Steve Jackson's Blog, page 24

March 7, 2025: Enthusiastic Crowdfunding Notes!

With exclamation points and everything!

Lede graf: My friend Jim Zub is crowdfunding a collection of his Skullkickers stories. If you like silly violence ( Munchkin fans, I'm looking at you!), the adventures of Shorty and Baldy are right up your alley. (In fact, we actually DID a Munchkin Skullkickers mini-supplement a few years back. That's how I met Jim.) This is already funded. You have nothing to lose but your mind.

Main graf: The Lorescape campaign has launched on Kickstarter. Is it strong? Hoo, boy, it is strong and not slowing down. It funded inside 15 minutes. After just a couple of days, it's closing in on $300,000. For those who missed my earlier plug, Lorescape is a terrain tile system that gives hexes the respect they deserve! It's a very good design, precision molded so they lock together solidly but separate easily, printed in a large (and already growing) variety of designs. My assignment for this week – as though I had just one! – is to rough out plans for Ogre/GEV and Melee/Wizard sets. It could happen. (Full disclosure: I am not just a frothing enthusiast, but an investor in this startup.)

Call-to-action graf: Anyhow, if a really good terrain tile set sounds like a thing you could use, get over there and support. Lorescape is going to be the new gold standard. I kid you not.

Closing graf: And let me renew the pat on the back for Steven, Nikki, and the whole crowdfunding team here, and my thanks to the authors, the British Steve Jackson and Sir Ian Livingstone, for Fighting Fantasy. That Kickstarter is over $220K now and is still rolling away just fine. Fighting Fantasy was the first solo fantasy adventure series to hit the mass market, and still IMHO the best, and now it's back in the US, and whether you are a long-time enthusiast or completely new to the concept, these are fun. We have five books in the original release, and we're going to keep on releasing more for years and years! So please support us right here.

Sig line: -- Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

March 6, 2025: Celebrate Game Masters With Our TTRPG Sale

Game Masters are some of the hardest working people in the hobby, so it's only right that they should be lauded for their efforts. International GM Day takes place every March 4, but we know it takes more than a day to draw up maps, plan encounters, and work on your delivery for wacky NPCs and villainous monologues. That's why we're having a GM Celebration Week over at Warehouse 23! If you're looking for great deals on GURPS , The Fantasy Trip , In Nomine , and other titles, you won't want to miss it! Explore our sales page to find:Up to 15% off select GURPS titlesUp to 25% off select Fantasy Trip quests, zines, and accessoriesUp to 15% off Dungeon Fantasy and In Nomine titlesUp to 15% off select dice sets and dice gamesOur GM celebration is also the ideal time to pre-order the softcover of GURPS Psi-Tech . It's the first time this GURPS supplement has been in print! The sale ends on March 9, so don't delay. Head to Warehouse 23 and create the ultimate campaign today!

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

March 5, 2025: Say "Yes, And!" With How To Be A GURPS GM: Improvising

Maybe the players are doing something you didn't expect. Or perhaps you're strapped for time but still want to have fun with your gaming group. Or you may possibly want to see about playing a whole campaign by ear. You can do all these things, and more, with How to Be a GURPS GM: Improvising .

I mean, technically, you don't even need a supplement to "make stuff up," really. But how can you pass up insight from How to Be a GURPS GM contributor (and GURPS guru) Sean Punch?

This approachable guide draws on Sean's decades of experience to detail what works and what doesn't when it comes to improvising at the gaming table: keeping it "fair," managing player expectations, and ensuring you're consistent and – most of all – fun!

Although designed with GURPS games in mind, How to Be a GURPS GM: Improvising contains invaluable insight for any RPG. So, if you're looking to keep the action going, don't stress or overprepare: Just download a PDF copy today, only at Warehouse 23!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

March 4, 2025: I'm Moving To Atlanta!

After 50 years, give or take, in the Austin area, I'm packing a whole lot of boxes and moving to the Peach State.

There are several reasons. The current Buda climate doesn't really agree with my gardening hobby. The Texas political climate makes it hard to read the news, over and above the daily disasters emanating from DC. But, most important, I have a whole lot of good friends in the Atlanta-Chattanooga area, and I'll be able to put together a game whenever I want to! DragonCon and LibertyCon will be right around the corner, as well as some other shows where I'm not a regular . . . yet.

This will not affect SJ Games at all. Our office and warehouse will stay in Austin. I'm already working from home, and now "home" will be in a different place. It will be an adventure!

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

March 3, 2025: Rodger B. MacGowan

With all the foofaraw of the past couple of weeks, an important and sad bit of news got by me. On February 21, only weeks after his studio was destroyed by wildfire, Rodger B. MacGowan passed away.

Rather than pretend I was on top of things and write a late obit, I asked our mutual friend Dana Lombardy for the best links honoring Rodger's life, and of course he came through. If you admired Rodger's work, you can pay your respects by reviewing just how much he did for the hobby:

• Official RBM profile on the c3i website

• Rodger B. MacGowan "In Memoriam" post on BoardGameGeek

• Remembering RBM on CardboardCommander.com

• A YouTube tribute

• GoFundMe for the MacGowan family

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

March 2, 2025: "You're Listening To FNRD – Forever, And Ever, And Ev-"

What if tuning into a specific radio station caused it to stay stuck on that radio station, unable to change the channel? No, it's not a Black Mirror episode; this really happened (as I recently found out and had to giddily post here) to drivers of certain Mazda cars back in 2022, who tuned into one channel: public radio station KUOW, in Seattle. And, yes, just that radio station – not anyone else tuning into FM 94.9 elsewhere.

