of the team with no secrets, takes the brunt of this. They’re alternately admired and feared. Sarah tells the team to stay out of costume until things cool down. Overclock skips school and hides out from his parents. Alone he tries to come to terms with the danger he’s created—much of what has happened seems to swirl around his time powers.

Mimic throws herself into her work. She pulls together the extra money she’s made over the last several weeks and tracks down her friend Jeanne. Jeanne is shaken by the superheroics at the school and Ally (Mimic’s civilian identity)’s rejection of her friendship. Mimic offers the money to Jeanne who rejects the charity. In the heat of the moment, Ally reveals herself as Mimic, the super who destroyed Ally’s house and put her family in their financial predicament. Her friend screams in her face and runs away. As Mimic salvages the cash from the snow on the ground, she receives a call from Molly, Sara Sparks' civilian identity.

The two meet at a local coffee shop and Molly finally reveals her secret identity to Ally. Sparks had long ago figured out who Mimic was but hadn’t said anything. The two talk about their troubles and the challenges they face. Sara reveals her worry about Bolt—that he hated her enough to come back from the future to fight her.

At the same time Gabriel goes to Overclock’s house to find him. Overclock is quick enough to keep Gabriel from revealing that he’s been skipping school. In Overclock’s room, Gabriel asks him to use his time powers to sever the connection between Gabriel and his trans-temporal Caretaker, David. He fears that David could take control; while Gabriel disobeyed orders to destroy Overclock, that could change. The two pass through a teleportal into the Overclock’s Time Observation Post, a base and source of powers. Using the devices there, he manages to temporarily cut Gabriel’s connection. However, using the base’s power gives off a signal, revealing its location to others.

As they’re working on this, Sara Sparks arrives at Overclock’s house. She goes up to his room only to be greeted by a construct the time hero left in his place. When Gabriel and Overclock return there’s a brief moment of confusion, until Sara Sparks reveals her identity as Molly. Overclock is embarrassed that Sparks figured out his secret ID but he hadn’t even guessed hers.

Back at home, Mimic’s mom reveals she is flying out to Oklahoma City for a job interview. Mimic panics and gets into a shouting match with her mother, smashing a prized lamp. When Mimic storms out her mother attempts to physically stop her. Mimic briefly loses control, turning to the same brass as the doorknob. She screams at her mother and the sonic force of it destroys their living room, the same way Mimic destroyed her friend Jeanne’s house months before. Mimic hurriedly apologizes to her stunned mom as her brother returns home. He also sees her in hero form as she runs away.

With nowhere else to go, Mimic arrives at Overclock’s house. More identities are revealed and the group tries to wrestle with some of their personal demons. However, that’s interrupted when Overlock hears someone speaking with his parents downstairs. When he enhances his hearing he realizes that it’s Dr. Alset and two companions. Alset, a scientist at AEON, has been in the shadows throughout the series. Suddenly there’s shouts and screams; Overclock smashes his way downstairs as he shifts into hero ID.

There he confronts Alset and his two associates. One looks like Gabriel, but with a purple crystalline form. The other has Overclock’s parents pinned with a metal table. This one looks like an adult version of Mimic, mask and all. Adult Mimic has greater control of her powers—shifting shape and changing substance freely. Upstairs, Gabriel grabs Overclock’s sister Morgan and rushes her to safety.

Mimic comes downstairs to face her adult doppelganger. She pulls Overclock’s parents free from the villain’s clutches and interposes herself. Adult Mimic grabs young Mimic and begins crushing her to death. As she does this she reveals herself. She is not the adult version of Mimic, but the adult version of Jeanne, contaminated by Mimic’s powers. She blames Mimic for her state and says that killing her will keep her transformation from occurring. Mimic makes a desperate gambit and pulls out her phone, dialing the younger Jeanne which makes adult Jeanne recoil.

Meanwhile Overclock and Sara engage with Alset and “Raphael,” another artificial being sent down the time stream to deal with Gabriel. Alset reveals his own temporal powers and reduces the impact of the heroes’ assault. Sara is flung out of the house and she smashes into a car across the street. Undaunted, she picks herself up and charges back in. Gabriel, entering into the fray, realizes that Alset uses chronal powers as a defense. To overcome this, Gabriel shifts and connects himself to the forces of the time-stream. It works, but at a cost. The combination of Overclock, Alset, Gabriel, and Raphael’s energies sets off a time quake, destroying Overclock’s house.

