Steve Jackson's Blog, page 402

November 24, 2014: WeLoveFine's Munchkin T-Shirt Design Contest Gets Extended

Some of you may have already heard about this, but we wanted to share the news on the DI, just to make sure everyone's aware.



Do you remember the Munchkin t-shirt contest that WeLoveFine was running? They extended the deadline! You now have until December 9 to submit your t-shirt design!



If you're on the fence about it, you should know that you could win $1000 for your design, and your shirt might wind up in retail stores all over the country! How cool is that?



What are you waiting for? Go submit your shirt design!



– Brian Engard



Warehouse 23 News: The Secret Masters Know What You Want.



The Illuminati Greeting Card contains [REDACTED] for someone special to you. [REDACTED] wants you to accept [REDACTED].



Available exclusively from Warehouse 23 .

November 25, 2014: Car Wars Classic: It Is Here (Or Was)!

It has been a while, so I had forgotten how cool it was to have a product I was involved with land on my desk. Not a prototype, not a printer's proof, not an advance copy, but the real, actual game just like the ones the fans get.



We're talking, of course, about Car Wars Classic . Shiny box! Compact, info-packed rulebook! Thick, beautiful counters! Dice! Turning key! Two-piece, double-sided map! Table and record sheets! I'm so happy. And we're already out of them. Our hobby distributor has sold their entire stock to retailers, so the ones your local store will receive (or have already received) are it. And the few copies we held back for Warehouse 23 are already gone, too! A reprint will take a while, but we're on it.



On another level, this tremendous reaction to Car Wars Classic gives us a turbocharge of energy and enthusiasm for the new edition of Car Wars , which I continue to work on even as we bask in the glow of brand-new, glorious Car Wars Classic ! Good times, baby. Good times.



– Scott Haring



Warehouse 23 News: More Mayhem!



Can't get enough blood and gore? Check out  Let's Kill , add Let's Kill: A Pretty Corpse for even more distinctive stick figure art and gruesome humor. 



Available from Warehouse 23 .

November 23, 2014: To Read More About R. A. Montgomery, Turn To Page 23. Fnord.

Raymond A. Montgomery, creator of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children's books, passed away on November 9, 2014.



I grew up being frustrated, terrified, and thoroughly entertained by those books, and I'm pleased that kids today are able to enjoy them just as I did. I hope they learn to create flow charts in the process, too.



Montgomery was especially noteworthy for not crediting all the CYOA books to a "house author"; the person who actually wrote the book got credit for it. (Thanks to Rob Kelk for pointing that out; I might have missed it.)



If you want to learn more about Montgomery and his Choose Your Own Adventure books, click here.
If you just want mindless entertainment with no moral choices, click here.



– Andrew Hackard



Warehouse 23 News: Character-Building Advice From The Master



Making a great GURPS template is easier than you think, thanks to GURPS Template Toolkit 1: Characters , written by gaming guru Sean Punch. This invaluable advice is perfect for GMs or players, and it's only a download away, and only from Warehouse 23!

November 22, 2014: The Daily Illuminator: 20 Years Of Beta

So: The blog you're reading has been running for 20 years. Really. In fact, the Daily Illuminator is far older than the word "blog," or even the descriptive term "weblog" that the net quickly truncated to one syllable. As far as we can tell, the Illuminator is the oldest regularly updated blog on the net. You can read back for Derek Pearcy's account of how it came to be, and, modulo trivial details, that's what I recall, too. Not to put too fine a point on it: Derek invented the blog! He might not have been the first one ever to have the idea, but his was an independent invention, and what he wanted to do was pretty much the feature set that blogs have today. (Except for the comment part, but we'll get to that.)



And he had a dozen other things on his plate, and I thought it was a really great idea and wanted to start doing it right now, because having spent so long doing newspapers, I was all in favor of constant communication. In other words, I like to talk, even if it's type-talking. And I wanted to tell people what was going on! Every day!



So I just sat down and created an HTML page and linked to it and wrote new stuff every day at the top of the file. Derek's version would have been way better. All mine had going for it was "here it is today." I suppose there's an alternate history in which I was patient, and Derek wrote his code, and it was so amazing that we all recognized that this was a Big Thing, and we published the first commercial blog engine long before anyone else got moving. So LiveJournal didn't happen, and eventually Facebook didn't happen either, and we all got filthy rich and moved to California and started more companies and changed the world. Hey, it could have worked out that way. We were running an ISP, after all. We had the tools to go further, but the vision was too limited, and we weren't even really looking in the right direction.



