Spectaculars Kickstarter Ends

Thanks to the generous support of over a thousand Kickstarter backers, Spectaculars not only reached its funding goal, but also raised enough money to unlock every stretch goal along the way! The game now enters the production and manufacturing process in an effort to achieve the target ship date of August 2019. A Pledge Manage for Spectaculars will go up soon, allowing backers to modify their pledges and provide shipping addresses. If you missed the Kickstarter, the Pledge Manager will also allow you to preorder the game at the discounted Kickstarter price.

Spectaculars Has Funded!

As of this posting, Spectaculars has surpassed its funding goal on Kickstarter, which means that the game will be produced! A sincere thanks to everyone who has supported the game so far. But it’s not over yet! There are still three days left to support the campaign, and a whole batch of new stretch goals are ready and waiting to tear through during the last hours of the Kickstarter.

$70,000 — Digital Creator Pack! For the first stretch goal, I will release for free to all backers the digital creator pack for the game. This stretch goal will give backers access to digital files used in the  creation of the Spectaculars game, making it easier to produce new material that looks just like the contents of the boxed set.

The digital creator pack includes:

• Digital files for all artwork used in the game 

• Adobe InDesign templates for all cards, the rulebook, the setting book, and series

• Any digital templates and artwork produced for stretch goals 

• License to create and distribute for free Spectaculars content

I want you to take this game and make it your own, make your own  content for it, share it with others in the community, hack it, and get  as much out of it as you can. This pack should help you do so, and help  make the material you create look as close to the original game as possible.

$75,000 — 12 Extra Initiative Cards! This stretch goal adds 12 cards to the initiative cards already included in the box set, giving you more flexibility when putting together the initiative deck, and more flexibility when designing your own scenarios, allowing you to add more minions, hazards, and events to the initiative track.

The extra initiative cards included will be:

• More color options for minions, hazards and events

• Unique “Critical Complication” initiative card

$80,000 — 25 Extra Identities! This stretch goal adds 25 identities to the existing pool of identities, spread across both the Common and the series-specific identity groups. These cards will draw inspiration from heroes in the major comic book imprints, allowing you to more easily recreate certain iconic heroes within the game.

The extra powers included will be:

• 5 more Common identities

• 5 more identities for each of the four series included in the game

$85,000 — 25 Extra Powers! This stretch goal adds 25 powers to the existing pool of powers, spread across both the Common and series-specific powers. These powers will expand the breadth of options you'll see when making characters, increasing the chances that all heroes and villains in a session will be completely unique in terms of their power sets.

The extra powers included will be:

• 5 more Common powers

• 5 more powers for each of the four series included in the game

$90,000 — Rulebook +16 Pages! This stretch goal adds 16 pages of material to the game's rulebook. This space will be used to focus on topics that, while not essential to gameplay, will help players and Narrators get the most out of the game.

Some examples of the extra content that will be included in these extra pages includes:

• Expanded guidance for Narrators, making it easier to personalize the game for your group

• Expanded guidance for creating your own issues and series

• More Story Rewards for heroes

• Expanded hero origins suggestions

• Expanded optional rules

$95,000 — Deck of Complications! This stretch goal adds an entirely new deck to the game: The Deck of Complications! Each card in this 40-card deck includes one or more suggestions for a complication that the Narrator can add to a conflict scene. During play, when the heroes roll drawbacks on challenge dice, the Narrator can draw cards from the Deck of Complications, choose one, and introduce that complication immediately. This will make it easier to improvise interesting scenes with escalating tension, and will include complications that range from putting innocent bystanders in danger, to forcing the heroes to deal with collateral damage to nearby buildings, to introducing minor villains in the middle of the conflict ("You didn't think I would come alone, did you?"). This deck is a tool the Narrator can use to make each conflict more dynamic without having to do any prep work in advance.

$100,000 — 4 GameTrayz Hero Trays! This stretch goal adds four hero trays, designed by Noah Adelman from GameTrayz, to every copy of the game! As you can see from the images below, these trays are incredibly well designed, and hold all of your components tightly in place during play, making it so that your cards don't slide around during play. Each tray also includes a storage slot for your percentile dice, and a trough to hold your hero points and time tokens, keeping the table clear of loose components during play. These things look amazing, and anyone who has a copy of Dusk City Outlaws knows just how great Noah's tray designs are. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

Spectaculars Livestreams: Help Make the Setting!

