Roguelike Megadungeon with Cairn, Solo Journal 1

I've decided to journal a solo campaign using my setting generator, Roguelike Megadungeon. I'll be using Cairn 2E as the system. It'll be my first time playing Cairn, so I am excited to try it out, although it is not my first time playing a Mark of the Odd game. RLMD is a setting generator, but it has a heavily implied setting and cosmology, so I am also excited to explore and showcase its procedurally generated adventures. 

I started by generating a few maps at a few different scales. Normally I like to show the procedures when talking about RLMD, but for now I'm just going to jump right to the maps. 

The first one is the region, which I named Disharmonia. It has some different terrains, a scrub plateau to the northwest, primordial snowy peaks to the northeast, wizard wracked wastes in the center (where soporific roots grow), a jungle to the southeast containing a religious site, and a keep built from fallen pieces of a sky fortress in the southwest. The wastes contain an entrance to the megadungeon. There is also a lesser-known ice dungeon in the snowy peaks. 

It looks like the keep is the adventurer's hub, so I generate a map for that too, calling it Hollandale Keep. It contains a black market run by goblinoid agents, so I am deciding the upper levels of the megadungeon are a goblin warren. The keep also contains two religious devouts giving out blessings publicly, a wizard's tower, a wizard's failed experiment, a famous restaurant and a refugee camp with an abandoned wagon containing some type of potential adventurers' loot. I decide the religious devouts are here from the religious site in the jungle. The wizard's tower is the seat of power and the home of the leader of the keep. 

I decide to drill down once more, deciding the famous restaurant can be a tavern that the party meets at and plans their adventures at. I generate Skykeep Grub, the communal watering hole. It contains a historical memorial, and a combination specialty vendor and restricted area, which I just decide is the bar. It also contains three NPCs, two of which are nobles, who I decide are looking to make names for themselves adventuring in the goblin warrens. They are interested in hiring mercenaries and adventurers for their risky delves. There is also a community leader, who I decide is an assistant to the wizard, looking to buy soporific roots from the wastes, a slightly less dangerous mission than the megadungeon itself. 

Now I need a party of adventurers. I generate four Cairn PCs: Lansford the Barber-Surgeon, Lichen the Greenwise, Madrigal the Fungal Forager, and Sable the Prowler with her pet wolf. They are sitting inside Skykeep Grub, discussing their plans. Madrigal has a letter detailing proof of his Fey noble lineage with a request for a meeting deep in the woods in 7 days. This will be the first thing the party tries to do since it is time sensitive. Sable has a mischievous spirit haunting her, always telling her to take to the woods, so it is not hard to convince the party to go on Madrigal's mission. The meeting location is also close to the religious site in the jungle, so they decide to go there, perhaps finding some easier work.

Travel begins using the Cairn wilderness procedure. The weather is a bit rough on us to begin with, and when we recover, we come across a friction breathing wyvern. I roll a die of fate to decide if they are intelligent enough to be bargained with, and I roll well, so the party has a change at a diplomatic resolution. I decide that Lansford's offer of three rations is enough to buy them passage. 

The next day they enter the jungle and have an encounter with a triceratops beetle. The party climbs a tree and waits it out. The beetle gets bored and wanders off. The party continues on their way but comes across an unpassable rift in the jungle floor. Sable ties Lichens iron pot to Madrigals 25 ft rope, and tosses it across the gap, finding purchase but destroying most of the iron pot as it goes bouncing down the crevasse. They leave the rope tied across for when they return. 

That night while they camp, another triceratops beetle attacks. This time they cannot run up a tree and engage in a brutal battle. Lansford is brought down getting gored by a horn before the party kills it. He is "walloped" and gains 5 max HP for surviving! They decide to rest the next day and forage for rations for a little while. 

While foraging, Sable discovers a Dwarven minecart passage. I decide this will be another small dungeon and generate one. The main features are a death lizard with a broken blood crown, a gem encrusted skeleton and a magic obelisk. I have flavor tables in RLMD to help flesh out relationships. Here we have an inquisitive obelisk, a secretive gem encrusted skeleton and an elemental death lizard. I decide that the skeleton is a fallen king, whose people took his crown and sealed him in the tomb, leaving the broken crown above as a marker shrine. The king hates the lizard as it makes its lair on his shrine, he wants his crown back and its magic would help him break the curse and escape the tomb. The obelisk gives information about the king to any visitors but asks for a secret in exchange for information. Finally, I make up an encounter table based on the two poles of the undead skeleton king and the reptilian death lizard. 

