Schlock Mercenary

Backers of The Planet Mercenary RPG Kickstarter have pledged enough to unlock the first set of stretch goals. We will now be making a challenge coin and custom dice, and including those at the $75-and-up pledge levels. The next goal is an additional 16 pages in the core book, and that's something that will go out to everybody.Additionally, the most recent backer-only update had links to a stack of wallpapers. As digital content goes those are just the beginning. We'll have a lot more to show off once the Kickstarter project closes and we have a budget again. The project runs through May 18th at noon, which should give most folks three paydays during which to consider parting with hard-earned money in exchange for 208 (or 224!) pages of awesome.Until then, Alan and I have plenty of work to do, so if we go quiet for a bit it's not because we've forgotten you. Some of these pages still need more awesome in them.

The Planet Mercenary RPG funded at $45k this morning. Thank you!Now let's begin walking our shots toward the stretch goals...The project's backers have already received two desktop wallpapers by way of thanks for getting us to this point. If you're a backer, check out the "Updates" section to collect your goodies.Funding inside of 24 hours is a happy harbinger of good things to come. I'm confident we'll reach some of these stretch goals, though that high prize, Commodore Karl Tagon's personal, annotated copy of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, is far enough out to be a real stretch. If we're going to reach it, we need 2,000 people to back the project at the $75 "Company Commander" level. That's just under four times as many backers as we have as of this writing.If you're on the fence about an RPG book, I totally understand. That's why Alan and I are creating this book with about 25 pages of rules, and 183 pages of illustrated Schlock Mercenary universe narrative. If you enjoy the footnotes I periodically include under the strips, this book is going to let you luxuriate in all-new material, complete with pictures designed to immerse you in the setting.Honestly, once this is complete I expect it to become a critical reference book for me as I write my way toward the climactic finish of the ongoing Schlock Mercenary over-arching mega-story. At the very least I'll get more consistent in the way I draw weapons.And speaking of drawing, I need to get back to that. It's proving challenging for me to update the comic daily while pounding out thousands of words of RPG text and staying on top of this project. I'd really hate to break a 15-year perfect streak of updates because I got distracted...

The Planet Mercenary Kickstarter is live!Head over to the project page for the full story.Here's a stripped down summary:

Most successful projects have a video, and mine have been no exception to this rule. For me, however, unless a project is about making videos I have no desire to watch a video about the project. Words and pictures are plenty.This is one of those cases where I have to own up to the fact that I am not my customer. That's why today Alan and I will be heading down to the Hypernode warehouse and shooting some videos, including a bunch of stuff the kids are calling "B-roll."The Planet Mercenary Kickstarter goes live just 72 hours from now, which probably doesn't give Alan's video team much time to edit, but even if they're hurried I suspect that won't be why I look awkward and uncomfortable on camera.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

We're launching the Planet Mercenary RPG Kickstarter on April 14th, 2015. That's just a week away.Here's a wallpaper featuring one of Planet Mercenary's best-selling brands, Strohl Munitions, makers of the iconic BH-209 Plasgun.

Kickstarter backers got the first alert, which is only fair because they're the ones who funded this two years ago. Our original delivery deadline was set for around six months after the Kickstarter closed. We only missed that by 18 months! Fortunately, the "how late are you?" clock can finally be stopped.Available Now!An Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins is a free PDF full of challenge coin stories. It is not an authoritative attempt to codify the rules of coin challenges, nor is it a scholarly treatise creating an historical narrative. It is a collection of stories that are similar to the sorts of stories you might hear if a bunch of people were sitting around at the bar one night draining pints and talking about challenge coins. We've done our best to present these stories in a way that respects the various challenge coin traditions, and pays appropriate tribute to those who have served.HostingThe document is currently hosted in two places:

Let me preface this by saying that I was saddened by Paul Walker's passing, more than a little conflicted at the tragic irony of the manner of his death, and that I haven't really been following the whole Fast, Furious, and Franchised story.This means that despite the over-the-top action and comic book physics of Furious 7, things that should aim it straight at me, I'm only a peripheral member of the film's target audience.With that out of the way: Ugh.Furious 7 spent far too much time wallowing in manufactured drama that it did not bother to earn. The film seemed to assume that I had been passionately tracking the various F&F character arcs, and was eager to be dropped straight into the kind of moist-eyed, conflicted navel-gazing that most films take an act and a half to set up.My viewing experience can be summed up as follows.