I didn't know how awesome, how world-changing, blogs would become. It seemed to me to be a necessary and valuable sort of technique for writing a column online – and hey, anybody could do this! Lots of people must be doing this already! The important thing is just to keep posting the news, right? But that means, hmm. It means we need to write a queue feature so we can write news one day and post it according to a schedule. It means we need some editing tools because writing raw HTML is slow. So, slowly, the code got stronger and smarter. In 2003 we got it out of flat files and put it into a database, and that was an improvement. But the point was always just "Deliver some news, every day. It's okay if it's not about us. Just tell them something cool." We didn't package it up and offer it to the rest of the net.



So we had fun, and posted every day, and told you about cool things. But we did not come early to one of the biggest ways that the Internet changed the world.



Ah, well. In that alternate history, everything got different sometime in early 1995, SJ Games got subsumed into the net operation about 1996, Munchkin never happened, and I never met some people that I kind of like. You know who you are. So, in the long run, it's all good.



Fast forward to 2014. Blogs are old news now, but they're still a great tool. We're going to keep posting Illuminators. We might switch to a commercial code system; we might keep on improving the homebrew we've got; we might beam it directly into your brains (without ever realizing that particular technology might have other applications). I can't predict.



Well, I can predict that we'll keep tweaking the presentation.  We really need to make it usefully searchable. (It's halfway there. A tag system exists. We can tag posts with keywords but, errrrr, there's no interface yet to let you search for them. And since I can't sit down and write that myself in HTML, it's not done. Yet.)



And we've talked about letting users comment, though the comments would have to be moderated, just like our regular forums are, and I think we might cut off comments after some arbitrary short time so readers could move on. Maybe exactly one day, so comments on November 20, 2034, would end exactly as the post for November 21, 2034 went up.



Or we might do something entirely different.



But definitely we'll keep posting. Thank you for reading. That's why we do it.



– Steve Jackson



Warehouse 23 News: How Gloomy Can You Get?



The sky is gray, the tea is cold, and a new tragedy lies around every corner . . .



In Gloom , you control the fate of a family of macabre characters and try your hardest to give them the gloomiest experience ever, all the while trying to cheer up the other families. May the most miserable soul win!

November 21, 2014: The Daily Illuminator, Sam Kieth, Mike Mignola, June Lockhart, And Me

When I was asked to write about my experiences with the Daily Illuminator my very first thought was: "The Daily Illuminator changed my life!" One benefit to being late with my entry, though, was it gave me a chance to read some of the other remembrances that have gone up in the past week . . . which led to slightly changing my plans for today's post. After all, none of you want to hear how a Daily Illuminator posting in January of 1999 led to my sitting where I am today.



So instead I thought I'd take this chance to thank the Daily Illuminator for dropping me in exactly the right place to have memorable experiences with:



Sam Kieth - You're either familiar with the work of comic artist and creator Sam Kieth or you just don't love incredible artwork and storytelling. During a convention in Atlanta I was invited on an airport run to pick up Mr. Kieth. Absolutely! The ride back – which took roughly an hour thanks to timing and traffic – was one I'll never forget as we talked comics and I got my first real peek into how the comic industry actually works. 


Mike Mignola - A highlight of my time at Steve Jackson Games has to be the many months spent working on our Hellboy Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game . I spent countless hours behind the scenes on the project, trading call after call with Mr. Mignola as we worked through the details. The final game book turned out incredible, and the experience taught me more about working with licensors than I could have hoped. I'd love to work on another Hellboy project one of these days. (Please!)


June Lockhart - Lassie. Lost in Space. You know these and you certainly know June Lockhart. What you may not know is that at San Diego Comic Con one year I found myself extremely frustrated and upset with June Lockhart during a brief incident at a hotel. I'd go into details, but it's actually rather embarassing since I shouldn't ever yell at people. Really. Inside voice, Phil! Inside voice! Trust me, I'll never forget . . . I'd better not say. Find me at a con and if the stars are right I'll make you laugh.
Now these are only a few memories I've collected because of the Daily Illuminator. After over fifteen years working with Steve Jackson Games I've collected hundreds of experiences that I can honestly say would have never happened if not for the Daily Illuminator. It is amazing how sending one email in response to one online post can change a life, but that's exactly what happened to me.



Thank you, Steve, both for all of the great years of work and for keeping the Daily Illuminator running for two decades. I hope I'm here for the next two decades and I hope I can give others as many fantastic experiences as you and the DI have given me.



