Introducing JürgenWerks

This past Sunday, I released the second edition of Doomed Slayers on DriveThruRPG.

Doomed Slayers is my exploration of how typical fantasy RPG "adventurers" might fit into a typical pseduo-medieval society - why they are tolerated by the rest of society and even needed, and how they interact with rulers and commoners alike. In this setting, I postulate a distinct social class of adventurers - here called "Slayers" - whose primary task is to seek down and slay dangerous monsters before they threaten society. In exchange for this duty and its implications, they are also allowed a number of privileges - like freedom of movement and freedom of taxation - and this mixture of duties and privileges allows them to co-exist in an uneasy status quo with other people.

You can find some reviews for the first edition of Doomed Slayers here, here, here, and here. But Doomed Slayers is only the start - it is the first release of JürgenWerks, my new publishing imprint. And thus it seems appropriate that I should discuss my future publishing plans.

First of all some discussion of how I create the products (at least, this is how I did it for the new edition of Doomed Slayers, and I plan to follow this model for future publications). I create the initial outline and manuscript as Google Docs, since I travel a lot and this allows me to add new material wherever I have an Internet connection. Once I am reasonably satisfied with this manuscript, I convert it into a LaTeX file, a document preparation system which was originally developed for scientific papers and which I am familiar with (plus, it is free). In particular, I use the Tufte Layout, which uses a wide "main text" column and a smaller side column with space for margin notes, references, and smaller illustrations. I read through the manuscript again a few times, and write appropriate margin notes expanding on the main text.

Next comes a "playtest" phase where I ask others to read the compiled manuscript and give me feedback. For the second edition of Doomed Slayers I tried a public playtest, but feedback was minimal. Therefore, in the future, I will do a private playtest where the playtest files will only be made available to those who specifically volunteered.

Then, after getting the feedback and adjusting the manuscript accordingly, I add the art. For the second edition of Doomed Slayers, I largely used illustrations I had purchased the rights for when I wrote the first edition. However, since then I have developed my own artistic aspirations (as well as bought a Cintiq Companion Hybrid), so I will do most illustrations on my own for future products (for this product, I've only created the cover design and a map).

All my products will be free of any kind of copyright protections - no watermarks, no disabling of text copying. Furthermore, at DriveThruRPG I plan use the "Pay What You Want" option for all my products - while there is a "suggested price", customers will be able to set any price they want. Yes, that also includes the option of getting the product for free. I am fine with this - I still remember when I had a lot less disposable income than what I have now. However, if you do get one of my products for free, I would appreciate it if you reviewed it - at DriveThruRPG or elsewhere - or otherwise spread the word about it. (Another option, if you want to "try before you buy", is to first get it for free and then buy it again, at whatever price you see fit).

So, what further products are in the pipeline for JürgenWerks?

First, there are two products which I definitely want to release during this year:

Doomed Slayers: Order of the Silver Hart is the first supplement for Doomed Slayers. Slayers are expected to stay out of politics - but how "non-political" can an organization of Slayers get which only accepts former nobles into their ranks, and which frequently rejoin the nobility right after mustering out of the Order? The manuscript for this product is about 75% complete

Urbis Player's Guide is the introductory product for my longest-running fantasy world: Urbis - A World of Cities. It will contain everything a player needs to know to create and play a character (using the Pathfinder RPG) in a world where magic and industry, commerce and science met and gave rise to vast and powerful city-states balanced between utopia and dystopia, freedom and oppression. The manuscript for this product is in development, but still in its early stages.

I have also ideas for further products, but their schedule and format is still rather tentative:

• Doomed Slayers: The Vanguard - basically, Doomed Slayers meets XCOM.
• City sourcebooks for Urbis (likely starting with Dartmouth, followed by Nimdenthal and Bodenwald).
• Assorted smaller sourcebooks on various Urbis-related topics - various organizations, different planets or planes of existence, regional sourcebooks, and so forth.
• A proper writeup of my Cold Frontier campaign, for Urbis/Pathfinder.
• Some Pathfinder-related products describing aspects of German folklore (such as creatures, unique entities, or phenomena described in my German Folklore for Gamers series).
• A setting sourcebook based on my After Victory campaign idea.

As you can see, I have lots of ideas - but I will need to prioritize. So, what are your thoughts? Which of these ideas excites you the most?

My Gaming Projects, Part I - Doomed Slayers

My interests as a role-playing gamer are varied, and I have a large number of gaming projects going on at any one time. In this series of posts I want to present an overview of the most important ones.

Let us start with the most successful one - "successful" because it has actually resulted in a published product:

It all began with some thoughts about the role of classical fantasy RPG "adventurers" - diverse groups of heavily armed, dangerous people who travel from town to town and kill creatures and people for money and treasure. In recent years they have often been called "murderhobos" and for good reason - from the point of view of the typical, upstanding citizen of a fantasy world they must seem like dangerous sociopaths best to be avoided.

So why do the authorities of a typical pseudo-medieval fantasy world tolerate them at all? Why aren't they seen as a threat to the peace of the land to be stopped as soon as possible before they get out of hand? If you play something like D&D the answer could be "because they are tough enough to take out whole armies once they become experienced" - but that's not a very satisfying answer, because then you need to explain why the adventurers haven't simply taken over.

I then realized that I could make all this make sense if I treated adventurers as their own distinct social caste, analogous to the nobles, priests, peasants and so forth you find in feudal societies - the difference is that anyone could join this caste, but would then be expected to follow this caste's strictures which conveniently justify all the usual behaviors you see in adventurers.

In this RPGNet thread, I worked out the basic duties and privileges of this caste - called "Slayers", as the main reason for their existence is to hunt down and slay dangerous monsters which threaten civilization. The duties are:

• Go where you are needed, help where you can (the duty to slay monsters above all else).
• Do not tarry where you are not needed (don't linger and cause trouble in places where there are no monsters to slay).
• Own only what you can take with you (don't own land or houses which would encourage you to settle down and lower the local property values).
• Fight the monsters, not your kin (basically, "stay out of politics" if it's not involving monster-slaying - though that works out better in theory than in practice).

Of course, Slayers also have some unique privileges to compensate for their dangerous way of life:

• Pay them what you can, appropriate to what you ask of them (pay them a fair wage, if you have the means).
• Do not bar their way (freedom of movement across national boundaries, freedom from tolls and taxes at such boundaries).
• What they find, they keep (right to plunder in monster lairs).

The response in the thread was overwhelming, convincing me that I had a winner. To showcase how such a subculture of Slayers would work in practice, I created a suitably generic fantasy world where all the major tropes of fantasy RPGs would have a place:

Eventually, this was published at DriveThruRPG, where you can pick it up for $3.99 - and since its publication, it has gotten some very nice reviews.

+Bruce Baugh writes:

"Out of all this, and the rest of the concepts laid out, a complete yet highly adaptable social structure emerges. You'll recognize precedents, and it's not like Jürgen would claim otherwise - he explicitly discusses some of them, and how the specifics of D&Doid fantasy might change them. You get a system that is fallible and exploitable in lots of ways, and yet serves a real purpose and is capable of enduring for a long time, if the classic dungeon fantasy conditions continue. You get a genuine moral and social foundation for what could easily be - often is - purely amoral or even anti-moral looting and pillage."

+Colin Ritter writes:

"Doomed Slayers takes on this peculiarity by presenting the caste of “Slayers” who have denied claims to social status, wealth, family and their past to become monster hunters. While a noble’s soldiers are busy protecting the borders and seeing to the interests of law and order Slayers actually do the hard work of hunting the things that the soldiers will not or cannot fight. To fans of “A Song of Fire and Ice” the Slayers represent a group similar to the Night’s Watch, but rather than maintaining The Wall and keeping forts they are bound by an honor code to roam the countryside fighting back monsters that threaten to destroy civilization as a whole."

 +Alexander Osias writes:

"Overall, Doomed Slayers is a good sourcebook -- however I find myself looking for more. I want more examples of different types of Slayer organizations that might have arisen -- some more like the Templars, some more like the Freemasons, and some like Hell's Angels perhaps? The intriguing premise already has me looking for more source material. This doesn't mean that Doomed Slayers isn't satisfying -- it means that it has set me up for the next expansion to this campaign premise, which will hopefully maintain its ability to translate almost all of the material into any D&D setting."

He was not the only one expressing a desire for more source material - and in fact, I have a half-finished sourcebook sitting on my Google Drive. Titled "The Order of the Silver Hart", it describes an organization of Slayers who will only accept nobles into their ranks - who upon becoming Slayers technically aren't nobles any more, though they will become nobles again once they stop being Slayers. And they insist they aren't involved in politics, even though many of their members will later rise to positions of power and leadership in their native countries and often forge powerful alliances with other ex-members...

However, as I said at the beginning I have numerous other gaming projects, some of which could also end up as publications - and I need to decide where I should focus my energies. So far, Doomed Slayers has sold 104 times, which certainly isn't bad for a small-press RPG publication, and certainly for my first RPG publication ever - heck, the revenues even paid for commissioning the artwork (though just barely...).

Still, I am wondering whether my other projects could do better on the RPG market. What are your thoughts on this?