Matt Forbeck's Blog, page 36

ENies Nominations Are Out

The nominations for the ENnies — the fan-based tabletop RPG awards from ENWorld.org that are handed out at Gen Con — were announced earlier today. The list is long and filled with great games and related things. Among them, two things I worked on that came out last year earned a few nods.

Tales of the Far West — a short story anthology from Adamant Entertainment, based on their Kickstarted RPG Far West — grabbed a nomination for Best RPG Related Product. That’s about as un-fun a category title as you can find, sure, but it’s a catch-all for anything cool that’s related to RPGs. That puts the book up against a fun and eclectic array of  competitors, including a soundtrack, a book on game design, a board game, and wrapping paper with pictures of Cthulhu on it.

In a more traditional vein, the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game racked up three nominations: Best Game, Best Rules, and Best Product of the Year. That’s a hell of a trifecta, and all credit for it goes to line developer Cam Banks, who did most of the heavy lifting for the game.

As the ENnies site states: “Voting begins on Friday, July 20 and runs to Sunday, July 29. The ceremony itself will be on Friday, August 17, in the Union Station Grand Hall at 8pm with the cocktail reception beginning at 6:30pm.” Depending on my schedule, I may once again serve as a dream date for that cocktail reception, although I may not be able to make the ceremony itself.

Congrats to all the nominees. It’s a fine list of games and “related products,” and I’m looking forward to seeing the final results at Gen Con!

 

More Kickstarter Stuff

Two more cool projects to add to the Kickstarter pile from earlier today.

My fellow Alliterate Steve Sullivan just launched a drive for his writing stunt. He’s setting up a live-writing event that pits fantasy characters against each other to coincide with the Olympics. He pulled it off in 2008, and he’s reprising it this summer too. He wants to start at the same time as the big games, so this is a short one, only 14 days in the whole drive.

My pal Greg Stolze is running Transmit and Other Stories, the latest in his Kickstarters that combine it with his ransom model. (Once he gets the money, he releases the story to everyone for free.) He’s already cracked open “Transmit,” and now he’s pushing for the other stories. Read some of his other work, and if you like it, give him a boost.

Ghosts of Ascalon on Sale this Week

For the week of Comic-Con (that’s this week, folks!), Simon & Shuster has put the ebook edition of Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon on sale for only $3.99. That’s 50% off, until July 15.

This is the first-ever novel based on the Guild Wars game, and I wrote it along with my pal Jeff Grubb, whose day job is to serve as one of the game’s primary lore masters. It’s gotten great reviews (averaging 4.5 stars on Amazon with 77 reviews, for instance), and it’s a great way to get into the world and get revved up for the upcoming release of Guild Wars 2 at the end of August.

Speaking of Comic-Con, much as I love the show I won’t be attending this year. I just got back from a week’s vacation near Watersmeet, Michigan, with my wife and kids, and I have many books to write instead.

Kickstarter Recommendations

I’m just back from a week’s vacation up near Watersmeet, Michigan, and I’m plowing through my in-box to catch up with everything that’s been happening while I’ve been gone. Among those things are a number of Kickstarters I’d like to recommend.

First off, my pals Robin Laws and Simon Rogers over at Stone Skin Press have launched a drive for a set of four fiction anthologies. I have a story in The New Hero 2 anthology, which was the first Shotguns & Sorcery tale I wrote, and I came up with a short fable in The Lion and the Aardvark too. The books are crammed with all sorts of other great tales, and I’m looking forward to reading them all.

My friend Steve Savile is one of the writers behind the drive for the adaptation of the O3 trilogy of progressive metal albums by former Dream Theater lead singer Charlie Dominici. If you’re into high-concept SF with a cracking soundtrack, be sure to check it out.

My fellow Alliterate Wolfgang Baur is running a drive for the Midgard Bestiary, a monsters book for Dungeons & Dragons. All stretch goals have been unlocked, making this a great value.

Lillian Cohen-Moore has a wild project for an RPG sourcebook/fiction book called The Guide to the Village by the Sea. It incorporates a condition she has called synesthesia, which causes her to taste colors and mix her other senses in unusual ways. It’s edited by my pal Rich Dansky, and his seal of approval is more than enough for me.

Fred Hicks and the rest of my pals at Evil Hat have a drive for their first board game, Race to Adventure. I’ve known one of the designers, Eric Lytle, for years, and he knows great games. If this is even half as good as their RPGs and fiction, it’ll rock.

My pals at Zombie Orpheus Entertainment — the folks behind The Gamers films and Journey Quest — have a drive for The Mask of Death, the Pathfinder version of the adventure the heroes played through in The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. Too much fun.

Jennifer Steen of Jennisodes has a drive going for her first game: Project Ninja Panda Taco. If that name alone doesn’t sell it to you, I don’t know what will, but she also has a crack production team, including John Adamus, Brian Patterson, and Daniel Solis.

On top of all that, my friend Ryan Macklin has a drive for his excellent Master Plan podcast about game design. He smashed through his first goal and is heading for stretch goals now. Only 30-some hours left here, so don’t delay.

Other drives that caught my eye:

Mage Knight returns as a video game.
Hieroglyph of the Human Soul , a film featuring Dean Haglund (had dinner with him once, such an enthusiastic guy).
B. J. Keeton’s drive for his science-fantasy novel Birthright. Only 40-some hours left.
My friend Jeff Siadek (designer of Battlestations!) has a drive for his debut SF novel Deep Black .
Rockford native Travis Legge’s romantic comedy film  Dry Spell .
My friend Lee Garvin (of Tales from the Floating Vagabond RPG fame) has a drive for his game  Badass Zombie Killers .
Gryphon and Eagle Games are bringing back some classic Sid Sackson games, including Sleuth.
Marc Zicree (with whom I enjoyed a dinner at a World Fantasy con years back) has a drive for a new SF film series called Space Command.

Whew. Now I need to get back to work so I can afford all this cool stuff.

Magic: The Gathering: The Spell Thief #1 Out Today!

The first issue of my second Magic: The Gathering comic book miniseries — The Spell Thief — hits comic book stores today. As usual, Martín Cóccolo does a fantastic job with the artwork, and J. Edwin Stevens adds in wonderful colors. Many thanks to Carlos Guzman, who wrangles this unruly lot as our editor. Christopher Moeller‘s art graces the cover.

In the previous series, our hero Dack Fayden tracks down the woman who destroyed his hometown. She’s escaped from him in Innistrad and now leads him on a desperate chase through the planes of the Magic multiverse. As you might imagine, it doesn’t go well, but it makes for a hell of a tale. See below for a free preview.

Kickstarter Kicked

Back at the end of May, I wrote a long post about how the first two 12 for ’12 Kickstarters had gone. (Go back and read that first if you haven’t already.) The third one ended June 17, and it was another wild and yet very different ride. I’m still digesting a lot of the information, but here are my first thoughts on how it did and why.

As you might know, the Dangerous Games Kickstarter was a huge success. The Brave New World Kickstarter brought in the most money till then ($13,276), and the Shotguns & Sorcery Kickstarter had the highest number of backers (332). Dangerous Games topped both of them by far, with $18,001 and 389 backers. That’s a 35% increase in backing and a 17% increase in backers. Fantastic!

The Kickstarter Dashboard graph for Dangerous Games looks nothing like what I expected. In the first two, we had a typical kind of Kickstarter in that it had a great start, leveled off to almost flat in the middle, and then spiked again at the end. The second one delayed its spike until the last day, which terrified me. If it hadn’t been for a lot of last-minute promotional help, it easily could have failed to fund all three books.

With this one, though, we had that starting spike, but then it continued to grow at a slow but steady rate. There’s jump in the middle from when Steve Jackson plugged the project on one of his updates for his Ogre Designer’s Edition Kickstarter. If you look closely, though, you can see where some of those people cancelled their pledges a couple days later, and we actually had a day or two of negative growth. Still, on the whole, Steve’s plug was a great help and popped us up over the full-funding mark.

The end of the drive was a great, strong day. It wasn’t like the end of the Shotguns & Sorcery drive, but I was panicked at the end of that one and begging and calling in all sorts of favors from people to plug it. This ending was a lot less nerve-wracking, as we hit all three stretch goals and then some.

So, what made the difference here? For one, I made a drastic change to the drive’s structure. In the previous drives, I set the goal for the first book as the drive’s goal, and then set the levels for the second and third books as stretch goals. I had a number of people get confused about why I was concerned at the end of the Shotguns & Sorcery about not funding all three books because the drive had clearly met its stated goal. I also knew that some people hesitated to pledge at the higher levels for fear of not getting all three books, which wouldn’t be fun for anyone.

This time around, I set the goal for all three books at $10,000. That meant that I could easily communicate what the real goal was, and it meant that those who wanted trilogies as their rewards could get them without fear of losing out. If the drive got funded, they’d get all three books, no matter what, and if not, they’d never be charged a dime.

I also set the two Respect the Streak stretch goals at the start. These offer extra copies of the ebooks from the earlier drives to higher-level backers if we reach certain amounts. While those were great fun and meant that people who’d just joined for this Kickstarter could get access to the earlier books, they’re weren’t essential. If they didn’t get funded, people might have to wait a bit longer to buy the books with the rest of the world, much less of a potential disaster.

We hit those fast enough too. In the final weekend, I came up with a stretch goal sure to appeal to my gamer friends and fans: a Dangerous Games playset for Fiasco. We hit that and even topped it well too. I couldn’t have been more pleased.

I can’t say if this structure change did the trick, but it seems to me it helped a lot. We wound up with Dangerous Games as the #8 fiction project on Kickstarter of all time — which, sure, in this case is something like three years, but I was thrilled to see it.

Other things that probably helped include:

The Dangerous Games idea is a great hook, easy to sell to fans of my games and fans of my writing.
The “get your gaming group in a book” level sold in the last couple hours. Big thanks to John Tynes for that idea.
I managed to publish the first 12 for ’12 book before this Kickstarter launched, which helped earn trust.
The Dangerous Games cover is my favorite of the lot so far: simple, iconic, and tells you instantly what the book’s about.

If you have other ideas about that, I’d love to hear them.

I have one more 12 for ’12 drive coming up later this year. It launches in August and runs through September, and I’m going to be hard pressed to top this one. With the help of my faithful backers, though, I’m going to give it the best shot I can.

Magic TPB Out Today!

The Magic: The Gathering trade paperback (TPB) hits stores today. This collects issues #1–4 of the Magic: The Gathering miniseries I wrote for IDW, with gorgeous art by Martín Cóccolo and handsome colors by J. Edwin Stevens. See below for a preview.

I had a fantastic time writing these comics, and I’ve had even more fun working on the next miniseries in the line, Magic: The Gathering: Spell Thief. I just saw the proofs for issue #2 of that, and it features one of my favorite moments in the series so far. It’s one of the most painful for Dack, the hero, but hey, he can take it.

Abhinav Jain (a.k.a. Shadowhawk) has a review of those first four issues over at the Founding Fields. As he says:

A fast-paced and thrilling ride that is a fantastic introduction to the world of Magic: The Gathering. Dack Fayden has arrived and he’s taking names! … Matt Forbeck’s Magic: The Gathering mini-series is a highly entertaining read on all levels, and I’d recommend it to everyone.

Anyhow, you should be able to find the book at your local comic shop or just about anywhere else that sells such things. Enjoy!

Dangerous Games Is Done!

The Dangerous Games Kickstarter came to a thunderous end tonight, and I’m still sitting here stunned. This morning, we had $15,298 and 349 backers, and I wasthrilled with that. After all, we’d already beaten the records of both previous Kickstarters in the 12 for ’12 series on both counts, right?

My only hope was that we’d reach $16,000 so I could have a good excuse to write the Dangerous Games playset for Fiasco. I figured we had an excellent shot at it, but we’d had such a great run so far, I wondered if the drive might have tapped out early.And I would have been fine with that. 

But the numbers kept going up throughout the day. We cracked the $16,000 mark at 2 PM or so, and they didn’t stop. At the end of the night, just before the deadline, they took a sharp jump.

I was glued to my computer for the last hour or two, just hitting the refresh button and watching the numbers climb, texting and chatting with friends on Twitter who were watching with me. At the end of it all, we racked up 389 backers, and we actually cracked $18,001!

WOW! 

Thank you all so much. Whether you supported with a pledge or spreading the word or even just crossing your fingers for me, you have my gratitude. I’m honored, flattered, and honestly flat-out humbled by the support. I cannot wait to write these books, and I’m going to make them the most fun I can.

Good night!

Third Dangerous Games Stretch Goal Unlocked!

Just a little while ago, the Dangerous Games Kickstarter breached the $16,000 mark, which crashed through our third stretch goal! That means I’ll be producing a Gen Con-related playset for Fiasco! That will go out free to all backers first before being released to the public.

Woot!

We already broke the first two stretch goals, of course, which means that those who back at the $50+ level get a set of the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World ebooks and those who back at the $75+ level get those plus a set of the Shotguns & Sorcery ebooks too. Plus all the regular backer rewards, of course!

Thanks to each and every one of you for making this happen. This has been the best of the three 12 for ’12 Kickstarters by miles, both in terms of backers and backing.

I have no more stretch goals after this. I’d still like to arrange a gathering at Gen Con, but I never much liked the idea of charging people to spend time with me. I’d rather just set up something informal and fun or simply chat with people throughout the show instead of setting a single time and place that some will inevitably have to miss.

We have about 8 hours to go till the end of this drive on this fantastic Father’s Day, so there’s still time for people to join us. I can’t wait to see how far this goes — and I’m even more eager to start writing these books! Thanks!

Last Day for Dangerous Games!

The Dangerous Games Kickstarter ends in just under 24 hours, at midnight Eastern Time on Father’s Day, June 17. It has been a smashing success so far, and I want to thank each and every one of my backers for all that they’ve done, both financially (pledges), morally (encouragement), and socially (getting the word out). Together, we smashed the 12 for ’12 records for both pledges and number of backers!

Honestly, I never dreamed it would go so well. I was a little nervous when I set the funding goal so high this time, but we not only shattered that but the first two Respect the Streak stretch goals too. As I write this, this is the #11 drive on Kickstarter’s all-time fiction list, and we’re only about $700 shy of the third stretch goal, at which point, I’ll produce a Gen Con-based playset for the Fiasco game — after I’m done jumping around for joy.

If you can spread the word and let people know that time is running out — or back the project if you haven’t already — I’d appreciate it. Just one last push here, and then it’s all over but the writing! Thanks so much!