1. Big Death Lizard 

2. Small lizards 

3. Kobolds 

4. Spirits 

5. Skeletons 

6. Crystal Constructs

The party heals up and decides to check out the dungeon. They enter carefully, interacting with the obelisk. Madrigal tells the obelisk his secret about his Fey noble lineage, and the obelisk tells them about the traitor king and how his people punished him and cursed him to live here in eternal unlife. After fighting off some small death lizards, the group proceeds to the tomb and meets the traitor king. I roll the best possible reaction roll for him, so he is helpful! I decide that he is lonely for conversation after a thousand years of being locked up. He tells the party that he hates the lizard, and tells them about a secret passage they can take to bypass the other rooms to get to the shrine. They go through the passage and then decide to ambush the lizard when they see it there. Lansford slings a rock at the opposite side of the clearing to distract the lizard, and they all rush in. They botch the opening ambush and Sable is seriously hurt, but the partly comes out on top. Lichen hides the broken blood crown in his backpack while the party rests, and they are able to fast talk the traitor king and get the crown out of the dungeon without a conflict!

Next time, the party will continue to forage and then push onward to make Madrigal's appointment with his Fey patron. We'll find out if the story of Fey lineage is true or some kind of ruse.

Second Wave Solarpunk

This blog post was written with much helpful feedback from kagozaiku of the Copy/Paste Co-op discord server.

At some point in the 2000s, people started to realize all that crappy stuff predicted by the near future dystopian science fiction genre of cyberpunk was starting to come true. People began to think collectively that maybe instead of all this digital panopticon stuff, we can try to manifest something nice instead. As an intentional contrast to cyberpunk, people started to rally around the idea of solarpunk as a positive vision of a beautiful, green energy-based society.

An image of solarpunk that described what would become the recognizable face of the genre's aesthetic is described in one of a handful of early solarpunk manifestos by artist Olivia Louise. In it, she called for:

“a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech, as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between.” 

I once saw an engineering presentation on biofuel technology, where in the introduction the presenter showed sweeping fields of forests, giving the impression of it being an environmentally friendly technology. In reality, the biofuels proposition to replace our civilizations petrochemical demands with fuels derived from plant biomatter, is an unrealistic one. This is an example of what I was later to learn is called greenwashing. It's the strategy of using green technology imagery to make an environmentally hazardous thing seem safe. Since the utopian solarpunk aesthetic has become somewhat recognizable, greenwashing has made itself synonymous with it. Solar panels have been reduced to representing the technological triumph of capitalism over nature, which negates any need to reassess society and ourselves on any meaningful level. The imagery of a utopian future has become a brand for corporations like Chobani to capitalize on.

There is good solarpunk media, but the genre often falls into a few traps, which I believe are holding it back from achieving its goals of imagining and manifesting a better tomorrow. With utopianism can come toxic positivism. It looks to create a cozy escapism, which is understandable, but that doesn't imagine unfamiliar future worlds. Our imagined utopias can't be in conflict with our assumptions about the world, so they just reproduce it without challenging it. It slaps trees on skyscrapers instead of wondering how society might have to change to get into ecological balance. It isn't looking to imagine new ways of living outside the capitalist mode of production. 

This is why I think a lot of the best solarpunk doesn't really fall under the solarpunk umbrella but is more just an inspiration or is adjacent. Even Psalm for the Wild Built, the classic solarpunk novel, exists at the edge of utopia, and looks out over the impossible social and historical gulf between humans and robots. Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke contain devastating effects of civilization on nature. Red Mars is about class war, not living in utopia. 

Donna Haraway, future theorist, argues that conflict is inherent in society and that a peaceful utopia cannot exist. She writes, “Sex is a constraint on the formation of societies because sexually reproducing individuals are not identical genetically. They therefore compete with different investment strategies… any society with most of its members engaging in sexual reproduction cannot hope for real peace.” The alternative being a laboratory-controlled society where individuals are created to fit into an authoritarian social structure. Their peace would be the result of total loss of freedom. 

Science fiction that imagines a better future doesn't imagine a world without conflict, it imagines what new conflicts will be there, or what conflicts that exist today have taken new form in the future. 

Haraway also writes quite a lot about cyborgs, sometimes positioning them as an archetype of the people of the future. They challenge our ideas of humanity and their world, rejecting the boundaries around our ideas of humanity, both draw closer to animals and machines. Individuals can be chimerical and contain permanent contradiction instead of needing to be rigidly and homogeneously defined.

A better future world that exists in harmony with nature celebrates human genius and our power of creation. That world accesses a deep cultural and ecological wisdom while always looking to create new things and see things in new ways. A communistic society that relies on the power of educated masses to prevent exploitation and be vigilant for the ever-present threat of fascism that threatens the world.

Haraway's approach is my favorite way forward for a mutated second wave of solarpunk to overcome greenwashing. The genre needs to become more chimerical, holding hope and the vigor of life, while coexisting in contradiction with non-utopian genres. In Final Fantasy VII, industrial pollution causes the planets lifestream to awaken. The lifestream grants humans incredible power, but also, as a defense mechanism, the planet gives birth to the Ultima Weapon, the one of the most powerful monsters in existence. Even in a setting of rampant industrial environmental exploitation, the planet has new and powerful creative abilities. The recent Weird Hope blog post inspired this post. It presents a new genre of psychedelic, hopeful, post-apocalyptic exploration. It takes a dark setting but injects it with light. Weirdhopian characters are becoming something beyond human to adapt to a world changed by humans. A second wave of solarpunk is one that doesn't block out the uglier sides of humanity but holds space with them as a chimerical passenger. A second wave of solarpunk imagines weirder ways to build a new world in the shell of the old by crosspollinating across genres instead of being locked into any restrictive definition. 

Dungeon and Sandbox Factions Shape Campaign Arcs

Sopkatok resides in a dungeon in Hot Springs Island
that showcases conflicts between sandbox factions

The word faction gets used to describe two slightly different things in the post-OSR. Factions in the dungeon and factions in the sandbox affect the game differently because of their sizes. There is an exception to this. A megadungeon can be big enough that their factions approach the same size scale as those of a sandbox hex or point crawl setting. I feel like I usually see dungeons written as atomized locations, external to and existing at the margins of the mundane world of the sandbox. It doesn't have to be that way though. Hot Springs Island shows that a sandbox setting can be written so wholistically and with so much attention to detail that each dungeon reflects some microcosm of the greater struggles of the world. I think a campaign arc can be much more rewarding if there is some harmony between at least some of the dungeons internal conflicts and those of the greater world. Just because the two types of factions are different, doesn't mean they shouldn't be connected. On the contrary, especially because they are separate things they should be deliberately tied together. This way the players' characters will be introduced to factions through action, and form strong opinions about and relationships with them. The more players become entangled in the narratives and conflicts of the factions of the world, the more they will be ready to engage in those conflicts on the domain scale of play once they get there. 

John Harper talks about a campaign he ran of the sci-fi OSR game Stars Without Number, which informed his design of Blades in the Dark. One of the tools he developed in this campaign was the Jobs Board, where players had a list of mission options available to them to choose from. They could of course do whatever they wanted, but the Jobs Board provided a lot of the grist for the campaign. These jobs came from the faction mini-game in SWN, which abstracts and simulates large scale actions of and conflicts between factions. So for example if the Midnight Syndicate is deploying cyberninjas to attack Holosphere International's manufactories, one of the jobs can be to defend a manufactory from cyberninjas. Or maybe the other way around, they can be paid to retrieve an encrypted drive from Holosphere and sabotage their infrastructure using advanced tech. The Jobs Board is a great way to gradually draw players into the moving gears of the greater world before they feel ready to make big moves on the domain level. 

I once ran a planar city campaign using a version of the SWN faction system with a jobs board to run the conflicts within the enormous megacity. This led to missions like raiding the tower of a wizard of a rival faction, for which I placed a MacGuffin in the first adventure from the Dungeon Crawl Classics mini-campaign The Sea Queen Escapes. They later raided a caravan I think delivering resources to some battlefront within the city, which I generated using Between The Skies. Eventually, they started sending NPCs and militia units to accomplish missions that they didn't have time for, while doing the most important missions themselves. Finally, as a campaign ending adventure, they attacked the tower of the leader of the main evil faction, Vecna. For this I used the tower of Svarku, the main villain from the aforementioned Hot Springs Island.

I don't know if the Jobs Board and the faction mission based campaign arc can work for all games and settings, but it is possible to ease a party into the world of domain level play by creating missions based on faction conflicts and it can be rewarding giving that "epic" feeling that many crave. When this happens, dungeons are not just delves, they are missions with purpose, containing faction actors who are pursuing their own goals tied to the greater world.

One Page Dungeon Classics: Gullet of the Rust Demon

I recently had the opportunity to run Gullet of the Rust Demon, written by Dan D. of the blog Throne of Salt. I ran it using Ashes Without Number, placing it in a preexisting sandbox. This dungeon first struck me because of its unusual map and its only monster, The Ooze. An indestructible mass of flesh and bone, it retreats after taking 1d20 damage, rerolled every encounter. The first room of the dungeon is an atrium with 6 doors leading away from it, and bizarre statue of "a tangled, tortured mass of humans" with a bottomless hole. The statues features imply some sort of explanation to the Ooze, although the dungeon itself doesn't provide anything to this end. Each room contains oddly specific contents that also imply some incomprehensible purpose to this location, rather than giving it away, each room really just piles more questions on top. Room 6 is a personal chamber/prison cell with "I am feeling ill" written on the wall. This room in particular is an opportunity to present an answer, is the Ooze maybe the person who was here, a final cultist of some sort maybe, and his curse led him to crawl into the bottomless hole under the statue, turning him into the cursed Ooze that haunts this ruin? We'll never know, but anyone who runs it will interpret it in their own way. While I realize this open ended-ness is an invitation to be creative, I think more fleshed out lore would make it a more satisfying adventure to run.

The primary conceit of Gullet of the Rust Demon is that it is an escape room style dungeon. After entering, the doors slam shut behind you, and you have to solve the puzzle of the dungeon to escape. My players, being paranoid dungeon-heads, searched the entrance to the dungeon, and discovered evidence of the trap door and managed to circumvent the trap with a chopped down tree from nearby. This didn't affect the experience too much. They still explored the dungeon, looting and pressing their luck with the Ooze, until they decided to call it and came out with a fair bit of technological salvage. The exploration of the central atrium and its surrounding rooms punctuated by Ooze attacks was a very different kind of dungeon crawl, especially because the party had a clear escape route through the front gate propped open by a tree trunk as an option. I thought the mechanics of the dungeons design created awesome tension for the delve. Ultimately the origin or purpose of the Ooze was not important, and the players got their treasure. If I ran it again, I would want some motivation for the Ooze, so that escaping the dungeon isn't the only puzzle. Lets say the Ooze was the last living cultist, who gave their body over to their evil god as a way to continue to exist after it lost the faith of its cult. The Ooze will attack any who violate its sanctum, but in fact more than anything it wants to be worshipped once again. 

Interview with Caelin Araven

I interviewed my friend Caelin Araven, author of Eco Mofos modules Cathedral of Hope, The Deluxo Waste and Continent Kimera. He was sharing some interesting thoughts on the "weird" in fiction so I interviewed him about it.

David Jackson: Hi Caelin, thanks for joining me in this interview. So, were going to be working on an Eco Mofos collaborative project together and one of the themes of Eco Mofos is "weirdhope." For the interview we’re going to do a theme of weirdhope also. So yeah just to start off with can you introduce yourself as a writer and talk about your interests and your writers journey that made you what you are now. 

Caelin Araven: Yes, so I'm Caelin Araven. I'm I guess the biggest third party writer of Eco Mofos at the moment. I’ve published a number of small modules for Eco Mofos, also for smaller indie games. For me I feel about the journey that brought me here, I feel that my life is kind of culminating to Eco Mofos and even something beyond that that I haven't reached yet. I started writing when I was 16 which is now around 20 years ago. I started Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition in 2011 but I gave Dungeons & Dragons up because someone was toxic in my group, and I didn't play for 5 more years. But back in 2017 I found a pathfinder group and I started homebrewing and GMing. And finally found my way into the homebrewing community and then through there into indie RPGs. I joined a game jam, got into the Lost Bay server, and from there I found the Eco Mofos game jam before Eco Mofos was published, and decided to back the Kickstarter and write for Eco Mofos. 

DJ: So you also wrote some fiction. You wrote a novel right? 

CA: Yeah I started writing poetry and short stories. But in 2016 I wrote a novel. But all of my proof readers didn't read it in the end and I got very depressed, and that's actually how I came to the Pathfinder group. Because I wanted some feedback that was instant and I wanted to look people in the face and see what they thought about my story telling. 

DJ: Thanks for sharing that. So you're also currently planning a few projects including possibly a crowdfunding project, although I think that's sort of up in the air. Is there anything you want to share about that stuff? 

