WILD - Kickstarter update

 

First of all, many, MANY thanks to everyone who has backed, shared, and supported the WILD Kickstarter. It's been going so much better than I'd ever dreamed, and we're edging ever closer to the important stretch goal to get Gareth Sleightholme to do the tarot art for the book (and then it's just a little further to get the cards printed too!)

The Focused Diplomat card
art by Gareth Sleightholme

Gareth's artwork will make the game so much better, and he's already been putting extra research into the imagery and symbolism of the traditional tarot cards to incorporate into the new WILD versions.

The Kickstarter has already blown past a few stretch goals, meaning the game is going to grow by another 20pgs, which is great because I woke this morning with a new clarity (if you pardon the pun) of all the extra stuff that needs to be in these pages, which will open the game up to many, many more dreamscape adventures. 

There will also be digital tools which mean you can play online with a digital version of the tarot deck, so you can draw cards, get additional information about the cards (and hopefully audio description of the cards for those who would like it). 

There will be some other cool extras as well including a user manual for the dreamshare device, and an additional adventure of corporate espionage written by Stoo, who has helped bring WILD to life as well as running the playtests.

It's been an exciting week and a bit so far, and another couple of weeks of WILD lay ahead. Hopefully we'll raise the extra funds required for those cards and the art. Fingers crossed. 

If you haven't already, please check out the Kickstarter here - spread the word!

If you want to hear Stoo and me talking about WILD, check out this livestream that aired with The Dark Orb last night. 

Until next time, stay safe.

Coming SATURDAY 14th NOVEMBER - WILD: Training Dive Simulation

 

Mock up cover for WILD - Art by Qistina Khalidah - 3D Mock up by Will Brooks

It is just a few days away, but WILD is heading to Kickstarter. I mentioned in the previous post, that the Training Dive Simulation - a starter into the world (and dreamworlds) of WILD would be heading to Kickstarter soon, and soon it is! Saturday to be precise. 14th November 2020.

It's a bit like that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail - "People said we were mad to launch a Kickstarter in November" but if this year has proved anything - we still need to dream. And to have dreams of something better.

With the American Presidential Election producing such a *hopefully* positive result (c'mon man, just concede, it's embarrassing) those dreams of something better seem to be making their way into reality. And the hopes of a vaccine against this awful virus means there's a little light at the end of this horrible tunnel of a year. 

Anyway, enough rambling. WILD is coming. As I said before, it's a great introduction to the game and can be played solo, or in a group with or without a GM. And it's different every time you play. If this one is successful, I've got expansions planned that will build upon this to reveal the dreamscapes, dreams within dreams, the collective unconscious, the incursions into the waking world... Oh the plans... 

But first, we need to get this one launched and funded! If it's successful enough, there will be a dedicated WILD Tarot set to go along with it! So, even if you're not keen, or can't afford it right now, please spread the word when it launches on Saturday.

Head over to the Kickstarter page, and you can be notified the moment it launches.

And head over to WILDRPG.com for more insights as the Kickstarter (hopefully) progresses. 

Thank you everyone. Stay safe, and keep dreaming.

Coming soon to KICKSTARTER - WILD

 

It's been a few years since my last post - at least it seems like it. What a year. As I type this, millions of Americans are casting their votes, millions of Brits prepare for another lockdown to keep this virus under control, and the world seems to be going crazy.

In the middle of all this, I've been writing the new edition of Doctor Who for Cubicle 7, and my good friend Stoo Goff has decided that he's going to Kickstart WILD - my roleplaying game of dreamshare technology. The game I've been working on for the last eight or nine years... Finally... 

Yes, it's filling me with equal amounts of relief (for finally getting it out there) and terror (what if no one likes it?) But it's moving. And sooner than you think. Hopefully, all going well, the Kickstarter will launch this month. 

The Kickstarter will be for WILD - Training Dive Simulation. It's the full rules you need to play, with simple character creation. You can use these to do whatever you like with the game - however it comes with a scenario where you play as a new trainee at ClarIT, the company behind the dreamshare technology. As part of your training you get to experience the first dreamshare experiment - when the creator of the device went into the dreamstate of his comatose daughter with the hopes of waking her. 

In the narrative of the game, he failed, and was trapped in the dreamscape with her - only when his ex-wife entered the dreamrealms did Clarity wake and everyone was freed from their unconscious state.

This simulation can be played traditionally with a group and a GM (or DreamMaster), without a GM, or even solo as a journalling game. The scenario unfolds through the draw of tarot cards (as does any conflict resolution), so you can play the simulation multiple times and every one will be different. 

Of course, as the system is all in here, imaginative gamers can take those concepts and run with it - creating dreamscapes and worlds of their own.

I just hope you all like it. 

Head over to the Kickstarter page here and you can sign up to be notified the moment the Kickstarter launches. Thank you for taking a look!

