Tactical Telepathicness … Telepathicity? Telepathitude?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 10, 2013

So my birthday was just over a week ago. And I’m still doing stuff about it. Yeah, that’s pretty much how I roll when it comes to schedules and deadlines. The sale continues, and the give-away continues.  Yesterday we had three people win copies of the outstanding RPG / TD hybrid, Defender’s Quest.  Apparently, the dice favored Tetris mash-ups this time around – Damon Smith, Binh Nguyen, and Darius – please check your emails! (Actually, the dice really favored the two entries that weren’t entering the drawing, rolling those numbers multiple times…. sheesh. I should use different dice next time!) Congrats, and thanks everyone for contributing and sharing ideas!

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, the first of the Frayed Knights trilogy, is on sale for half price here and at Desura, an indie-focused gaming service. There are only a few days left on this, so grab it now before you forget! 🙂

And since I realize a few folks here might not know what I’m talking about…

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is by far the largest game I’ve ever worked on (and I’ve worked on games that have sold seven digits). After talking about making computer RPGs for years, I finally took some time (a few years, gah!) to actually make one. It is a style of RPG that has been neglected over the last decade or two – the first-person party-based dungeon crawl – in the style of classics like Might & Magic, Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale, etc.

But I wasn’t content with just imitating old classics. I wanted to experiment with new ideas, inject it with my own brand of goofiness, and tie it a bit more to classic “dice-and-paper” role–playing from the era that inspired the original computer RPGs. While there are a lot of things I feel I can improve on (and indeed, I’m working on doing just that with Frayed Knights 2), I’m quite pleased with the results, and I hope people who are just now hearing about the game can check it out and understand why. It garnered multiple awards, including RPG of the Year from RPG Watch and GameBanshee.

I’m super-thrilled to be working on the sequel right now.  And I really appreciate everybody who has supported – and continues to support – this game. You guys and gals are the ones who make this all worthwhile.

Making indie games is not … well, as a friend of mine from the game industry used to say, “It’s not all fun and games, sometimes it’s just games.” Yes, it’s fun. And yes, I do it ‘cuz I love it — it sure as hell ain’t the money. Not that I’m at all opposed to that kind of thing. 🙂

For many of us, making an indie game is a huge investment of time, and personal expenses that we hope will be recovered on the back end. Releasing a game doesn’t usually have the fairy-tale ending.  Steam doesn’t always appear as a handsome prince, blessing your game and helping you sell hundreds of thousands of copies.  You persevere. I study these success stories, working hard to make my own, and even the legendary success stories usually involve years of toiling in obscurity before becoming an “overnight success.”

With that in mind, I wanted to point out the Kickstarter for Craig Stern’s Telepath Tactics: A Strategy RPG. It’s already passed its original goal, and is now trucking into stretch goal territory, but is now entering the final days of the campaign.  Craig is like me, one of those “working class indies” who has released quite a few games in the past which are quite good, but haven’t had the budget to really make them “pop.” Hopefully this campaign will do the trick.

If you are interested in this, now is the time as it enters its final push. There are only a few days left. Craig has a track record of previously released games, so as “real” indie Kickstarters go, it’s fairly low-risk IMO.

And I expect it to be full of telepathicness. Well, telepathy. Or something like that. It’s his world’s answer to “magic,” giving it a somewhat different flavor from the run-of-the-mill fantasy worlds. Though there’s plenty of traditional fantasy elements. And I can guarantee it’ll be full of tactics. By stripping away most of the randomness, his games have a different feel to the combat.  It’s less of a risk-mitigation thing and more of a planning-ahead thing. If you’ve played his previous games, you know what I’m talking about.

And hey – why not? Have you played Telepath RPG: Servants of God? It’s his most recent and best example of his work. You can check out the free demo at that link. It has the same deterministic tactics-heavy combat system (albeit not nearly as in-depth as what Telepath Tactics is doing), interesting characters and relationships, TONS of dialog and story, and a rich fantasy world.

AND…

(Wait for it….)

You can win a free copy! Craig has kindly donated three of them to be given away around this time tomorrow.

What must you do to obtain one, you ask? Well, I’ve been really digging this “no right answer” stuff in the comments, because not only do I get entertained, everyone else can be, as well. So let’s keep doing that, shall we? With something not exactly related to the game…

Let’s say you were born “gifted” with a telepathic power – a very limited form of mind over matter, or mind-reading, or mind-over-mind, or some other sort of extra-sensory perception. Unlike the heroes in Sinster Design’s Telepath series, your powers are not well suited to a combat role. Or much of a persuasive role. Or – really – any useful role at all.

That’s right – you are “gifted” with one of the world’s most useless variations of telepathy.

What would your useless telepathic gift be?

I’ll start out: Mine is “detect the presence of air.” Not really determining its composition, whether it’s healthy air or poison gas, just that there’s non-vacuum gas of roughly air density within my line of sight. I suppose if I lived in space or spent a lot of time snorkeling I could find some very minor uses for it. But otherwise — yay. There’s air ahead.

Everyone who comments will be added to the drawing unless you state you aren’t interested (use “N/G” at the beginning or end of your post, for “No Game”, to make it easy).  That way those who already have the game can contribute as well. The drawing will be sometime tomorrow morning. And yes, unlike Craig’s game, randomness *WILL* be involved. 😉

Have fun!

 

Filed Under: Deals, Frayed Knights, Rampant Games - Comments: 24 Comments to Read



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