Dreaming of a Better System

Sorry it's been a little quiet here on the blog. While my other writing gigs seem to have dried up, and the day-job is building up slowly to the crazy panic and frenzy of the festive season, I've been able to turn my focus (pardon the pun) onto WILD.

My problem was, as I was laying out the pitch that I took to Dragonmeet last year (almost coming up to the first anniversary of that - arg!), the more I thought about the game system that I had in front of me, the more unhappy with it I was. I wanted it to be more narrative, but my head was too old-school and hung up on the past.

Thankfully, the last few games I've been playing with my group have really opened up my eyes to different possibilities and I realised where I've been going wrong.

First thing to do was to change the tarot cards I'd produced for playtesting. I realised that while I had four suits that were also the Attributes, I noticed that the suits of the tarot I had assigned to each were wrong and were better suited (pardon the pun again) if I switched three of them around. And then, I realised that I needed to update the court cards from their original names from the first draft of the rules to the more recent revision... So, a lot of Tippex was used and they were tweaked.

Then I started considering the basic mechanic of the system, which was far too much maths. X+Y±Z+card (try to beat difficulty) A, check difference. Blah, blah, blah. TOO SLOW... and boring.

I tried the new system with the newly Tippexed cards, and checking for a success is so bloomin' quick you wouldn't believe. Very, VERY little maths. It's just a little easy to succeed at the moment, so it's going to get a tweak (but not to the actual system, more to the interpretation of the results).

With that major hurdle sorted, it's back to the actual writing.

One day I'll get this bloomin' thing finished!!

New World, New Times, Mutation...

Just a quickie to say that things have changed.

Nothing major, just the basic look and some logo designs. The Autocratik Logo has evolved over the years... originally it was designed to look like Debs and myself holding a red flag, to symbolise how we were being revolutionary - ha! As if. Anyway, back then, when I was a comic publisher, it was the shape of the mast head of a comic - and had the full name - "Autocratik for the Masses" - which was a play on REM's album, Automatic for the People.

When I thought about going it alone again in the world of publishing, doing things my way, the name Autocratik seemed to be apt again and I redesigned the logo. It was a development of the Soviet propaganda art that I always loved, and hence the logo used a Russian "D" - it looked like an A to western audiences, hence A for Autocratik, but in my head it was D for Dave and Debs.

And, with #RPGaDAY ending a few days ago, I thought now would be a great time to rebrand a little. Nothing too major, just losing the Russian lettering and avoiding any confusion. So the new logo is the ultimate in minimal A's...

The typeface of the logo's different now as well. It used to be Impact, which is pretty common. And it's also cut off from the bottom - no it's not a cropping error... it's intentional. Makes the A's look like cool triangles. I like it. It's simple and basic...

Now I just need to do some new normal business cards and do a new T-shirt for Dragonmeet.

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