About a year ago, I published two role-playing PDFs, an adventure (War in the Deep) and a sandbox setting (The City of Talon). I posted my earnings-to-date six months ago. Here’s what I’ve earned since then:

Sales For The Past Six Months (June-November 2009)

Sales For The Past Year (November 2008-November 2009)

I won’t bother charting the month-to-month sales, as they’ve obviously tailed off dramatically.

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 6,649.

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum in past six months: 7

Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 3,852

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum in past six months:

The keywords used to find Talon: “the crimes of talon” (7!), “brent p. newhall”, and ”d&d quest ideas”

bluedwarf.co.uk appears to be a text adventure inspired by Red Dwarf. No idea how that links back to Talon; maybe somebody linked to it on their forum?

Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I’m a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

I’m happy to have made over US $120 on two PDFs, though it’s still not that much considering the amount of time I put into them. Even so, $120 is at least a return on my time spent on this hobby.

Plans

I now want to publish more supplements, of course.

In my last “Plans” section, I wrote about my intention to publish two settings and one adventure by…now. That hasn’t happened, though one of those settings is now about 80% complete.

So. I will make that 80%-complete setting a focus, and will ramp up work on an adventure to publish.

I would like to develop an overall theme for my adventures, so I’m not just publishing random ideas. So, I’ve decided to build a broad campaign idea, and set each adventure somewhere within that campaign. Each adventure can be played alone, of course.

I’m also thinking about expanding into systems beyond D&D 4E. Everyone’s building for that. Imagine a series of adventures just for Star Wars players, for example.

Hmmmmmm.

Miniature picture courtesy adobemac on Flickr

What makes Google Wave work for role-playing games?

I’ve been playing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now, primarily with role-playing Waves. These are Waves in which people pretend to be characters in a story.

There are tons of ways to role-play; sitting around a table, over live text chat, or on a forum. Wave appears to be well-suited to role-playing.

I’ve noticed a few things:

• Players are less committed. That is, players leave for relatively long periods, then come back. This is partly due to Wave’s youth; checking Wave is not yet an ingrained habit for players.
• Parties are less cohesive. Same thing here; Wave’s not yet a habit. But I can see parties as being much more malleable; people will come and go.
• Systems must be simple. I’m observing a D&D 4E game on Wave, and one combat round took 2 days. I love D&D 4E, but I think it—and other relatively “heavy” systems—are less appropriate for Wave than their simpler cousins.
• Everything’s visible and malleable. Anyone can jump in and fix a mistake or restructure content.

My Response

I’ve created an RPG experiment on Google Wave. It’s a floating fantasy city that anyone can interact with. It’s a sandbox role-playing game of exploration and intrigue. It has elements of:

• Wikis
• Choose-your-own-adventure books
• Old school text adventures
• Tabletop RPGs

Even better, I’ve created a website where you can see all of this. I think it will be visible even if you don’t have a Google Wave account. Go here:

There are already 10 locations you can explore and interact with, and a fairly robust (and original) system for creating your character. Hop on in!

What do you think? Does this interest you?

Google Wave logo courtesy Google; fountain photo is courtesy antmoose on FLickr.

(This posted a couple of days late; technical issues, blah blah blah.)

Here are the purchases I made this week:

Ridiculously low expenditures this week, thanks primarily to a pot of ham soup I made over the weekend. This provided me with a meal every day, and the rest of my sustenance could be provided by other groceries.

And this marks the end of my weekly expenditure adventure posts. I’ve proven to myself the importance of recording my expenditures. I’ll keep doing that; I just won’t post about it here on the blog.

There’s value in public exposure too, of course. But I want to try keeping them private, to see if that’s enough.

Note: This is part of my attempt to review every Gundam show that I’ve seen, which is almost all of them. This is a spoiler-free review, though I do describe the show’s premise and villains.

