Rites of the Blood Open Development opening soon!

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bloodbathAfter a bit of a lull, I now have (most) of the first drafts in for Rites of the Blood. As such, I’m starting an open development period that will last from now until June 9th. As I finish my notes on a chapter, I’ll make that file available on a new blog post with notes. However, I’ll also leave up previously uploaded files for comment during the time period, and I’ll post everything on this landing page. Readers should be able to add comments to the documents, but I’ll be the only person with edit authority.

I’ll be keeping an eye on discussion in the documents, on these blogs, and on my personal social media (Facebook, G+, and Twitter). If you have a thought, please toss them up in one of those places. I’m not trying to be exclusionary, but I can’t follow a heavily fragmented discussion on a lot of different sites, so taking the extra step to drop them on the document or in one of those spots would help me immensely. As a side note, I don’t engage in every conversation, but I will read things in those places.

I’m hoping to have the first chapter for review up sometime this week. Looking forward to digging into this manuscript!

Blood Ritual Rites of the Bloody Blood

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Big Ritual Blood Play, borrowed from http://thechristoff.deviantart.com

Hey all! This is Eddy. So, for the past twelve months or so, I’ve been minding my own business, focusing on my new full-time day job working on the World of Darkness MMO at CCP, helping Rich out as liaison between CCP and Onyx Path, and doing a little freelance writing here and there. But with Hunters Hunted 2 up on Kickstarter and Anarchs Unbound being edited, Rich asked me to step up and help out with developing Rites of the Blood. So I’ve stepped up, spending some nights and weekends to help out, because I love Vampire: The Masquerade so much.

I’m running a touch behind, but I wanted to get some quick input on the outline before I farm it out to writers. Particularly, I have a slush pile of wordcount that I want to devote to converting bits from Blood Sorcery and other books, the blood magic stuff that people were asking about during V20 that I didn’t have the room for. If nothing else, I’d like people to add comments on what bits they’d like to see converted, along with book and page references. But comments should be open for anyone to post, if you have thoughts.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14ItF7G8xXCAA_9We3c3AMa4uOy3kKVAVrfK7Qry0mYY/edit

Looking forward to being back in the saddle again! :)

EDIT: Closing down comments on this, so I can get it to the writers ASAP. Thanks for all the feedback!

Anarchs Unbound: Redlines and Rewrites

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Hey, gang:

As the final touches are put on Hunters Hunted II in preparation for Kickstartery, I wanted to offer you a forward-looking peek at some of the Anarchs Unbound work in progress. You can find one of the redlines here.

If you’re unfamiliar with our process, a redline is when I as developer take the writer’s draft, make the changes I think are necessary to it, ask for further embellishment on topics, and suggest that the writer reconsider some point or another. It’s a good gig — I get to be tyrant! The writer then incorporates my comments or defends his position on why he wrote something a certain way, and then submits a final draft. The final goes through another round of development and then heads off to the editor, who performs a line and copyedit.

I always thought the Damned would make a fine Anarch band with a really reasonable sense of humor.

This draft is nice and clean. You’ll see only a few editing marks and a handful of comments. Some drafts are denser with corrections while upon occasion a draft arrives in nigh-immaculate shape, and doesn’t even require any rewrites. In most cases, though, the results look something like the draft linked above.

Right now, all of the writers have their redlines back and some of the finals have even made it back to me. As it stands, Anarchs Unbound is scheduled to complete in development on February 18. It should hit that date without problem and that’s a good sigh — it means that the Vampire schedule is being whipped back into shape after a few titles slipped last year, and you’ll have an opportunity to see more Vampire books, and sooner.

Enjoy!

Anarchs Unbound Dev Scenario: Stealing Alexander

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I’m using the the following scenario as a playtest bed for some of the Anarchs material that’s rolling in. It’s for an elders one-shot or mini-chronicle that uses some of the concepts and mechanics of Anarchs Unbound, currently in development.

The Prince of Atlanta has much to deal with during the week that the city hosts the Grand Masquerade. The agenda for this Kindred convocation seems fluid — vampires of every clan and sect will attend, with a week-long observation of neutrality from all attendees (at least in open sight of others). Camarilla luminaries will rub elbows with Sabbat icons as True Black Hand agents discourse with Anarch firebrands and Inconnu mystics. The gathering will be at once political and apolitical, a chance for the undead to associate without the sanction of their sects… but many contacts are made and relationships are forged in this bizarre crucible “celebrating” the Kindred condition.

