Themes are go! New stretch goals revealed...
over 3 years ago – Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 07:50:01 AM

Hey folks!

We smashed the first stretch goal of £7500, so I can now confirm that we'll have original music coming in from Chris after the campaign. We've already been chatting over influences & direction, and I'm looking forward to when we can share something :)

New Stretch Goals

So, onto the next stretch goals. Since we're not too far away from the second one, I'll announce the third as well :)

£10,000 - Two brand-new character playbooks from guest collaborators. I'm really excited at the prospect of working with these two talented designers. They will be expanding my original set of six character roles to eight, giving you more choice during the setup of your station. Both designers bring a really unique perspective into the game, and it should be really fun to see what they come up with!

•  Viditya R Voleti (Twitter, Itch). Viditya is a QPoC game designer, interactive artist, writer and self-proclaimed king of goblins. I've liked his work for ages, but the game that really sealed the deal for me was Space Between Stars. In his own words, "Space Between Stars is a collaborative storytelling roleplaying game about characters who are the crew of a spaceship exploring an unstable universe, dealing with their own internal issues and growing together through shared experiences, one job at a time". Spaceships? Collaborative stories? Internal strife & growth? Sounds like a perfect complement to ORBITAL!
•  Jay Dragon (Twitter, Itch). Jay is an ENnie winning designer and director of Possum Creek Games, currently working with a whole host of friends to bring the beautiful (and astonishingly successful!) Wanderhome into the world. If you somehow haven't seen it already, Wanderhome is a "pastoral fantasy tabletop RPG about traveling animal-folk and the way they change with the seasons". I'm hoping we can capture a little of the tender magic spilling from that project to help bring a little warmth to the cold vacuum of space (though, Jay, if you're burned out on gentle vibes and wanna go a little darker, all power to you! 😂).

£12,500 - More music! An ambient soundtrack. If we can hit this stretch goal, I'll bring Chris back a second time to record a series of ambient / cinematic tracks to play while you're actually running scenes in the game. I think music has the potential to really elevate a tabletop session when properly applied, and crafting custom tracks especially for the game should go a long way towards making that easy. Each track will be available as both looping and single-play versions, so you can enjoy them however suits you best.

A quick shoutout!

Mnemonic, a super interesting RPG project with a big focus on world building and shared memories, is really close to hitting its goal. I'd encourage you to take a look not only because it looks like a rad game (!), but also because it was a direct inspiration for the way we're handling community copies with ORBITAL. The whole concept of community copies within the indie RPG scene was popularised by the Mnemonic team, and this new evolution takes the idea even further.

Fundamentally, it's about making sure that nobody gets left out. It allows designers to charge fair prices for their work without excluding those who can't afford to pay. I believe it's the best of both worlds!

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Thanks again everyone,

J

Milestones & playbooks!
over 3 years ago – Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 07:49:43 AM

Hey folks, I hope you had a good weekend. We had a bank holiday here in England, and while we had some of the coldest August weather on record (!), we still had a nice little break.

Milestones

Since the last update, we've hit a number of milestones with the project:

• We're now over 200% funded.
• We've got over 1000 backers.
• The guest playbook stretch goal from Viditya & Jay has been met.

So yeah, a good weekend!

Playbooks

So what do playbooks actually look like in ORBITAL? If you've played a No Dice, No Masters game before (like Dream Askew), you'll find a lot of it recognisable. It also owes a great debt to the innovations of designers like Jay Dragon, Riley Rethal and Luke of games from the wild wood (among many others), who've evolved the original playbook structure over the course of their games. Let's take a look at a draft playbook I've put together — one of my favourites, The Heart.

The playbook is split into three columns, and you mainly read from left to right as you progress through character selection, creation and use in play.

The left column has an introduction to the character, summarising the archetype and the sort of challenges you might face. It also has some guidance on playing the character, including a set of principles to follow while playing (your agenda) and some questions to think about while you play.

The central column is all about creating your character. Making characters in this system is super fun & quick because you just go down the column making choices from the lists as instructed. There are no mechanical stats or abilities to determine, though some of your choices will of course impact the narrative options you have in play. As you go each through this process, you're encouraged to talk about your choices with the rest of the table to spark ideas and connections. Maybe one of your key relationship characters (NPCs) is the same person described in another playbook (so The Heart's 'drunk I owe my life' and The Source's 'cantankerous infirm mother' might be the same person!). By the time you've completed this column, you should have a good idea of the sort of person your character is, including what they look like, what their life is like and where they can be found.

The right column is about further connecting your character to those your friends have made, and also to the story you're all telling together. You'll ask questions to each other to establish relationships between your characters, and you'll also choose how your character is connected to the big, central threat that you'll create when you make your station together. In this way, you should be able to quickly get to the point where all of your characters can be in scenes together, working to prevent catastrophe (or, y'know, just hanging out!).

The right column is also where you'll find your moves, which you use in play to shape the narrative. While playing a scene, you can use these short prompts to empower your character to take action in the scene. They're designed to be flexible enough to be used in a number of situations, while also meaty enough to inspire you as you read down the list. My favourite Heart move is one of their strong moves (which require you to have earned a token in some way); 'Bring adversaries together over a shared meal.'. I've seen this used twice now in two very different situations, and it never fails to make a memorable scene!

So there we are. I'm continuing to iterate & develop the playbooks for ORBITAL, and I'm also happy to announce that Luke (of the aforementioned games from the wild wood) will be joining the project as a design consultant. Luke will be bringing their wealth of experience with the system to bear on my rules & playbooks to ensure they're in the best shape they can be. So you might see some changes to content or layout in the final version. But hopefully this gives you an idea of how you'll create & use your character in the game.

Please feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Cheers,

J

Funded in 10 hours!
over 3 years ago – Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 01:30:05 PM

 wow.

Uh, so, hi! Jack here.

I had some 'second album' anxiety about this one, especially because ORBITAL is quite a different game from Artefact. But wow—funded in 10 hours! Thank you all so much.

This initial funding goal includes the printing of the book with stitched binding, metallic inks & premium papers, and it also covers the cost of the illustrations, editing, sensitivity reading & accessibility design. I'm so happy it's all gonna happen now!

So what's next?

Well, I do have a few stretch goals in mind... Like Artefact, the goal with most of them is to add depth to the core experience, bringing in work from a number of different creative disciplines.

The first of these, which I'm extremely happy to share with you, comes from Artefact composer Christopher Michael Roberts. Yes, folks, we're getting some original music for ORBITAL!

Chris is going to be making themes for each of the six character roles and six setting elements in the game — short pieces of music to be played as you introduce each of them around the table. I think it's going to really help draw you in to the different playbooks, and no doubt encourage you to do your best 'hollywood trailer' voices as you read them out loud...

And, well, if you think I might be Chris's biggest fan in part because he's, y'know, one of my best friends (!)—you'd probably be right. So don't listen to me, listen to Shut Up & Sit Down:

"(about the Artefact soundtrack) It’s as far from kind of like… kind of whatever trad board game music is, than you can get. It’s really quite something. I would encourage that people check out this game, if just for the music. I think it’s wonderful." - Tom Brewster, SU&SD

So yeah. I'm excited. And even better, we've already almost smashed through this stretch goal target, which is £7500.

Thanks again for all your support. I'm really excited at the prospect of sharing more stretch goals with you soon.

J

A quick correction!

I copied some of the text for the ORBITAL rewards over from Artefact, and in my lazy editing I forgot to change the estimated retail price for the Digital Edition. It'll be $12 after the campaign, not $10! Not a big deal, but it certainly makes that tier seem like less of a bad deal! Unfortunately I can't change it now the campaign is live. Oh well!