Desperate to contain the situation Overclock calls on his powers to shift the fight to his sanctuary, the temporal observation post. The fight continues, and while the real world is in less danger, the sanctuary begins to suffer. Gabriel strikes at his opposite number, shattering them with a potent attack. As Sara and Overlock hold their own, Mimic confronts the older version of her friend. In the midst of the fight, adult Jeanne-Mimic pushes herself, absorbing and transforming into the time force itself. The change rips her from the time stream and sends her tumbling into the void. Mimic desperately reaches to save her friend but the force pulls her in as well.

Mimic and adult Jeanne are gone.

Staggered by what has happened, the others strike at Alset. Sara still tries to pull her blows but Gabriel calls her out on it. Alset strikes with dark visions of the future. Then he manages to tag Sara Sparks—and somewhere across the city Sara’s uncle collapses. Alset begins laughing—he hadn’t expected his time attacks could have such an effect. Overlock pushes himself and drains Alset’s time energy, desyncing him from the timeline and making him wink out in a paradox.

But all is not settled, Overclock can tell that the temporal observation post has become dangerously unstable. The system advises him that the only way to save Mimic is to collapse the waveform and annihilate the post. But that will destroy the source of Overclock’s powers as well. Despite that he orders Sara and Gabriel to flee the base. They believe he will follow.

He does not.

Sara, Gabriel, and Mimic find themselves in Overclock’s bedroom. The house has been restored and his parents have no memory of the battle. However Will, Overclock’s civilian identity, is nowhere to be found. Over the next few weeks, the remaining team pulls their lives together. We see Mimic speaking to her mom. We see Gabriel, now perhaps “grown up,” briefly mourn his artificial construct foster father, another victim of the temporal battle. We see Sara trying, and failing, to explain to Will’s parents what happened to him. Then we see Sara sitting at her Uncle Ted’s bedside. He’s in a deep coma, leaving Sarah the only active member of her legacy.

Then we see the far-future—a place of terror and despair ruled over by the Empyreonix. Finally it has the Time Observation Post it tried to wrest from Overclock. But the facility has been badly damaged. We see the figure of the Empyreonix working on those repairs. In the background there’s a capsule and within we see another version of Overclock, marked with the sign of the Empyreonix infection.

Highlight
Several hard moves in the fight landed well, but I'm especially pleased with the revelation of Future Mimic as Jeanne.

Moment of Insight
This is the session where we finally got the characters to reveal their secret identities to one another. That's a key element for the Janus, but we had other PCs hiding that (and their background) from one another. That created some asymmetries and confusion in play. I think I'd watch more carefully for that-- especially since it is the Janus playbook's key feature.

Actual Play

SANDY CONSPIRATORS
Last Sunday I ran my second session of Cryptomancer for February. In session one they picked characters and I’d thrown them into a Chad Walker’s challenge dungeon from Code & Dagger 2. Both Code & Dagger supplements come free with the purchase of Cryptomancer and have a ton of interesting new material. The dungeon scenario introduces the setting’s hacking and infosec concepts in an easy to grok way. 

For this week, I went to one of my favorite play structures—what I’m calling a Conspiracy Sandbox. It’s a kind of session I adore running. I walked away from the game jazzed and excited. The players seemed to dig it—doing legwork, building a picture of their target, and starting to think of approaches. I have a video of the session which you can see here. 

In a Conspiracy Sandbox the characters work in the shadows against multiple factions to achieve an objective. They have the tools, resources, and powers to carry that out. The question is how to apply these resources to achieve their goals without blowing things up. The GM sets a goal, presents the actors, and then lets the players get to it. You may have already run or played in this kind of game before. If not, let me encourage you to give it a try.  ​​

BACK TO THE CRYPTO
Sunday’s Cryptomancer game took an even lighter approach. Their patron asked the PCs to intervene in the city of Crucible’s underworld. She’d received reliable information that the Risk Eaters (the big bad of the setting) worked to draw out the conflict between the two largest criminal gangs in the city, The Coppermen and The Silverhands. Both had absorbed most of the smaller criminal guilds and groups in the city, leaving them the last two standing. The Risk Eaters wanted a long, protracted multi-year conflict which would drain resources and slowly destabilize Crucible. 

