Flaming Monkey

This recent conversation on The 20′ By 20′ Room strikes me as an example of how people using different jargon (or differing understandings of the same jargon) sometimes have a really hard time communicating. Among the commenters are people who don’t know what DIP or DAS means, people who are fuzzy on their Forge terminology, and people who (like me) have no idea what the heck aerobic gaming vs. anaerobic gaming is supposed to mean. Throw all of that together and I think the result ended up being people spending more time and energy defining (and redefining) terms than about the original topic of DIP and DAS in indie games.

I just read through the new annotated version of kill puppies for satan. Yes, this is the same game that Vincent publicly disavowed, and yes, I said annotated, not revised. Vincent just shoved some more text in there, put the main rulebook and cockroach souffle together in the same pdf, and added a few pieces of actual art. Included in the new text is a shiny new resolution system that he completely stole from Sorcerer (which he freely admits) and then dumbed down, and which may or may not be broken, since he didn’t actually playtest it or anything

If you already bought kpfs from Vincent you should have gotten an
email about the annotated version. If you didn’t buy it yet….well, buy Dogs in the Vineyard first, and then if you’ve got some cash left (and a black sense of humor), buy kpfs too. You can even get a package deal if you buy them at the same time.

I’ve realized that I never mentioned that my long awaited copies of The Mountain Witch and Burning Wheel (Revised) finally arrived from IPR a couple of weeks ago.

While the roughly two month delay in getting the games wasn’t IPR’s fault, I have to say that I wasn’t entirely happy with the way they handled things, as I had to rely on the updates Tim posted to the timfire publishing webpage and what I was able to find out by poking Brendan at IPR to know what had caused the delay and when my order might arrive. While I appreciate the fact that Brendan is doing all the work of processing and shipping the orders himself, the lack of communication was less than reassuring. Oh, and putting some bubble wrap or other packing material around the books before putting them into the priority mail envelope would have been nice too. Everything I’ve heard about Brendan makes him sound like a real standup sort of guy, and I’ll almost certainly be ordering from IPR again, but if this had been my first foray into buying indie games I might be hesitant about making another purchase in the future.

Enough about the buying experience part of things though. The two games both look great (especially The Mountain Witch), I’m really glad I bought them, and I’m hoping to find the time soon to give them each a close read.

Good news:

We did it, everybody! We raised $1000 for the Red Cross and now Executive Decision is free for all. Everybody remembers that it’s by Greg Stolze and it features scenarios by Greg, Chad Underkoffler, Dennis Detwiller, Ron Edwards and little old me, right? Plus part of it is printed egami rorrim ni!

The game itself can be downloaded here.