In the first article in this series, we presented a three-step look at how we, at ICOSA Entertainment, approached world-building for our upcoming Pathfinder® compatible steampunk RPG, Pure Steam™. This approach required us to at first limit our ambitions to create something indelible, then to “un-limit” ourselves from our biases to create something marketable, and lastly to appreciate each other’s roles to better work as a team. Once the main build was complete, though, how did playtesting it turn out? Let’s take a look back, shall we?

When the directive came down for us to begin thinking about ways we could playtest the game, there was a strong desire among the dev team to get out among the public and see their reactions for ourselves. “Going out into the public” to premier something personal you’ve created takes guts, but it also requires that you don’t underestimate your audience. We knew going in that we’d need to be ready to improvise, and—being that we were offering a sample of our joint work through a playtest module called “Trouble in Grassy Spur”—we knew we had to be ready to adapt the storyline of the adventure based on player reactions to it. We didn’t want to shove anything down anybody’s throat (i.e. the “our way or the highway approach”), and by accepting the fact that much about the adventure layout and player characters (all informed by the rules we had written) might have to change on-the-fly and ultimately for good, we approached this opportunity with open minds. “Don’t let the rules get in the way of fun,” was an operating principle during the playtest. Borrowing a page from Nike, our motto became, “Just wing it.”

(What’s that you say? Give you an example of how we…er…wung it? Prithee play the part of harkener as Davin informs you, “I ran Grassy Spur a couple times; once at RinCon [in Tucson]. ::SPOILERS [Highlight to read]:: Instead of chasing after the train with the bomb in it, the players decided the best way to protect the bridge was to derail the train before it got there. This created a real quandary for me. A whole series of encounters and challenges occurred on the train. I could say the bomb detonated and end the session right there, or I could repurpose it. I decided to change the map into a jumble of box cars with bloodied but still alive anarchists hiding in the wreckage. Here began a massive battle that ended with the death of all the anarchists and a TPK (total party kill) which was just as well since the heroes would have been guilty of an alignment shift and in big trouble for derailing the train and killing all the passengers.”)

Thus, we opened up with a salvo of public appearances (in character even) last summer, highlighted by our appearance at GenCon. Adam and Brennan went into the GenCon playtest with general questions in mind: “Is there a flaw in our presented module?”, and “Do our player characters work?” But our concerns even ventured into the specific: “Does the chaplain’s gravitas ability grant enough temporary hit points?”, “Does the chaplain have enough options in a given situation, both in and out of combat?”, and “Do the ructioneer’s class abilities reflect its flavor?” But the only answers we got were, “Yeah, this is fun.—It looks good so far.—It’s more polished than I had thought for this stage of development.”

Brennan relates, “Those answers didn’t fulfill my questions, but instead only affirmed that what we were doing was working. Granted, the playtesters weren’t game designers scrutinizing every detail, which I know now is what I was expecting, but instead just average gamers, a couple of which had never even heard of Pathfinder. And this turned out to be true for all of our playtesters, they were just average gamers with a ‘yea’ and ‘nay’ attitude, not scrupulous game designers.”

Stay tuned next week as we bring you further insight into the playtest of Pure Steam™, how we may have been wrong in gauging our audience, and what that taught us about consumer relations and the creative direction we were headed—exclusively right here on DMing.com!

Now them, let’s continue where we left off last week in our exploration of the Pure Steam™ dev team’s thoughts on how they designed their RPG world…

The Follow-up – Un-limit Yourself

Then I met the rest of the dev team. (We’re making a CD soundtrack to go with it!? Badass!) But collaborative efforts are tricky beasts. You have to yield preferences and go for what works for the whole, and this is usually nothing more than a matter of perspective. You have to “un-limit” yourself from any bias or creative roadblock that might hinder progress. Recognizing how what you provide to any situation can satisfy a need, even if it’s not everything you wanted, is a valuable lesson in any collaborative effort.

For me, this meant adjusting to a more prescribed framework: Pathfinder rules. I don’t own Pathfinder® products. I’m not a convert. (I’m not even much of a steampunk aficionado.) I always thought the earliest stages of planning for our game had intended a more “scratchbuilt” system of our own design. The choice had been made. More practical and marketable. This, of course, informed the world building and storytelling, things I considered my strong suits. Many things changed. Fantasy races had to be made to fit the world model we had been developing. Magic had to be explained (and even explained away in some places). Two of my original class ideas went through the grinder and became archetypes instead, and another was left regulated to a few scribbled notes. I won’t say it was painless, but the game is in a lot better place today because of those changes.

Limiting myself when I was alone had helped to keep me focused, but un-limiting myself from my selfish impulses had let me accept what the game needed to become if it was to see the light of day.

The Bottom Line – Know Your Role

Adam is our creative director. Davin is our steampunk guru. Brennan is our Pathfinder® guru. Ben is our musical guru. Yours truly is just a simple writer and RPG-enthusiast. It’s important to have your bases covered, and if those bases are already covered, don’t be afraid to play between them. (I guess that makes me shortstop?) Look for ways you can unforcefully complement those around you. This means not to insinuate yourself. By becoming comfortable with how I can help shape world lore and, more generally, the quality of language in the final product, even if many of the systematic aspects of the game don’t come from me, I’m satisfied with my role in the group.

This is analogous to how player characters should interact in a roleplaying game. You might not always be the highest damage dealer, or have the most hit points, or be the one with the most skills or feats, but you can still enjoy the role you play if you find a way to complement the best parts of those around you. It’s a social experiment of the highest order.

In the next piece, we’ll explore how playtesting Pure Steam™ went, some of the things we learned, and, in looking back, what we would have done differently. Then, in the final piece, we’ll discuss gaming as a business and other money matters. Until then, thanks for reading and commenting!

Our Armed Forces protect our rights and freedoms – including the freedom to game whenever and however we choose – and in light of the holiday, through the lens of our roleplaying , we got a little reflective. We reflected on our characters, especially those who died in service to a greater good. Everyone loves a good hero (some of us prefer anti-heroes) and many heroes die protecting the innocent, defending freedom, and saving the world.

One such hero was the first character I created for our first ever Paizo Adventure Path campaign: The Shackled City. It was 3.0/3.5 and I wanted an uncomplicated hero. I chose a half-orc barbarian named Grimjaw. I created him with a highland flair – he shared the red hair of his human mother and wore her family’s tartan into battle. But after his escape from the orc tribe (where his human mother was enslaved and had told him endless stories of her people’s heroes) and meeting his grandfather who trained him in highland battle, he had been captured and enslaved himself. He was freed by another member of the party – a transmuter named Cinder – whom he owed a life debt. They started the campaign as friends and he looked to her for wisdom and leadership.

Relatively early on the party was in a dungeon complex and found that one of the villains was a half-dwarf/half-troll slaver named Kazmojen. The party wished to parley but Grimjaw could not suffer slavers. He flew into a rage and one punched a henchman – instant kill. The battle was joined and he waded his way to the terrible beast of a slaver. The two of them grappled and Grimjaw was rended almost in two by Kazmojen’s claws. Grimjaw lapsed into unconsciousness and the rage stopped…

It was a good and honorable death. It was so good that I just couldn’t, in good conscience to the character, raise him. I rolled up a new character – even when the party would promise the funds to raise him.

Care to share the glorious deaths of your characters who died in service to a greater good?

I always knew it took more effort to create something than destroy it. I just hadn’t calculated how much actual work it took also!

When I was little, my brother and I would rage across the backyard in an imaginative frenzy—playing good guys and bad (Janus would have been proud)—hopping over tree roots that were the wriggling tentacles of a monster, or hiding behind air conditioning units and garbage bins that were outcroppings of a space station.  Many of our games were kept strictly to the mind, with little more than pencil and paper to breathe life into our feverish creations. Imagine our surprise when years later we discovered bound roleplaying game products at the local hobby shop—a codified system of rules and concepts so congruent to our own ideas; ideas we thought only we understood!

Now that I’m only slightly less little, my brothers-in-arms and I are laying the finishing touches on an RPG world of our own design: Pure Steam™. It’s a Pathfinder® compatible campaign setting mashup of steampunk tropes couched in an alternate history version of the real world. (Already I see the hands going up in the back.) “What’s steampunk?!”

Get ready for a half-dozen different answers. “Just take any real world object and add gears to it.” “It’s Victorian gothic horror.” “It’s the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” “It’s H.G. Wells and Jules Verne on acid.” Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a subculture literary movement within science fiction that supposes a world where innocence, mystery, and pre-modern idealism still exist. A world of steam.

What we are making doesn’t attempt to replicate any of those things quite so literally. We supplant Victorian flavor with Appalachian. We mix World’s Fair grandiose architecture and materials science with Western weird horror. We cloak modern fantasy in late 19th-century American trappings east of the Mississippi. We stir a witch’s brew of solid crunch and compelling fluff and let the resulting “moonshine” distill in your mind. (And I may have said too much already…)

Needless, you must be asking yourself, “How did you get started on this? How could I do something similar?” Well, while it’s no guarantee it’ll work for you like it has for us, fellow reader, we dare to share with you snatches of our recipe. Go lock your doors, and pay attention now!

Before we get into it, a little backstory. Pure Steam™ is the brainchild of West Virginia-bred (aka “coal country-bred”) Adam Crockett, aka “B’omarr Punk.” I knew right away he and I shared a kinship by our related online handles—both Star Wars inspired. As we gamed together, I learned how simpatico we seemed in our sensibilities (e.g. how we each enjoyed the challenge of playing 0-level commoners, our admiration for 3e Forgotten Realms® and Todd Lockwood’s art, or the way we’d greet each other with, “Hey lover!” or “Sup sexy!” even though we’re both happily straight). He was that rare kind of person with whom I knew I could share unfulfilled wishes of creating something unique, something we both cared about, that would draw upon our collective interests and produce something we could be proud of. Contrary to whatever might be on your mind (you sicko, you!), I told him I’d be ready to help if the idea ever took off.

Step the First – Limit Yourself

And so it began as most things do: unfulfilled. Then he contacted me while I was away in Japan and requested I make good on my previous promise. I had no idea how big the project would be, so I knew it was wise for me not to get carried away and instead limit myself. I offered a simple class idea. While there was not yet any concrete ruleset and little else to go on besides “19th-century American steampunk,” the class was warmly received.

My thinking had been simple but layered. Limit yourself. Get right down there to the ground-level and scratch at the surface. I thought about the Civil War, a defining period, and the people who had fought in it. I sorted through the crowds of faces in my mind and tried to lock onto something that stood out. I used period art and I read. I wanted to create something commonly recognizable but undefined, something rooted yet inspirational, something heroic but outside the rank and file. Something I could mold and recast. The Chaplain was born.

Having “survived the proving grounds,” Adam assigned me the duty of recasting more of the classes for the game. “Great!” I thought. “We’ll keep it very limited. Controllable. A few core classes, no extraneous races, very low magic, a true role-player’s paradise where the differences are in the nuances.” I wasn’t concerned with anything else. Little did I know that I would have to greatly adjust my aim if I was to serve the entire creative process beyond my own selfish wants.

Stay tuned next week as we bring you the second half of the story of Pure Steam™, how it came to be, and the lessons learned in the doing—exclusively right here on DMing.com!

Splitting treasure is often a great way to end a gaming session.  The bad guys have been defeated & now its time to taste the fruits of victory- from magic items that let you do cool things to GP that allows you to go buy magic items to jewelry/gems/tapestries that you can sell for GP to then go buy magic items.  Fun times.  However occasionally, like deciding what movie to watch, you all just don’t agree.  And at the risk of ‘throwing another hissy fit’ I don’t think handing out stuff that we happen to come across works in most situations.

Let’s start with the premise treasure division should always be based on roleplaying the character; & how would that individual want the treasure/rewards to be shared.  In addition to any traits, & overall personality, alignment is a big consideration. A Chaotic character would not share treasure the same way a Lawful character would, just as an Evil character would not share it the way a Good character would.  Because no two characters are the same, each could (or to me, should) have different ideas on how to split spoils. i.e. the current party of misfits in our Runelords Adventure Path is pretty much the opposite of the homogenous band of Dwarves establishing a kingdom in the Kingmaker AP.  So while its not very realistic to say that a random bunch of different strangers with completely different goals would decide to do things the same way nationalistic stunties did, the Organic Method is what both campaigns are doing.

I don’t think its just clerics of Abadar or even Lawful Neutral PCs who’d want some basic record keeping when it comes to tracking treasure. At the very least, True Neutral would also seem to apply as well, if only for the balance aspect. A case could be made for LG & NG heroes as well. But then there are those characters with a mercantile background or an interest in business- they would also favor a split via a record. Then there are those characters who simply believe that they should be paid what they have earned, whether they are soldiers, sailors, or alchemists. And finally, some PCs simply hold to ‘fair is fair.’

The practical argument is that certain classes will have a much easier time finding equipment that they can use than others. For example, there’s probably not going to be any magic bullets, guns, or gunpowder written into the adventure, meaning that the guy that uses these items is always going to have to be buying them at full price. Meanwhile our Half-Elven Rogue will much more easily be able to find enchanted rapiers or ensorceled studded leather armor.  Meanwhile the Half-Orc cleric may indeed one day come across a magical whip, but a magic longsword for the party’s fighter is much, much more likely to happen.  Since the game is designed around math, there is a fixed amount of treasure written into the adventure. If 1 character is getting stuff for free, thats an unfair situation for the character who has to guy out & buy their stuff at full price because the ‘pool’ is finite.

The most balanced way to do things is to let people who want some treasure to buy that treasure at 50% of what it cost of their own share. So the Rogue could get Masterwork Thieves tools at 50gp, but then doesn’t get as much gold from the pile. The others meanwhile can use the extra bit of remaining gold to buy what they need but that wasn’t what the writers included.  But that’s a tale from the other side of the screen- what do YOU think?  How does your gaming group divvy up the loot?