So the PCs have a clear goal: spark an open war between these two nasty groups. The Patron gave them the names of the two leaders, the three most important lieutenants for each, and a sketchy sense of their activities. Then I let them loose. For the once-arounds, I took a lighter approach than usual. Players could ask and obtain significant general information without a roll. I assumed they had the skills and connections necessary. However, once they dug down and focused on specific characters and operations, I had them roll to determine their level of success. As I mentioned above, I had a dynamite time and I’m excited to see how they pull on the threads.

BLADES/NOT BLADES
My Cryptomancer prep took less than an hour, which included finding NPC pictures. In my notes I briefly described the two groups, wrote down the NPC names, and then created twisty details for each. I had some hooks prepped, but even more emerged from play. When players rolled critical successes, I made the revelations more dangerous for their targets. I also took a page from Blades in the Dark and created Heat clocks for The Coppermen, Silverhands, and Risk Eaters. Failures and mixed successes added to that. Filling those clocks would alert their targets. In retrospect I should have also tied this to Cryptomancer’s Risk mechanic. 

There’s a lot of Blades in the Dark in a Conspiracy Sandbox. Both have groups carrying out shadowy missions. But Blades’ engagement roll reduces or eliminates planning. BitD has a legwork phase, but that’s minimized. This sandbox leans into the planning, something Cryptomancer’s unusual setting mechanics needs. This kind of game thrives on players who love mysteries. A mystery is just a problem to be solved and there’s a real pleasure to be given the problem solving resources and let loose to tear into a challenge.

Related Posts:

• ​​Age of Ravens: Factions in Action
• Age of Ravens: Multigenre Campaigning
• Age of Ravens: Mysterious Planning
  

​
For the full backlog of Age of Ravens posts on Blogger see here. ​​

Mandy Morbid recently posted about her experiences, and the experiences of others, with Zak S. What she said is profoundly disturbing and entirely unacceptable. We encourage you to read Mandy’s post, which can be found here. (Content Warning for various types of abuse).

Before continuing this statement, we want to make it very clear that we believe Mandy, we believe Jennifer, and we believe Hannah.

The Gauntlet’s official position on Zak S going forward

The Gauntlet will no longer provide coverage to Zak S or his publications. Due to the fact he has a history of harassing Jason and other members of The Gauntlet, we have had a longstanding ban on having him on our podcasts, and he has never been welcome in our community spaces. We will be extending that ban to any kind of coverage of, or participation in, his ttrpg work. Here are the specifics of what that means:

• We will not review his work on our podcasts.
• We will not permit his games to be played on the official Gauntlet Hangouts calendar.
• We will not permit his games to be played during Gauntlet Con or any special events by  the Gauntlet community.
• We will actively discourage discussion of his work in our private spaces, such as The Gauntlet Slack, and ban it entirely in our public spaces.  
• We will not work with people who work with him. For example, Codex will not publish an artist or author who is actively working with him. Folks who have worked with him in the past must promise to not work with him again in order to have a professional relationship with The Gauntlet. 
• Members of The Gauntlet organizational team will no longer attend conventions in our capacity as representatives of The Gauntlet so long as Zak S is welcome to attend those conventions. We will also strongly discourage our membership from attending such conventions.

The Gauntlet’s past coverage of Zak S

The Gauntlet has been around for awhile and has put out a lot of content. We are going through our archives and making decisions about how much of our previous Zak-related coverage we want to still be available to the public. There are a few podcast episodes where his work is prominently featured. We will be deleting those episodes or cutting out the Zak-related content. We will make a judgment call in each case about what we will delete or cut. It will take us a couple weeks to untangle everything (our back catalog is deep) but know it is happening. If you want to help us and point out very old podcasts or APs that prominently feature Zak’s work, we would appreciate it. Please post a link in the comments.

