Wet Bones: A progress report on my Spark vs. Dark adventure

SYSTEM: ICONS

The adventure I've written in Jim Gardner's universe is called Wet Bones. I will be running Mike Lafferty and Walt Robillard through it on the BAMF Podcast soon; for various reasons we have not recorded this yet. We're currently slated to record the first session this month; it's been pushed off once due to family emergencies. (Actually, I could do another playtest on roll20 to see if the last set of tweaks^H^H^H^H^H^Hmassive changes did what they were supposed to do. Holler if you're interested in a sub-three-hour adventure, preferably on a weekend. Two to four players. Familiarity with the game not needed.)

The original adventure I wrote is about four hours with the option to go longer; for Mike's purposes, he needs it to be in one or two segments of between sixty and ninety minutes. So in play, there will not be room to go down a lot of side paths. (I provided a lot of internecine conflict that might come up if the players go in a specific direction. You don't lose any of the main story by cutting it down to less than three hours, but you lose some flavour. C'est la vie.) It will have an example of a minion fight, of some research tests, stunts (many of the villain and hero powers get stunted off the "Darkling" or "Spark" qualities), and two other combats. I'll be on the lookout to bring some Qualities in, but that's really quite specific to the characters and events; I make that up on the fly.

However, it leaves me conflicted about what to do with the text of the adventure.

The adventure has a couple of goals:

• Be a good time. I hope this will be fun to hear and to play. If you don't enjoy it, it doesn't matter if I achieve any other goals.
• Guide people to Fainting Goat's back catalog Mike has a business, and he'd like to sell stuff. Heck, I've written for Mike and for Walt and I'd like them to sell stuff. Mike's first idea was that I run a Fainting Goat adventure but at the time I was stoked for Jim's book so I pushed for running a Spark vs. Dark adventure...but I've done Assembled edition updates of a bunch of Fainting Goat characters, and those are the pre-gens for the adventure. In the adventure, I provide only the updates rather than the whole character, so if you want to play with the characters provided, you have to get the Fainting Goat product. (Well, half of the characters are from Stark City). Villains are a mix of original and from Super Villain Hand Book and from MMM. If you don't have the appropriate Fainting Goat source, my thinking goes, you'll have to do a lot more work to run the adventure.

  At some point, I'll release the "So you want to create characters" section, but that'll be some time after I release the adventure.

• Proselytize for ICONS There's a lack of ICONS Assembled actual play recordings out there. There are some, such as SkyFyre, but there can be more.
• Promote Jim's book Jim is my friend and I liked the book. He can probably use the attention because the second book in the series (They Didn't Tell Me The Gun Was Loaded is the title, I think, but I might have some words wrong) is now available for pre-order. And, because Jim will mention the podcast once it's out, I hope that a few new listeners will then get something from Mike or buy ICONS or both.
• And of course fame or humiliation for me. (Not fortune. Very little in the tabletop RPG field seems to go for fortune...)

I do explicitly state in the text of the adventure that while Jim and Fainting Goat have given me permission to use the setting and the characters, they don't relinquish rights and I have no rights beyond this one adventure. And Steve Kenson hasn't been involved at all. (All of which is true.) Given that, I was going to release it under whatever the Creative Commons license that requires attribution.

So: when to release the text of the adventure? Probably not before the podcast is released. I'm open to suggestions, but my current thinking is:

1. Release a version when the first part of the podcast goes live. Yes, that will include the shocking twist ending; so what? (It suddenly occurs to me that the released version should have links to the appropriate Fainting Goat pages.) That version might be a simple link to a Google Doc.
2. Six months or a year later (time to be determined with Mike), I'll release a version as a PDF (maybe laid out in Word, oh boy! or Scribus: something that looks better than a Google Doc but doesn't involve me paying someone for layout) that includes character creation.

My feeling is that interest will be highest at the first session. If people like it, that's the time to give them pointers to the Fainting Goat website and to a place where they can get the book/pre-order the next book.

I don't know from marketing, though. (I'm a technical writer. I've tried running my own business: I suck at it.)

The counterargument is that it could actually be popular. Maybe I'm stealing money from myself. Maybe someone will want to do a roleplaying setting for the Spark vs. Dark books and they would actually give me money for this. That sounds like a lot of ifs, though.

Anyway, that's the state of things. Feel free to comment.