I'm sure anyone who reads this blog (which recent evidence would suggest is surprisingly more than I previouly thought) will undoubtedly have spotted the cafuffle that's being going on over our name and the possibilities of an official Savage Worlds license. As the title to this posts suggests, and has been mentioned previously, I've decided that The Black Orifice, as a concept rather than a name, I suppose, is not worth ditching for the sake of a Savage Worlds licence. I thought I'd best put out a detailed blog post to fully explain my/our decision.

Firstly let me clarify the situation over this blog: The Black Orifice is a shared blog site for myself and my writing partner Nigel McClelland. Whilst we share the site we are independent individuals with our own opinions, and to some extent our own IP (although much of what we do, and undoubtedly the best of what we do, is shared. So, whilst Nigel and I "work" together through this blog, we have our own separate ideas and opinions and use the blog to voice them. To think of The Black Orifice as a "company" is wrong. What the Black Orifice actually is is perhaps a little harder to define. Firstly it is a website that NIgel and myself share to talk crap, air our opinions and host out games for download. Actually, I've siad firstly, but I think that's about it. What's important is that you don't see opinions expressed on either blog as being any kind of company line. Opinions expressed by Nigel in his blog are his own, as are opinions expressed in mine. When we started this blog we weren't particualrly thinking about producing much in the way of games, rather wanting to blog about our hobby, write reviews and share our thoughts and feelings with anyone who might be interested in reading about them.

However, we are both creative people who enjoy our hobby immensely and enjoy writing stuff for it. We started the blog when we'd just grown so tired of the "industry" that it had destroyed our fun in gaming - writing Etherscope was a large part of that, but the commercial failure of Gateway was the straw that broke the cammel's back. At that point we swore that we'd never do anything to wreck our enjoyment of gaming and the pleasure we got from playing and making our own games. At first this meant giving our games away for free to download. However, there's nothing like the feeling you get when you see your own work in print, even if its just a vanity print, like I did for Midgard. Midgard is actually an important milestone in the development of the blog. Most other stuff that we've done had been fairly simple short pieces of support for existing products, whether it's Gateway, Etherscope or Savage Worlds. Midgard was a complete game, and one I really wanted to see in print. Lulu gave me the opportunity to produce that finished product, and doing so gave me enormous satisfaction.

At this point I was quite into the whole give it away for free philosophy, and so decided that I had to sell it at cost - that seemed the fairest way to go about it, giving Midgard a cover price of only £1.82. However, at a convention last year I was "involved" in a discussion (perhaps spectator too is more accurate) between Rich Stokes of the Collective Endeavour, Angus Abranson of Cubicle 7 and Dave Salisbury, the proproietor of Fanboy3, one of the UK's leading (and my local) game store. (To be fair to Angus, he was about as much a participant in the conversation as myself, and shortly made a polite exit - I merely mention him here as I'm a terrible name dropper... did I tell you I went to school with Anna Friel?) The conversation was about the relative merits of small independent publishers getting their games into distribution (yes, Cubicle 7 have done a lot to support this recently , and Angus did mention the plans they had to do so before making his polite exit). From my point of view, Dave made a convincing case for distribution, with RIch arguing that he felt the effort invovled didn't produce enough reward. However, I was left with the impression that if you want your game to be read and played by as many people as possible you should really be in distribution.

At the time I thought I was better off staying out of the financial rat race altogether, but the more i thought about my games and what my goals are, or should be, the idea of getting my games out there to as many people as possible grew, and, having been convicned by Dave's arguments, realised that that meant getting something out into distribution. I have been working on Sion: Deliverance in one form or another for a number of years, and since PEG decided to make the Savage Worlds licence free, I had been decided to use Savage Worlds as the system. It took me a while to complete it to a workable standard, and a while longer to get everything through licensing agreements, but just recently the game was approved. Nigel (until recently) had been a bigger fan of Savage Worlds than me and was keen to join in writing stuff for Savage Worlds, so it seemed like we were going places, with Sion well on the way and Savage Etherscope in the works. However, one of my goals in starting the Orifice was to write my own systems, and writing for Savage Worlds wasn't something that sat entirely comforatably with me anyway. Yes, I love playing the game, and enjoyed that it allowed my to recycle some older material in Extreme and Shadowflux and generate a bit of interest, but for my bigger projects, like Sion, there was always a thought niggling away at the back of my mind that I should be writing my own system for this game. There's also the issue with the Savage fan license that you can't sell things (even at no profit for yourself), and so I couldn't just do what I had done with Midgard for Sion unles it has its own system.

So when we were told that we'd have to change the name if I wanted to publish Sion as a Savage licensed product and NIgel reacted... like he did... it led to a number of conversations between Nigel and myself about what we wanted to do and where the Orifice was going. Nigel made it very clear that he wouldn't be willing to change the name - we both feel that we sold ourselves out a bit to get Etherscope published (not that there's anything about Goodman Games that we were directly upset by, but the process took us to places we never would have gone to and although we didn't realise it at the time, have ended up haing a serious deleterious effect on our creativity and enjoyment of what we're doing). That left me with the decision to either go it alone and start up on my own, and work without Nigel's input, or to give up on Savage Worlds licensing. I don't want this to sound like Nigel held me to ransom, he really didn't. He respected that it was my decision and that it wouldn't stop us being friends, just that he would not have anything more to do with writing and developing material for Savage Worlds.

Hopefully by now you can see the reasons for why I have chosen not to continue down the SW path. For me its not about the name, or even about Nigel's rant (which I see might make people think negatively of us), but its about what I want to get out of the whole process of writing games. I just want to have fun writing and playing games. Without NIgel's input that just wouldn't be the same. At the end of the day I'm about as tied to the name The Black Orifice as I am to writing Savage Settings, so its not a road I am so keen to tread that I'm willing to sacrifice the enjoyment I get from writing and designing games. For now, I have manage to get Nigel inspired again in writing our own game system, so after all the mess and misery, I think we're now back on track and closer to our original goals when we started the Orifice.

Cheerio for now,

Ben

You might by now have seen Nigel's recent blog post (http://www.webjam.com/the_black_orifice/nigels_blog/$nigels_blog/2010/05/19/pinnacle_entertainment_group_can_go_fuck_themselves). I'd just like to add some of my own thoughts on this most recent turn of events.

Whilst what I have to say is perhaps - no not perhaps, definately - more measured that Nigel's coments, I do agree with much of what he said. So much so that I am seriously considering scrapping my plans for publishing Sion and just putting it up as a freebie giveaway. May be if anyone actually reads this, you might want to make some posts and let me know which side you think I should come down on.

Here's the situation as I see it. Firstly "The Black Orifice" is cheeky, and it is a double entendre - perhaps even cheekier if you consider that we put a logo that says "a Black Orifice Production" on our books. But it is a DOUBLE entendre - Orifice is a synonym for hole, so you could see it as "Black Hole", which seems perfectly valid for a RPG producer. Its not even like its a particularly original pun - it's only one letter different from the well respected back office shareware software "Back Orifice"! Okay, perhaps we're playing a little game, being riske in order to help draw oursleves a little attention, to help os stand out in an otehrwise uniform marketplace. Hell we're not the first to use that strategy when naming our "company" - I mean where do you stop? Is "Reality Blurrs" suggestive of taking hallucinatory drugs? is "Kram" suggestive of multiple penetrative sexual intercourse? Is "Nevermet" suggestive of swinging? Is "Third Eye" suggetsive of a penis? It just depends how much you're willing to read into things. What really galls is I've already posted (in good faith) my announcement on the PEG boards, that I've posted numerous times on those boards using the Black Orifice name and no one has (to my knowledge) complained.

My first impression is that it's pretty pathetic to even bother about something like this in a grown up world - hell, I teach 11-16 year olds and I'd accept with a wry smile if such a pun was used in a student's work. To be frank it shocks me that Pinnacle would be so bothered about such a harmless little pun to prevent a product that they have previously praised from going to print. Okay, I can understand that they want to protect their image and good name, but I don't see how this really would damage them. Rather I would have thought if anything there's a net gain for them - perhaps I'm being cocky in assuming that my little product is going to be well received, but I am certain Pinnacle have benefitted from having licensed products for Savage Worlds keeping a steady trickle of SW products on the latest release shelves in your FLGS. They've approved the product - not just that even, praised the product - so surely the very small possibility of damage to PEG from a licensee being called "the Black Orifice" is more than mitigated by them having a high quality new licensee supporting their system. I think this kind of oversensitivity is a relic of the "D&D is the work of Satan" period of the 80s. I think roleplayers are mature enough to deal with this fairly mild double entendre.