A message to our friends in the ttrpg industry

If you have supported or defended Zak S in the past, you need to step up. The Ken Hites and White Wolfs and LotFPs of the world need to take this opportunity to disavow Zak S.

DriveThruRPG? They need to de-list his products from their site.

We intend to use some of the goodwill and influence we have amassed in this industry over the years to encourage our friends to de-platform Zak. The Gauntlet is not a supporter of ostracism or blacklisting, largely because it usually disproportionately falls on creators of color, but does believe Zak qualifies for such treatment because of repeated demonstrations of abuse.

A message to ttrpg fans

We understand that many people, some of our organizers and members alike, feel that Zak has created some compelling game content. Unfortunately, he’s a toxic, abusive person and we should not be giving him aid and comfort with our dollars. There are plenty of OSR publishers out there who are making amazing content that is equal to or surpasses Zak’s work, and who are not abusers. We have listed a few below and you can find even more in our Fear of a Black Dragon podcast feed.

The Melsonian Arts Council 
The Hydra Cooperative
Tuesday Knight Games 

A few things to close with

We approve all comments on our blog posts. Negative and unhelpful comments will not be approved. If you post negative or unhelpful comments in any of our public spaces or social media threads, you will be banned or blocked immediately, no questions asked.

If you are a victim and you need a safe community or space, or need support and you feel the Gauntlet could help, reach out to us. We will help you find resources, offer any support we can, and provide a safe space to vent or decompress.

We have compiled a set of resources related to trauma, abuse, online harassment, and related matters, including supporting those who have been victims. You can find those resources here.


Folks: this needs to be the end of the line for Zak S in the ttrpg industry. We cannot tolerate him in our spaces any longer. We call upon our fellow publishers, community organizers, media producers, and convention hosts to cut ties with him immediately.

​

OPENING SCENES
I love the way Hearts of Wulin players have generated cool and interesting characters. Sometimes it's easy to bring their stories together. But sometimes I need a little inspiration for that initial incident. I've assembled a list of 18 "starters" for Hearts of Wulin Stories. Most of these are shamelessly stolen from wuxia movies. All of these assume you’ll seed and connect the PC’s entanglement characters, friends, and family throughout. 

MY RPG TOOLKIT LISTS
Someone Goes Missing: Random Journey Event List
Mutant: Year Zero: 36 Mood Elements for The Zone
Mutant: Year Zero: 36 Plots for Roles
150 Colorful NPCs for 7th Sea
150 Details for 7th Sea Scenes
The Fall of Summer: 36 Freehold Threats for Changeling the Lost
Stories from Iruvia: Plot Hooks for Blades in the Dark
333 Names for Blades in the Dark
500 Cyberpunkish Names
Shadowrun EZ-NPC Generator
Magic, Inc Departmental Listing: Office Spatial Distortion
13th Age: 101 Backgrounds​​

by Jason Cordova

Today I added several tiers on The Gauntlet Patreon called “Quality of Life Keeper.” I wanted to use this post to discuss the purpose of those pledge tiers and how they came about. 

The work we value

Last week, I tracked the number hours I spent working on tasks for The Gauntlet. In total, it was 43 hours (not including the roughly 15 hours I spent planning and running games on Gauntlet Hangouts, which I consider to be fun activities). The only financial compensation I will receive for those hours is having my cell phone bill paid for by The Gauntlet. That makes my rate of financial compensation for last week’s Gauntlet work roughly 69 cents per hour. 

That’s a pretty stark number, and I’m not bringing it up simply to shock you, but to also offer a basic commentary on how certain types of work in indie ttrpgs (and, I suspect, in the wider industry) is valued. Outside of a very tiny group of people, anyone who is not involved in the direct publication of a ttrpg book (editors, artists, writers, and so forth) but who is otherwise doing work in the industry, is getting paid little to nothing for their effort. Convention workers, forum moderators, community organizers, and so forth, do work in the industry that is considered of little value. 

My situation in The Gauntlet is definitely on the more extreme end of the spectrum, but I suspect if people start to get really honest about compensation levels in this industry, it would be pretty eye-opening. 

But what about The Gauntlet’s bumpin’ Patreon? 