– Phil Reed



Warehouse 23 News: Join The Perfect Wizardly College
Whether you're a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy hero or any dungeon-delving fantastic adventurer, you need magic. GURPS Magical Styles: Dungeon Magic presents seven unique groups, each with their own slant on adventuring, unique spells, and emphasis. Their secrets are a download away, but only from Warehouse 23!

November 20, 2014: Paul Chapman On The DI

My first Daily Illuminator was in July of 2001, I think. Back then, only SJ and Andrew (wearing his managing editor hat) signed their posts with regularity, so it's entirely possible that a couple of the miniatures division news bits from the winter of 2000 came from me, but it's hard to say.



I didn't start posting regularly for another 4 years, but between 2006 and 2011, I wrote many, many, many Illuminators. I have no idea how many – more than one thousand, certainly.



My favorites were announcements of cool things we were doing in the office, of course: the playtests, the Halloween gaming sessions, the convention reports. I also got a kick out of the "geek interest" bits I'd use to fill the days when we couldn't quite reveal what we were working on.



Oddly, the aspect I enjoyed the least then is the element I appreciate the most today: the editing process. Steve was an editor before he was a game designer, and his red pen bled over my drafts again and again. At the time, it was incredibly frustrating, but it was also extremely educational.



Looking back at the earliest entries, it's amazing how consistent the core of the Illuminator is. The technology may have changed, but the posts have always had the genuine "hey, this is cool" – whether we worked on it or not.



Here's to 20 more!



– Paul Chapman



Warehouse 23 News: Run, Spyke, RUN!



The Ogre is coming for you!



John Kovalic shows us what happens when our product lines meet – especially these two powerhouses of gaming. 



They come in Blue , Black , and Tan colors, available exclusively from Warehouse 23 .

November 17, 2014: The Illuminator Must Go On!

Back in the Good Old Days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and knowing a little HTML made you an internet savant, Steve Jackson Games committed to publishing a Daily Illuminator every day – Every. Single. Day. Hell or high water, rain or shine. Then one day, that streak was threatened. As I remember it, a truck failed its Control Roll on the curve at the base of our driveway, and knocked over the utility pole holding up the power line to the office. No power! No net access! Dogs and cats living together!



Fortunately, our in-house internet service provider, the fondly remembered Illuminati Online, had an ace in the hole – an Unitnterruptable Power Supply, with a back-up battery that was good for about 15 minutes. The interface to the Illuminator was primitive, but I stepped into the breach and posted something explaining the situation and hit "Send." Thus the streak was preserved. Again, this is as I remember it, so it might not have actually happened this way at all. But it makes for a great story!



– Scott Haring



Warehouse 23 News: A Colonial Compendium



Protecting the Thirteen Colonies from horrific threats is tough work. You need every extra advantage you can get – including the new skills, weapons, spells, combat options, and more in Colonial Gothic: The Player Companion . Download it today from Warehouse 23; it's like magic!

November 18, 2014: The DI: A Meditation On Quality

Wow, the Daily Illuminator. Hello. It's been a while.



You learn some interesting things about quality, if you look long enough at the right people. Steve Jackson is the one the people I've looked at for a long time, and if you're reading this it's probably because you also think he has an interesting take on quality – he only does great stuff, absolutely, but over years and years of watching him, while he doesn't always move as quick as he'd like, he's never been any slower than he had to be. He gets things out about as quick as they can get out, and they're almost always more than good enough.




Sometimes they're even great. When I was a kid, pressing against my early teens, I first came across Steve Jackson Games, and while it would be a long time before I ran into anyone else who'd ever heard of them, everything they put out was as professional as a twelve-year-old could discern, a real publisher doing consistently non-sketch work. We have a whole generation of people for whom great graphic design is one of those party tricks you pick up with enough spare time, making party fliers for friends, but this was in a time when you had professional publishing and you had wide-eyed unshaven dudes hawking photocopies on card tables at sparsely-attended game conventions.



I'm not accusing Steve Jackson of being shaven, here. What I'm saying is that everything he did crossed a clear threshold of goodness. I worked with Steve for about four and a half years, over which I learned more from him about quality than I think I ever got out of anyone else. That's actually where the Daily Illuminator, which I think is the oldest blog in the world, came from.



In late 1994, there were fewer than 20,000 websites. I mean, that sounded like a lot back then. In about a year, there'd be more than 600,000 sites, so really the Internet was just getting started. Three years later, there'd be 10 million sites. In 1994, though, the interests represented on the early Internet were skewed more toward its geeky origins (no surprise). The summer before, an amazing thing had leaped out into the gaming scene, a game called Magic: The Gathering . As the first collectible card game, now a powerhouse category of gaming, it had a tremendous influence on the direction of the industry at large. At Steve Jackson Games, we worked extremely hard to translate Steve's classic game, Illuminati , to this new medium.