Vampire20LogoFor one coterie of Kindred, however, the events of the Grand Masquerade pale in comparison to gaining revenge against a hated rival. For, while the Prince’s attentions lie with the impending convocation of all sects, the time is right to steal the torpid form of the Methuselah Alexander.

Over a century ago, Alexander relented to the will of his assembled Primogen — for he was then Prince — and starved himself into torpor to satisfy the Kindred’s demand for exile. His childe assumed the praxis following Alexander’s abdication, and has since remained Prince. The result empowered the Primogen who, after removing the tyrant Methuselah, replaced him with a figurehead who nonetheless held power at their whim: a puppet, but a puissant one.

For the Camarilla Kindred of Atlanta, the transition from Alexander to his childe was pomp and circumstance. Nothing in their unlives changed as this particular maneuver in the Jyhad played itself out. To the Anarchs, however, the transition represented the grand betrayal of the War of Ages. Meet the new Prince, same as the old Prince, and no Kindred’s lot improves who isn’t already at the top. The shift in praxis was symbolic only, consolidating more power among the council while stripping it from the office of the vacant Alexander. With a strong Primogen and their sledgehammer Prince ruling Atlanta, the Anarchs could do little but bide their time and wait for an opening.

That opening has come. As the Prince and Primogen attend to their high-profile self-congratulatory fashion show, Alexander will be left on his own. And what better statement of Anarch craft and the unsuitability of the Primogen than to abscond with the slumbering corpse of the one-time Prince while his caretakers preen before the rest of Kindred society?

Not everything is so simple for the Anarchs, however. Stealing Alexander would be a grand coup — but they have to find him first. And then, once they’ve seized the torpid Methuselah, what do they do with him? Is diablerizing him publicly, destroying him as a symbol, a grand enough gesture? Would it be better to expose the Primogen for all their vain weakness and demand a ransom? Or might Alexander actually harbor some sympathy for the Anarch cause after a century of torpid punishment?

Hunters Hunted 2 and Anarchs Unbound

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A lot is happening in Vampire-land.

An Anarch in his native environment, circa 1982.

First, the outline for Anarchs Unbound has been posted, and awaits your commentary. Feedback on the Hunters Hunted 2 outline was strong and definitely helped us refine the direction of the book, and I’m hoping we can see some similar strength in feedback on the Anarchs outline. The writers are looking to the online outline (online outline… that feels odd to type. Online outline with inline comments… align!) for their writing assignments, so you can be certain if you leave a comment there that both I and the writer will see it. The more you let us know what you see AU offering, the more we can help it do that. Unless you’re Conrad. I have a macro set to dump all of Conrad’s comments into the trash.

Vampire infestation? Sullivan Dane can help you.

Second, the texts for Hunters Hunted 2 are available for perusal. I’m turning on the comments in this one, too, but they’ll be used differently in practice. The HH2 texts are already developed (but not yet edited), so what you’re seeing is 95% of how the content will appear in the book. I’m leaving comments only in case there’s some egregious flub in there (“Lincoln wasn’t president after Carter, Achilli! READ A BOOK.”) that made it past me. Previous player-supported clean-up efforts included a historical inaccuracy corrected in Children of the Night and a technical correction in HH2, so I’m really happy to see not only that the system works, but that the excellent community of Vampire players is willing and expert enough to help. Mike Chaney is hard at work on art directing HH2 right now, and I’ll see if he has any docs that we can share for that in order to pull back the curtain a bit on that part of the process.

Open Development: Anarchs Unbound Live Outlining Session Results

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The community outlining session of Anarchs Unbound at Atlanta by Night was a massive success. The group of players in attendance had a nonstop stream of great ideas, which we added to my basic skeletal outline. I didn’t know what to expect going into this Open Development session, but the assembled players certainly didn’t disappoint. I don’t think we had a single idea come up that wasn’t useful which is a testament to how well the players understand what we’re trying to do and (hopefully) an indicator that development is headed in a direction that players want and find useful. It was awesome to behold, and huge thanks to everyone involved.

The next step is to distill this into an actual outline from the mindmap, which I’ll also share publicly once it’s up and running.

You can see the mindmap that we authored in real-time right here.

WTF Is Happening With Vampire, You Slack Bastard?