It’s true The Gauntlet enjoys a moderate amount of success on Patreon. Compared to a lot of other outfits in the indie space, we’re practically rolling in it. But here’s the thing: The Gauntlet’s financial success does not trickle down (up?) to the people who organize it. As an organization, The Gauntlet is much larger than others in our lane. The scope of what we do is much wider. Nearly every single dollar of our revenue streams, including Codex sales on DTRPG, go toward paying our expenses—expenses which do not include pay for people such as myself. Our costs include: website hosting fees, Dropbox, Libsyn hosting, Basecamp subscription, bookkeeping software subscription, editing for 6 different podcasts, artwork for Codex, layout for Codex, my cell phone bill, and numerous expenses that pop up each month but that are not recurring (such as graphic design for logos, Gauntlet Hangouts site maintenance, Gauntlet Con expenses, etc.) We also have a few people in the community who get a modest payment each month for the critical work they do in the community. We have a new, interesting source of revenue from the Codex Vol. 1 Kickstarter, but right now, much of that money is set aside until fulfillment is complete—and whatever we have left over will probably be used for much-needed community improvements, such as an improved scheduling system for Gauntlet Hangouts. 

The short of it: we make enough money to pay our bills, but not enough to pay me or other folks who currently volunteer their time. And don’t get me wrong: I’m super-happy we can pay our bills, and very grateful for our supporters who make that happen. We’re past the days where I have to pay for things directly out of pocket, and that feels good. 

A sad and punishing lifestyle

Working 43 hours a week for no compensation is fucking brutal, because I still have to work my main job in order to survive. This has lead to a number of sad consequences for my life: I don’t have time to exercise, I don’t have time to hang out with friends outside of The Gauntlet, I have not been on a single date since I broke up with my partner (that was over a year ago), I have not taken a vacation in 3 years, and I have not been to the movies in 2 years. My only “me time” outside of The Gauntlet is occasionally watching TV and going to work at Starbucks instead of my home office. I can’t even attend much of the gaming convention circuit because, even though it is beneficial to The Gauntlet for me to be at those conventions, I have to pay the expenses from those trips entirely out of pocket  (in addition to the fact conventions set me back DAYS in terms of the work I am responsible for). 

Yesterday was a rough day for me. I literally broke down crying two different times on account of the intense burnout and feeling stretched so thin. A change had to be made. 

The way forward

​First of all, a major goal for me this year is cutting back on the sheer volume of work I have to do for The Gauntlet. This is much easier said than done, because we have a lot of commitments and I possess a lot of institutional knowledge. It will be a job just figuring out the way forward, but I have started to make some progress. Yesterday, I retired our Game Designer Patreon program. That wasn’t easy for me to do, because the work I did with those game designers was very important to them (and to me) but I had to cut it because it was taking up a lot of time while bringing in relatively little money for the community. Our Patreon will take a hit from it, but that will be outweighed quite a bit by the personal time I will be able to claw back.

In the future, in addition to cutting projects that aren’t an overall benefit to the community, I need to figure out which tasks I can delegate to other people. That will be a slow process, but it’s one I’m willing to start looking at. 

But even that won’t be enough. I will always have to spend a lot of time on this community, and at some point, I need to start getting paid for that. I would also like to start paying more of the folks who are currently volunteering their time for the community, even if just in a small way. 

The Quality of Life Keeper

All of the above has lead to the creation of 4 new Patreon tiers. The pledge levels for those tiers are $15, $25, $50, and $100. Those pledge tiers come with all the same benefits as the $8 tier, but the extra money from each pledge goes directly toward paying the people who help organize The Gauntlet. My hope is that people who have the money to spare and who want to see The Gauntlet keep going will consider pledging at one of those levels. This will be acutely helpful for me since my day job is essentially consulting work, and if I can start bringing in a little bit of pay from The Gauntlet, I can scale that work back, leading to less burnout. 

The Gauntlet is doing the most amazing work in indie ttrpgs. Our desire to create fantastic, high quality content and a fun, inclusive play space is undiminished. But the folks who organize The Gauntlet deserve to get paid for their work. Plain and simple. This is the start of that important conversation for us. 

If you'd like to help out, our Patreon can be found right here: The Gauntlet Patreon