It was a pretty urgent endeavor, at the time. The company was in trouble for a good many reasons, not the least of which was Steve's insistence that a game he'd been aggressively developing – and expensively marketing — for years was in fact not going to work, and he'd rather shelve it than squeeze something out which, yes, might make a lot of money, and might enrich some partners, and might provide years worth of steady income from supplements, but it would not be good, and so it was not going to happen. The book I'd been working on, also expensively marketed, was pulled by Steve just a month before it was supposed to go to the printer because he didn't think it was good enough. And he was right, it wasn't.



I personally was shattered on the other side of what we had to do to get that game to the printer, along with the issue of Pyramid Magazine that would help promote it. But I had this idea that the magazine – and our usual company organ, "Where We're Going" – would lag too long behind publication to affect the early sales we needed to create a wave of positive interest around the game. So I had this idea that we put up a web page, something like a .plan file, which would keep fans appraised of the status of the game, and celebrate when it finally came out. In the future, we could go on about what we were doing in general.



For weeks, Steve bugged me to stop talking about it and to actually do it. I told myself I was too shattered after slipping Illuminati: New World Order off to the printers, and I needed more time to get my head together. I told myself I needed to figure out how HTML tables worked, since clearly you'd also need something like a little calendar off to the side of the page, so you could see where posts had been made in days past and click through to read them.



Steve, of course, took a proper measure of the situation and, opening an empty file, began typing. He posted the link off the main SJGames page and people began viewing it. He invited me to contribute, and I made some posts over a couple of years. Four days into the launch of what we now recognize as the world's oldest blog, I became its second writer. If I'd had a better grasp at the time of the difference between good and good enough, I'd have been the first. That title remains Steve's. It's one of his strange gifts, his sense of quality. It taught me that you can't simply hold the bar high or low and expect a consistent outcome. All you can do is take a good measure of the situation, consider what you have to work with and the time you're given. Then you jump as high as you can and, if you've done it well, then you'll soar right over the bar you've set.



I literally can't believe that I'm talking about something that happened twenty years ago now. The Internet is a different place, certainly, as much as it was ever any one place. From the early tens of thousands of sites, many tens of millions of sites and blogs and pages have bloomed. The quality of the content varies widely, but good things still get out there. And over the last two decades, Steve Jackson Games has rolled forward, doing things more than well enough. Maybe Steve would've wanted some of his efforts to have come out better, but that'd only make him human. What makes him interesting is the same thing that makes the Daily Illuminator interesting even after twenty years: he keeps doing what he's doing, just like the Illuminator keeps rolling along.



– Derek Pearcy



Warehouse 23 News: A Double-Trouble Creature Feature



Stop draggin' your heels and boost your Savage Worlds game with two new monsters – Creature Feature: Slime Dragon and Creature Feature: Doom Worm . Download either (or both!) from Warehouse 23.

November 19, 2014: Daily Illuminator 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago, I was working on my first professional gaming illustration gig – Illuminati: New World Order , for Steve Jackson Games. How I came to leave the newspaper business, and wound up creating cartoons and games for a (rather wonderful) living was in itself a bizarre series of coincidences. Almost Illuminati-esque, you might say. Which seemed appropriate, all things considered.



In 1993, I'd drawn an editorial cartoon for the Wisconsin State Journal – Madison, Wisconsin's morning newspaper, where I was on staff – about the OJ Simpson trial (look it up, you young whippersnappers). One of OJ's lawyers had claimed that there was a "conspiracy" to get their client, and I ran with this idea for a cartoon, creating a weird (and – I hoped - hilarious) set of interlocking theories, expounding on the absurdity of it all. Being a bit of a gamer – not to mention a Steve Jackson fanboy -  I threw the Bavarian Illuminati into the conspiracy cartoon.



Long story short, a reader faxed it (look it up, you young whippersnappers) to Steve, in Austin. Steve must have liked it, because he asked me to take over the Murphy's Rules feature. (He also pointed out a typo in the cartoon, which is about as Steve as it gets.)



Anyway, flash forward a few months, and INWO was behind schedule. So when I e-mailed Steve, asking if they needed help, he threw twenty cards my way. I was beyond thrilled! This was an actual, real, honest-to-goodness Steve Jackson-created collectible card game I was working on! As the project approached its end, I'd heard that Steve Jackson Games had thrown some card samples online.



