Tag: patronage

A DivNull Lark (#03): Indie gaming gift, late 2010

wordman 76 Comments

A year ago, the first DivNull lark helped bring Blowback to market. It’s October, so let’s do it again…

The next DivNull lark will match the first: a gift of $1000 to help bring an independently published story game to release within a year. That is, pitch me your idea for how you would use $1000 to either make a new game or improve an existing one that hasn’t been released, and I’ll donate $1000 to the idea I like best to help make it happen.

Conditions:

  • Only pitches made as responses to this post, publicly, will be considered.
  • No pitch made after 15 October 2010 will be considered.
  • The donation will be made on or before 31 October 2010.
  • If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2011 to make good on the idea. At that point, the world will know if you are person of your word, or a failure.
  • This donation in no way affects any rights you have to your work. Nor does the donation create any liabilities from your work for the donator. Succeed or fail, you’re on your own.
  • Payment will be made via PayPal, in United States currency. No exceptions.

The winner will be decided solely based on my learned deliberation capricious whim; however, I do take advice. If you see an entry you really like, feel free to lobby for it in a response below.

All responses to this blog are vetted manually before appearing. Historically, I am a bit slow at doing this. I will try to be more prompt for the next few weeks, but if your comment doesn’t show up right away, don’t panic.

Update: This contest is now closed to new submissions. I will, however, leave the comments open for people to give advice on the entries they like.

Kickstarter: Early Dark

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Early DarkAnthropos Games is soliciting funding on Kickstarter to print of their new game Early Dark. DivNull makes a point of backing any tabletop RPG that shows up on Kickstarter, especially if the result will be open source or a cut above your average game. Early Dark seems like it has a chance to be the latter, which is why it’s being mentioned here. Its goals are certainly interesting: “Treat gender, race, and human consciousness as progressively as possible; Forge a world indebted to non-European myth and story in addition to common Western fantasy tropes; and Create a dynamic game engine that drives dramatic narrative while reproducing realistic conflict and human limitations”.

This is also a decent opportunity to praise Kickstarter for a feature: making the amount pledged independent of the “pledge tiers”. That is, you can choose the benefit of, say, the $20 tier, but still pledge $100 if you want. Often, I want to pledge a certain amount, but am totally uninterested in the extra crap thrown into that tier.

One the other hand, Kickstarter’s search feature is horrible. It should not be difficult to build a search like role-playing and rpg, but that fails totally. Also, role-playing and roleplaying return totally different results. That could be considered desirable, but only if you also allow role-playing and roleplaying (or, better yet, role*playing) searches. Kickstarter has informed me they intend to fix this, but nothing has happened as yet.

A DivNull Lark (#02): Locus cartography

wordman 1 Comment

Chartographer's Guild LogoDivNull conceptualized this month’s mapping challenge over at the Cartographer’s Guild, a site dedicated to making maps for games. I also am sponsoring the contest’s prize, a $200 gift certificate to Indie Press Revolution.

The gist of the challenge is to design a map of a building (or set of buildings) that focuses geomantic energy, under a particular set of guidelines, in one month. This is explained in more detail (with perhaps more asterisks and sportscars than necessary) on the challenge page. This challenge follows the same rules and procedures as the others.

The winner is decided by members of the Cartographer’s Guild forums, which are free to join. Good luck!

(Also, the contest doesn’t mention or require this, but if you want to enter a map, please consider posting it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Thanks!)

Kickstarting e20

wordman 1 Comment

e20 SystemGary M. Sarli, editor and developer of the well received roleplaying game Star Wars Saga Edition aims to create a new generic roleplaying system called the e20 System. Based on the open content d20 system, e20 development uses a patronage model, where the public can pledge funding and, if a certain pledge target is reached ($10,000 in this case), pledges are cashed and the product begins. The patronage project site kickstarter handles the pledges for e20.

The project has a little bit to go to reach their target by the deadline of March 15. To help them, DivNull Productions is increasing its pledge to this project to $500. Two things interest me about this project. First, just like its inspiration, the result will be Open Gaming Content. Second, the design of the system is being driven by feedback from millions of hours of playing the d20 system from players all over the world, a real playground of evolutionary forces. While I’m not the biggest fan of d20, I care a lot about open source gaming, so I wish good luck to this project.

Please consider throwing a few bucks to the project to help them meet their goal. (And, while you’re at it, see if there is anything else on kickstarter that interests you.)

A DivNull Lark (#01): Indie gaming gift, late 2009

wordman 14 Comments

The Story Games forums focus on the creation of independently produced roleplaying games. On October 2nd, 2009, forum member Valamir started a thread asking members to hypothesize about how they would use $1000 to produce their game.

On a whim, DivNull Productions decided to take this out of the realm of hypothesis, with Wordman posting:

This post started with the following hypothetical:

Posted By: ValamirImagine said benefactor announced “Pitch me your game ideas and the designer whose idea I like best will get $1000 to bring it to fruition”

Other popular game design forums maintain, however, that debate about hypothetical situations are useless and only “actual play” matters. So, let’s play…

As of now, there actually is a benefactor (i.e. me) saying “Pitch me your ideas for how you would use $1000 to either make a new game or improve an existing one that hasn’t been released, and I’ll donate $1000 to the idea I like best to help make it happen”.

Conditions:

  • Only pitches made on this thread, publicly, will be considered.
  • No pitch made after 15 October 2009 will be considered.
  • Donation will be made on or before 31 October 2009.
  • If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2010 to make good on the idea. At that point, the world will know if you are person of your word, or a failure.
  • This donation in no way affects any rights you have to your work. Nor does the donation create any liabilities from your work for the donator. Succeed or fail, you’re on your own.

While this pitch process was neither widely advertised nor, to be frank, particularly well run, a number of compelling proposals were submitted. These remain visible in the thread linked to above, but have also been reproduced as the first 11 comments of this thread as well.

We are no longer accepting pitches; however, there are likely to be more of these “DivNull larks” in the future. This one was something of a trial run, so was deliberately kept somewhat quiet. Future larks will be more public.

DivNull will announce who receives the gift in a few days, both on this blog and in the original Story Games thread.