But then on the other hand I have to think whether or not I'm being just as pathetic if I don't just change the name. I've put a lot of time and effort into Sion and I would dearly like it to be available as a physical book, dearly like it to be on the shelves of gaming stores so that others might see my work and play their games in my world. Is a simple change of name not a small price to pay? Or would I be selling out?

If there's anyone out there comments to help me resolve my dilema would be appreciated.

CHeerio for now,

Ben

So, we've had this blog site for 15 months now, so I thought I might reflect on how things have worked out.

When we started up the blog we were quite disenheartened with the whole business of being a "professional" writers. It was probably all of our own making, but a number of different events had conspired to mean that we had fallen out of love with writing RPGs. Whilst things might appear to be a bit off-and-on over the past few months, I think "the Orifice" has certainly served its purpose. Nigel and I are writing again. The decision that we made, which has enabled us to get back our enthusiasm for writing, has been to give stuff away for free.

When we started the Orifice up the idea was to strip things back to what we loved doing. To stop worrying about unit sales, reviews and award nominations. The idea was that we would just put stuff out when we'd got it done - not to bother with things like editing and marketing that were driving us mad. The theory being if we put stuff out for free people might download it and read it and, if they liked the material, run it or integrate some ideas into their own games. How much of what we have done is actually being used we can never, I suppose, be sure, but I think we are getting a fair few downloads.

After our intial zeal for producing free material, a bit of realism and commercial thinking has crept back in. I guess it kind of started with the POD of Midgard. There's just something more satisfying about having a quality hard copy of your book in your hands than even something printed on my home colour laser printer can achieve. At that point we started to think about what is the best way to get our products seen by as many people of possible. The answer, so Dave at Fanboy3 tells us, is to get into distribution. And so we have started to think about a few products we might produce that we could make commercially viable enough to interest distributors. The money isn't our main concern here, but getting a product into distribution will mean it will have costs that need to be covered. And whilst the retailers, distributors and printers are all taking some money out of our efforts, it seems like we would be cutting off our nose to spite ourselves not to make a bit of money for ourselves too. Having looked into the process before now the sort of money we'd be talking about wouldn't massively affect the price of the product anyway - the casual gamer might be surprised to know how little of the cover price actually ends up in the writers', or game company's, pockets.

This, then, brings me to Savage Worlds, and the Freebie Settings. Savage Worlds suits us in so many ways. As mentioned in a previous blog post, a generic system allows us to put out a setting very quickly. With Savage Worlds this is especially the case - the system is so versatile it takes very little to embody your setting with a few rules tweaks, edges and hindrances. Also, it's a system that seems to have a good following, making it a good starting point for any commercial venture, as the D20 System was when we started up ten years ago. The freebie settings allow us to kill two birds with one stone. Whilst I would hope putting them out is bringing us new interest from the Savage Worlds fanbase, it also provides an avenue for our wacky and weird (and some of our fairly traditional) setting ideas, enabling us to put out the setting with as little effort as possible.

I'm probably not doing myself any favours, commercially speaking, putting these settings out so quickly one after the other. I'll end up getting through my backlog of half written dead projects and then end up with a big wait for the wacky idea, or get tied up with a bigger project like savage etherscope, and end not putting anything out for months and everyone forgetting we exist.

I'm just a slave to my own exciteable personality - as soon as i get an idea I just want to work on it all day long, and as soon as i get the job done, even to the poor standard of editing in these freebies, i want to get it out there. But then thats why we started up the Black Orifice, so that we can work quick and fast, put things out for free and not worry about endless dull proofreads, editing and rewrites. I tell you if we could find someone who enjoyed editing as much as i like page dressing and we both like writing, and who would do it for free, we'd conquer the world (or maybe just do what we're doing now without the typos and internal contradictions!)

