We Have Switched Hosts!
God, I haven't posted in nearly a year... and this is the only thing I can come up with?!?
I've been meaning to move away from GoDaddy for some time now, and now I'm about 80% along the way to do it. I have more admin control now, but with that does come some risk as I'm technically not a sysadmin. Heck, I haven't touched Linux in five years at least...
Anyway, this site seems mostly intact... Some images are a bit wonky, and some of the older download links might not work well, but it's a start!
If you see any other problems with this site, please let me know.
Zoinks!
"A Night in Seyvoth Manor" for 5E
In case you are not aware, we're running a Kickstarter for the 5th Edition conversion of our ENnie-nominated adventure A Night in Seyvoth Manor that is already 300% funded!
We continue to be overwhelmed... Over 300% funded?!? Never imagined we would get that far, and we're eternally grateful for that!
The only stretch goal we've had so far is the creation of pre-generated characters, and we had a bit of a crazy idea with that that we're wondering if we can make it work: create two groups of characters...
- The original Scooby Gang - Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby
- The "new" Scooby Gang from Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles and Cordelia
This of course brought up some questions... like what would the races and classes be? So far this is what we've come up with:
ORIGINAL Scooby Gang:
Fred: Human Paladin
Daphne: Elven rogue
Velma: Lore-heavy mage, either a halfling or a gnome
Shaggy and Scooby: ... Oh boy... Let me come back to this one later.
NEW Scooby Gang:
Buffy: Human monk
Willow: Half-elf warlock
Xander: Halfling bard
Giles: Elf or maybe human... and I'm debating either a cleric or a lore-heavy mage
Cordelia: Human or elf, sorceress (wild magic), heavy on Charisma
Now, let's get back to Shaggy and Scooby... Neither of these are "characters" in the D&D sense of the world, so we'll have to take some liberties. I've asked this question on Twitter and I've come up with two possibilities:
Shaggy and Scooby are the SAME CHARACTER: As above, Shaggy is a Druid with wild-shape that can only convert to one type of animal... a Great Dane (we can go with the Mastiff stat block).
Scooby is the main character, and Shaggy is the animal companion: Let's face it... Shaggy is not worthy of being a PC, and if anything he's Scooby's sidekick. So make Scooby a class capable of either an animal companion (ranger?) or a familiar (mage?), and make Shaggy that semi-useless familiar.
Personally I'm leaning towards the first option, but that introduces another problem: there are only four characters, when we kinda need five. So who should the fifth character be? None other than Scrappy as, you guessed it, a gnome barbarian!
So, since we've gotten this far without mentioning stretch goals, I'm going to see about stylizing these character sheets as best I can and including a portrait for each character by the lovely and talented Val "Kick Girl" Hochberg! We're also going to see about working them in to a cover in such a way that doesn't get us sued by Hanna-Barbara.
We've considered creating other types of characters, some that are more down to Earth and fitting the theme like Van Helsing, Blade, etc... but the above somehow feels most appropriate.
Anwyay... We keep trudging foward! Five days left! Tell your friends!
D&D Beyond – First Impressions
So the day has come... D&D Beyond open beta has begun, so I decided to take a look.
First off, I'm looking at this strictly as (1) a software developer and architect, and as (2) someone who would actually use this thing. Without any mention of possible pricing, I can't say yet whether it's worth it or not, so I'll treat it for now as if it was free.
Some general comments...
- The website is hosted on CloudFlare, which is a pretty decent hosting service that is designed to handle excessive load and usage. Let me put it in simple terms: the D&D Beyond site can likely handle more users, more bandwidth and more activity than WotC's own website.
- The core of the site is built around Cobalt, which is a framework designed to support "hybrid" apps (both native and HTML-based app), which not only answers the question about support on multiple devices... but it does seem to hint how this whole thing will work offline. On devices, the HTML and Javascript pages that drive the app are physically on the device, not on a webserver, so it doesn't have to be online to function as a website would. Where the data physically is is another matter... I would venture to guess that the compendium wouldn't be available offline, but character creation and character content can be saved on the local device through Cobalt's integration between the HTML app and native services.
