The Good, the Bad, and the Con
over 2 years ago – Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 10:43:58 PM

Bad News

We're looking at an unavoidable 2-3 month delay in the production schedule. I'm really sorry about it, but it is fundamentally unavoidable. This is also going to result in the scenarios being pushed back to a similar degree.

Fundamentally, unforeseeable risks are part and parcel of projects like this. Recent news means I'm going to be unable to work for at least one month of my planned schedule on this project, and far more likely 2-4. Rather than rushing the project and being unhappy with the end result, I've decided to announce a delay early.

Good News

This delay is because I'm getting married in December. I will be moving to Virginia some time afterwards. It is going to be a big, fairly traditional, desi muslim wedding and so will be an involved, multi-week process. 

I suspect that moving in will also be less than conducive to a regular working schedule.

Big Bad Con

I am going to be at Big Bad Con! I'll be running tests of the Guns Blazing RPG and Wargame. Depending on how things go, I may also be running some other games I can't talk about. Sign ups go up tomorrow, so if you're going to Big Bad, sign up early to get a look at the game's next iteration.

Whether or not you sign up, if you come to Big Bad Con, stop by and say hello! Would love to meet any of you.

Alternate History and Guns Blazing's Europe Part 1
over 2 years ago – Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 12:54:48 PM

This update was meant to be a comprehensive overview of what the Alternate History genre is and why I made the calls I did for Guns Blazing.

Then it got unwieldy.

Now it's a broad overview of the genre and an introduction to our point of divergence for Europe in specific. There will be follow ups soon.

A Wholly Insufficient Overview of Alternate History

Alternate History as a genre is pretty self-explanatory: It's a genre of speculative fiction where history didn't go as we remember it, that explores the consequences of that divergence from our history. The most famous cases tend to be about world war 2, with the American civil war and napoleonic war as common follow-ups, but it's a varied genre, with a legacy technically going back to Herodotus' Histories and Livy insisting that the Romans definitely could have taken Alexander the Great. 

The goal of such works varies. Occasionally, it's used as a medium to reach some greater thematic point, or a simple exploration of seemingly clear points of divergence in history: "What if Alexander the Great had gone for Europe", "What if Lincoln hadn't been shot", and the like. Often enough, however, it's some combination of nationalistic, ideological, or utopian. An insistence upon a better world that might have been if things had gone differently. At least, according to the author.

For a depressing example, take the trend of post-soviet science fiction, which often posits some divergence or time travel that results in the Soviet Union defeating the West, occasionally with a diversion to ally with the nazis depending on how unpleasant the author is.

Less depressing examples abound: A lot of early 20th century utopian was expressed through alternate histories of varying forms. From socialist world governments to an-cap minarchies to agrarian eco-states, speculative politics have often sold their vision of the world through the genre.

However, not everything with an alternate history is an alternate history work. Leaving aside mistakes. the genre assumes that the divergence is a focus of the piece. Similarly, a contemporary fiction piece doesn't become alternate history because the linear march of time rendered the present past-tense.

Kaguya's Mangaka would occasionally note that history in Kaguya was different to our own to explain worldbuilding decisions, but it's not what we would consider alternate history as the focus is on romantic comedy rather than alternate history specifics. Battletech has history diverge from our own in the 80s, but that was contemporary when it released.

For our purposes, when we're talking about an alternate history we want:

• A divergence
• Its Consequences
• A focus on the above

And that encapsulates what I like about the genre. It's an exploration of history's fragility. How easily, at any number of occasions, could the world have been rendered near-unrecognizable by the smallest of divergences. How easily, at any number of occasions, actions we take could cause those divergences echoing forward through the generations.

Naturally, the divergence we're focusing on today is disappearing Napoleon the First.

Let's Kill Napoleon

Guns Blazing's broad point of divergence is the emerging prominence and visibility of Jinn in the world. However, there are more specific points of divergence in various regions that lead to the alternate 1925 the game is set in. For Europe, the most prominent of these is simple: No Napoleon.

He's not necessarily dead. His fate is left purposefully ambiguous. Corsican politician, victim of Madame Guillotine, Ottoman mercenary, sailor...

There are a lot of possibilities. The important thing is that they didn't land him in the history books. And from there, we start charting changes. This simple change, for example, has direct and massive effects on:

• Spain
• Italy
• The Holy Roman Empire
• Haiti
• The United States
• The Ottoman Empire
• Mysore
• France
• Russia
• The Swiss Confederation
• Britain
• Poland
• And, let's face it, probably more.

