YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS!  WE’VE REALLY OUTDONE OURSELVES, BRINGING YOU SOME OF THE MOST PROVOCATIVE, EXCITING PLAYSTORMING OF THE YEAR!  THIS BLOG POST IS DESTINED TO BECOME A MAGNIFICENT MILESTONE IN THE MARVEL AGE OF PLAYSTORMING!!

Whoa, sorry.  I’ve been reading a lot of old Stan Lee comics lately.  Let me start that over.

About a year ago, I decided I wanted to make a game based on something I love: Silver Age comic books.  We did a playstorm and it was good, but I felt like something wasn’t quite right.  The game was fun but it wasn’t quite doing the things I wanted it to do.  I put it on the back burner.  Then, six months later, we made MonkeyDome.  A game that, if you’ll excuse a boast, does some pretty awesome things.  Now I am revisiting my old idea and playstorming to answer the question: can I start with MonkeyDome and end up with the Silver Age comic book game that I am dreaming of?  READ ON, FAITHFUL FANS, AND FIND OUT!

Silver Age Comics and Me

When I was a kid, I loved going to the comic book store to pick up the new issue of Batman or Spider-Man or X-Men.  My dad would give me an extra couple of bucks to get him a back-issue of World’s Finest or The Flash or something from when he used to read comics in the 60s and 70s.  I would always read both and, before long, I was preferring the older comic books.  The newer comics consisted of Wolverine and Batman repeatedly showing off how bad-ass and serious they were, and for me that got old kinda fast.  But in the comic books from the 60s and 70s, there was never a dull moment!  Superman was competing in intergalactic Olympics on other planets!  The Avengers were battling Lava Men inside the Earth’s crust!  The Flash’s rogues gallery, consisting of Captain Cold, Mirror Master, Gorilla Grodd, and many others, were teaming up to defeat him!  Professor X and Magneto were competing for the loyalty of mutants with outrageous super powers!  How could a kid like me not love this stuff?

One specific thing I loved and still love about the Silver Age was how the super heroes would take a seemingly limited super power and come up with a hundred and one creative ways to use it.  Take The Flash for example.  The Flash’s super power is that he is super fast.  So obviously he can use his super speed to catch bad guys who are getting away, or knock out a bad guy before they have time to react.  But how about running across water?  Or up the side of a building?  Or through time?!?  How about running in a circle so fast he created whirlwinds?  Or (this one really stretches it) running so fast he has infra-red vision?

A Game is Born?

Silver age super heroes finding creative new ways to use their powers is a lot of fun.  So about a year ago I asked myself: would it make a fun game?  Lord knows that just because something is cool in a movie or a book or a comic doesn’t mean it will also necessarily be fun in a tabletop game.  Games need choices.  Games need tension.  Games need a lot more than a cool idea.

Well if you’ve got a concept for a game and you want to see if it’s got legs, there’s one quick and easy thing you can do: playstorm!

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello folks, Eppy here. I’ve finally gotten around to launching the website for my publishing company. I’ve taken a page out of Sandra Lee’s playbook and made it semi-homemade (all the credit with half the effort). Check it out at http://dig1000holes.wordpress.com/.

This is the future home of Time & Temp and where to look if you’re interested in picking up a copy.

At GenCon I had a chance to sit down privately with Mario and David over at The Game Master Show about Time & Temp, and I simply don’t shut up about it. So much so that I think I might have explained the entire game away. So, if you’re sick of reading all six pages of rules, you can give your eyes a rest and put those ears to work.

At the moment, Time & Temp and Dig 1,000 Holes Publishing don’t have a website. That will be rectified soon enough. Until then, good old ISS here will be my clearinghouse for Time & Temp supplementary materials.

For those who’d rather print than photocopy, I present the following pages from the unbound edition of Time & Temp in an easy to use PDF format.

The Matrix

Incident Reports

Personal Progress Reports

Twas a good year for the ISS at GenCon.

Trial & Terror: SVU nominated for an ENnie (alas we didn’t get it, but the nomination was a thrill).

Sign in Stranger debuts at the Pirate Jenny booth and sells out.

Time & Temp debuts, gets the nod from Robin Laws and practically sells out (I’ve got four copies left and four original playtesters who definitely deserve copies, so that worked out nicely). Soon you’ll see it for sale on IPR.

All of these have been playstormed to one degree or another at the Imagination Sweatshop. It’s the year of the storm!

And veteran ISSer Jason Keeley was there with Pantheon Press stuff, running games and spreading the word.

This GenCon,

At the Design Matters Booth (#1834).

The process of co-creating, co-writing, and, most importantly, playing MonkeyDome blew my fucking mind.

It was a horrible mess. Gray matter everywhere.

Took me a whole week to piece it all back together, which was a feat due to my complete lack of king’s horses or king’s men.

This festering wound in my skull, along with a particularly eye-opening and downright thrilling Western mod of MonkeyDome we played, dead tired, on the train to JiffyCon laid the groundwork for a new game I’m tentatively calling Swords Without Master (or Sword Buddies, who knows.)

A Tale of Two Rogues

Over the past few months, I have been immensely enjoying Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar series. Some of the stories are distant memories recalled from the mists of my youth; many of them, brand new. These books rekindled in me the lusty fires of sword & sorcery. And what’s more, I recognized my gaming desires tucked inside the text: a tantalizing blend of humor, thrills, and wonder. I had discovered that, perhaps not by accident, I had grown into the fiction that gave birth to this hobby. Read the rest of this entry »

The polls are open! Vote here!

Do not forget Trial & Terror: Supernatural Victims Unit for Best Free Product!

Do not forget these other worthy games!

Exclamation point!

We’re part of a revolution!

I know, we’re just as surprised as you are.

It’s Summer Revolution and this shit’s getting hot!

A bunch of indie roleplaying games are up for ENnie awards, many of which are personal friends of ours, some I even personally walked over to the ENnies booth last GenCon and made sure they submitted, and they all want to you to know about them. They’ve made a list. A good list. A list with Trial & Terror on it. Check out that list!

Voting is not for another week (don’t worry, we’ll remind you).

Now is the time for action! Now is the time to spread the word!

That’s right, Trial & Terror is up for an ENnie in the category of Best Free Product! And it appears to be the best hard-hitting game about supernatural crimes of passion ripped from today’s fictional headline in the category. At least of all of the ones in the category that were created in one week.

So we got that going for us.

This nomination is quite an honor for us, and we have to once again thank our amazing artists who made it all look like a real, grown-up game: John Carimando, Scott LeMien, and Andrew DeFelice.

Expect to hear from us soon about rocking votes and whatnot. In the mean time check out the game if you haven’t already. It’s free. Seriously.