On Monday and Tuesday of next week (10/29 and 10/30), I will be running livestreamed games of Spectaculars on the LoadingReadyRun Twitch channel (Monday, at 6:00 PM Pacific time) and on the Saving Throw Show (Tuesday, 8:00 PM Pacific). I’m very excited (despite spending a couple of days doing too much air travel!) , partly because running for those folks is a lot of fun, but also partly because YOU are going to help me make the setting in which those games will be run.

That’s right, for each of the Kickstarter livestreams, we’ll be playing in the same comic book universe. Now, normally, I’d let my players create the world, but since I’ll be running for several different groups I decided to invite you to step into the role of my players and help me create the setting, as well as the villains that the heroes are going to face in the first two streams. Take the survey in the link below, and cast your votes, helping to shape the comic book universe these livestreams will showcase.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TWPBDJ9

Spectaculars Kickstarter is Live!

Spectaculars, the new tabletop roleplaying game of comic book heroes and villains, is now live on Kickstarter! Seeking funding for a print run to be delivered in August 2019, the Kickstarter campaign is live now, through November 20th. As with Dusk City Outlaws, backers of the Kickstarter can receive the physical game for a $65 pledge, $10 less than the MSRP. Back the game now to help make Spectaculars a reality!

Neo-Dunhaven Released

Now available on DriveThruRPG, Neo-Dunhaven is a setting hack for Dusk City Outlaws that translates the heist game into a the dystopian cyberpunk setting of Neo-Dunhaven. Under the oppressive eyes of the Consortium Council, the Right Kind of People of Neo-Dunhaven plan heists and execute cons, dealing with artificial intelligences, digital memory storage and transfer, and an immersive virtual reality network. Designed by Steve Kenson and Rodney Thompson, Neo-Dunhaven includes complete conversion guidelines, information on the Neo-Dunhaven setting, eight new cartels for use in that setting, and a revised and expanded group of specialties for use with Neo-Dunhaven.

Announcing Spectaculars!

View fullsize

Scratchpad Publishing is proud to announce Spectaculars, a tabletop roleplaying game of comic book heroes and villains! Like Dusk City Outlaws, Spectaculars will ship as a box set, including everything you need to play the game right in the box. More than that, Spectaculars is focused on campaign play and worldbuilding, and is meant to help you run a campaign without needing to do any prep work between sessions. Spectaculars has no default setting of its own; instead, the game guides you through creating your own setting, helping you craft and introduce important elements to the setting as they become necessary.

More information on Spectaculars is forthcoming, and soon. In the very near future, Scratchpad Publishing will once again be returning to Kickstarter to help fund the production of the game, so stay vigilant for the campaign to go live! You can also sign up for our mailing list to be alerted as soon as the Kickstarter goes up!

Get ready. It’s your world, so defend it.

Sign up for our mailing list for more updates.

The Zombie Job Now Available

Scenario W01: The Zombie Job is now available on DriveThruRPG! This scenario was designed for, and run on, LoadingReadyRun's Dice Friends streaming show, and involves the crew being hired to retrieve a heretical tome that reanimates the dead. That tome is currently located inside a quarantined funeral parlor filled with ravenous, reanimated dead, the result of a ritual gone wrong.

Turf Wars, Digital Creator Pack Now Available

Now available on DriveThruRPG are two supplemental products for Dusk City Outlaws. The Turf Wars supplement expands the campaign rules in Dusk City Outlaws, giving a structure for play over the course of a year in New Dunhaven that has the crew playing members all drawn from the same cartel, fighting over districts to add to their cartel's turf. The Digital Creator Pack is a package containing art, icons, and templates used in the creation of the Dusk City Outlaws core game, as well as a license to create and distribute supplemental materials for free. You can pick up both of these new products on DriveThruRPG right now!

Now Available for Purchase!

Physical copies of the Dusk City Outlaws core game box set are now available for purchase through this website! Simply click on the "Add to Cart" button below, on the Dusk City Outlaws product page, or on the main page to order a copy shipped to your doorstep by our shipping company, Blackbox!

Buy Dusk City Outlaws

As an added bonus, for those who purchase the game through this website, once your game ships you will also receive complimentary copies of the core game PDFs through DriveThruRPG.

Character & Crew Sheets Available

You can now download, for free, PDF copies of the character sheet and crew sheet from the Dusk City Outlaws core game box set. This package includes both color and black-and-white versions of each sheet, as well as a printer-friendly version of each. They are now available on DriveThruRPG.

Day One Backer Scenarios

Four new scenarios are now available for purchase on DriveThruRPG. These four scenarios are a part of the Day One Backer bonus, and if you backed the game on the first day of the Kickstarter you should have already received your download codes from DriveThruRPG for these PDFs. For everyone else, these scenarios are now available for purchase.

DCO Shipping Soon

Dusk City Outlaws is set to begin shipping to backers and select hobby game stores soon! Within the next two weeks, US backers should see their copies shipping out of the distribution warehouse and headed to their doorsteps. International backers should see the same before the end of March, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

Once backer copies have shipped, we will also have limited quantities available for sale through this very website. Keep an eye here for more updates!

Complete PDFs Posted

The Dust City Outlaws Core Set title on DriveThruRPG has been updated with the complete PDFs for all paper components that will come with the box set. If you backed the Kickstarter or preordered the game through Pledge Manager, you can download the updated files from DTRPG now!

If you haven't purchased the game, you can still pre-order through Pledge Manager, or purchase only the PDFs through DriveThruRPG.

This is a big step for the game, and we move one step close to everything being manufactured and in your hands! These files have also gone off to the manufacturer, and we're now in the process of getting the physical game produced. Now, we're going to turn our attentions toward the digital scenarios, Digital Creator pack, Turf Wars, and Neon City Outlaws, while our partner works on the Companion App.

Pre-Orders Open!

I'm pleased to announce that the Pledge Manager for Dusk City Outlaws is live for a limited time. From now until the time that the game goes to print, you can use the Pledge Manager to manage the rewards you will receive from the campaign.

If you backed the Kickstarter, check the e-mail address you use for Kickstarter for an invitation to join the Pledge Manager. This will allow you to configure your rewards, set up your shipping address, and, if you would like, upgrade to a higher tier or select any add-ons you would like.

If you missed the Kickstarter but still want to order, click on the link below to join in! You can share that link with anyone else you think might be interested in preordering the game.

Limited Time Only!

The Pledge Manager will remain open until mass production of the game begins, at which point pre-orders for the game will close. Act soon to make sure you get your copy of the game!

Kickstarter Ends as Huge Success

Well, we did it. The Kickstarter campaign for Dusk City Outlaws has ended, and was far, far more successful than I ever could have hoped for. We unlocked every stretch goal, and revealed every guest scenario designer. To quickly summarize, here's everything that will be included in the game when it ships to backers, with things unlocked by stretch goals in bold:

• The 24-page Player Rulebook, with expanded campaign rules & variant rules
• The 48-page Judge Rulebook, with expanded guidelines for creating your own scenarios
• The 240-page Traveler's Guide to New Dunhaven digest-sized setting book
• 19 full-color cartel sheets (two for each cartel, plus three rare character cartel sheets)
• 26 full-color specialty sheets (including 10 sorcerous specialties)
• The 60-card Deck of Quirks
• The 40-card Deck of Enemies
• A tear-off pad of character sheets
• 5 sets of percentile dice
• 4 advantage dice
• 4 challenge dice
• Cardboard token sheet
• Four bonus scenarios
• The Dusk City Outlaws Companion App for iOS, Android, Windows 10, or Mac

Just incredible. Thank you so much to everyone who supported the campaign. Now, I set to work wrangling artists, editors, graphic designers, and the manufacturer to try and get the game out to you on time.

If you missed out on the Kickstarter, have no fear! Sign up for our mailing list, and once Dusk City Outlaws becomes available to order (hopefully through our pledge manager) we'll let you know!

Funding Goal Reached!

I am pleased to announce that Dusk City Outlaws has hit its funding goal! Thanks to everyone that has contributed their support to the game so far. We've still got a few weeks left, so that means it's time to dig into our stretch goals!

I've just posted an update to the Kickstarter that details the new stretch goal tiers. Every $5,000 above the goal, I'm adding something or improving something in the box. The more stretch goals we hit, the better everyone's copy of the game gets!

You can check out the latest update now for more details.

Days & Nights in the Dusk City

From the beginning, one of the most significant goals for Dusk City Outlaws has been to be the kind of game that could be easily pulled off of the shelf at a moment's notice and be ready to play without significant prep work. A lot of the decisions that went into the design of the game come from this root, and one of the most significant one is the decision to break play up into fairly structures daytime and nighttime segments, during which you either do planning, or do legwork.

Another major goal for the game is that I wanted it to be a player-driven sandbox; this goal also ties into the idea of being able to run without prep work, because it means the Judge doesn't need to understand some twisting path of a narrative, only react and allow the players to keep the story moving forward. But sometimes player-driven sandboxes stall out; players have too many options, and don't know what they should be doing. To address this, I knew the game was going to need two things: a clear call to action and a limited amount of time in which to get things done. This is the pull-and-push of player motivation in Dusk City Outlaws.

The Call to Action

The call to action is something that many tabletop roleplaying games that I like get right. Shadowrun, for example, is one of the best examples of this; you need to get a job from Mr. Johnson in order to pay your bills, and that job has a clear goal that you have to accomplish. There's a lot of Shadowrun inspiration in Dusk City Outlaws, and indeed one of the elevator pitches I use when describing the game to my fellow game designers is, "It's the premise of Shadowrun, the strong factions of Legend of the Five Rings, against the backdrop of a fantasy version of New York City." Getting your job from your broker at the beginning is the clear call to action, and I've found that the best successes I've had in scenario design are the ones where there is a clear target (steal this diamond, rob this bank, etc.) with interesting obstacles around them. This is the pull, the thing that lures the players toward it: the clear goal, with a call to action to achieve it.

The Time Limit

It's that second core need of the game, a limited amount of time in which to get things done, that led me to clearly define day and night segments, as well as planning scenes and legwork scenes. Putting a time limit on the Job puts pressure on the players to move forward; it's the stick that puts forceful motivation to the players' actions. But at the moment you put any limitation on the players, you need to also give them a clear sense of what the confines of those limitations are. In the case of putting a time limitation on the Job, that means the ultimate resource the players have is now time itself, and I found quickly that I needed to be able to tell the players now only how much of that resource they had, but how quickly it is expended. That's only fair, and the players won't enjoy their time at the table if they have a limitation placed on their resources but no clearly defined way that they are expended. If it's all arbitrary, they don't get the satisfaction of feeling like they earned their success, or deserved their failure.

Planning

While that realization led clear definitions of time resources (you have X days to do the Job, and each day is divided into one daytime segment and one nighttime segment), players then needed to know what they could actually do with their time. From the start, I said I wanted this to be a game where clever planning is rewarded, and where that instinct to come up with the foolproof plan that many gamers have is both rewarded and prevented from spiraling out of control. I felt strongly that coming up with not only the basic sketch of a plan, but also coming up with all of the details and contingency plans, would lead to a more satisfying payoff. I also wanted there to be a real risk of failure (if not complete failure in the Job, at least failure to account for something in your plans) because I feel like the highs of success are greater when this is the case. But if I was going to let the players do the planning, I had to put limitations on it. We've all played in that game where players dither forever. To keep planning from spiraling out of control, I said that planning consumes your main resource (time, in the form of an entire daytime or nighttime segment) and put a 15-minute real-time limit on planning scenes. This has had the nice effect of spurring the players to the meat of their planning quickly, with little distraction or dithering.

Spencer Crittendon's planning notebook.

Legwork

Looking to the source material for the game, the con/heist genre, it seemed like a common trope is that no plan can instantly be put into motion. The main characters needed to get out there and set things up, meet contacts, recruit allies, set up cover stories, and, in the process, provide lots of opportunities for their opposition to make life more difficult for them. Every time the main characters went out and started putting a piece of their plan into motion, it was associated with a high risk of being caught. The classic con movie, The Sting, is one of the best examples of this, and some of the most tense moments in the movie come well before the climactic final act.

This is where the idea of legwork scenes came from. I found pretty quickly during playtesting that a player-driven sandbox game needed something very important to feel satisfying: a sense of progress. If you're going to ask the players to drive the action, they are going to want to feel like they're actually getting things done. So, I started out allowing everyone to define or participate in one legwork scene. That "or" in there was quickly revealed to be a problem; it led to lots of time spent with the crew divided into smaller groups, which would inevitably result in two or three players sitting around the table doing nothing and waiting for the current scene to play out. So I shifted the rule to say that everyone takes the lead on one legwork scene, and then can participate in as many of the other players' legwork scenes as they wanted. Coupling this with some better guidance for the Judge (focused on introducing complications that encourage many members of the crew to get involved in the scene), the pacing picked up significantly, and the players' sense of progress grew significantly.

There was one final major tweak that I made to legwork scenes, and it came after a playtest I ran at PAX West 2016. After that playtest, some of the players made the suggestion that the one thing missing from legwork was some assistance from the game in helping the players define the scene, a template that they could follow to easily set up the action. This is something tied into the challenge of player-driven games; when the options are too wide-open, players often feel paralyzed by their choices. I then created the template that players use in the game right now to help define their legwork scenes:

“Specify one thing you want to get out of the scene (a specific piece of information, some asset or resource, the cooperation or aid of an individual, and so on), and describe the place you are going to get it. You then explain how you are going to get it and, if necessary, who you interact with to get what you want.”

This turned out to be a great aid in keeping the pacing at the table moving forward. Defining what the player wants to get out of the scene up front sets and end goal for the scene, the "pull" that the player is working toward. This is also nice because, at the end of the scene, the player can look back and see if they got what they wanted, leading to a very clear sense of progress. Describing the place where you are going to get it helps the Judge provide the backdrop and set decoration for the scene, an important part of immersing the players in the setting. Defining how you are going to get what you want helps the Judge not only make the call on what obstacles and challenges are present, it also points to which skills or other mechanics you're going to need to use to succeed, and the option to talk about who you interact with opens the door to introducing recurring NPCs into the game. Best of all, this structure still allows players freedom to drive the game forward in the way they want, and lets them play to their strengths. If you're a Vesper who is good at dealing with nobles and need blackmail material on a noble to use as leverage, you describe your method as interacting directly with the nobility; if you're not good at dealing with nobles and are instead a Mummer who is good at dealing with criminals, you describe your method as seeking out another criminal who actually has the blackmail material already. Players can play to their strengths while still following a template that makes things easier on everyone.

Dusk City Outlaws LIVE!

Starting very soon, we're going to be Dusk City Outlaws is going to be played live for your viewing pleasure! We've got a schedule of livestreams coming up that should give you a chance to see the game in motion and give a sense how it plays.

---

Note: All times listed below are for the Pacific time zone in the United States.

Sunday, January 29th, 2:30 PM - Divvy the Loot: Join me (Rodney Thompson) as I livestream a game for some friends of mine here in Seattle. Two of the players have playtested before, but the other two will be brand-new to the game! This is a two-part livestream, with a 4-hour scenario broken up into two halves.

Tuesday, February 7th, Time TBD - The Saving Throw Show: The Dungeon Bastard, aka Tom Lommel from the Stonesetter Job actual play video, takes the Judge's seat for a livestreamed game on the Saving Throw channel.

Sunday, February 12th, 12:00 PM - Divvy the Loot: Time for Part 2 of the livestream from January 29th! We'll be picking up where we left off at the end of the last stream and wrapping up the scenario.

Friday, February 24th, 6:00 PM - LoadingReadyRun's AFK Show: I'll be traveling to the wilds of Victoria, Canada to bring a livestreamed game with my favorite Canadian nerd comedy group that I am personally friends with!

Now Live on Kickstarter

It's with great pleasure that I announce that Dusk City Outlaws is now live on Kickstarter! You can go back the game right now, and help us make the game a reality. We would like to thank you in advance for your support, and encourage you to spread the word about the Kickstarter to anyone who might be interested.

Click here to back Dusk City Outlaws on Kickstarter!

Google+ Community

As interest in the game builds, I thought it would be a good time to start pointing players toward a few central locations where you can start talking about the game and how you're using it. It's my hope that players aren't just going to play the game, but are going to take what I create and run with it. Roleplaying games flourish when the community feeds its creativity back into itself, and I'm hoping that even when the first previews of the game go live people will start coming up with their own ideas and putting them out there for other people to see and use.

So, if you're a Google+ user, you can head on over to the community I've created and start talking about the game.

Dusk City Outlaws Community on Google+