Head over to www.wildrpg.com for more, and stay tuned for updates.

Above all, take care of yourselves. Stay safe. Vote if you're able.

Dream of a better future.

WILD Dev Diary 3 - Pages and Pages

It's WILD Wednesday again, and first a little update.

This time last year I was building up to Dragonmeet. My idea was to print a pitch book that I could take with me to the convention and show to prospective publishers to show what I had in mind, to see if I could convince someone to help with a Kickstarter or other such launch. To put some money into the project to pay for some cool artwork (always a major selling point) and to help with the business end of the game's development and publication.

While my art skills are not great, I thought the book itself came out pretty well.

Within the book's pages was a summary of what the game setting was like, how I hoped the game would work, and how I envisioned the line developing and progressing - supplements and additional books, etc.

I also provided a sample from one of the chapters (character creation) so you could see how the book was structured, and how it was worded - explaining everything with parallel narratives.

Some of the sample text from within the pitch book

I thought it looked cool, and I talked to a couple of people about it at Dragonmeet. Some parties were interested, but we'll see if anything comes from that.

I talk about WILD a lot on this blog, so I figured I'd take some of the text from this pitch and place it in an easily accessible place. The buttons at the top of the page take you to my Facebook, Twitter, etc. There's a button for the Harry Potter pitch, and there's one for the WILD RPG. That takes you to a static page that I'll keep updating and expanding upon which is basically the text from the pitch book. I've put the setting information on there to start with, while I finish off the rules. Head over there and check it out if you like. I hope it gets you interested and keen to explore the WILD world a little deeper.

Who knows what this year's Dragonmeet will bring?

-

Meanwhile, my usual WILD Wednesday post is to look through the old Dev Diary that I've been carrying around for the last 7+ years.

We're still quite near the beginning, so a lot of this has changed, but it does seem like my love of square books was already showing only a few pages in. With the idea of a square book within a normal RPG sized box, which gives you space at the top for the cards/dice/etc. Of course, this is back when I was thinking of dice...

Opposite that are some early sketches of devices I'd seen in movies that read brainwaves. Looks like I was doodling the Squid device from the fantastic Strangedays movie. Ralph Fiennes was frakking amazing in that one.

Next few pages, I seem to have made some notes about Objects and Locations as Metaphors. Must remember that...

After a discussion of what happens to injuries over levels of dreaming, I made a few notes while sitting in the local library on my lunch hours. Looking at dream research and scribbling some bits about recording information from a sleeper using EEG, EOG and EMG.

This continues for a bit looking at the parts of the brain that are active during dreaming. This eventually lead to me changing how the tech looked to become a headband with elements that went behind the ears to stimulate the right parts of the frontal lobes, and the hippocampus at the core. Of course, I'm not a scientist so a lot of this is lost on me. If there are any neuroscientists out there who want to chip in, feel free.

Okay, that's enough waffling from me for a week. Until next time, dream big.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

I thought, with it being Halloween week, I'd write about a movie that I've always thought was the biggest influence on my writing for the WILD RPG. No, not Inception, though that's the one that really got me writing the game itself...

No, I thought I'd write about a scary movie that completely opened my eyes to dreams as a game device - Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The UK Movie Poster, which was also the cover of the VHS I bought back in the 80s (I still have that somewhere)...

The only problem is, I started to look into Elm St... It was a long, long time ago, and I noticed that it came out the same year as another movie that was a huge influence on me as well... Dreamscape.

And now I can't remember which one I saw first.

So I'll credit them both with being the biggest influences on WILD.

There's a good chance I saw Dreamscape first as I was a massive Indiana Jones fan (Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first VHS tape I bought as it was one of the first VHS movies to come out at a retail level immediately - and I ended up buying Temple of Doom as a new Rental VHS which cost a fortune... saving, paying for it in advance instalments at my local video rental store... yes, I was that big an Indy nerd). Anyway, I was a big fan of Indiana Jones, and there was this movie coming out that had Kate Capshaw in it - the underrated Willie Scott from Temple of Doom. You could tell someone in the movie's marketing thought "you know, that actor from Indiana Jones is in this movie, let's market it like one of those films..."

Jump on that Indiana Jones bandwagon why don't you?
The amazing Drew Struzan again. I miss movie posters like this...

Original UK VHS Cover

Dreamscape is far from being an Indiana Jones movie. Dennis Quaid plays Alex Gardner, a psychic who is brought into a research project to project himself into the dreams of others to try to help them overcome night terrors. He stumbles upon a plot by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), a government agent using his psychic agents to implant dreams of nuclear terror into the mind of the President, and aiming to assassinate him in his dreams. Gardner sets out to stop the plot, save the President, and aid the nuclear peace process.