Now, that Napoleon's absence could change a given country doesn't necessarily mean that it does. There are other factors pushing towards the fate of most of these countries: Italy's nationalistic unification, the fall of Mysore to the English, the collapse of the HRE, and the French demanding the reimposition of slavery all have broader societal causes than just Napoleon. But while removing Napoleon doesn't mandate a change, it brings up the possibility of one. And, in turn, the possibility of changes caused by these changes.

With our divergence set and first-order effects mapped, our next job is to extrapolate to 1925, when our game is set. One of the traditional ways to do this is to establish a timeline. We're not going to do that.

Never Trust a Timeline

Lots of Alternate History works will put together a sort of comprehensive timeline of their history, tracking individual changes through time that get the setting to its 'present.' Having read a lot of these, I think that this is a bad idea, and haven't done it for Guns Blazing.

A timeline is A) a significant investment in time, B) adds little to the main body of work, and C) every single entry is a chance to make a mistake.

Whenever you put something on a timeline, you have a chance of making a mistake that will annoy some of your readers or undermine the things that actually matter about your alternate history. It's easy to get dates or specifics of a biography wrong, to assume that a change is more minor than it is, or miss political factors that would lean heavily against an event you want to happen. The longer your timeline, the more mistakes compile. And, to be frank, what you're getting out of it isn't worth it.

The advantage of a timeline is that you've shown your work. A reader can look at it and see the exact route that got you from your point of divergence to the point you're actually writing about. The problem is that that's basically irrelevant to the quality of what you've done. If your Now is badly written, implausible, racist, or just dull, an accurate and detailed timeline won't save it. If your Now is an excellent exploration of what could have been, that you made errors in the background doesn't meaningfully hurt it.

All you need to do is provide enough details so that readers can piece together the changes and why they're important. A timeline will almost never help with that, and a fan-made timeline is much more satisfying to watch as people piece it together.

Europe in Guns Blazing

Western Europe isn't particularly in-focus in Guns Blazing. While the goings-on of colonial powers have oft-catastrophic side effects upon their oppressed subjects, the details are fuzzy and unimportant. Vague news about elections, wars, and strife. Maybe the British call up hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects to die in Europe. Maybe France extracts food in the middle of a famine to shore up the domestic economy. The what is more important than the why.

Eastern Europe, however, has more going on. The Ottoman Empire and Russia have conquered chunks of the region in centuries past, that are now yearning for freedom much like other parts of the world. Russia also has land borders with various Asian countries, making its people and politics more directly relevant.

But we're already at 1,200 words, and I'm trying to keep these updates under a thousand where possible. So for more detail on Eastern Europe, why there wasn't a World War 1, the Italian War, and European geopolitics, we'll be revisiting this with the next update.

Supernatural Threats: The False Majooj
over 2 years ago – Tue, Aug 01, 2023 at 04:16:50 PM

We collected the bodies from the battlefield, dug a hole that was 30 fathoms long and 4 fathoms deep. We laid them in there, but as it was late, we covered half of the hole with earth and left the other half until the morning. We placed a sentry and it turned out that one of the dead clambered out of the hole at night and was found sitting on the edge of the grave, while some others had been turning, because they hadn't been killed, just wounded and shocked by explosions of heavy shells. This happens quite often.' - Letter from an unnamed Russian soldier during the first World War. [from Anthony Beevor's Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921]

What is the False Ma'jooj

As with all Supernatural Threats in Guns Blazing, there are two answers.

In fiction: The Ma'Jooj are a new type of creature emerging from industrialized warfare. They claw their way free from mass graves, corpse-strewn craters, and the cities reduced to rubble. Emerging amidst gore and death, they lead armies of Restitched: humans brutally stitched to their equipment as living war machines. 

They are an image of death in the modern age: Grey steel, battered flesh, and tattered uniforms, devouring everything within reach until starved or put down like a mad dog.

Narratively: The Ma'jooj embody of industrial warfare as a machine that uses people as parts. A machine with no purpose save endless, ruinous destruction.  It takes people and renders them interchangeable cogs in military operations: Swapping limbs as if they were equipment, stitching weapons to their bodies as if they were vehicles, and expending them as if they were ammunition.

It also represents a fundamental change in how war is fought. The massive weight and all-consuming violence of industrialized total warfare, changing the very nature of armed conflict irrevocably. A conflict that must be fought, must be opposed, but must be done with the tools that created it or else it will devour you and anyone else it can reach.

A History of the Ma'jooj

In Islam, Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj are a sign of the apocalypse. Described variably as a race of monsters or just deeply unpleasant people, they will emerge from their eternal prison in an endless tide, devouring all in their path, filling the heavens with missiles and seeing them return to earth drenched in blood. They are characterized by endless, ceaseless hunger, cannibalism, and violence.