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My desk is at the bottom of a well at the end of a staircase with a thousand steps. And there are vampires down here, too.

It’s ben a while since I’ve blogged about what’s happening with Vampire, you know. Sorry about that. So, in an attempt to rectify the information flow as we’re just under a month outside Atlanta by Night, here’s where some things stand.

V20 Companion

After many long months, people are receiving their prestige print copies of the V20 Companion. There’s been some positive feedback and some negative feedback. On the plus side, people are very happy with the look and feel and quality of the book, which is great to hear. In the minus column, especially as they receive the physical copies, people want more substantial books — that is, more page count. We’re fully aware of this and, going forward, every book has both a greater word count and page count than the Companion. The V20 Companion was 40,000 words in length: just a bit longer than the word count of the original clanbooks. The subsequent books in current approval and development (Children of the Revolution and Hunters Hunted 2) are 75,000 words in length, and we still have yet to nail down on the details for Anarchs Unbound (but I can’t imagine AU being shorter than 75,000 words, can you?).

The single greatest expense on the V20 Companion was the printing cost, as you might expect, with its full-color printing, gilt-edged pages, and leather cover. Each of those books cost $41 to print. So, if you ponied up $50 for your copy of the Companion, as per the Kickstarter, $41 of that went to the printer. Another $2-$5 went to shipping. Some amount of the rest rolled into logistics (KS and the pay service, Amazon Payments, takes a cumulative chop of about 7-10 percent of the total amount Kickstarter funding) and other things, like getting me to Atlanta to do the book signings. So there’s some transparency about how that whole process came together. We discuss this a little more in the roundtable call from a while back, if you’d like to have a listen to that.

Children of the Revolution

All of the art for CotR has been approved by CCP, Rich has done the initial layout, and I’ve proofed that first layout. Hereafter, a final, printer-ready proof is coming together, which CCP will approve and we’ll fire off to the printer. That should be the version available to the Kickstarter backers of the prestige print run. It’s come together really well, a spiritual relative of Children of the Inquisition and Kindred Most Wanted, with a full-color layout that’s really sharp. I think it’d be awesome to have these PDFs in your hands… er, inboxes… um, tablets… whatever by Atlanta by Night, but that relies on the pipeline between Rich and CCP. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter updates for the status of that. The Red List update is also in the works, with all of its art complete, I believe, so that extra add-on is shaping up nicely. Here’s an excerpt — check out the background texture, the full-color art, and the bold layout. (Remember also that this is from the first proof, and is subject to change on the graphic design end.)

Click to embiggify.

Hunters Hunted 2

I should complete redlining the outstanding draft over the course of this holiday weekend, as only the Numina chapter remains to be marked up on my end and sent back to the writer. I have many of the other drafts in their final form and ready for development, including the intro, high-concept and setting chapter, tactics chapter, and characters chapter. Final drafts should be a quick cleanup (you can see the shared redline markup of the tactics chapter here) and then off to Rich for art direction. I’m a little behind on putting together the video script for the Kickstarter project, which I should complete soon, and Rich and I will see what sort of prestige offering we can make that enhances the value for the players, since the prestige print runs come at a very high of expense to perceived value ratio. That is, we’ll talk about doing another leather-bound prestige print run, but we’ll also discuss other options that make for a prestige print run that might yield greater satisfaction to cost on the player end. Me, I suggest printing the entire print run on shotgun shell wadding and sending the “prestige print run” as a box of shotgun shells with the book printed inside them. Rich… well, he’s not as supportive of this idea. FINE, IT’S IMPRACTICAL, I GET IT.

Anarchs Unbound

I haven’t yet outlined or contracted AU, but I have writers in mind for it. What I’d like to do is sit down at Atlanta by Night in a panel or conference room and nail this down in a real-time feedback session with players and attendees. That is, we’d block out an hour of programming, I’d peck at my laptop and anyone who wanted to could offer real-time input to the outline as we create it and project it onto the conference-room screen. I don’t yet know if this will happen like this (I have a phone conversation scheduled with Ric tomorrow to discuss show details), but I think this would be a great opportunity to work hand-in-hand with players so that they have some proverbial skin in the game. Thereafter, we’d put that outline doc on the internet to solicit wider feedback, like we did with HH2, and then turn the writers loose on it.