Sure the special effects have dated a bit, but the plot's great. It was a revelation at the time for me, and I found the idea of going into other people's dreams fascinating.

If you haven't seen it, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Then, a matter of months later, the TV channels in the UK started running ads for A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The ads were really creepy, and had a lot of the iconic imagery that you expect from Elm St now - Johnny Depp getting swallowed by the bed, Amanda Wyss spinning around in the air, Freddy walking through the cell bars... I was very intrigued. I managed to rent the VHS the day it was released. I have a weird memory of watching it around at one of the game group's house, Milo's I think.

I was mesmerised. Genuinely scary, but when the line between dreaming and reality blurred - when Nancy falls asleep in class but class continues as a weird dreamscape... And the concept of grabbing something in the dream and waking, pulling it into the waking world... I loved it.

I mentioned before on this blog that I attempted to run A Nightmare on Elm Street as a Call of Cthulhu game for my unsuspecting players, but I don't know if it worked. I seem to remember it not going so well, once characters started dying...

Thirty-plus years later, and I'm still fascinated by dreams, and, along with Inception, these movies continue to be an inspiration for my game writing.

WILD Dev Diary 2 - Current Structures and Past Inspirations

Last blog post I explained that I had a notebook filled with every note, inspiration and working-out I had since I started writing WILD, my RPG of dreamshare technology.

Seeing as the builders next door are using pneumatic drills to dig up concrete, my concentration for actually working on WILD is a bit fried, so I thought I'd continue my look at the old notes and see what I'd put.

My next couple of pages are a list of films, TV series and books that I considered inspiration for WILD. You'd probably recognise a lot of them as ones I mention frequently on this blog.

Inception, Suckerpunch, The Matrix, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, Dreamscape, Sleepwalkers (TV Series), Assassin's Creed, Cell, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mulholland Drive, Ink, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The City of Lost Children, eXistenZ, Life on Mars, Parasomnia, The Bridge (Banks), Awake (TV Series), Fringe, Lost, Vanilla Sky/Open Your Eyes, Paperhouse, Escape Into Night, Twin Peaks, House of Sleep...

I haven't gone back and added to this list in a while, and there have been a few I should add. Must do that.

On the next page, I have a list that just says - "To Look At:"

Under that, is "Dream Journals" - something I've done a bit of research into, especially considering the idea of solo gameplay in the WILD universe that involves journaling.
"Lucid Dreaming" - well, that kinda goes without saying, but this was early in the notes.
"False Awakenings" - done so many times in horror movies... "That was a horrible dream, ah, jump scare!"
"Eckankar" - a modern religion whose followers believe that the soul can leave the body and travel to other planes of reality.
"Interobjects" - the dream phenomena of encountering an object that is the merging of two objects but it's incomplete.
"Pre-lucid dreaming" - near lucid dreaming.
"Veridical Dreams" - prophetical dreams, or dreams that contain real events that the dreamer is unaware of.

After that is the page from the photo at the top. The Stages of Sleep (NonREM or NREM) through to REM.

I drew this weird doodle of what I thought the dreamrealms would look like, but it's nonsense. Just the doodles of an idle mind.

--

That's enough of that for this entry I think. Don't want you getting bored.

CURRENT STATE OF PLAY

I mentioned before that I had a restructure of how the game works, and the game system itself, and I thought I was pretty happy with the way it was working out. I kinda came to a grinding halt actually writing it, trying to get it down on paper. I'd got the basics of it down, and I thought the best way to describe it was to give an example of the system in action.

The Matrix, obviously not WILD... 

So I had a basic example of a hacker trying to get information out of a computer before the guards arrived, and started writing how the "roll" works - I put "roll" in quotes as it's actually a pretty simple card draw looking at some tarot cards.

Then I thought - why make up the results just to show what happens? Why not actually draw cards and type it up? Win or lose, it explains everything.

A couple of draws, and our hero had failed to get the information - three guards burst into the room and she was trapped. Another draw, and she'd kicked one through the office door, smashing the glass, and punched another in the face. Another draw, and she'd managed to knock the second guard out, but the third guard got a shot off, and she was injured from the hit. A third draw, and while she managed to dive to get the memory stick as the guard continued to fire at her, he clipped her in the shoulder and she crumpled to the floor. She was alive, but captured. The memory stick hidden for now...

The "rolls" were super quick, the whole scene resolved in a matter of minutes with action playing out in a smooth flow.

Excellent.

I'm happy with the way the game system works, I just need to try to structure the rules so they are (a) interesting, and (b) easy to refer to - though the rules are so simple you'll remember it pretty quickly.

Right, I guess I should get back to it.

Until next time.

Keep dreaming.

WILD Dev Diary 1

Synchronicity has a knack of sneaking up on you and before you realise it, the universe has given you multiple signs that all point to the same thing.

