For a while now I’ve been meaning to start working up some feature articles for the site, The idea is to give the players of 7/13 a bit of insight into the way I design, run games, and basically what I’m working on. I suppose I’m fairly safe in the assumption that after well over a decade of being immersed in role-playing and having run games for over a hundred people all over the place that I know a bit of what I’m talking about. I don’t know everything, mind you, but I know enough.
What I’m working on right now is another section of the rants page for features involving insight into the design elements of Seven13, as well as a bit of info on why I do what I do and why I write it all out that way. You may find some useful information here for your own campaigns and you may not, but at least you may have a better understanding on why things in 7/13 are the way they are.
Look for the first feature soon.
Lemme tell you first folks, driving Boston, MA is a friggin’ nightmare. It’s definitely designed for the foot-borne traveller. I pride myself on being a hell of a driver and whatnot, but it just doesn’t help that much. Next to Boston, driving through New York was a dream (though I didn’t drive directly through the city). That having been said though, the Compleat Strategist was a nice place with an excellent selection of books (and yes, Felix, that is the way it’s spelled). I got to talking with some nice folks and got a couple of books off my hands as usual. I stayed a couple nights in Danvers, MA, just a bit west of good old Salem. Yes folks, that Salem – the witch trials place.
I spent most of my morning today in Salem hanging out around town and checking out the area. It’s a beautiful town with some excellent architecture. Not to mention it’s the one place where you can openly be a heathen and everyone’s perfectly alright with that. I suppose they figure after hanging a few folks 300 or so years ago they owe us or something. Funny thing is, all of that business dealt with their own good Christian brothers and sisters. I sincerely doubt a sinlge pagan was among those. Generally, folks, that’s because most of us pagans would have packed up and left town long before, assuming any of us would have it in our heads to live with the Puritans in the first places. I for one think that perhaps the reason for all the mass hysteria there was based on the simple fact that the puritan lifestyle wasn’t even remotely entertaining. I mean, if you take a look at the lifestyle regulations at the time, rustling up some craziness was bound to happen sooner or later. I spent a good time at an awesome shop called the Broom closet there talking with some modern day witches (of the Wicca persuasion), who were completely un-pretentious (often such nonsense is a staple of modern witches) and totally cool. If you happen to stop through Salem, check out the Broom Closet…nice pagans and a fabulous selection of genuinely useful stuff for those of you who practice the Craft (I personally swing a different way for religion, but this was an awesome shop for Wicca). Other than that they carried some typical tourist stuff, but you gotta make a buck.
Salem and Danvers were good for selling books as well. As a matter of fact, I’m almost sold out of what I brought along for the tour so it’s been a good run, which is excellent because costs for the Northeast were way over what I expected. The drive into Maine was awesome – I took the coastline road off Rt 1 and stopped in Ogunquit at the beach and took some very nice pictures. Unfortunately, I also dropped my cell phone into the Atlantic amidst all of this. Salt water and electronics is bad news folks. For a fun fact, though, Ogunquit is the town in Maine where Harold and Fran are from in Stephen King’s The Stand. If you haven’t read that one, you should.
That’s all for now though – I’m at Crossroad Games here in Maine tomorrow and, after that, I believe I’m headed back to the heat of Texas for a while before heading up through the Rockies on my next tour. I know I’ve been talking features for this site and more updates of this and that, but a lot of that will have to wait until I get home. Until next time…
– Ashe
You know, it’s always interesting to me when I’m out up at the local coffee house working and someone says “Hey man, chill out a bit…you work for yourself after all.†Therein lies the funny bit about owning your own business: yes, you get to make your own hours…the problem is all of those hours are work hours.I’ve been working from when I get up pretty much to when I crash out at some odd hour for more than a month now – often more than 18 hours a day. That’s some long hours folks, but I’m not on here to whine about it. I love what I do. Sure, I hate programming and I had to code pretty much all of the website you’re looking at now, but in the end I love gaming. I’m a gamer before I’m a game designer or manufacturer and I wanted a site that gives off more of a community feel than the typical gaming company. I wanted the forum to integrate with the site and I wanted all of you to be able to comment here on the rants without having to make a new account and whatnot. These are pretty small things, but they’re important to me because I care what you guys think about the game. I’ve always been of the opinion that once (as a designer) you release a game it’s no longer yours – it belongs to everyone who plays it. I hope once the book gets out that I’ll see more folks on here working with me on the Wiki site (I’ll be putting more into it soon) and whatnot. I hope that most of the site integrations work as well (drop a line if you find a problem) and I hope to see a lot of you on the tour in the next few months. Keep checking here for the tour dates and diary.
- Ashe
Well I suppose it’s time to get things going again. I know it’s been a long damn time since I’ve been on this, or since I’ve updated the site or anything. I’d say I’ve been working like mad, but I really haven’t. Sure, I’m working on the next two Seven13 books and promotional stuff for the CoE tour, but I’ve also been taking a bit of a break. It took me the better part of fourteen years to get 7/13:CoE to press and by the end of the month I’ll have it in my hand. It’s a massive thing, doing that and after all of that work I decided to chill out for a bit. There may have actually been a few days in there that I might not have done any work on some aspect of Broken Doll Studios at all, But probably not. Mainly I’ve just been taking a bit of time to reflect on everything. Probably I’m going to do a lot of overhauling on the site soon, including this part of it. Likely also I’ll be getting right back into the thick of things as soon as the book hits. I’m releasing it in July and I’m handling all of my own distribution, but I’ve already broken major ground on getting it carried in all of the national chains. So look for it out there folks and find an independent retailer to bug about carrying it. If you have one, shoot me their info and I’ll send them promo stuff as soon as I get it. It’s all well and good to be carried in the national and worldwide booksellers, but I much prefer the underground, I’ve always been more at home there. Sometime soon, I’ll start doing all of the rants again. Until then, Keep the Memory, Live in the Now, Believe in the Dream.
Walk in Balance,
Ashe
Well after way too long I finally got the website close to the way I like it with this blog site and the forums. Right now i’m working and kinda actually debating on the Wiki section of the site. The problem I’m facing with allowing everyone to post their own characters/angles and ideas is the whole intellectual property thing. I mean, most folks are generally cool about everything and whatnot, but there’s always that one chance that we’ll put out a supplement a year from now that was in production for forever only to have someone sue us for intellectual property rights to some obscure reference from something on the Wiki project site. So, I’m gonna have to whip up a disclaimer or something or other before I go that far just to cover my/the company’s ass. But if I can be secure in that it’ll be a hellofa site.
Page layouts are 70% on the finals. All 13 chapters are laid out and ready for proofreading before print, barring the need for a few more pieces of artwork that are currently still in production. After that it’s the Appendices and then off to the presses.
The Quickstart rules are on hold right now. I can’t decide quite what I want to do with them yet. Originally the idea was to make a PDF, then I decided to go to the WIki site with them but now it’s kinda up in the air. So bear with me folks, aside from the artists I contract,, I’m pretty much the only one who works here.
– Ashe
Well this is the rant page as it is thus far. I’ll probaby try and work on it in my spare time, but PHP gives me headaches and so this will probably work for now.
Check this site frequently if you like for posts regarding all types of stuff from myself and the other Broken Doll Crew members and feel free to comment if you like.
– Ashe
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