So there, in a nutshell, is where Vampire development currently stands. It’s slower than I’d like it to have been, but I have to balance all of this freelance development with my full-time day job, in which I have one project in production and another in pre-production. I’m aiming to have everything back on its original proposed schedule after AU, at which point, we’ll head into our next round of approved proposals, but we’ll talk about those in the future.

Some Hunters Hunted 2 Redlines

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Lubricating the development of Vampire since 1998.

Good evening, my darlings. I’m hard at work on Hunters Hunted 2 for Vampire: The Masquerade and I wanted to pull back the curtain a bit and show you a draft in development.

Click here to download Chapter Three: Tools and Tactics

This is Black Hat Matt’s Tools and Tactics chapter. It’s a first draft, meaning that Matt has written to a close approximation of his word count, and covered the topics I’ve requested in the outline as well as exploring material that, during his writing, he’s thought critically about and decided is worth discussion. There’s a little extra room for Matt to round out his word count in the final draft, but this says almost everything he anticipates saying.

You’ll notice my markup in the margins, making some grammatical changes and asking a few leading questions that can help fulfill the full 15K word count that has been allocated to the chapter. I may ask for more of some material or I may ask that he pare back on a concept that doesn’t quite fit as well as I’d like.

Some of my changes are minor but significant. Things like word choice go a long way toward making Vampire evoke the gothic-punk flavor you expect, and maintain a consistent feel throughout the line. For example, I change almost every use of the word “day” to “night,” unless the writer is actually talking about the sunlit hours. Vampires don’t “live to see another day,” for example — they’re undead and rise when the sun sets, so that’s the sort of thing I’d change to “survive for another night.” Similarly, unless the word “friend” is literally the best choice, I usually change those, as well. When you’re a deathless corpse returned from the grave to steal the warm blood of the still-living, do you really have any “friends”? Maybe you have allies or contacts or acquaintances or people you know, but “friends” don’t really figure into the Kindred condition.

Other changes are more significant. Sometimes I excise an entire paragraph or subsection if it deviates from the theme, mood, and purpose of the book. Sometimes I ask a writer to take a greater look at an idea to retool it or rewrite it entirely. Sometimes I really like a single reference the writer has made and ask him to spend some of his word count expanding that solitary idea into a more substantial discussion.

It’s also worth noting that this draft is particularly clean. It’s solid conceptually, it’s well written, and it evidences Matt’s many years of experience in not only writing for Vampire but writing for me in particular. You may think, “Wow, that’s a lot of markup,” but you should also note that it’s mostly positive feedback. And, well, it’s actually not a lot of markup. First-time writers for me usually see a lot more red, but that’s to help us both. They improve their craft a bit and I get the draft I want. It’s worth spending the time to build the relationship because, over time, the writer knows what I want, how to format it, and how best to communicate it in a consistent Vampire way. I’m rarely driven to drink more than a fifth or bourbon or gin by the time I’ve worked with a writer three or four times.

Take a peek through the draft here and note not only what Matt says in his manuscript, but what I ask him to polish, remove, or expand. You’ll be able to see firsthand how I do my work.

 

Children of the Revolution: Full Text Available

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The full text of Children of the Revolution is up here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18J5p636V-OrGcF1ZI4c3pfV7m_mwNPLjK8X3oE-97oA/edit

Feel free to share with friends and leave a comment.

The book is in layout right now, and the art is (I believe) in CCP’s hands for approvals.

This was a trying book to work on. It fell right in the middle of my many moves (Atlanta to France to Corpus Christi to Dallas to Raleigh-Durham) and lurked like an omnipresent shadow on my doorstep, no matter where I moved that doorstep. Still, the Kindred within are of a kind with the books that inspired Children of the Revolution, those being Children of the Inquisition and Kindred Most Wanted. Depending on which character you read, you’ll experience a variety of approaches, from first-edition wonder to second-edition conspiracy to revised-edition grit to 20th anniversary edition practicality. I also took your feedback to heart, adding a few lines here and there for clarification or exploring some of the concepts you wanted to shed more light on. The back-and-forth was a bit different this time from the V20 Companion, as the balance of systems-to-setting wasn’t to be determined. I missed that a little bit, and I think it suffered somewhat in the moves(s). That said, I’m looking forward to your feedback as we move into development work on Hunters Hunted 2. Until then, though, enjoy the fruits of our mutual labor: the 18 Kindred who distinguish themselves as the Children of the Revolution.