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Experience Points #9: Evil Hat Productions

Posted on Oct 08, 2008 under Experience Points | 1 Comment

To finish off this series of interviews, Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions was able to answer my questions about their product lines. Evil Hat was instrumental in bringing me back into the hobby of gaming, thanks to The Rolemonkeys running a session of Spirit of the Century, which caught my interest and drove me to look into many new systems. So, indirectly, Evil Hat is responsible for this blog.

Here’s Fred’s answers to my questions.

Spirit of the Century/FATE 3.0

With the products Spirit of the Century and Spirit of the Season currently in print and several others currently in the process of being completed (Dresden Files, and a SotC supplement), what is next for FATE 3?

Hopefully Dresden Files be a better game than Spirit of the Century, as we’ve learned a few things about how the Fate 3 engine runs from listening to feedback on Spirit, such tweaking the fate point economy and making some new decisions about how combat runs so it won’t drag on.

Lenny Balsera and I have been talking about where to take Fate 3 once we get past the great wall of Dresden, and we’ve got a few ideas cooking. One that we may or may not follow up on is to do some of the development of a Fate 3 “core book” out in the open as a series of blog posts. But either way, eventually we’ll roll all that and more up as a book, just like we did with Fate 2, and make the PDF free for all online.

What can you tell me about the products currently nearing completion? When can we expect them?

Ohhh, the pain, the pain inherent in that question.

Evil Hat has a curse. We’re hexed. Whenever we talk dates and deadlines, we strum the threads of karma and the universe comes along and kicks our precious timeline in the jimmy.

All I can say about the Dresden Files RPG is what’s next: we have a second round of alpha playtesting that I’m hoping to get kicked off by the end of the month — basically I need to get past Dexcon this next week, and then do some revisioneering, while Lenny finishes up his latest work, and assemble the playtesting crew.

But that’s just the second alpha round. You can get a sense of the full scope of the project by checking out my “State of the Hat” posts over on my livejournal: http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/tag/state+of+the+hat

Don’t Lose Your Mind, a Don’t Rest Your Head supplement written by Benjamin Baugh, is planned for release at GenCon in August.

And we’ve just kicked off the very very beginning of development on a new Spirit of the Century supplement, also with Benjamin, but we’re early enough in that process that it doesn’t have a date attached to it.

We’re also working with Chad Underkoffler to publish his Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies game, which is the next PDQ product from him, and Daniel Solis’ Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. But both of those projects are still exploring themselves, playtesting and such, so it’s hard to give those timelines too. Plus: the curse!

Don’t Rest Your Head

Are there more supplement materials like Don’t Lose Your Mind planned for the DRYH product line?

Planned, no, but possible, yes. It’ll partly depend on how well Don’t Lose Your Mind does, in terms of sales. Don’t Rest Your Head has done reasonably well for us, selling around 1500 copies over the course of two-plus years. But that suggests a potentially small market for supplemental material. So it’s up to the public to show us what it thinks of the idea of expanding the game, and whether it’s worth our time to go big or go small or go home, as far as our plans go.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

How would you describe the setting of Do in three sentences or less?

Flying monks living in a temple at the center of the sky solve the problems of the universe when those problems come knocking. The sky is full of these Little Prince style worlds; every now and again, someone on one of those worlds sends the temple’s pilgrims a letter requesting their help. And so the pilgrims fly off to set things right, with Avatar: The Last Airbender style visuals at their backs.

Will Do use a system we’ve seen before, or is it something completely new?

Completely new. Daniel Solis has a brain that works nothing like the rest of us. Dan’s been something of an amateur boardgame designer for a while, so he brings an unusual approach to how he designs roleplaying games. He’s also one of the best layout artists out there, having an incredible eye for aesthetics. Frankly I can’t wait to see what this means for the final form Do will take.

General Questions

In SotC and DRYH, a fairly generic setting is provided with a few details that a gaming group can choose to use or not (for example, the character of Doctor Methuselah). In future supplements, will we see a continuation of these storylines? Why or why not?

Don’t Rest Your Head has what Ken Hite called a “thin gruel” of a setting, and honestly that was a pretty fair evaluation. DRYH doesn’t have a super-strong setting in part because it simply can’t. The “right way” to do DRYH, at least from my perspective, is to build your own campaign-specific setting out of the answers the players give on their character questionnaires. There’s no real way to write for that — but that’s part of why the GM’s side of the system is so lightweight, with the only mechanical question that the GM really needs to answer is “Okay, X happens– how much does it hurt?” and set the Pain dice accordingly. Sure, there’s the hope and despair economy to manage as well, but that’s just a shaker of spice to season the Pain. By being a lightweight system to GM, and with a thin setting, DRYH is strongly focused on making it all about the protagonists. So no, I don’t see DRYH having an ongoing storyline save in the stories that the player characters bring to the table.

