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