Alan and I met with Sandra on Friday and checked on the alignment of the ducks. There were several duck-vectors to be scrutinized, but in our assessment, those ducks will all be in a row by April 14th.So that's when we're launching the Kickstarter.For more information on the Planet Mercenary RPG, check our development blog at schlocktroops.com. The image above is available over there as a wallpaper.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

Schlock Mercenary is a long form comic strip in which the fifteen years of daily updates are all part of the same continuity. That continuity is broken up into books, in large measure because I don't expect anybody (not even me) to keep track of all the things that happened in the last 15 years of strips in order to enjoy the things happening this week. When I start a new book, I reset some of the narrative "rules." "New story" things start happening. We begin an all new set of dramatic and character arcs. If you're blazing through the archives one click at a time, you're going to miss this. With the current site design that can't really be helped. If you're reading the books in print, your arrival at the last page is a very strong signal that we've finished a story. Today we sit at the boundary between Book 15 and book 16, and I created a "THE END" graphic and a "NEW BOOK STARTS HERE" graphic to try to communicate that. But what does the boundary mean? Here are the implications, with bullets:

I really liked Home, though it surprised me straight out of the gate with an unexpected, and pretty hard-to-swallow premise: the aliens invade and relocate the humans to Australia, and the human military is nowhere to be seen.To quote Harrison Ford, on the set of Star Wars when Mark Hamill had a continuity concern, "Hey, kid... it ain't that kind of movie."So... my expectations were set very early on, and then the movie proceeded to do wonderful things. I had a great time. Rihanna performed brilliantly as Tip, and Jim Parsons managed to sell "deep and meaningful" while nailing "silly" in his voicing of Oh.I'll admit, things were just a little too "tidy" for my tastes (How to Train Your Dragon spoiled me) but the film was delightful, and not only clears my Threshold of Awesome, it scoots every other film down a notch by being the most fun I've had in the theater so far this year.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

I didn't see Divergent (the first movie in the trilogy of which Insurgent is the second) because I found the whole premise too ridiculous to swallow, and while I like a single-threaded thought experiment as much as the next person (read: "they're okay, but can I see the dinner menu?") the film itself didn't look like it was going to reward my patience.Insurgent, on the other hand, put some really cool visuals on display in the trailers. Also, the local IMAX has $5.00 showings on Tuesdays. I decided that for $5.00 I would shell out two hours for the chance to see those visuals all big and pretty-like.The movie took far too long to get to them.The story being told by the film, the CORE story, the protagonist's journey, could have been told very well in a tight, 88-minute film that showcased not just the special effects, but also the impressive range of emotion that Shailene Woodley can bring to the screen.Instead, it did what book-to-film transductions usually do -- it compressed the story of the book, fulfilling some promises made in the prior stories, and including along the way a big pile of stuff that didn't really matter to the core story of the film itself.I understand completely the drive to be epic in scope, but for me an epic needs to have more foundation than an absurd premise--and when I say "absurd" I don't mean "fantastical" like rockets and ray-guns, or dragons and dwarves. I mean "absurd" like "let's pretend human nature works THIS way instead."Ultimately, for me, Insurgent commits the venial sin of taking an extra 30 minutes to tell a story, and spending those 30 minutes wandering a crumbled-concrete wasteland that has long since lost its appeal (sometime before Fallout: New Vegas, I think. I need to check a calendar.) It comes in #4 for me fun-wise this year, but it does not clear the Threshold of Awesome.On a semi-related note of clumsy silliness, I really liked the music, but when I went shopping for it I accidentally bought the Divergent score, by Junkie XL, who I had never heard of. It sounded kind of thin. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what I'd remembered.Then I realized my mistake, and went back to Amazon and bought the Insurgent score, by Joseph Trapanese. It sounds wonderful.(Note: These are the film scores, not the soundtracks with the pop tunes on them.)(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

I got some artwork from a fan last fall, and I was too busy to blog about it at the time. One thing led to another, and now it is spring, which means I'm a horrible person for not having said anything sooner. Here's the piece: