Schlock Mercenary

Thank you.—Howard, Alan, and Sandra (plus a cast of dozens of others soon to join the project...)

The Planet Mercenary Kickstarter closes Monday Morning at around 2pm Eastern time.If you're still on the fence, and don't want to miss out, pledge a dollar.We'll be using Backerkit to allow people to increase their pledges, and to specify the things they want, and you'll have until at least mid-June to settle up.The Kickstarter page is a long, involved, possibly confusing thing. Here are some easy links:Seventy Maxims: Click here if you want to pledge for the hardback copy of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. It's $20 in the US, with additional shipping for Canada and the rest of the world.Company Commander: Click here if you want everything—RPG book, cards, dice, screen, PDFs, the Seventy Maxims book, and more. It's $75, and you'll need to increase your pledge by $10 to get the RiPP token add-ons, but that can wait until June if you'd like. This is by far our most popular pledge level. Again, additional charges will apply for shipping outside the US.RPG PDFs only: Click here for the "Air Dropped Grunt" level. This gets you the core RPG book and the cards in PDF format. This is $20, with no shipping charges at all. Note that this does not include the Maxims in PDF format, because we're not doing those as part of this Kickstarter.Foot in the Door: Again, here's the $1.00 pledge level, the "Forward Observer." It gets your foot in the door so that you can increase your pledge to cover any of the rewards I've listed above. If you decide you don't want this stuff after all, well, you're out a dollar, but at the very least you'll get some nifty wallpapers for your trouble.If you don't play RPGs, but have been looking for a good encyclopedia of the Schlock Mercenary universe, the core Planet Mercenary book will deliver that in spades. It's an in-universe artifact, written by the R&D team at Planet Mercenary. Their CEO's commentary will appear in the margins (she was promised those would not go to print, but somebody screwed up) and we'll have plenty of references to things that have happened in the Schlock Mercenary comic strip, as told from the perspective of folks on the outside.This Stuff Ships In April of 2016We have a lot of work to do before we can deliver the goods you're pledging for. The artists have barely started their work, and at least one of the manufacturers has a 26-week cycle. The Planet Mercenary Team (Howard, Sandra, Alan, Jeff, Ben, and a bunch of other folks) will be working on this for the next ten months.Between now and the shipping date we'll keep you in the loop with regular blog posts here, in the development journal (schlocktroops.com), and via Kickstarter updates. We'll post lots of digital goodies between now and then, including pre-release rules, draft images (like this early draft of Jeff Zugale's cover art) and probably plenty of fun desktop wallpapers.Thank YouThis has been one of the most successful role playing games to appear on Kickstarter. Your faith in us is humbling and a bit intimidating, and we promise that you have not misplaced it. You backers have made this crazy, wonderful thing possible, and in about three days we'll start our journey to carry it from "possible" to "wonderful and in your hands."Thank you for giving us that opportunity.This is going to be so. much. fun.

This is the Mad Max movie I didn't know I had always wanted until I saw it. Tom Hardy plays Max as crazy-mad instead of angry-mad, and it's the "seeing things that aren't there" crazy instead of merely being angry with grief (though, he's that too. And unhinged.) Also, we see him employ some skills beyond simply driving, taking a beating, and shooting things (though he does plenty of all three of those.) Max's world is a familiar sort of wasteland, but it has an actual economy, requiring a bit less suspension of disbelief. Which is good because we'll need that stuff for more important things than "how are people still alive at all?" Plot-wise, I loved how the fairly straightforward, convoy-on-the-run story has some actual, human motivation beyond "let's steal gasoline." I say "fairly straightforward" because there are a couple of twists in there, but I liked them, too. I've heard that some folks are complaining that Charlize Theron's character was somehow too bad-ass, and was upstaging Max. I looked for that, and am happy to report that Max was every bit as awesome as I hoped he would be. If his star seems to shine a little less brightly, it's because that wasteland is chock-full of crazy-capable bad-asses (including Theron's Imperator Furiosa,) which makes sense since these are the people who are still alive. Still alive at the beginning of the movie, anyway. I love comprehensible action scenes, and MM:FR was full of them. The camera gives us several "savor the moment" shots where the action is so iconic we need to slow down a bit and soak it in before the flames and the dust muddle it up. The post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the film has its roots in the original Mad Max film, obviously, but that aesthetic has passed through a number of hands over the years, so that by the time it arrives back home in the Mad Max franchise you can taste all kinds of things in the dust, including Fallout: New Vegas, Defiance, and Borderlands. I did not hate that one bit. If Gearbox ever makes a Borderlands movie, I expect it will look like Mad Max: Fury Road with better weapons and more hockey masks. Mad Max: Fury Road comes in at #4 for me so far this year, clearing my Threshold of Awesome with room to spare. Extra headroom was added by the guy playing a flamethrower guitar while chained to the front of a stack of speakers on top of a vehicle that has an entire kettle-drum battalion banging away in back. (That dude convinced me that post-apocalyptic role playing games have room for a bard, provided he has an electric guitar that shoots fire.) (crossposted from howardtayler.com)

There are only four days left in the Planet Mercenary RPG KickstarterIt closes on Monday, May 18th. The project page has a timer on it, and nothing I can do will slow the ticking of that clock. We've had a very busy week as it has ticked away, too. Two days ago I blogged about The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. I posted a sample page, and some text, and I provided a link that would let you back the Planet Mercenary RPG project at a level which ONLY includes the in-universe Maxims book. A day later we were joined by 440 backers, more than had pledged on any other single day of the project.This morning their enthusiasm unlocked the "All The Ships, To Scale" project.Jeff Zugale, who draws spaceships for a living, has agreed to this commission. He'll do a big image with all (or many) of the named ships of the Schlockiverse, to scale (much like the posters famously done by Dirk Loechel, among others.) Here are a couple of Jeff's "spaceship-a-day" sketches. Yes, these are things that he dashed off in his free time.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you're not interested in the Planet Mercenary RPG. How could I possibly tempt you into that Kickstarter? What product could be sufficiently enticing to bring you over to our project page and enter a pledge? The answer? Provide something that I've been anxious, thrilled, and quiveringly-excited about for months now: The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries We have a pledge level for the Seventy Maxims book. [UPDATE: We actually have several. Do not panic about the sold-out ones. We screwed up and broke them. http://bit.ly/70MoMEM will take you straight to the Maxims-only pledge. And now, back to the plug!] This isn't just 70 pages of aphorisms. It's far too substantial for a poster. This is the hardback version of Karl Tagon's personal copy of the 3001 CE Edition of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. This is an in-universe artifact. To introduce you to it, here is a block of text from the introduction:

This coming Wednesday, May 13th, Planet Mercenary's game designer Alan Bahr will be taking questions over in the RPG.net chat. Follow Alan or me on Twitter and we'll tweet you a reminder.I'm not sure how the chat room over on RPG.net works, but if you're already a member of the role playing cognoscenti I suspect you're already on top of this.Speaking of Planet Mercenary (which is pretty much all I'm speaking of this week,) the Kickstarter just crossed the $200k threshold, and we have now promised an additional 16 pages in the core book. There will be four new playable races, including the Uklakk, who have two bodies and a shared, radio-networked brain. If you've ever wanted to throw down as a bicameral life form, that's going into the book now. We'll also add some weapons, some ships, and some playable locations.Our next stretch goal puts Game Chief screens in every Extended Mag, and makes them available as add-ons for just $5.00. Beyond that? Check out the most recent update for the full reveal. The reveal includes the blue-lines for Jeff Zugale's cover for the book.

We have entered the final week of the Kickstarter for the Planet Mercenary Role Playing Game. Expect me to talk about it rather a lot. I promise to try to be interesting.If you haven't yet looked at the project, please click here and see what we're building! We've already hit the stretch goal that will let you acquire the COMPLETE Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries (it will ship with the game, in April of 2016), and we're about to add an additional 16 pages of content to the core book.And now I shall try to be interesting!The very first mechanic I dreamed up for this game was the one that involved cards. At the time I was unclear on exactly how it would work, but Alan spent eighteen months grinding on it with is alpha-test team, and out of that effort sprang the thing we now call the MAYHEM! deck.Many of you have asked what the MAYHEM! cards will be like, and we've teased you a bit by dropping some card names on you. This, unfortunately, is not the post where we reveal the MAYHEM! deck in its full glory. This is the post where we show you our late-beta designs for the cards.

The Planet Mercenary Kickstarter just crossed the $150,000 mark, unlocking the The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries in hardback. There's a pledge level that ships that book, and only that book, if that's what you want. If you've been waiting for a Seventy Maxims text, it's part of the Kickstarter now. For those of you interested in the role playing game, however, I want to talk about some of our design principles, how we arrived at them, and what they mean for players and game chiefs. 1) Story Comes FirstThis might not be immediately obvious, but this design principle grows straight out of the First Law of the Schlockiverse: "There Will Be A Punchline." We won't let complex calculations drown the story. Players should be able to very quickly see that the thing they want to do has an associated bonus or penalty, and that their success or failure will be determined just as quickly with a single throw of the dice. 2) Abstract Everything UpEvery game is a physics simulation of a sort. We can't do away with physics altogether, and we don't want to. Our goal however, is to treat the physics as abstractly as possible without violating the laws of nature. A good example of this is your party's grunts. You may have a hundred NPCs in your employ, and in combat this company of sophonts will all be fighting with you. But we won't be rolling for them individually, because that way lies madness. Your character's combat rolls will be handled individually, of course, but the fire team alongside you will be handled en masse, with a single roll determining how they fare during this turn. That group of six grunts will be treated, in a sense, as if they're a single character, with bonuses and penalties that stem from how you've been treating them, and how effectively you're issuing orders. "Abstract everything up" means that you can shout "suppressing fire!" during your heroic leap. A throw of the dice will then determine whether or not your crew is covering you while you dive for the airlock controls armed only with a logic probe and a bowl of chili. 3) Failure is FunThis principle has been the hardest to get across. Many role-players want to game the system so that they can't die, and can't even really get hurt. Many games are designed around "balanced" encounters which ensure that the party only loses a fight when that loss has been scripted. That is not this game. You will fail. You will die. You will lose teammates and gear and reputation, and the whole time it's happening you will be enjoying it because it's going to put you in the middle of the best story you've ever told. And it's going to make the end of that story the sweetest, most awesome thing you've ever heard. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But we built this game with that end in mind. If your character dies, you immediately head-hop into a member of your fire team, who has just received a battlefield promotion. Will she swear vengeance upon your killers? Perhaps not. She might say "it took that jackwagon way too long to catch a bullet. I'm done taking orders. I'm giving them now." Your first character's failure to survive the cascade of hot, jacketed metal becomes your second character's opportunity to become the Heroine of the Resistance. 4) Role Play is LearningMany role playing games have a learning curve that is built around figuring out the "builds." Once you know how to build a tank, or a healer, or a suicide ranger, the probability curves bend in your favor, and you win. All the time. Planet Mercenary has a learning curve that wraps around the other players. The timed initiative system ("Spoke first? Goes first") may seem at first to be an invitation for the loudmouth to dominate the game. And it is. And then it is a thrown gauntlet, an open challenge for the rest of the players to take the game back, and to turn the loudmouth back into a party member. Your game group will grow and change. You will learn to react to one another, and with practice you will become a well-oiled machine in combat. You may need the guidance of a wise Game Chief to make this transition, but when it happens you will be amazed by each other. And that? Oh, that's so much more fulfilling than having an ironclad DPS build on a sheet of paper. 5) No BacksiesDid you state an action and then realize it was dumb? The fastest way to derail a game forever is to allow phrases like "no, wait, that's not what I do" or "no, you didn't do that" to affect previous events. See those sections above on "failure is fun" and "role play is learning?" Yeah... no backsies is how that happens. And by the same token, we're not backing down from this. Our design principles are bold ones, and they differentiate Planet Mercenary from every other game we've played. Yes, we risk losing a few players by saying this, but if what you want is to always succeed and to have exact numerical values to describe every aspect of your character's physical form, equipment, and training, Planet Mercenary is not the game you're looking for. We think it's a lot better than the game you're looking for, and that, too, is a position from which we're not allowing ourselves any backsies. (If we fail, it's going to make a *great* story.)

If you want in on the Planet Mercenary Role Playing Game, the Kickstarter closes just 13 days from now, on the morning of Monday, May 18th. Be warned: For the next two weeks you'll probably hear from me a lot on this front. I owe it to the fans, and to my fellow creators to do all I can to drum up as much support for this as possible.Whether or not you role-play, The Planet Mercenary Role Playing Game will be the definitive encyclopedia for the Schlock Mercenary universe. It will painstakingly (and humorously) detail the interesting places and cool technologies I've cartoonishly rendered in the comic, and it will flesh out a few key characters of the comic, rendering them as if my comics were crude caricatures of real people.Of course, commissioning these pieces takes money, which is why we turned to Kickstarter. We'll be paying our artists up front, and doing our very best to treat them right. We commissioned a few pieces before the project launched in order to prove to ourselves that this would work, and we're now confident that the Planet Mercenary book is going to be a fully immersive look at this universe I've been struggling to render for fifteen years now.Pictured to the left is Felipe de Barros' rendition of Captain Tagon. The deep-set eyes, the stiff spine, that brick-like face... it's all there.If you've ever wondered what an amorph would look like in real life, I have a secret: I've wondered that too. I'm excited to find out. I expect to be scared of Sergeant Schlock. He is, after all, a monster.As an added incentive to participate, if we raise another $18k in pledged support there will be two books produced. The second one will be Karl Tagon's personal, annotated hard-copy of the 3001CE edition of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. He loaned it around, and a couple of other people have written in it.

My oldest daughter came back from college and told me I needed to see something called "Galavant" on the television. We don't do cable in my house so I Youtubed some trailers, got hooked, and checked it out on Amazon Instant Video.Galavant is a trope-ridden medieval fantasy comedy musical. How such a thing existed without me knowing about it without the help of my children reflects poorly on me.If you enjoyed the musical episodes of Buffy and Community, if you sing along with Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, you should buy Season 1 of Galavant on one of the services where it's available (Amazon, Google Play, and iTunes.) I bought the HD version on Amazon and have now watched the whole thing three times through.I'm not a fan of the streaming model, where I pay "own the whole thing" prices, but can't actually watch unless I have a persistent connection and a DRM-ish browser window. Galavant is good enough that I'm perfectly happy to tell myself that I paid $20 to rent it. I got 176 minutes of great programming. I've spent more than that for movies half that long, and no lie, if Galavant were a theatrical release I would rank it above everything I've seen so far this year, including The Avengers. In fact, I came home from The Avengers excited to hurry up and write a review so I could watch Galavant.Seriously, when it comes out on Blu-Ray I'll probably buy it again.Am I gushing? Yes. I don't do this often.

Before I talk movie, a plug: The Planet Mercenary RPG Kickstarter is going strong, but is a couple hundred supporters shy of the big stretch we all want.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a bit of Ben McSweeney's preliminary line-art from the Planet Mercenary RPG weapon section:Here's the draft text that goes along with it:[REDACTED] Autocutlery Chainsaber Mark IXMost civilizations invented power cutting tools long after they dispensed with swords in favor of firearms, and most civilizations became briefly fascinated with those cutting tools as a way to bring the sword back. And for most civilizations it ended there. Along came [REDACTED] Autocutlery with a bad idea to make good money: they would, with actionable deliberation and insufficient testing, weaponize the chainsaw. The result was the Chainsaber line of weapons, none of which is as effective, gram for gram, as a firearm. But the grunts want to swing chainsaws at things, and the Chainsaber Mark I took off plenty of enemy limbs and friendly fingers, so the product line and most of the customers survived, and eventually we got the Chainsaber Mark IX (The Mark V is pictured above.) The Mark IX has numerous available grips, each of which is designed to maximize the leverage of the gripping limb while putting the weapon’s center of mass in just the right place for deft swinging. It is surprisingly light, and when fitted correctly is even more surprisingly difficult to kill oneself with. Maim? Still easy. But let’s be honest with ourselves here. The only place the Mark IX chainsaber is deployed is with companies who want to make a lot of noise and throw a lot of gore in order to take the fight out of an ostensibly stronger opponent. When this works, bully! When this doesn’t work? You get the opposite of “bully,” and while a lot of words mean that, you should pick one which also means “we got cut to pieces with our own toys.” Would you like more pages of delicious material like this? Back the Planet Mercenary RPG on Kickstarter, and you'll have two hundred pages of this stuff, including illustrations, maps, deck plans, and yes, rules for bringing a chainsaber to a gunfight. UPDATE: Alan and I are doing an AMA over at r/fantasy on Tuesday. If you've got questions about the game by all means ask them! And since it's an AMA (Ask Me Anything) you can ask other stuff, too!