Basically, anyone who tuned into that station in their affected Mazdas found themselves stuck on that channel. It also messed up some in-car computer systems in other ways, breaking back-up cameras, Bluetooth, GPS, and more.

The reasons are kind of interesting, if you're a geek. (Basically, KUOW was sending out cover-art images without file extensions, which freaked out the Mazda's software.) There's an article on the topic here, and a somewhat more in-depth video here.

And if reading this news tidbit has caused your computer systems to be permanently stuck on our fine website of gaming delights, we humbly apologize fnord.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

March 1, 2025: It's Back From The Past: GURPS Classic: Time Travel Adventures

If you're going to go back in time, maybe you want to do something more interesting than traveling to the first Daily Illuminator entry. Maybe you're searching for adventure! We've got you covered.

Behold! After being unavailable for decades, GURPS Classic: Time Travel Adventures is back – as a PDF or in print!

This collection of three adventures for the different campaign frameworks found in GURPS Classic: Time Travel will take you . . . pretty much everywhere, from getting involved aboard the sinking of the Titanic (spoilers, I guess?); to untangling a cross-time mystery involving the destruction of the Great Pyramid at Giza; to visiting an alternate Earth where magic and science go hand in hand.

When it comes to classic adventure, there's no time like the present! Err, the past. Err, it's complicated. Anyway, get GURPS Classic: Time Travel Adventures , only from Warehouse 23!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 28, 2025: Why Are There Game Designers?

I think it's a valuable question to ask! I'm re-reading The Well-Played Game by Bernard DeKoven this week and reflecting on his answer to that question. To understand why we need game designers, let's first understand the process by which games emerge. Let's say you and I are hanging out together, and we want to play a game and experience something particular through that play. If it's something simple, like "I want to toss the ball back and forth with you," that's easy – we simply do it. As we do so, we may implement new rules to refine and clarify that experience (don't let the ball touch the ground, don't "double-tap" the ball, don't toss the ball overhand, etc.). What do we do if we want something really specific, though? What if we want to play, "the feeling you get when you're on a boat looking out at the shore, and the world seems soft and flat and sublime, and the water is warmer than you expected and you wonder how long you could be here until it got cold"? What do we do now? It would take us years of mediation to somehow transform our ball-toss game into this new experience, and it would involve a tremendous amount of trial and error to produce the mechanisms that provide us with our desires, and it would probably involve a lot of time spent engaging in "un-fun" play as we experiment with what works.  But what if we could find someone who already did all that work for us? What if there was someone we trusted to have done all that trial-and-error work, tested and modeled all the negotiation we would otherwise have to do? We may still need to do a bit of negotiation to figure out exactly how to make it work for us, but it would be way easier than having to come up with all of it from scratch.  That's the function of the game designer, from my perspective. The person you trust to give you the model of the experience you seek, that you can build atop and uncover new experiences from. To be a game designer is to seek the trust of those you play with and provide for, and it's a sacred and compassionate relationship. That's why playtesting is so important – because if you're trusting me to give you something, I want to make sure I'm damn certain that what I give you is what I mean to give you. Do you agree?

– Jay Dragon

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 27, 2025: Update On Kickstarters

It makes me very happy to see how well the Fighting Fantasy Kickstarter is rolling along – just shy of $185,000 in support as I write this! – and we have an important new announcement coming "real soon now." Please consider backing this project if you haven't . . . among other things, these books are a great gift for the non-gamer you know who should be a gamer!

As for the Lorescape terrain tiles . . . over 5,500 people have signed up to follow, and you can join them here. Just click the link so you're notified when this launches in a few days.

(As for me, I'm still at GAMA and things are going from great to better.)

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 26, 2025: GAMA Gathering Graded G For Great

The hall doesn't actually open until Wednesday. I'm writing this late Tuesday night, at least by home time, and I am already very impressed. And already out of business cards!

This show is clearly bigger than last year's, which was itself the biggest and best ever.

I took some meetings today (surprise, surprise), and played a game by a new designer. She may or may not want to publish it herself, and she will certainly find other options here this weekend, so I won't namedrop – but hey, if you are reading this, I had fun!

I also had fun during the off hours. We are moving ahead with the next Fantasy Trip solo, a David Pulver entry called The Path of Mastery . It's the kind of thing that is a pleasure to edit, so when I was a bit "peopled out" from the show, I came back up to the room and read the whole thing, a paragraph at a time. (David, if you are reading this, good job!)

I am masking as faithfully as possible. It's really important that I not go home sick, because I really need cataract surgery . . . ASAP . . . and obviously they can't carve up the eyes of a COVID sufferer. (Yeah, I'm dramatizing. Cataract surgery is super routine, super safe, and almost always gives very, very good results.) At any rate, once the thing is done, I shall report on the results as soon as I am allowed to look at a computer screen again.

But I digress. This is a show report. And it really is shaping up to be the second year in a row of Best GAMA Show Ever. If the numbers would be of interest, I can report them when I get them. But the non-numerical evaluation is G for Great.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!