Spirit of the Century on the other hand has an even thinner setting, but a more detailed storyline bubbling in the back of my head. There’s a pretty natural progression that these could take, riffing on the title — the other titles in the series, that may or may not turn into products for us, would be Shadow of the Century and Spirit of the Millennium, just to give you a taste. Possibly with an epilogue called something like Shadow of the Millennium or whatever. Shadow of the Century is probably the closest to potentially actually happening, based on a concept of — more or less — turning the Century Club into the A-Team in the dark oppressive future of 1984, but that’s still a ways down the road.

Do you have any other new properties that we haven’t already covered that are currently in development? When can we expect to see them?

Well, like I mentioned, we’ve got Ben Baugh working on a new supplement for Spirit of the Century. How soon we’ll see that will depend on boring things like budget and time availability.

There’s also something else I’m sort of working on in partnership with another company that I can’t really talk about yet.

But in both cases, these projects will involve dinosaurs. Because who doesn’t need more dinosaurs in their games?

My business partner Rob Donoghue has become pretty enamoured of D&D 4th Edition lately (as have I, though not with the same verve as Rob), so who knows what will come of that.

It’s all very speculative and “hmm, if only we could have the time and money to do…” stuff at Evil Hat these days. Largely because the Dresden Files RPG is consuming such a monstrous portion of our resources. Many new and exciting things can happen… once that’s done.

Has the coverage of your games on actual play podcasts such as the RoleMonkeys increased the interest in your products?

Absolutely, categorically, yes. Back when the Role Monkeys (and the Game Master Show) were doing their first few podcasts of actual play of Evil Hat’s games, I was watching the day to day sales numbers pretty closely. The experience was new! Numbers were exciting! And did I mention new! So when those podcast episodes hit the interwaves, I saw a real, palpable spike. Just goes to show the truism actual play sells games is dead on.

What do you think the relationship between this new media revolution and independent publishers should be like?

Hm. Symbiotic? When it comes right down to it, podcasts need content, and publishers need exposure, so these two things are really primal peanut butter and chocolate, if you ask me.

Several other publishers offer free micro-supplements or adventures on their websites. Does Evil Hat plan on offering these kinds of gaming aids to the community? If not, why?

No. I do see the point of it, but I think our community is lively and vibrant enough that we can rely on them to pick up that particular slack. I’d rather focus Evil Hat’s resources and attention on getting out the big new things rather than potentially nickle and diming our often-constricted output to death.

But this is definitely a moving target kind of answer. As Evil Hat grows, our capacity to do small things without those being at the expense of the big things will improve, I’m sure.

Do the fan-made supplements affect your position?

Only by making me all the more comfortable that Evil Hat doesn’t need to directly do that. I’ve rarely seen something produced by a fan of our games that I didn’t find in some way much cooler than what we ourselves might do. Our fans are great.

What sort of challenges does an independent gaming publisher face?

Plenty. It’s easy to dream big, reach for the big, and then crash and burn when you inevitably fall short. If there’s one thing I’d recommend to folks wanting to start out, it’s to downsize those dreams a bit, start small, and incrementally build from tiny successes into big ones. It’s what I’ve done over the last two years with Evil Hat and it’s worked out pretty well as a model.

But as print on demand gets cheaper and cheaper, and more interest in electronic products grows, it’s going to become harder and harder for a single small operation to get noticed in and among all the hubbub. Independent publishing is where a lot of the exciting innovation is happening, but those innovations really have to ring out and be heard, be something extraordinary, be something worth talking about and learning from, in order to have a shot at sales success.

But that’s not the only kind of success to be had. There are lots of others — I mean, heck, look at what Levi Kornelsen’s doing with Amagi Games (http://www.amagi-games.com/) — weekly, sometimes even daily, free, excellent ideas for things to do with your games. And he’s putting all of that out in the public domain. Levi’s success won’t be measured by sales figures, when it all gets tallied up, but I’m betting it’ll still be palpable.

What did Evil Hat do to resolve these challenges?

We got married.

Seriously, Evil Hat would not exist without Deborah Donoghue (Rob’s wife) and my wife, Christie. My wife supported me when I decided the Internet industry was poisoning me and I had to get out, and she’s made it possible for me to have a full time game industry life, at least for a few years. I’m so much happier and healthier as a result, and Evil Hat’s been able to turn into something I’m very proud of. And without Deborah and Christie backing Rob and I when we got the chance to score the rights for the Dresden Files RPG, that simply wouldn’t have happened, and so much of Evil Hat’s success has come about simply because we’ve had that opportunity.

It’s a good life. It’s hard work. I wouldn’t choose any other way to do it.

All of Evil Hat Productions games can be purchased at Indie Press Revolution. Be on the lookout here on Reviews from a Dead Planet for reviews of their upcoming and already released products!

Blog @ Canadian Geek

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