Before I get into this, I want to throw out a disclaimer.I don’t know anyone’s true costs or bottom line, only what I can hypothesize from my own experiences in running Kickstarters and cost research in the areas in question. Certainly, costs can be mitigated to some degree by large volume orders, current pre-existing stock of product,’creative’ accounting, etc.
Good, now with that out of the way, I can certainly be accused of having Kickstarter on the brain, but I’m sure I’m not the only one out there with this problem.As this platform continues to grow in the consciousness of our ‘incredible shrinking world’ society, and its power doesn’t seem to be dwindling, I’m going to give readers more advice that I’ve gleaned from my five successful, and one ongoing, Kickstarter campaigns.
First and foremost, I want to reiterate what Kickstarter truly is: a platform by which creative people can gain funding to create projects that otherwise would not be possible. The key word there is ‘funding’ and in the current landscape of the Kickstarter universe, that is becoming a very murky proposition.
In my continuing series of ‘Top 10s’, I’m very happy to be doing a subject that incorporates two things I would simply have a hard time living without: fantasy gaming art and the games themselves.So, considering I’m currently in the middle of running a Kickstarter that not only is looking to produce an absolute load of original fantasy fiction, but also an RPG and art book, what better time to compose a list of The Top Ten Role-Playing Games of All Time.
Now, I suppose I should mention that I’ve been playing RPGs since I was 10, and without revealing just how old I am, it must be understood there is a measurable amount of time involved there.Certainly, I’m not the foremost expert on role-playing games, but I’m going to put myself in the upper 10% of gamers and that should give me enough perspective to comprise this list.
Having established that I can’t help but say that going back in time, weighing the impact, reach, and longevity of so many games was an absolute thrill, and so many memories came flooding back with each one. I was also surprised at how many I’d played (all of them), even if just once during a random gaming session in some long forgotten era of my life.
These games, you see, are like time capsules of memory, and when they come up in conversation with gamers, I think every one of those in the discussion is ripped back through time to the point where they sat at a table, rolled dice, and laughed with friends most likely long out of their lives. Only games that take place on a table-top make such an intimate miracle happen, their power unmistakable and their reach deeper than most non-gamers would ever understand.
So, without further ado, let’s get into the meat of this list and find out just what games made it in, which ones were snubbed, and how many people can disagree with my choices!
It seems to me the Baroness was made to be drawn by Adam Hughes…
What isn’t to love about The Baroness?Well, I suppose a great deal if you are on the side of ‘good’, but nonetheless she’s still a character that has captured the imagination of a generation of young men growing up in the 1980s.
I was a fan of action figures, and when Hasbro initially released their G.I. Joe A Real American Hero line in 1982, I spent three days one weekend catching nightcrawlers (bait worms in southern Indiana speak) by hand with a flashlight at five cents a pop until I had enough to purchase the first run (rough calculation, I caught upwards of 1000 of the slimy little buggers).
At the time, I was eleven, and my G.I. Joefigures provided a great combat story to be told over and over again in the woods by my house, in my sandbox, on the riverbank, and on the floors of various friends living rooms, but I must admit a purely war-driven story can get tiresome without something more meaningful to fight for.
Enter Cobra, the G.I. Joe nemesis. But still, even after you could lay hands on villains to fight, there was something lacking until women were finally added to the story.The addition of Scarlet was a turning point for me in my action figure storylines, and yet a great deal of imagination had to be used because to this point action figure manufacturing hadn’t really ‘figured women out’.That is to simply say, female action figures weren’t all that alluring, mostly because you couldn’t effectively produce their hair.
Sure, there was Star Wars, of which I had a nice collection as well, who had Princess Leia, and that figure was fine, but they (the manufacturers) had a huge advantage because of Leia’s famous head-buns.Those could be sculpted, but free-flowing hair was a much more difficult endeavor and so figures like G.I. Joe alums Scarlet, Lady J, and heaven forbid Covergirl (probably the ugliest figure ever created and based on a model turned soldier of all things!) never really made boys’ hearts go pitter-pat unless you were reading the Marvel comics or watching the animation.
The first Kickstarter success, and it was a true joy!
In early November 2011, I attended World Fantasy Con in San Diego with John O’Neill and the Black Gate crew. It was a truly eye-opening experience for the ‘writer me’ as I’d attended many conventions in my day, but nothing that was so cloistered and dedicated specifically to the art of writing.
I well remember sitting in my room after the first day of listening to readings and thinking to myself, ‘Holy Crap, you absolutely C-A-N’-T do this!’ [Seriously, just listen to Claire Cooney recite any of her works from memory and tremble beneath the power of a truly gifted writer].
After I got home from the convention, I crawled into bed for three days and didn’t come out again because for the first time in my life I felt the power of ‘real’ writers and how far I had to go to reach the level of their talent.
When I finally emerged from my cocoon of despair, I clicked on Facebook and found a post from old time D&D artist Jeff Dee concerning something he called Kickstarter. It was a curious thing, this Kickstarter platform, and the more I researched it, the more I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’m not Claire Cooney, but I bet I can get a book made anyway.’
At the same time, John O’Neill, our fearless leader at Black Gate, was thinking of creating his own line of novels from Black Gate under the power of the current business model he’d used to help found the magazine, namely his own pocket venture capital. I asked him to try Kickstarter and he declined, so I bet him, in no uncertain terms, that no matter what he managed to do with his book line at Black Gate, that using Kickstarter I would outsell him by a multiple of 10 and produce twice as many original books as he could.
Thus began 2012, something I like to call ‘The Year of Kickstarter’. Not only had I discovered this platform, now three years old in the marketplace and ready to tip the balance of acceptability, but so had EVERYONE else.
By February of 2012, Kickstarter money contribution records were falling almost weekly in every category imaginable, especially in computer games. Funding was surging to unforeseen levels with millions of dollars going to video games, art books, albums, miniatures, you name it.
I watched, I studied, and I saw the evolution taking place right before my eyes, but in so doing I also caught the wave and road with it on my new publishing company I’d affectionately named Art of the Genre after this blog. By February, I’d managed my first successful Kickstarter, The Cursed Legion novel, with former AD&D art legend Jeff Easley.
When I was a kid, I loved where I lived. Honestly, I had a great childhood, raised along a tranquil riverbank in a peaceful little town in northwest Indiana. I had no siblings to distract me from my internal reverie, was cared for by a loving mother who chose me over all else, and had friends fostered from Kindergarten all the way to High School Graduation.
I would sit and wonder about all the kids in my class that would rage and swear at our small town, and ‘how they were going to get out as soon as they could’. To me, I could think of no place I’d rather be.
However, upon graduation I moved to southern Indiana to go to university, and by my sophomore year had met my wife. She, unlike me, had a turbulent childhood with dozens of moves and no lifelong friends or a place that she identified as ‘home’. As is the case with most single children who become involved with people who have many siblings and large families, I was pressed to follow her family and so began a journey that has taken me all over the U.S. in the intervening years.
Yes, the kid who never wanted to leave his town has lived in half a dozen states and moved more times than I’d like to remember, which is to say pretty much every three years for two decades.
Why do I bring this up, you might be asking yourself? Well, I bring it up because of my books, most specifically my RPG books. If you have ever had to move, you know the burden each piece of your life [bed, couch, clothes, kitchen supplies, etc.] places on you as you try to pack it, protect it, and hump it into trucks, cars, up steps, down steps, and across countless miles.
If you have a cover by Brom, are you selling your words or his art? Even worse, are you simply selling sex?
Sex… yeah, I said it. Is anyone listening? Probably, because like rubber-necking a car accident, when someone says the word, we all have to take notice, especially here in the U.S. Face it, at our roots, the base Caucasian population is of a repressed Puritanical or Fundamentalist mind, the South, fire and brimstone Baptist, and the fastest growing minority, Latino, inquisition-descended Catholic.
Still, we are Human, and as such, if sex isn’t on our minds, then there is a natural selection breakdown in the root of our Darwin-based evolution.
This creates a hard edge of self-loathing, Hail Marys, and scarlet letters that is terribly hard to overcome, especially for those in the art community. Not that the art community doesn’t produce sexual products, but that doesn’t mean they are accepted without judgment outside that community for it.
I had this problem in 2012, but before I get to that, I’ve got to take the way-back machine to my formative years.
I was raised by a single mother who decided that when my father cheated on her when I was less than a year old, she would dedicate her life to her son, and no other man. So, in that sense, I was raised in a completely sex-free environment. It wasn’t spoken of or seen, and I was educated as a Methodist until my late teens, seeing the church as a counter to the budding feeling of puberty.
However, like my favorite line by Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, ‘Nature finds a way’ and my sexual rebellion was profound, even if I journeyed into that particular bliss blindly. In my home, there was never ‘the talk,’ so when my twelve-year old friends and I entered an abandoned house on the far side of a community woods and found a collection of Penthousemagazines, to say my world was shaken to its foundation is a massive understatement.
At fifteen, I rebelled against the establishment, went to K-Mart and purchased a poster of The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas, which I pinned to the wall at the foot of my bed and waited. Silence… It was the only reprimand that came from my action, the same stoic suffering that my entire family has practiced since it came to Indiana through the Cumberland Gap in 1840.
Visually, buying into the selling of sex was forefront in my mind, and I got to see first-hand the balance trying to be struck in my new gaming passion, Dungeons & Dragons, concerning the female form in fantasy. In the late 70s, selling sex was something that TSR was willing to take a shot at in black and white illustrations by Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, or Bill Willingham, but then the Bible belt constricted a notch in the 80s and they pulled back from this ideal. Still, beautiful women in questionable clothing crept into the covers of Elmore, Easley, Parkinson, and of course the ‘thigh-master’ himself Clyde Caldwell.
Are we the only two left in Final Fantasy XI? Yes, but at least we look good together my love...
You can never go home again, or at least I believe that’s the saying. I tend to agree, as my home town in NowhereVille Indiana stands as a shining example of the power that ‘getting out’ has on a person’s life. Still, when I do make it ‘home’ — and yes, although I’ve lived in four other states and half a dozen apartments, condos, and houses longer than the days where I spent my youth, my mother’s house on the Tippecanoe is still my home — I can breathe easy like nowhere else in the world. [On a sad note, someone recently related to me that maturity is achieved the day you lose your last parent because you are truly on your own. I’ve luckily not reached that level of independence, and certainly that is why my mother’s house still holds such warmth, because there I’m still the child, and who doesn’t like being the child once in a while?]
Honestly, I could shed tears as I write such profound revelations, as I think about home, three thousand miles from the City of Angels and all the chaos that goes with it, but I won’t. Instead, I want to try to translate that same feeling to another venue, that being the art of the quickly disappearing MMORPG.
Before I can truly begin to talk about the vanishing, however, I suppose I should first discuss life. On the 16th of March, 1999, Sony’s 989 Studios released Everquest and the world of online gaming was never the same. Sure, Ultima Online had been around since 1997, but it never stole gamers’ attention and basked in the world spotlight like Everquest, or ‘Evercrack’ as it was called by many because of its addictive qualities.
This game, eventually wrapped into the Sony Online Entertainment bundle, had hundreds of thousands of registered players by 2004. Somewhat unbelievably, thirteen years later, another expansion for the game appeared this November [2012], but like most games of its kind, the death throes can be a long and lonely road.
These are my people, and I love them dearly, but when Neil Gaiman is our beauty 'ringer', we've got problems!
In a bout of good humor, I bring to you today a topic that has been on my mind for some time and finally reached a writable level whilst viewing an image of this year’s winners of the Hugo Awards for writing.
What could have gotten you so motivated by said picture, you might ask? Well, it drove home the point that I have a theory artists are prettier than writers, and by a large margin. I mean, kudos to writers like China Mieville and Joe Abercrombie for swinging for the fences of rugged or charming beauty, but sadly two home runs can’t bring up the collective batting average of an entire team.
Now surely your hackles are up at such a broad brush [yes, pun intended!] and callously superficial statement, but remember this before you go finding a rope and a solid branch of a tree, I’m also writer!
Therefore, I attest this whole line of thought has to be like Chris Rock blasting African Americans, or Foxworthy busting Rednecks, right?
Well, I’m going with it, so just try to have some fun along the way because that is all this is really about!
There was this time in my misty past, well before that advent of cable television in my home, when I didn’t have access to giant robots. During those dark days of the 1970s, when I was sick and had to stay home from school, my mother would drive me early in the morning to my grandmother’s trailer before she had to go to work. It was there, snuggled on an old floral patterned couch, that for at least an hour each day I achieved a moment of pure heaven.
I can well remember the incredible color of her small television as it displayed Star Blazers and Thunderbirds cartoons in those wee hours of weekday mornings. God, how it made being sick SO worth it, and during those episodes I grew to love space even more than I did when I watched Star Wars.
Fast forward to 1986, cable having found its way to my household as well as a wonder of wonders in a new piece of technology called a VCR. My oldest friend Mark (then a new friend), having just introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, told me that there was this program on at 7 AM each morning called Robotech and I ‘had to watch it.’
Where Star Blazers began as a child’s infatuation, Robotech took things to the next level in a true love affair. I mean, I was just 15, couldn’t program a VCR (I mean who could, right?), and got my tired teenage butt up before 7 every day for a year so I could record every single episode personally.
When old is new again: The reprints of 1E AD&D by WotCAlmost two years ago I got fed up with rules. Well, sure, I’ve probably never been one to take rules seriously anyway, but in RPGs they can become cumbersome very quickly. This is probably one of the biggest knocks on D&D 3rd Edition, although I was still taken with the game the moment I laid eyes on it.
Since 2000, I’d regularly played 3rd Edition in some form or other, either in 3.5 or Pathfinder, and found the boundless customizations, prestige classes, skills, and feats an addictive agent as my gaming world grew. Still, at some point, all the calculations begin to wear on you and you long for the ‘good old days’ when leveling up a character meant rolling for hit points, checking every third level to see if your saving throws went down, or adding a spell or two.
This feeling of being overburdened came to a head in 2011 as I decided I’d take down my long unused and dusty 1E AD&Dtomes from the shelf where they looked longingly at me day after day. There, amid the wonder of my youth, I rediscovered the simplicity of the original Gygax and Arneson texts.
Before I get into this, I want to throw out a disclaimer. I don’t know anyone’s true costs or bottom line, only what I can hypothesize from my own experiences in running Kickstarters and cost research in the areas in question. Certainly, costs can be mitigated to some degree by large volume orders, current pre-existing stock of product,’creative’ accounting, etc.