We've stormed the center ground of the Planet Mercenary RPG Kickstarter, that calm patch in the middle when things slow down a bit. We're pretty close to the next stretch goal, at which point some company pins will be created for our favorite weapons manufacturers, including Strohl and Phubahr.There may be a couple more as well. We have some other manufacturers whose logos are being locked down.Jeff Zugale is currently working on the cover art while Alan and I pound on the core content of the book. It's amazing to see how much progress we've made in the last couple of weeks, and equally amazing to see how well some of these pieces are fitting together.Saturday's pounding involved smashing Photoshop into the Mayhem deck until it spat out another draft for the backs of the cards, shown to the left.The Mayhem deck informs your role play by adding information to about 25% of your successful die rolls. There are cards like"Let Me Show You How It's Done," in which your action was so successful that nearby grunts or players gain permanent bonuses. These are offset by cards like "That's Coming Out Of Our Pay," in which your success was mitigated by collateral damage of some sort.Then there are middle-ground sorts of cards like "Somebody Just Earned a Nick-Name," which will have players scrambling to turn recent events into a nick-name for the lucky person who rolled Mayhem this time around.How exactly these cards play into the story is up to you and the Game Chief. Testing has thus far shown that the general result is laughter, and it happens in-game, driving the session forward rather than derailing it. The Mayhem mechanic worked far better than I hoped, and I credit Alan for turning my hare-brained idea for dice-and-card blend into something so enjoyable.

Go ahead and sing it. You know the melody already.When I wake up, well I know you're gonna beyou're gonna be the one who vibrates me awakeWhen I go out, yeah I know you're gonna beYou're gonna be the one who counts the steps I take. If I get drunk, well I know you're gonna beyou're gonna be the one who logs my lifts of glassWhen I'm hung over? Well I know you're gonna count You're gonna count the hours I spend flat on my ass. But I would walk 5000 stepsAnd I would walk 5000 moreJust to feel that buzz upon my wrist for my ten thousand step reward When I work out, yes I know we'll have some funbecause you'll be the one who's workin' out with me.And when I'm hungry from the workin' out I've doneI swear I'll tell you every calorie I eat. When I come home (When I come home), and I'm limpin' like a foolI'm gonna limp along with gusto 'cause of you.But when I shower, well I only have one rule I'm gonna take that long hot shower without you. But I would walk 5000 stepsAnd I would walk 5000 moreJust to feel that buzz upon my wrist for my ten thousand step reward When I'm lonely, well I know I'm gonna beI'm gonna be the man who's lonely wearing youAnd when I'm dreaming, well I know you'll know I dreambecause somehow you track my sleeping and that's creepy. When I go out (when I go out), well I know you're gonna goYou're gonna go just fine with what I choose to wear.And when I come home (when I come home), yes I know I'm gonna wishI'm gonna wish I'd walked instead of driving there.I'm gonna wish I'd walked instead of driving there. But I would walk 5000 stepsAnd I would walk 5000 moreJust to feel that buzz upon my wrist for my ten thousand step rewardApologies to the Proclaimers, and to my FitBit, who doesn't get to go out nearly as often as he'd like.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

I'll keep this as spoiler-free as possible. The Daredevil series on Netflix is worth the investment in a Netflix membership. It's richer and more powerful than any cinematic superhero story, and while it is dark, it is not the trendy kind of dark. It's the kind of dark a good storyteller uses so that when we get light, the light is blinding and brilliant.If you don't mind spoilers, this discussion of Catholicism in Daredevil is worth reading. If you've already finished the series that article will deepen your understanding and appreciation of the series.The story of Daredevil goes well beyond what's actually in those 13 episodes, and I'm not talking about what's coming next season. The very existence of that story, in that format, on Netflix, is the beginning of a much broader narrative about the future of entertainment.

It's like this: for the next 25 days I'm going to be burning through whatever social capital I've accumulated in order to drive eyeballs and open wallets at this thing. But I don't want that to be all I talk about. You'll get bored, and I'll get stressed out, and then I'll just get louder and oh! Look! COOKIES!Long-time reader, first time cookie-sender Blaine sent me this box of shortbread cookies topped with lemon rind, a recipe inspired by the "puckerdoodles" from Force Multiplication.They were baked by Blaine's partner Lysander of LDOriginals, and I must say he did a solid job with them. I should also confess to sharing them around generously. My family got one half of the batch, and I got the other.

Here's a draft of the page layout from the Planet Mercenary RPG, which is now going to have 224 awesome pages: