Thou Art But A Warrior: Help support a new 2nd edition!

After nearly three years of working on it off and on, the new revised edition of Thou Art But A Warrior is finished and ready to be published! And thanks to the generosity of Ben Lehman, the new edition contains not only the expansion rules, but also the core Polaris system rules. It also contains the new illustrations that I blogged about previously. (Um, very, very previously.)

The Indiegogo campaign to fund a print run for the new book has now gone live.I'll be blogging here about the new edition, as well as progress toward the campaign goal and any stretch goals I might wind up putting forward. Please consider throwing a few dollars my way in order to help make this happen and to keep costs low for everyone.

Not that you care, but...

I updated the links list on the side there, since half of them were either abandoned or defunct.

Also, I've started re-vamping Under The Sun - my Game Chef entry. Hopefully I'll have a more complete version to show off soon, though laying out Thou Art But A Warrior remains a priority.

Thou Art But A Warrior - now a PDF!

Hey folks! Thou Art But A Warrior is now for sale as a PDF! Check it out!

That is all.

More illustrations for the new edition:

While the first draft of the revised edition is being edited, I've been working on doing illustrations for the new edition so that when the edits are finished I can go directly into laying out the book. (That's the theory, anyway. We'll see how that works out.)

I've been pleased with the work I've done so far. I have to admit that I had put down the sketchbook several months ago because I was frustrated that I couldn't translate my knowledge of the human form to drawings that didn't look like cartoony shit. Six months or so seems to have broken down that particular block, for which I am very grateful. So far I have been very satisfied with the quality of what I have been producing. So without further ado...

A character that will be referenced in the examples of play, a secret Christian within the emir's court.:

(CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW)

I have to admit, the inherent sexism of the setting was killing me. So when I found a way in the examples to have a woman in armor, I didn't even think twice. What she's wearing is a mish-mash of Christian and Muslim armor, which I had fun doing.

(CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW)

Because there is an Islamic angel, there also needs to be a Christian angel. I'm quite happy with this illustration - especially with the reflections cast by the halo and with the fact that the wings don't look like total crap.

(CLICK FOR LARGER)

And, because Thou Art But A Warrior is, of course, a tragedy... (I showed it to Kit last night when I finished it. His response: "Well that's cheerful.") I actually really struggled with the composition/pose of this one.

So that's proceeding well, even if I've decided to re-do the very first one that I drew. (The faces were just... weird.) My plan is to have eight illustrations, so that means I'm five eighths done! If I knuckle down, I should be able to finish by the end of next week as long as the inspiration continues to flow.

I'm impatient for my software to get here. (It's now officially in the mail! Yippee!) I want to start laying out this thing!

New edition of Thou Art But A Warrior! (Plus updates on other projects)

(Quick note: Yes I know my website is down. Again. It'll be back up soon.)

It's been a while since I posted - I've been a busy, busy geek. Since it's been so long I thought I'd give an update on various projects that I'm working on. But first, my plans for the revised edition of...

Thou Art But A Warrior

I've mentioned a few places online that I'm working on a revised edition of Thou Art But A Warrior. The past few years, I've encountered some issues with play that have led me to want to make some changes. Also, sales have pretty much slowed to a small trickle, which I attribute to the fact that Thou Art But A Warrior is a supplement. $30 is a tough sell for a supplement and the base game in this economy.

After some examination of my numbers, and looking back at my experience last year trying to sell Thou Art But A Warrior as part of Pirate Jenny, I've come to the conclusion that most of the people who own Polaris and are interested in Thou Art But A Warrior already own the supplement. For people who don't own Polaris, the price of both books is acting as a barrier. Ben has been kind enough to give me permission to release an edition of Thou Art But A Warrior that includes the Polaris system.

This represents a substantial addition to the book, effectively doubling the amount of text. It required a lot of writing, and re-writing, and more re-writing, but I did finish a first draft and that draft is currently being edited by my long-suffering husband who I voluntell to help me with my projects for no pay. (I love you, sweetie!) Currently, it's too early to say what price point I will be targeting, but I can say that I would like to include color in the new edition if it's at all feasible. I can say that I plan on releasing the revised edition for the end of this year.

As for the current book, there are a few print copies of Thou Art But A Warrior in stock. I plan on letting the book go out of print, which means once they're gone they're gone. My struggle to access a professional copy of Acrobat that will let me add bookmarks continues, but I have every intention to start selling PDFs once I have run out of books, and anybody that buys the unrevised PDF will receive a free copy of the revised supplement PDF once revisions are complete. At the very latest, I will have PDFs for sale around mid-August.

Lastly, while the book is being edited, I've also been working hard on completely re-vamping the design of the book. When I published the first edition, I gave myself a month and a half to do the layout and all the illustrations. Considering that I laid the book out in Word, that wasn't nearly enough time. As a result, I wound up rushing the interior illustrations and I've never really been happy with the quality of the artwork. Since the interior design is changing anyhow, this is a good chance to re-work the illustrations for the new edition. I've already penciled two updates to existing illustrations in the book that I may or may not add color to digitally. (Experimentation is in order.)

The first (graphite and white prismacolor on tan sketch paper):

With the old illustration, I was super happy with how the fabrics and the swords came out, but I always hated the anatomy and the faces. I also thought the shading was kind of flat. I'm much more pleased with the new version.

I also did a new drawing for the Islamic angel that appears as an illustration. Here's the old version.

Not bad. It was actually my favorite illustration from the previous edition, but I'm not crazy about the face or the wings. The drapery is nice in spots, like with the sash. But overall, I thought I could do much better if I had more time to do it right. Which is why I drew this:

MUCH better. The wings don't feel stiff, the shading is much more interesting with the hand as a light source, and the drapery looks much more natural. (Click to view a larger version. I'm very proud of the subtle shading.)

So that's it for Thou Art But A Warrior. I think it's safe to say that things are proceeding well. I just hope I can get my hands on a copy of InDesign by the time that it's time to start doing layout!

And now, something completely different: A card game

I've been cheating on Black Sky lately. There are several problems that I'm not sure how to fix, so I'm letting it lie fallow for a while. In the mean time, I've been working on a silly card game about playing MMOs. I have to admit that the original idea came from Cape Freak, but he's taking his MMO card game in more of a dungeoneering direction. So I decided to design the MMO card game that I wanted to play - game about MMO economies and screwing over your fellow player. I just finished the prototype deck yesterday:

Now I just need to give this baby a test run and see if it's any fun. I hope it will be fun, but who can tell?

That novel I've been promising to write

I've been working on this novel off and on for the last two years, obsessively outlining the plot and detailing all kinds of background information. Lately I started actually writing the damn thing. Currently, I'm ~15,000 words in - significantly further than when I attempted this thing last time.

It's amusing that the valuable lesson I'm applying from having completed NaNoWriMo is that I'm giving myself permission to not write perfectly. I'm not writing at the break-neck, mind-numbing NaNoWriMo speed that results in huge volumes of crap, but I'm not spending two hours on four paragraphs either. That's what re-writes are for.

I feel good about this. This is something I will finish. I just hope I don't take too long about it.


And that is all for now.

An update: No, I'm not dead

Regarding my absence:

So I'm back from my vacation in the Florida keys. I won't bore you by talking about how warm and fantastic it was. But I'll be spending some time going through the photographs that I took and posting some of the best ones here. We saw a lot of really neat wildlife, and I can't wait to pore through my photographs.

Regarding current projects:

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be working with Seth Ben-Ezra to illustrate his upcoming game Showdown. It's still in the planning stages, so it'll be a bit before actual illustrations appear here. But I will post work as I do it, and will link to Seth's page for Showdown in just a bit. I'm super-excited, because I read the forum thread that the game was spawned from and it promises to be very fun.

Regarding the second print run of Thou Art But A Warrior:

Due to circumstances beyond my control, there likely will not be any more printed copies for around a month. I have had delays both with the printer, which I have started a thread about on the Forge, as well as with UPS, who has had my proof for almost TWO WEEKS now.

I will be rushing to have a PDF version of the game available on the Un-Store as soon as possible to make up for this delay. I do apologize if this inconveniences anyone. When I started the reprint process at the end of October, I didn't realize I still wouldn't have my proof by now.

Thou Art But A Warrior now on IPR

There was a bit of a backlog, but Thou Art But A Warrior is now officially up on IPR.

You can find it here.

GenCon 2008 Wrap-Up

A couple things, and then I'll stop posting about GenCon and start posting about current projects and concerns.

1) FINAL NUMBERS: Thou Art But A Warrior sold 24 solo copies and 7 copies as part of the package with Polaris for an astounding THIRTY ONE copies. I had suspicions that I could sell that many, but the fact that I actually accomplished it despite overall booth numbers being low makes me really, really happy.

2) OTHER COOL THINGS. There are a couple things that deserve mention here, but since I've already discussed them elsewhere I'll just post links to the relevant threads.

Danielle's amazing game of Kagematsu was fantastic, and is one of the things that I'm excited to see next year. Ron started a thread in the Playtesting forum on the Forge, which you can find over here.

Tony LB is posting actual plays of all seven (SEVEN!) of the games of Misery Bubblegum that he ran at GenCon. I'm even more excited about Misery Bubblegum than I am about Kagematsu. Hopefully some time within the next little while, he'll have gotten to posting AP of the game that I played in. That thread is also in the Playtesting forum, and can be found here.

A lot of people talked about their GenCon experience in this thread over on Story Games.

Steve Segedy started a GenCon post-mortem discussion in the Conventions forum on the Forge, and there's been some good conversation already.

3) FUTURE PROJECTS. One of the reasons I went to GenCon, besides engaging in dirty dirty capitalism and hanging out with new friends, is to do some networking and get my name out there for future projects. This aspect of GenCon was much more successful than last year, as I have a few definite things lined up. As of yet, it's too early to talk about any of them. But I'm confident that I'll be able to talk about them more in the future.

The art in Thou Art But A Warrior was really well received, and I have hopes that it will generate interest in future illustration work.

4) BLACK OPS ANGEL GAME. I saw a lot of neat games that handled character creation in rather unorthodox ways, which helped to shake loose a lot of ideas for how to deal with this problem in the game that I'm working on now. I have every hope that by the end of the year I'll have an alpha version of the game finished and ready to start mutilating playtesting.

I've thought a lot about how I want to plan things, and I decided that taking two years to develop Thou Art But A Warrior was a sensible move on my part, considering that I have so many other projects on the go. I might shoot for having an ashcan available for next GenCon, but for now I'll just concentrate on trying to finish an alpha version of the game.

Thoughts on GenCon 2008

1) Zombie Cinema is amazing. It really took a lot of people by storm, and I hope that Eero sold the crap out of it. Every time I looked, I saw him running demos, which bodes well for sales.

Also, listening to Eero talk about his game is super entertaining, because Zombie Cinema with a Finnish accent comes out sounding like “Chombie Kinema”. The rest of the Forge/IPR booth people were enthralled, and there was much talk of “chombies” throughout the con.

I told pretty much everyone that I talked to at GenCon for longer than 60 seconds that they needed to play this game. So hopefully Eero will do well.

2) I suck at visualizing people on the internet. I thought Graham would be large and bulky, so imagine my surprise when he was… well… small. Also, Josh Roby was way taller than I thought he’d be. The funny thing is that I never really know how I picture people until I meet them and am then surprised.

3) Tony LB is working on a card/roleplaying game that simulates shoujo anime hauntingly well – Misery Bubblegum. It’s short, maybe an hour and a half, and he ran about a million games at the con. He had people who didn’t even like shoujo sold on the game. I can only apply the term “gut punching emo porn” to this game in the most positive way imaginable.

I knew nothing about this game going in, other than having heard Lenny (one of the Evil Hat guys) rant about how amazing Misery Bubblegum was. The group of people I played with were, by and large, pretty tired. But we played the crap out of it and wound up with a heart-wrenchingly sad tale with a pretty heartwarming end.

This is far and away the game that I am most excited about for next year. It warms the cockles of my little heart, and I told Tony that I would have given him money right there and then if he had had decks to sell.

I also have fanart of Misery Bubblegum which I will post later, I just haven’t had a chance to scan it yet.

4) Flow charts and diagrams were my obsession of the con. I discovered that making sarcastic flow charts is quite fun.

5) Thou Art But A Warrior, as mentioned previously, sold very well. I ran a crap-ton of demos of it, which was good. Sadly, I discovered that my demo is much stabbier than I thought it would be – owing the fact that I often had to stab NPCs to make people state that they wanted a conflict, despite stating up front that they could declare a conflict whenever.

Lenny enjoyed my demo far too much, as the stabbing made his eyes light up.

6) Speaking of Lenny, one of the Evil Hat guys described him as a rabid ferret. I found that a very accurate description. He’s a very cool guy to talk to and game with, but holy shit. You could use him to power a lap top.

7) Graham ran Poison’d for myself, Vincent, Joshua Newman, and Danielle Lewon, and it was officially the best roleplaying game I have ever played. EVER. At one point, Graham said the following to Vincent, of course in his adorable British accent: “the crew would like to tie you to the mast, if that’s not too much trouble”. I laughed so hard that I cried at many points.

I played an utterly reprehensible human being named Bloody Harry, and was kind of relieved at the end when he got a chisel through the eye socket. Also, I kind of traumatized Vincent, which still amuses me to no end because Vincent was the one who pulled this out of his brain in the first place.

8) Seeing Graham surrounded by women for most of the con was pretty amusing. It must be the accent.

9) I only bought three games, which kind of surprised me given how many new games there are this year. I demoed a lot of them, and plan on keeping on eye on them while I make up my mind if I want them or not.

I think I’m just tired of buying games that I know I won’t ever play.

More later, I’m sure, as I think of more amusing things to share

Thou Art But A Warrior successfully released at GenCon

The release of Thou Art But A Warrior went amazingly well. I'm not sure of exact numbers yet, since I left halfway through Sunday, but I definitely exceeded my sales goal - which is amazing. I'm hoping that Polaris will have enjoyed a sales boost as well, but I won't know for sure for a bit yet.

Thou Art But A Warrior will be available for purchase through Indie Press Revolution very shortly. There will also be a PDF version of the game available at some point in the next few months.

Many thanks to everyone at the Forge booth this year who supported me in running a crap-ton of demos.

Status update

1) Status update the first: THE HOUSE

We moved in yesterday without any serious incident. It is, as of yet, very very messy. It will be occupying much of my time.

Unfortunately, my notes for the angel game I'm writing are lost in one of these many boxes. Dammit. I guess that's incentive to pack.

2) Status update the second: THOU ART BUT A WARRIOR

I got the proof back today, and am pretty excited about it overall. There's two really minor things that make me Sad: the page numbers are oddly placed (I laid out the book using Word - fuck you, Word!), and the ad for Emily Care Boss' games is low-res.

I'm super sad, because revising it would cost me fifty bucks and make my timeline totally not workable. So I have to print my first hundred copies with slightly retarded (but correct) page numbers, and a low-res ad.

Woe.

But hey, you know. Learning experience.

Thank GOD. It's finished.

So the book is done. Finished. Thank God.

I decided pretty last minute that I wanted to get the title of the book calligraphed in Arabic and I am super, super, SUPER excited about how awesome it makes the cover.

So here's the cover and title page, just because they're too awesome not to share.

I'm sending the book to the printer in the morning. But no rest for the wicked; now that I'm finished with the book I get to finish packing the apartment. Oh well.

Someone shoot me in the head

So I finished the interior layout. It's done. Finished! (Shit. Except that I have to fix the index. Oh well. Almost finished!)

And then I discovered I hate my cover. HATE it.

FUCK.

TABAW is almost finished! Also, I'm going to hell.

So work is proceeding apace on Thou Art But A Warrior. It looks like I will meet my self-imposed printing deadline, so - hooray! Thank god the end is in sight.

I've been taking much-needed breaks by visiting Eat Poop U Cat. Thou Art But A Warrior is so full of Serious Thought that sometimes I need to look at something silly like Batman in women's underwear to relieve the stress.

Tonight I took a longer break and drew a panel, for which I am totally going to hell. I mean, generally Eat Poop U Cat will make me go to hell, but this really will.

If you think that's twisted, here's the sentence it's based on: "The children's suspicions were confirmed--Uncle Mort sliced further into his stump of an arm anytime his miniature hippopotamus needed to be fed."

I laughed almost the entire time I drew it. Ah, good times. Good times.

Last color illustration finished

Layout has been pretty torturous so far. For some reason the fact that I'm designing for print has made everything I learned in University fly right out of my head. Makes me wonder why I spent $20,000 to get a degree in design if it can fall out of my brain that easily. But thankfully, Joshua Newman has been kind enough to give me some pointers that will hopefully get me going in the right direction.

I finished the last color illustration - hooray! And it is, even if I do say so myself, awesome.

You'll note that I previously mentioned this would be on the cover? Well, I lied. I tried to the other half of the image with cowering Muslims and all, and it sucked. I hated it SO HARD. So I decided to adapt one of my other images into a cover and to make this an interior illustration because, well, I already did all that work on this half after all.

So slaving continues. Meanwhile I have a game I'd much rather be working on which, amusingly, also involves angels (but in a totally tongue-in-cheek way). God willing I'll have this finished by my self-imposed deadline of the end of June, but we'll see.

Getting ready for Publication

A couple of things. Firstly, I just got back from Camp Nerdly, which was amazing. I was lucky enough to get in one final playtest of Thou Art But A Warrior, and it went very well. Jason Morningstar posted a thread over on Story Games which doesn't do the game justice, but it's definitely one of those "you had to be there" types of games.

Also, I'm very glad the playtest happened because I discovered a strange loophole in the code of conduct that determines experience. Apparently you can do all the horrible shit to your family you want as long as your family isn't Muslim. Whoops! That needs to be fixed.

So much thanks to Nick Marshall, Clinton Nixon, Jason Morningstar, and Rachel Walton for bringing the awesome to Camp Nerdly. And Jason says he's going to try and get the Durham 3 (4?) to play Thou Art But A Warrior in the future, so awesome!

Second, I'm getting to the point where I'm finishing layout and illustration for the book. My goal is to have illustrations done and a draft layout with the few minor changes implemented done by the end of next week. We'll see if that goal is achievable. At the very latest, I want to be printing the third week of June, because god only knows what could happen with shipping cross-border to IPR.

The cover illustration is coming along nicely. No, the colors on the angel will be changed. The reference materials I found had red and green, and I'm initially wanted to match the colors of the reference materials. But then I decided that, you know, considering this is mostly targeted at gamers who are - by and large - not Muslim, I don't want to have a Christmas angel on the cover of my book.

Here's how it's coming so far:

CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

(I'll probably change the green to a more teal-y color rather than change all the red.)

Once I finish illustrations, I don't know that I'll have a lot of time to do other artwork while I'm doing the layout of the book. Hopefully it won't take up too much time, but having heard horror stories about layout from lots of designers, I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

The finish line is in sight!

Lastly, I paid Ron for a spot in the Forge booth yesterday so it is now official. Thou Art But A Warrior will be released at GenCon this August. Now that I've turned in my money, I don't have much of a choice!

More work on Thou Art But A Warrior

Well, GenCon is approaching fast, which means that I've been working on finishing up all of the art that will be used in Thou Art But A Warrior. I cleaned up the pencil sketches that were posted before, and those will be used in the book. All that remains is to finish the cover - which I have been rather neglectful about.

Joshua A. C. Newman gets partial credit for this drawing, because he was the one that pointed me to some nice reference images of Muslim depictions of angels. I decided that I wanted to make use of that for the cover, so I drew the following - make sure you click on the image for a larger view, as there's some nice pencil strokes there.

CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW

My husband made the point, and rightly so, that I shouldn't have just an angel on the cover, as this is a game about Muslim knights and not about Muslim angels. So I decided this will be part of a wraparound cover image with the angel on the back cover terrorizing some knights on the front cover.

Rawk.

It's late, and I'll be gallivanting off to Nerdly in just one short day! So it might be a bit before I get to post anything more about this. I'm sure I'll have interesting stuff post-Nerdly, however.

Thou Art But A Warrior Illustrations, Part Two

These are the other two color illustrations I've finished for Thou Art But A Warrior. I'll probably keep it to three for the interior, to keep costs down since it's going to be a short book. But I'm super-happy with how they turned out.

My goal is to make TABAW a very art-rich text. With me doing all the layout, game design, and art, all it costs me is time after all!

CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW

I tried to vague up the angel's clothing, simply because I couldn't find any good resources for artwork of Islamic depictions of angel clothing. Oh well. It turned out pretty badass anyway. (Though the wings were a trial.)

The colors took forever to get right with this one. Super-saturated colors are hard to work with. But I like the result. Very dramatic.

That's all that I've got for TABAW for the time being, but I've got tons of other things I've been working on - including the long-planned webcomic. I've started scripting pages, so I'll be posting concept art for that now that I feel confident this is a project that will see the light of day.

Back online, new images

So the past few weeks have been pretty productive in terms of art-production, what with having no computer and all. I've been going back through my sketchbook and re-drafting sketches done during the initial stages of working on Thou Art But A Warrior. The goal is to clean them up sufficiently to use them in the final book, along with the finished color illustrations.

These are relatively low-quality scans, because I plan on working on these further to clean them up.

One of the things that excited me the most when I started doing research was the beauty of the padded surcoats and the chainmail armor. The armor from this period was just as beautiful as it was functional. I've been having a lot of fun with it.

I've been trying to maintain a balance between Arabs, Moors, and Christians in my illustrations. It can get pretty challenging trying to differentiate, but I think I managed well with this one.

There's something weird with the face here. But I like the pose, particularly the hands. So I'll probably salvage it.

Keep watching this space for new stuff. I'll be updating frequently as I go through my artwork and update my portfolio and revamp my website.

Brief update

So my computer is still dead. Five year old motherboards are hard to replace, so my new computer will likely beat my new motherboard. (It was time for an upgrade anyway.)

I've been working on a lot more traditional media stuff, pencil and marker drawings. A lot of these have been illustrations for Thou Art But A Warrior, but there's other stuff in there as well. And I'll be posting artwork that I'm working on for the Game Chef contest once the contest deadline is past - since it's supposed to stay secret until then.

Also, once I have the new computer I'll be able to push through all the website updates I've been wanting to do.