They're broadly analogous to Gog and Magog in Judaism and Christianity. Though I'm not particularly familiar with those versions of the tale, and research is plagued by apocalyptic would-be theocrats spouting garbage, so I'm not going to pretend they're a particular influence here.

Yajooj and Majooj aren't portrayed often in media. Even the Muslim apocalyptic cranks who host sites detailing them, or insisting that current political events are them, often slap text over images of Orcs and call it a day.

Guns Blazing's approach instead takes heavily from factions like Star Trek's Borg, Quake's Strogg, and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. It uses the mechanisms of repurposing and mechanizing human bodies to represent how modern war treats people. To portray a fundamental, horrific shift in how wars are fought.

The Ma'jooj in Your Game

The Ma'jooj are a straightforward and brutal foe. They have no allies, no negotiating, no complicating relationships across the lines of battle. Total war has no masters, merely those who lose more to its all-hungering maw, and those who lose less.

As such, player interactions with the Ma'jooj tend to be straightforward. Whether it's the main foe in a campaign or an emerging problem in a larger conflict, there's no negotiating with, subverting, or getting perks themed from the Ma'jooj. There's only violence.

You kill them, or they kill you.

As an enemy, False Ma'jooj are split into two categories. The Ma'jooj and the Restitched.

The Ma'jooj themselves are towering, durable killing machines. Born of death, they are sharp-edged parodies of the humanoid form, growing armor plates, grenades, and weapons of all stripe from their skin. No Ma'jooj have the Pawn or Shah roles: Even the Shrapnel-born, least of their number, are killing machines comparable with light walkers or armored cars. Their skin resists small-arms, they can pull weapons from their own flesh, rip men in half, and each and every one of them is a skilled surgeon.

Fortunately, they're relatively rare.

More common are their victims, the Restitched. 

The Restitched were living creatures captured by the Ma'jooj, cut apart, and reassembled into a variety of warforms. They range from domesticated animals turned into living alarm systems, to infantryforms with guns stitched to their torsos, to tortured agglomerations of many people, made to command formations or pilot large vehicles.

The Restitched are still living things. They bleed, breathe, and eat, though all thought excess to their purpose has been cut away from their tortured minds. They're designed like military equipment, tailored towards a given task or set of tasks, and everything extraneous to that cut away.

Mechanically, Restitched are skilled but extremely specialized. Most Restitched infantryforms, for example, have had jaws, tongues, and at least one arm removed, replaced with metal prosthetics so the limbs can be used elsewhere. Restitched Controllers, meanwhile, are dedicated command forms. They can neither move without assistance nor defend themselves, as these are extraneous to their purpose.

No restitched are Ferz, and most have no weapons unsuited to their chosen role. A dedicated sniper or gunner has no sidearm for enemies that get close, a dedicated room-clearer has nothing accurate beyond short range. Additionally, they tend to be fairly poorly armored, as even the most impressive Restitched is fundamentally disposable.

July Update: Life Happened. Also: Major Narrative Rewrites
over 2 years ago – Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 11:26:18 AM

So sorry for the radio silence. Had some wild life developments over the last few weeks that, alongside some playtesting results, delayed me. I should have dropped an update in regardless, and I apologize for the delay.

Life Update?

Can't talk about it yet. It's personal, not professional, but it shouldn't cause a longterm delay.

Playtesting Results?

This news is worse:

I deeply dislike how the game functions outside of combat at the moment. I think the clocks work fine, but current guidance on clock length is too generous, it's too disconnected from what happens in combat and missing impetus to bring the game together thematically and mechanically. I thought the unreleased faction rules would fix that.

They didn't!

So now we're going back to more extensive rewrites which are delaying...quite a bit, to be honest. I'm hoping to be back on track for the expected release dates, issues like this are factored into the development time, but We'll See.

Stress, Cycles of Play, and Flying Circus

There's a pretty excellent roleplaying game called Flying Circus by Erika Chappell. It's my favorite nominally-PBTA game, and if you like biplanes (And are an adult), you should check it out.

At the core of Flying Circus' gameplay loop, meant to encourage the irresponsible, self-destructive lifestyles lived by many period pilots. Going on missions gets you stress, which you need to blow off in town to avoid catastrophe, but your main ways to vent stress are self destructive vices of various sorts. You can build and maintain healthy options, but it's difficult. Stress will often encourage you to move between towns to outrace the consequences of your actions, keeping you from putting down too many roots.

This system is really effective at shaping Flying Circus' play cycle. So, when I went back to basics for the narrative phase, I decided to look at it for inspiration.

By inspiration, of course, I mean I have ripped it off pretty shamelessly and will be crediting Erika in the final book.

Stress in Guns Blazing

Alright, I admit, the ripoff isn't completely shameless.

While Stress is great as a way to propel and tie together the game, the dynamic of revolutionaries, freedom fighters, and insurgents is a very different one to that of fighter pilots. It's less hedonistic and far more likely to stick with a specific location and its associated NPCs.

Instead, Stress serves to model the trials and tribulations of irregular combatants in the period. The combination of trauma, combat stress, and political struggles that causes freedom fighters to make mistakes, independence movements to hurt innocents, and international brigades to collapse into infighting.

As such, here's how Stress works in Guns Blazing at time of writing:

During Character Creation, you pick Stress Triggers. Two of these come from your playbook, the rest you choose from a pre-selected list. Whenever you hit a trigger, you gain a Stress. Some moves, enemies, and other mechanics can also cause you to gain Stress.

While you have more than 3 Stress, you suffer additional complications on rolls you can't apply a skill to. While you have more than 6 Stress, you suffer additional complications on all rolls. These complications represent actions taken or elements overlooked because of the stress you're under. Ie. snapping at a friend or lover, overlooking a poor element of a deal, or missing a detail while under pressure. If you hit 10 Stress, you make a catastrophic mistake, progressing the Campaign Clock, damaging a positive Bond, and erasing 3 Stress.

During the narrative phase, you can spend campaign ticks clearing Stress. You can also take take Consequences when invoking an Aspect clear 1 Stress instead of gaining any mechanical benefit.

We're Getting Minis
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 12:12:49 AM

First things first: 85% of you have completed your surveys! This is great, but if you haven't, remember to complete it ASAP. I can't send you your rewards if you don't have a finished survey. If you haven't received the email, use this link to get one.

With that in mind:

The Minis

I've wanted to commission minis for Guns Blazing since I had the idea for the project. The game's tactical focus warrants minis for in-person play, but the nature of the setting meant that there are...enormous holes in a theoretical miniature line. 

Designs like Iramite fungiforms, more obscure Jinn, and Majooj are completely unrepresented.  Players and figures from nations that didn't exist historically would warrant their own uniforms, and extant miniature lines tend to focus on the colonizers rather than the colonized.

So getting a remotely satisfying miniature line for Guns Blazing would mean, well, making it myself.

Fortunately, I know a guy.

Obadiah Hampton is a member of the local wargaming scene who's created custom models for local tournaments and events before. He's a really skilled sculptor, and the moment he mentioned he'd be willing to create some sculpts, I knew I was in good hands.

And what hands they were!

This little turntable gives you a good look at our first mini: The Sporeling!

As the most basic Iramite fungiform, the Sporeling was a clear pick for the first mini to make. Any Iramite force in the RPG, or colonial empire in the wargame, will see entire squads of Sporelings pop out of destroyed units and slain foes. Its cane toad back and hexapodal, lizard-like gait are distinctive, and the design is simple enough to make a good testing ground, giving me some idea as to if I want more of these in the future.

I am beyond thrilled at how it turned out. 

The model nails some impressively fine detail for those with fine resin and powerful printers, and still looks good with more durable resins instead.  I'm in love with the little tendril of drool, and look forward to making this available for folks.

Future Models

The goal is to commission one model from each starting wargame faction and supernatural threat, each representing something you can't really get anywhere else. At current time the planned models are:
British: The Iramite Sporeling, completed above. The most basic Iramite fungiform.
Majooj: The Restitched Cog, one of their basic infantry units.
Basilisk: The Iconoclast, one of their mid-range monstrous infantry.
Atom: The Ash Ghul, one of their Jinn elites.
Green Banner: The Hinn Revolutionary, one of their basic infantry units.
Mysore: The Bandoqchi, one of their elite infantry units.
After the first few STLs are designed, this part of the project aims to become self-funding: New STLs are commissioned whenever the existing STLs fund them. I'll also talk a bit more about what I'm hoping to accomplish with the STLs as they roll out.

Getting the STL

The STL wasn't part of the Kickstarter campaign: I wasn't sure if the final product would be print worthy while the campaign was ongoing and preferred to underpromise and overdeliver rather than the other way around. Once I've done some final checks, I'll be adding it to the pre-order store, and everyone who backed at the Complete Package or higher will get the Sporeling STL for free.

Otherwise, the STLs will be available for digital download in a week or two. Additionally, I'm chatting with some local 3D print shops so folks can purchase printed models directly. Once we've got more designs ready, I'll also set up a commercial print license in case you want to sell official Guns Blazing minis.