I think Savage World's slogan: Fast, Furious, Fun sums up my attitude to writing as well as it does to gaming, showing why Savage Worlds is a perfect vehicle for my style of writing.

Cheerio,

Ben

I recently bought The Day After Ragnarok. For a long while I had looked  at this and thought that it wouldn’t be my sort of thing. But I recently followed a thread on the RPG.Net forums asking people what they thought was the “Savage Worlds setting par excellence”. The Day after Ragnarok (henceforth tDAR to save my RSI) was mentioned a few times – not a lot, but the arguments for why it should be considered the setting that best fits the Savage Worlds ruleset intrigued me, so I bought it.

I have to say I was not disappointed.

For those who are not yet aware of tDAR, it is a post-apocalyptic pulp setting (for Savage Worlds, as mentioned above), written by Kenneth Hite. Mr Hite is not an author I have had much prior experience of, but Nigel speaks very highly of his Trail of Cthulu, so I was expecting something well done based on his reputation alone. What I was less certain of was that the setting would be something that suited me…

Why? I love pulp. But I have never been able to find a pulp game that I have wanted to play. I’m not sure why – I mean, I love White Wolf’s Adventure!, and have created numerous characters for it, and even a piece of fan fiction, but I’ve never been inspired to actually run a game. I was trying to explain to Nigel, when I mentioned that I’d ordered tDAR, why I felt pulp games were in need of a good setting. I don’t think I did a good job, but having read tDAR I think I now understand why I think this is the case, and why Adventure!, no matter how much I love the system, doesn’t have the requirements for an inspirational setting for a roleplaying game.

I don’t know whether this is just my personal preferences of if I’m tapping into something more profound on the nature of roleplaying games. I think it also ties into why I don’t usually like licensed RPGs (ed - he says this after getting very excited while awaiting his copy of Dr Who). I think the thing that draws me into a setting is its secrets and the new places and ideas it lets me (either as a GM or a player) and my players explore. In a licensed RPG it is often the case that much of the setting is already widely known. The same thing can happen with “new” IP games too, just not as often. When I used to play oWoD Vampire I regularly ran into players who knew more about the setting that I would have liked (or indeed than I knew myself). For me it is this that usually inspires me to go a step further and write my own setting. My dissatisfaction with Vampire led me to write ShadowFlux (soon to be available as a freebie setting from the Black Orifice) and watching Firefly led me to write Sion: Deliverance (currently in playtest). Previous Pulp settings that I’ve read have done little more than add a few OTT villains and the odd mysterious island in the pacific or plateaux in the deep jungle to an otherwise historically accurate setting. I think this is a particular problem for a pulp game, where exploration is one of the key themes of the game. It’s no good if the GM and players already know what’s out there before you even start to read the setting. Perhaps I’m being a bit sweeping here and a bit overly critical of other pulp games, quite a lot of which I’ve not actually read, so I will get back to the point in hand…

Which brings me back round to what I like about tDAR, and why at some point in the future I hope to run it.  But it also allows me to talk in more detail about my initial misgivings. When tDAR came out I was put off by the post apocalypse part of the setting mix, and got the impression that it was a bit more post apocalypse and a bit less pulp. For some reason the setting date, 1948 – being post WWII – also worried me. For me, pulp is really 1920s and 30s, and the 40s feels too late. And this is coming from someone who wrote a Victorian setting set in 1984! I was a fool. None of my misgivings were founded. Above anything else, the setting is very pulp. Yes an apocalypse has happened, and yes, the world has been seriously changed as a result. Yet there’s still a British Empire, there’s still a USA and Nazis, and Stalin and his evil communists. The nature of the apocalypse in fact creates a legitimate reason for all the pulpy madness that you might want – giant snakes, ape-men, magic, weird science devices made from the flesh/blood/skin of Jormungandr itself. The setting is fantastically well researched, with many historical facts inspiring some of the most unusual ideas, and the background of Ragnarok from Norse myth slotted smoothly into the whole background. Indeed, Mr Hite informs us, even the very idea that the Nazi’s were interested in trying to bring about Ragnarok was an historical fact!

In more detail the setting can be seen to break down into a number of different “components”. Each different component provides inspiration games of different sub-genres of the mix. If you want to run a very post-apocalyptic game, set it in the Poisoned Lands of central North America. If you want to go Nazi bashing, head off to Argentina or Antarctica. There are many more different ways to run a tDAR campaign, and each style is presented with a couple of pages of notes and plot hooks to help you put together your own campaign. There’s even a short skeleton campaign where a couple of lines give the inspiration for a series of adventures – or perhaps even and adventure serial. Whilst this is not in as much detail as your classic plot-point campaigns in a typical savage setting book, this format does allow the author to cover the quite wide range of campaign styles you can manage with tDAR without taking over half the book. Personally I’m not a big fan of plot point campaigns – I feel they take over a large swathe of the book and f I don’t like the campaign or want to run something a little different this is just dead space. tDAR’s approach is much more friendly to my type of GM, who is happier (indeed, inspired into) putting in a bit of work to flesh out their own adventures that I know will work with my players, rather than putting together fumbling through something someone else has created.

Looking back over this review, there’s one word that I seem to keep using: Inspire. I think tDAR is inspirational. Whilst the artwork isn’t perhaps the best you’ll see in an RPG, it certainly captures the pulpy feel of the setting – after all, if you’re artwork’s too good, it just wouldn’t feel like pulp! This is a very stylish product, from the setting content to the art, but perhaps most importantly, in its writing style. Ken Hite has a very distinctive writing style he uses in this book. I don’t know whether it is his style or if he was specifically trying to capture a pulpy style of writing, but it certainly captures your attention and draws you into the setting.

To add a bit of balance I suppose I should also say what I was, perhaps, a little disappointed with. On this score I come mainly to the game mechanics. Whilst there is the requisite smattering of flavourful new hindrances and edges, there’s nothing in the way of new game systems. I’m on a savage worlds kick at the moment, and I’m hungry to buy and read, and possibly play, as much SW as I can. As a result I like my savage settings to give me some new game systems so that I can blend them into my own settings or other games to get better mileage out of my purchase. tDAR keeps things fairly vanilla SW. It’s not a big problem – this product sells itself on its setting – but I would have liked to see a bit more in the way of new system ideas. Finally, whilst I very much like the light touch campaign-style/skeleton campaign approach, I think perhaps a solid fully-fleshed out adventure for each type of campaign might not go amiss – it would certainly help GMs who wanted to run a quick one-shot.

Overall, though it is a stylish, inspirational and fun setting that might finally see me run a pulp game, and well worth its tiny price tag!

For those who may be interested, our gaming group has gone through some changes of late, which have been very prositive, and just maybe it is something that other people's gaming groups can learn from to their advantage.

We have a small group of five of us who we, until recently, gamed with on a weekly evening session of about two and a half to three hours. It was proving unsatisfactory as it meant that it only took two people to be mssing for a session that it became unplayable. It started to get the the point where we were unable to play regaularly and became very frustrating. We were also finding the social side of the meeting was starting to slip as the game took over as we tried to squeeze as much play as we could. In addition, we've also found some of the gaming itself starting to slip, as I (at least) struggled to get games fully prepared for a weekly session, of there ended up being so long between planning the adventure and actually running it that I'd forgotten some of the details of it by the time I came to running it.

However, we have had, about once or twice a year, a "special" session, where we start at lunch time and play through until late, on a saturday so that the late night doesn't interfere with anyone's work or study. These specials have provided some of our best roleplaying experiences of the last few years, including the first ever sessions of Etherscope and my soon-to-be-released Savage Worlds setting, Sion: Deliverance.

The decision that we made was to ditch the weekly short session in favour of monthly "specials". We've had two now, one for December and one for January, and both have been execellent games, and well worth the wait. These specials have allowed us to expand out our group, inviting people from further afield or who wouldn't normally have the ability to get to the gaming session on a weekday evening due to being confined to public transport options. The gaming is better, allowing more time for planning and a much more immersive gaming session. And the social event is better, too, with more time for a chat during breaks in the game, and as I provide transport for half the group, some good chats in the car on the way home, too!

All in all it's been a very definite change for the better. I don't know what everyone else's gaming situation is like, but if you have the opportunity to change as we did I would very much recommend it!