First of all, I'm back to working on WILD. I'd had a bit of a break from it while I did some commissioned work on Doctor Who, but now I'm back to getting my head into the dreamrealms. Returning to it when I've had a break from it, I started to see ways to fix it, make it work better, and that involved tweaking the game system rather dramatically.

Second bit of synchronicity came from reading a handful of articles and listening to a couple of cool podcasts about game design and publishing. Most of them included a comment about keeping people interested in what you were working on by publishing a regular "Development Diary", so your potential audience and players could see how the game was progressing, the thoughts behind your design decisions and so on. And while I've been posting the odd update here and there about how WILD was progressing, these articles and podcasts lead me to think I wasn't doing it regularly enough.

And then, the third bit of synchronicity came on Sunday. It rained. I mean, it RAINED. It looked like the fight scene at the end of The Matrix Revolutions. It was hard to actually see through the rain. And, being the fool I am, was walking home from the dayjob in it. No raincoat, no umbrella. Just my suit jacket. And a hat... By the time I got home, my clothes were plastered to me. I hung my jacket up, and it dripped so much water I had to put newspaper under it. Two days later, and it was still wet, and will need a clean.

Inside that jacket, in the inside pocket, was my notebook. An A6 Moleskine-a-like made by popular stationery chain Rymans. This notebook as not left my side in many years. It is where I started formulating the ideas for WILD, making notes of how the game would work, how dreams work, key ideas of dream research, psychology, and inspiration from all sources.

It's like a backup of my brain - all the many ideas that I need to write down so I don't forget, they're all in there. And after the downpour - after my complete drenching - it was a little damp.

Luckily, it was just the black cover that was wet, and the pages were untouched. Lucky.

This reminded me of something I'd planned on doing for many moons - writing up some of my ideas and thoughts as a Developer Diary, so not only you could see how my brain got from "Wow, I should make a tabletop RPG of dreamshare technology" to where I am now, but also so I have a backup of what I've scribbled down, and can remind myself of ideas I noted down many years ago that I may have forgotten all about.

And so begins my Dev Diary posts. Hopefully, this will be fairly regular - and it'll get me writing and thinking more and more about WILD.

--

 Let's make a start, and look at the first page in the Dev Diary! This is really going back a bit. I have a distinct memory of coming out of the cinema after watching Inception and my head was full of ideas of dream sharing and why there wasn't a game that did that.

I was reminded of the game I ran in my late teens that was based on A Nightmare on Elm St, and how obsessed I was with the third movie - Dream Warriors - and how the characters all appeared in one dream to tackle the evil. And how I loved Dreamscape, and The Matrix, and how I really wanted to write a cool game that captured that feeling.

So I bought this notebook and started jotting down some ideas - each idea has a little box next to it to categorise it so I could keep track of which ones were [Game System] or [Setting], and so on.

A lot of these notes were made sitting in the library, opposite my dayjob, when I'm desperate to escape from the mundane work on my lunch hour and just think about what I'd rather be doing.

That first spread (and the pages that follow) are me randomly writing down ideas that I needed to remember:

[Game System] Do dreams have a number of points for their stability? The more fantastic the elements in the dream, the more likely the dreamer will realise it is a dream and it will collapse, but is this just for people who are untrained and unaware that they are asleep? What about people who have gone in fully aware?

[Note] How much of a dream is remembered upon waking? Some seem to be lost instantly, while others can always be recalled.

[Why?] Why are dreams being explored? Is there a Collective Unconscious? Maybe not so much Sandman-esque dream-realms, but maybe more like Tron - where multiple dreamers, using the technology, have formed distinctive locations through repeated visits. 

[Note] Without the machines can you enter someone nearby's dream maybe through will, etc.? Maybe part of the plot would have to be getting the device onto a target without alarms. (Dreamscape)

[Note] Powerful enough dreamers bringing objects out of the dream realms into reality. (Elm St, Paprika)

[Note] Doing it without a device, only through meditation. Drugs don't work, produce impure results.

[Game System] Maybe a dream has a number of Story Points? As the players use points to manipulate the dream to their own ends, they are used until the dream collapses. A dream within a dream uses a portion of this as well. Architect can increase and replenish a little, trying to hold the dream together until mission end. 

[Note] Actives need to be classified to be different from Projections - the "scenery" characters who are a figment of the dreamer's mind. Do these Projections act hostile against intruder Actives or is that too derivative? (Inception)

[Game System] Injury and death in the dream, does it result in waking or continuing injury into the real world, or both? A threshold for injury? When hit or injured a character needs to make a roll to resist waking... lighter injuries are ignored, but more severe injuries are carried over into the real world. Fatal injuries have a chance of waking - or dying in the dream like the folklore says.

[Scenes] Start in the middle of the action, never describe going to a location. Keep players on their toes.

--

That's the first few pages. More next time, which hopefully will be less segmented!