After War: Gundam X was the third Gundam series set in its own timeline, and it suffered for it. G found a core audience but was generally reviled by hard-line fans for being too cheesy. Wing was hated for being too melodramatic (and its pilots for being “too pretty”). After that, a lot of Gundam fans just stopped caring. So X suffers it ignominy of being the only Gundam show (besides the first) to be canceled partway through its run.

It didn’t deserve that fate. While X is a lighter show than, say, Zeta or Wing, it’s a solidly constructed series that runs a wide range of emotions and themes.

Its timeline is actually closest of all alternate timelines to that of original Gundam (“Universal Century”); in fact, X can be seen as an alternate history version of U.C., asking what would have happened if Amuro had never appeared, and Newtype psychic development continued its rapidly escalating arms race.

In After War Gundam X, 15 years have passed since this universe’s version of the apocalyptic One Year War. That conflict grew increasingly devastating, until Earth’s biosphere partially collapsed, wrapping the planet in a decade-long cloud of choking dust. While humans and most species survived, the world is now a post-apocalyptic wilderness of fierce bandits and abandoned technology amidst struggling pockets of civilization.

And struggling as much as anyone is Garrod Ran, the show’s 15-year-old protagonist. He’s a standard mecha shonen hero: courage and spirit to spare, but not a lot of brains. Not to spoil anything, but in the first episode he stumbles on a Gundam, and proceeds to pilot it (big shock there), with the help of a very quiet (and, it’s hinted, previously abused) girl named Tifa, who can activate an insanely destructive weapon in Garrod’s Gundam. The two quickly develop feelings for each other: Garrod wants to protect the delicate and sensitive Tifa, while Tifa appreciates the first person who’s ever cared for her safety.

Garrod and Tifa soon join the crew of a large hovering battleship, the Frieden, and with a few other mecha pilots, they wander around helping people and running from the enigmatic and delightfully evil Frost brothers.

So, it’s basically an action/adventure show. It’s a bit less episodic than most super robot shows (or G Gundam), though; the Frieden’s crew soon investigates the Frost brothers’ political machinations, and seek to forestall potential conflicts and wars. Characters from previous episodes re-appear as larger foes emerge.

If this sounds simple, it is. And that’s part of the charm of X. It avoids the over-the-top energy of G which puts off many fans, while following a straightforward, easily-comprehensible story. The characters are easy to root for. The Gundams are presented as powerful war machines. Secrets are revealed and the stakes build. The animation’s clean, and the music’s appropriately operatic.

It’s a fun ride.

This is the latest in a series of reviews about every Gundam series that I’ve seen (which, at this point, is almost all of them).

My last review focused on Gundam Wing, but let’s back up for a minute. Before that, and after Victory Gundam, Sunrise decided to expand into new, “alternate universe” Gundam shows, which would preserve the core themes of Gundam but tell stories in different worlds and timelines.

The first attempt was Mobile Fighter G Gundamm, which returned to the roots of the mecha genre with an over-the-top, high-spirited show of Manly Men.

Which brings us to the Dragonball Z comparisons. Indeed, G is close in spirit to Dragonball Z. This strikes Gundam purists as heresy, and I understand. I tried to watch G several times, but suffered from prejudice. I was so used to the more serious—or at least convoluted—style of other Gundam shows that I just couldn’t stomach a show that looked so much like a cheesy shonen series or a 1970′s Go Nagai mech show.

Which turns out to be the key to appreciating G Gundam. This is a throwback to early giant robot shows, to Getter Robo and Mazinger and Voltron. The characters are mostly two-dimensional, but they’re supposed to be. They’re archetypes. They’re characters in a morality play. They exist to show us clear viewpoints and opinions.

And they do so in the context of the Gundam Fight, the cheesiest mecha idea ever — giant robots descend from space colonies to Earth and bust each other up, the winner’s colony winning control of Earth for the following four years. I mean, really, what?

It works. It works because the Gundam Fight is not the point. This is a story of characters and morality. Of people pushing themselves and striving to accomplish lofty goals.

It’s a cartoon about giant robots beating the crap out of each other.

Relax and enjoy.