Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Glee!

50 fresh new copies of Cannibal Contagion were waiting at my desk upon my return from lunch. It is a good day!

I wanted to take a moment to update everyone on the current status of Cannibal Contagion’s first print run and pre-orders. I received the initial test print prototype a week and a half ago, and it was indeed very nice. The layout was fantastic, the art was crisp and evocative of the atmosphere I seek to create.

There has been a minor problem with the cover, though, that I am seeking to get straightened out. Only problem is that Lulu’s support team takes at least a day to respond to any email and follow-up, which adds up when multiple questions and interactions are necessary. Once the cover issue is resolved, though, I’ll be placing the first bulk print order. I hope to do this before this weekend. I don’t want this sitting on my shoulders while moving to my new place, ugh.

But yes! Soon! The book is AWESOME, and just holding it in my hands and smelling it’s freshly-printed deliciousness almost brought me to tears. I finally accomplished one of my dreams. Awesome.

I just now finalized my order for the first test copy of Cannibal Contagion. Lulu estimated a delivery time of about 2 weeks, based on print time and shipping speed. At 206 pages, it has greatly exceeded my initial estimations of size, and that’s with only fairly minimal art content.

So in more of less two weeks of time, I’ll be looking it over, and if all is well, placing the order for the first 100 copies. I’ll be shipping the pre-orders out ASAP. I’m expecting to have them in the mail by the middle of May, but the print time might change that.

I’m overjoyed right now, if you couldn’t tell.

Last night I played my first game of Left 4 Dead in months, and while a bit rusty, we kicked ass. It was great to buy a new Xbox, take it home, plug it in, and get an invite to play within 10 minutes. Fabulous. So yeah, I have zombies on the mind, oh yes.

The Cannibal Contagion Print Draft is about… 3/8 of the way to completion. I’ve got the basics the way I want them, and I’ve formatted and inserted the art all the way through to just at the end of the character creation section. I want to take this moment to once again elucidate how fucking awesome I think the internal art is. Leo and Vero did a knock-down bang-up fantastic job capturing exactly the feel I was looking for. I’m almost getting a bit choked up each time I place another of their pieces within the text, because each one works so damned perfectly. Seriously, folks, mega kudos. You rock.

Something else? Thanks to working on this document, I can’t get “Eye of the Tiger” out of my head.

One Last Thing: I Promise you, I am working on some play reviews of the GameStorm sessions. However, they are far from complete, and I’m choosing to put more creative direction into assembling the print draft of the game by next week’s deadline. So, once that deadline is reached, and the draft has been sent to the printer, rest assured there will be reports. Oh yes.

In less than one week’s time, I’ll be debuting three new scenarios for Cannibal Contagion at the local GameStorm convention. If you’ve been looking to try it out for yourself, then sign up for the con and register for one of the seats at the table. Each session is slated for a maximum of seven player slots, and some of them are filling up quickly. Current status of the games:




Name: Cannibal Contagion: the Unitologist Gambit
Time: Fri 5 PM to 9 PM
Description: This session: A game of horror, madness, and violent survival on a distant space mining colony. This game is based on the dark futuristic setting of the recent hit video game “Dead Space.” Familiarity with the franchise might be useful, but is not at all necessary, and there will be no spoilers of the events of the actual video game.
Status: 4 Slots left to be filled




Name: Cannibal Contagion: Occupant Necrodanger
Time: Sat 12 PM to 4 PM
Description: The sinister Parasol Collective has developed a new virus, codenamed “The Z-Contagion,” and they’ve decided to use the remote Possum Town as their first major testing experiment. Your characters are stylish-yet-clueless members of the local R.A.T.S (Rural Assault Team-Squad) Special Forces country militia unit, and must find a way to stop the contagion from destroying your way of life… and taking your jobs!
Status: 6 slots left to be filled




Name: Cannibal Contagion: The Jesus Camp Massacre
Time: Sat 6 PM to 10 PM
Description: It’s summertime, and you’re a plucky teenager who just wants to raise a ruckus and party on until the next school sessions begin. However, this summer, you just don’t get to. Your parents sent you away to Youthpastor Cody’s Righteous-Awesome XTREEM Revival Camp. Now instead of partying, your only hope is just to survive the weekend with your sanity intact!
Status: Only 1 slot left to be filled!

“Cannibal Contagion is a game of mental stress and violent survival against hordes of infectious supernatural cannibals. The players use high-stakes playing-card battles to determine the outcomes of their actions, with a heavy focus on pure primal narrative, stress-induced madness, and totally badass action. These pages contain a complete role-playing game, including rules detailing character creation, mechanics for resolution of mass-character conflicts, methods for generating your own custom Contagion effects, guides and advice on how to set up and run games with little to no prep time, examples of rules in play, and a slew of quick-draw tables to help you jump right in and play with but a moment’s notice. Read these rules, grab your friends and a deck of playing cards, and get ready for some zombie-murdering comedic survival horror adventures.”




Pre-orders are available now, to be shipped at the end of April. All pre-orders will be numbered and signed, and include a free full-color copy of the PDF as well. Final print will be 120 pages, cost is $20 + variable shipping (I do ship internationally!) – just click the button below to order!

Some lunchtime thoughts…

If you’ve played monster video games and you’ve watched monster movies, then you’re probably quite familiar with the way that a good many of them build of the danger levels over the course of the experience. Rarely does the biggest and baddest monster just pop right out at the beginning of the movie or game. Instead, the heroes frequently have to overcome obstacles which start relatively minor, but which progressively and even exponentially increase in potency. In video games, for example, the bad guys get increasingly gruesome and more dangerous (I almost mistyped this as “gangrenous” there, but I guess that would work too) as the stages progress, and thrown in every few measures is an exceptionally strong “boss” type of menace.

One of the major features in Cannibal Contagion of which I am particularly fond* is the way the game implements this concept of “threat escalation.” Specifically, three game mechanics work to facilitate this, namely the Adversity Tokens, the Crazy-Go-psycho Meter, and the Infection tallies. As the session progresses, players should notice a definite increase in the inherent danger of the scenario. The Adversity pool increases by an increasing amount of income, allowing the CiC to throw bigger and badder Threats at the Survivors. As the characters call upon their madness and adrenaline to perform greater deeds, they spiral ever closer to the bottom of their sanity, towards that inevitable breaking point. And of course, since this is a zombie game, the threat of becoming one of them shambles ever so steadily closer.

As the game is played out and these three mechanics roll along, you can visibly observe the increase in threat and danger, and I love this, so very, very much. Each time I see it in action, it fills me with glee. So now that I’m working on a follow-up game using the same basic system of game mechanics (think: Shoot Em Up: the Movie: the Game), I’m currently mulling over some different methods of threat escalation. Obviously the Madness and Infection mechanics wouldn’t apply, because they are specific to the zombie genre, and rarely-if-ever present in gun-fu sh’mups. So what, then, could serve as that mechanic?

Perhaps a system of fucked-up meta-morality, a form of karmic retribution that the player knows is just around the bend, and the more bullets they fire and the more people they kill, the closer they get to that destiny? Or maybe some form of Shadow, a haze of disassociation that degrades the character’s connection to society and reality? Maybe a Weariness sets in; the more people they kill, the less they even care about “all of this,” the less “their mission” matters to them any more. Or instead, a mechanic that represents some kind of reward, a Payoff, a Score that will only be dramatically timed into the game when the appropriate number of bullets have been fired in an appropriately bad ass manner.

Hmmmmm…

* and by “fond” I mean “really damn proud”

My pal “Zipp Dementia” has adapted the Cannibal Contagion rules to be used for online forum-based roleplaying with a D20. Looks interesting. So far Zipp’s been in on two of our local playtests, and contributed greatly to the ideas and musings that led to the new Draft 5 mechanics of the game.

This looks nifty so far. Thanks for the link, Zipp!

- NPC

It’s official: Cannibal Contagion is almost complete – it is in a “release candidate” stage of near-final development. After this weekend’s session, I can see exactly what minor tweaks need to be done to make this game ready to go. It does exactly what I want it to. With a good month of focused editing, art assembly, and formatting, it is entirely possible that I could have a handful of copies to pimp out by this year’s Gamestorm convention. I’m thrilled by this notion, but I also understand that if at any point I feel like I’m rushing it, I’ll step back and wait until after the con. I don’t want to publish a rushed game, as that would just piss me off, and I’d be pretty ashamed.

This excites me, and gives me a feeling inside that both turns my insides to warm, pleasant putty while chilling my bones with apprehension. I felt this very same sensation when I got my very first piece of commissioned artwork for the game from Vero and Leo. I’ve watched a project which started largely for me as a method for distracting myself from heartache over an ex-girlfriend morph into a great goal of actually accomplishing something with this over-abundance of fluctuating creative energy. Soon, hopefully soon, I will see tangible results. I just have to make sure and frequently remind myself: be patient, don’t rush this, yet don’t coddle it either. It will be ready when it’s ready.

Speaking of this weekend, Saturday’s “serious” Cannibal Contagion session was one of the best I’ve ever played with these rules – a session of a caliber that exceeded even that of the much-loved “Spaghetti Monster Must Die!” first session ever. The revamped Crazy-Go-Psycho rules worked almost flawlessly, and after only a few minor tweaks will be exactly how I want them. It was good to see the mechanics applied to a scenario with a more serious, less tongue-in-cheek theme, as it proved to me that such an approach to this system is very feasible. All in all, the session was just plain awesome – so awesome, in fact, that I’ll be fully fleshing out that scenario and making it available as a free downloadable demo scenario at the time the game is launched.

Anyway, to further entice you with the new rules, I’ve uploaded a one-page special preview of the newly-redesigned character sheet. Download it here. As of now, the playtest rules are being taken offline. The Draft 5 Revisions are mostly staying in as finalized rules, and the online rules available until now are a bit defunct. Massive thanks to all of the testers who helped me bring this game this far!

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What else have I been up to? Playing (and loving) Mass Effect and planning for my first ever Gen Con.

This past Saturday’s game session at Go Play! led to a fantastic after-talk, in which many great rules updates and amendments were proposed. I spent the weekend writing them up a bit more coherently, and here’s what I’ve got so far (after the cut below):

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