- The server runs the website using "nginx", which is a web service similar to Apache. Although I can't confirm it, my going theory is that the server side is written in Python (which would have been my personal choice), although PHP and other languages is surely possible. Whatever it may be, it's safe to say that they're officially a Linux shop... a big departure from WotC's history of being obsessively Microsoft-centric.
- Looking at the client-side code that I can see (and I admit there isn't a lot of it since only the Compendium is available), it looks well put together and fairly clean. In layman terms, it seems to suggest that the developer that wrote it knows what they're doing and isn't a total idiot. But, like I said, there isn't much there... we should have a better impression of their abilities once the next beta phases go live.
- The app works really well, better than I expected actually. This goes along with my opinion that a company like Curse has done this sort of thing before and isn't making stuff up as they go along.
- The app is visually appealing. Although it only contains SRD content right now, everything looks good. It even has pictures for all the monsters (well, most of them anyway... didn't go through all of them). The bugs I have seen are trivial and don't prevent you from using it (if you remember Dungeonscape/Morningstar, the bugs there made it unusable).
- The app works out of the box on desktop and mobile, which was as could be expected with the Cobalt framework.
All in all, I'm fairly impressed. It's better than I expected, and it shows that there's a serious company with experience doing this sort of thing behind it.
The Unexpected Reveal
The D&D Beyond beta did reveal something interesting... and I'm guessing it wasn't intentional.
If you look at the beta site, the logo on the top left doesn't go to dndbeyond.com... it goes to the domain tabletophero.com, which in turn redirects to dndbeyond.com.
So what is tabletophero.com? We don't know, but doing a WHOIS on the domains reveals something even more interesting: tabletophero.com existed OVER SIX MONTHS BEFORE dndbeyond.com did.
dndbeyond.com ... Registered Feb 2017
tabletophero.com ... Registered July 2016
So... that being said... I have a new theory.
At first I thought that WotC likely asked Curse to create the app, but I don't think that any more. I think that Curse was already creating an app of this nature, called tabletophero.com at the time, and only after was it pitched to WotC. WotC saw the working app and went with it, rebranding it to be dndbeyond.com.
This approach differs wildly from what Trapdoor tried to do with WotC; when they pitched to WotC, Trapdoor didn't have an actual working app to show... at least not on three platforms (Android, iOS and desktop). They had what they thought it would look like, but I'm guessing that Curse was much farther along in their development, and the fact they can show a working app on every target platform was likely a big plus. This would also explain how Curse can take D&D Beyond from announcement to open beta in like a week; they've been working on it for a long time now.
This is all wild speculation, but if you think about it... it sure does look probable. We will likely never know the truth, though.
The Elephant In the Room
All the above is based on me looking at the app as a developer and as a user... but there's going to be one big problem with it and everyone knows it's coming: pricing.
As has been mentioned many a time, WotC has a tendency to price these sort of things at an absurd amount, making them impractical to afford or making people unwilling to pay for. Many are hesitant to pay for books they already own, but many indicators seem so show that will likely be the case here (see Fantasy Grounds).
We can only hope that WotC will snap out of their archaic mindset and get with modern times, but that's a big thing to ask.
More to Come
All in all, the app does show promise... But there isn't much to the Compendium, to be honest. What will make or break the application, at least from an application perspective, are the next two phases: Phase Two being character creation, and Phase Three being homebrew support and campaign management. Personally, I'm particularly curious about Phase Three.
The Sum of All Fears
As several of you may know, I've had a little project of mine - the campaign The Coming Dark - in development for quite some time. Almost five years, to be precise... it's technically the reason this blog exists.
Over a year ago I decided that I was going to launch The Coming Dark, Chapter One: Into the Light as a Kickstarter. That's easy to say, but the fact that I'm writing this a year later without having launched anything yet says otherwise. I think that deserves explanation, or at least discussion; doing so may or may not my product or my image, but I feel some things need to be said.
Fear of Failure
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that sometimes I'm probably more open about my personal problems than I probably should be. After all, here I am trying to come across as an industry professional and a publisher but at the same time I'm talking about my own personal problems and issues. I know it's probably inappropriate, and I've had many people tell me "you know, maybe you shouldn't say that publicly"... but I don't exactly have anywhere else to say it.
I've mentioned this before as well: although I don't have a clinical diagnosis, I'm reasonably sure I regularly suffer from depression. Granted, I'm not a doctor, but I can sort of feel that I suffer from it more often than most. With that comes a sense of despair and a fairly large lack of motivation to do anything, even those things that you love. As a result of this feeling, I've lost count at how many times I've looked at this campaign and thought "what am I waiting for to publish this? I'll get on that tomorrow!" ... and never do. Be it depression, be it fear of rejection, be it aversion to briefly becoming a shameless salesman while the listing is active... it's always something that makes me think "I'm not ready."
In the back of my mind, there is also that fear that I may fail. This project is very personal to me - it's actually dedicated to both of my recently deceased parents - and I can't help but think that a failed Kickstarter would be mentally disastrous. I have the fear that if that does happen - however unlikely it may be - I would have failed them and failed myself, and I likely wouldn't be able to ever recover from it.
Fear of Success
I'll be totally honest here: for a while, I've been horribly terrified at the possibility of overwhelming success. I have what I consider a very small goal ($2K), but I have this fear that if the Kickstarter does overwhelmingly well and I suddenly have tens of thousands of dollars handed to me on a silver platter... given the personal problems I deal with on a daily basis, would I actually use that money for what it's intended for?
I am openly critical of projects that raise an ungodly amount of money and three months later say "we spent it all on shoes and don't have anything to give you." Having that happen to me terrifies me to the point of paralysis; fear of making the wrong decisions, or fear of making inappropriate decisions, makes me feel that I would rather not be in that situation at all. I don't want overwhelming success, so what would I do in light of such success? Spend it on actually fulfilling purchases or buy a container full of mammoth tusk d20s?
Fear of Exposure
You may not have noticed because the internet is what it is, but you'd be hard pressed to find a photo of me online; those photos of me that are out there weren't actually posted by me. That's actually on purpose, and I honestly prefer to hide behind my "digital rabbit" avatar than use my actual photo. I've hidden my appearance so well that at GenCon 2013 nobody would have known who the hell I was if it wasn't for the Twitter ID on my show badge.
Why? You see, I've actually been "doxxed" before... As a result of an alternate reality game I was once involved with, I was throw to the wolves that are 4chan. I've had photos of me posted on public forums I frequent in an effort to mock and humiliate me. I've been crank-called as a result of this exposure. I've been threatened online, and I've had my family threatened (even though they knew nothing about them) as well. Suffice to say, it wasn't pretty or pleasant, and it's not something I'd like to go through ever again.
Since then I've retreated to being the "digital rabbit" avatar (which was part of the first alternate reality game I ran), and I've effectively built a brand around that image. I have thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter, but outside of close friends and family I'm pretty much known only by that image (for the next GenCon, I probably should get it made into a T-shirt...). It's who I've become, and what I'm known best as.
Because of past experiences, the idea of making a video for the sake of Kickstarter concerns me. I've weighed whether it's necessary, and depending on who you ask it may or may not be, but these days once your image is out there it stays out there... Five years ago it was possible to purge, but not now. I've been stung before, and those scars haven't quite healed yet.
Whether a video is absolutely necessary or not is up to discussion, but I can't get myself over the stage fright and the thought that I would have to step out from behind ths curtain I've built just to shill my product. Is it necessary? Is it worth it?
Conclusion
I've been thinking long and hard about this, and have come to the conclusion that TCD: Chapter One needs to be launched one way or another. And now, with the recent release of the 5E licensing, it's the best time to do that.
So I'm going to take a very big risk: I'm going to launch it without a video... focusing all my efforts on the copy on the page. The way I see it, my goal isn't very high so it should be OK... and, worst case, if I see it's not going to make it I have two options: (1) create a video while the project is active, or (2) re-launch it with a video after the first one fails. If all goes well, I won't need the video at all and life goes on.
I know the numbers... I know the likelihood of success is higher with a video... but I think I can still make it.
I'm in the process of tweaking the listing, but barring any convincing arguments or discussions it's going to get launched and launched soon.
So, if you've read this far, what do you think?
Trapdoor Technologies : They’re baaaaack!
One of the most frustrating things about freelance writing and publishing is that sometimes you're really excited about a product that you put together... and you can't tell anyone about it. This has been my torment for the last two months.
Some of you remember Trapdoor Technologies and the ups and downs they had with their product Morningstar... DungeonScape... Well, whatever it was called. I've had my share of exchanges with them and have made some commentary on their product in the past. Some of it good, some of it bad, but in either case it was necessary. They had a vision of what they wanted their product to be, and although they had high expectations in it Wizards of the Coast didn't exactly share the same vision. And, if you know anything about WotC's history, that shouldn't exactly be a surprise.
They launched a rather ambitious... Well, let's be honest here: extremely ambitious... Kickstarter in the hopes of making DungeonScape a reality, and it didn't exactly go as planned. Most people that suffer such a defeat go crawl under a rock, but not these guys. Well... actually... they kind of did crawl under a rock, but while under said rock they were actually working on the product anyway.
For months they worked in obscurity, releasing occasional tidbits of news like working with Ed Greenwood (which must have given someone in the WotC legal department an aneurysm), quietly developing their product and working towards releasing it to the world.
And now they have.
Today, Morningstar... DungeonScape... whatever it was called before is now officially called Playbook, and only minutes ago did they rebrand their Twitter account to @__Playbook__ and launched their Playbook micro site.
Now, what does this have to do with me?
Well, a long long time I ago I had an idea for an adventure called "Cavern of the Damned". At the time there wasn't much to the adventure concept... Actually, besides the first room - the cavern, filled with the damned - there wasn't much else. So it languished for a while, being sidelined by all my other projects that I've been kicking around (like the campaign I've been writing for five years now, but I digress). But I got to talking with the Trapdoor guys, and they asked me if I'd like to publish it (reminder: "it" didn't technically exist) through their platform, Playbook.
Three months ago I agreed to doing that... And I sat on my ass for a month doing absolutely nothing on it. With two weeks to go before the agreed upon deadline, I decided "you know, maybe I should write this thing." So I did.
I'm happy to say that I completed "The Cavern of the Damned", a Pathfinder Roleplaying Game adventure for a party of 1st level characters, and sent it on its merry way. Trapdoor in turn converted it - using magic, I can only assume - for use within the Playbook system. I admit I don't know what that even looks like because I haven't had any of the Apple Kool-Aid and don't own an iPhone or iPad, but it's out there somewhere.
I'm actually excited about the product for a variety of reasons.
- It's the first real Pathfinder product I've ever written. I don't exactly count The Dragon's Master because that was originally a 4E module and, quite honestly, wasn't very good.
- It's not very combat heavy. There's one big combat-like encounter right at the start, but beyond that it's designed to involve skills more than combat.
- I'm dying to see the interactivity that Playbook brings to it.
- Holy crap, I have COVER ART! And I didn't even ask for it, they just did it! That excited me more than anything!
Anywhere, so there it is... Playbook is, in some form, already available in iTunes; I'm not exactly sure what it looks like because I'm not an Apple guy, so I have to wait for the Android version.
But, be it now or in the future, go get Playbook and go get Caverns of the Damned!
In the meantime, Trapdoor is starting up their social media machine once again, and that includes the relaunch of their blog. So go read their "resurrection" blog post for more information!
-=O=-
Addendum: If you go to the main Playbook site, you can see a gallery of images from the app. Most of the images are actually from my adventure, Cavern of the Damned, and include the intro, the map, a few pages from the adventures and a monster. As far as I can tell, CotD is to be included free with the app as an introductory product. I'm cool with that... because I WROTE THAT THING!
About the Author
Software developer and game designer in Miami, Florida. Currently working on content for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Pathfinder, 13th Age and other systems.
Links
Recent Posts
- In Response to Threat of Arrest
- Everything Is Better With Tentacles – Planning
- We Have Switched Hosts!
- Hey, GenCon People… Please Read This
- Atomic Age – Dice Mechanic