"Online"? What was that? Was it anything like e-mail? I'd ditched my old AOL account earlier that year, switching to a local internet service provider. But while I'd read of these new things called "web browsers" in Wired magazine, I had no actual experience with them, per se. Wasn't really sure what folks were talking about.



Thus, one evening, over at our friends Cassie and Igor's house, I asked Igor – a computer scientist - if he'd be able to look this Steve Jackson Games "page" up, somehow.



"They call it the Daily Illuminator," I helpfully added.



Igor – I'd one day name the Dork Tower character after him, but that's another story – of course, could go to this web page, simply, easily, and apparently magically, and *click* the Daily Illuminator appeared:

Nov. 26, 1994
We announced this in the INWO FAQ a few days ago, but just to make sure nobody misses it . . . we now have a confirmed printer ship date for Illuminati: New World Order. It will ship from the printer on December 7 (two days after the planned date . . . we'll live). Distributors will be able to release the game to retailers on Friday, December 16. This means that motivated retailers will have it that same day, and the others will have it within a week.
 For more information - and previews of the art, if you've got Mosaic - check out our INWO web page.

– Steve Jackson

Why yes, yes indeed, Igor had Mosaic (look it up, you young whippersnappers), and *click* there it was: the INWO page. Well, when I say "click" it was more like "chug, chug, chug, chug." Then "chug" again, and a bit of clanking or something. This was 1994, remember, and I'm not sure what the speed of the dial-up modem was, but I'm not sure I can even count that low, these days. Still, even though it seemed to take forever, up - slowly but surely - came an image.



Of an INWO card.



One of my INWO cards. The Deasil Engine!



ON MY FRIEND'S COMPUTER!



Look, I may be easily impressed, but this blew my mind. You have no idea how things like this just did not happen before they started happening! And it got me to thinking: If Steve Jackson Games could put pictures of INWO cards online, well, maybe, um . . . why couldn't I put my then-comic strip, Wild Life, online? Somewhere, I read I was one of the first ten cartoonists to post comics online regularly. I'm not sure if that's the case or not, but wow, was it ever cool back then.



A couple years later, when Wild Life painfully ended, and Dork Tower burst forth, I put that online, as well.



And look where that got me.



Happy 20th birthday, Daily Illuminator! Thanks for changing my life.



– John Kovalic



Warehouse 23 News: Heroes Get Things Done!



You're trapped in the field with bad guys at your back. You need help . . . fast. Call through red tape and get support from your supervising agency, with GURPS Social Engineering: Pulling Rank . You can only download it from Warehouse 23!

November 16, 2014: Happy 20th Birthday, Daily Illuminator!

I first became aware of the Daily Illuminator not long after it started, probably around 1997 when Knightmare Chess grabbed me and wouldn't let go. Back then, I'd check it now and then and read back to see what product announcements I missed.



Now, of course, reading the Illuminator has become a daily (or nightly) ritual, one that started 15 years ago when I was a grad student in Victoria, British Columbia. Because of time zones, the new Illuminator would post at 10 p.m. each night, giving me a brief glimpse of home . . . and, of course, talking about games I really enjoyed playing – I first heard about Chez Geek , Tile Chess , and several GURPS supplements when they were announced in the Illuminator.



(And then I paid way too much for them, because the only game store in Victoria added a "you're on an island and where are you going to go?" upcharge. They aren't around anymore, and good riddance.)



In fact, I have the Illuminator to thank for working here. I was not happy in my grad program (nothing against Victoria, the university, or my friends up there – I just didn't want to be a student anymore) and was looking for a path back to Texas where I would see the sun more than once or twice a winter. One day in early 2000, I saw that SJ Games was looking to fill four jobs, none of which I was remotely qualified for.



I applied anyway, and the rest is history.



The part of the Illuminator that I really enjoy is that it's just as much a company blog as it is a news feed. In a given week, you might read about new releases, staff changes, new technology, Cthulhu, and some funny video that happened to cross Steve's desk – or anyone else's. The Illuminator doesn't speak with one voice, and to me that is one of its strengths. We are a community, and the Illuminator reflects that. Reading the archives is a look back at our history.



What's next for the Illuminator? Good question. Keep watching and find out when we do!



– Andrew Hackard



Warehouse 23 News: A Dozen Threads Of Adventure



Go shopping for unique "star silk" at Starspun Hollow – but don't get entangled in local complications! The secrets of Village Backdrop: Starspun Hollow are a download away, from Warehouse 23.