CA: The crowdfunding is up in the air at the moment. I recently got some money that allows me to not do the crowdfunding. But the idea behind it was that I redo the layout of all my zines into kind of a brand layout of Caelin, still recognizable as an Eco Mofos zine, but also recognizable that I wrote it. And for that, with the money I wanted to make a distribution point at my house so I could print the zine and have them sent all over the world. 

DJ: Um how would you print them, are there local printers in your area?

CA: Yeah, I got a contact with an anarchist print shop, which prints for donations. So you dont have to pay at all, but they expect you to pay the cost of the ink and the paper. 

DJ: That's actually super cool, what's the name of that printer?

CA: An old friend of mine. It’s um Paper Jam.

DJ: That's awesome. 

CA: Yeah.

DJ: Ok so the first "weird" question, or the big "weird" question. At some point you mentioned recently, that you don't know what the word weird means or what weird is, which I thought was super interesting. And um, I know you've been thinking about it a bit and exploring. So, can you tell me now, what is weird?

CA: Yeah um. I think its ultimately very subjective what weird is, but the weird I was looking for in that sense when I said I don't know what weird means, is kind of I feel a narrow point on the spectrum, between the unknown, wonder, and the mundane and known. And what I’m missing mostly is wonder in my writings. 

DJ: So it has all those things or its somewhere between them?

CA: Yeah its a way inbetween yeah. I think there's a bit of all those four: unknown, known, wonder and mundane, is needed, but in the end it leans towards wonder and unknown where you find the sweet spot of the amazing feeling of weird that I’m looking for.

DJ: How did you get to those four?

CA: Yeah I was thinking of all that I dont like about my writing. And I think it is that I always overexplain everything. Because I’m both writing fiction but also writing kind of a rule book for GMs when I make a module, so I’m over explaining my worlds a little bit. And I feel, that yeah, lets see, so yeah the unknown was missing a bit, but also I don't get the feeling of wonder because I know what's behind everything that's happening in my worlds.

DJ: I see. That's an interesting point, there's a relationship or tension between usability and I guess the poetry of weirdness. I feel like weird can be explained, though, I can imagine, I guess it would be nonsensical explanations. I feel like I’ve seen really dense weird information being conveyed but actually the information doesn't make sense. Or it's alluding to something you don't understand. So yeah it still does capture that in between point. 

CA: Yeah you need a frame of reference to get what you don't understand also. 

DJ: Yeah I like that the mundane has to be there also. It reminds me of, also, have you heard of the uncanny valley? (note from David: the Uncanny Valley is a theory that zombies and androids look unsettling to us because they are close to normal humans, but slightly off.)

CA: That's how I got to this theory.

DJ: Yeah. It's what’s familiar, but feels just a little bit off.

CA: So there are some pretty well known writers and I guess some old fiction that influenced role playing games and you know modern writers, and even people within role playing games who write weird stuff. Some examples we've talked about are HP Lovecraft, right, one of the main creators of cosmic horror and the weird as an idea. And within the OSR, I think Patrick Stewart, his Deep Carbon Observatory is super weird. So does that canonical weird fantasy description, does that fit to your description of weird?

DJ: I feel Lovecraft at least does a lot. I feel what Lovecraft does really well is that the protagonist and the reader are on the same journey of discovering the weird at the same time. So they discover pieces of wonder and unknown. Yeah piece by piece. It's also the same journey that happens with the protagonist and the reader in their heads and I really like it. And I’m a big fan of Patrick Stewart and Fire on the Velvet Horizon and Veins of the Earth and have been a massive fan ever since I got the books. I feel the monsters in Fire on the Velvet horizon are really weird, yes. And they really evoke a sense of wonder in me, something that I wouldn't have gotten without the book. It's something that I really want to achieve one day in my writings

DJ: I know I feel like I’ve seen Fire on the Velvet Horizon, but I haven't read it so I don't know it that well. Can you give me an example of something?

CA: There's something, um there's a I feel it's kind of a slug man. But he goes into towns and he can't be harmed by anything except violence by law. So he tries to stay inside the law, but also tries to change the law, so that he has more chances to rule society.

DJ: That's a good one. Is there another OSR author that you consider weird? 

CA: Well talking about Eco Mofos, that of course has the weird in it. I really like how David Blandy uses the tables to limit the explanation of the world. So you get a lot of freedom to interpret the world and the weird itself.

DJ: Yeah that's a cool thing about it too, because I guess the weird is an inbetween point it leaves room for the reader, like you were saying like Lovecraft does, for the reader to imprint their own fears onto these things. So, I guess the weird is also related to um fear a little bit and bad things in society right, like bigotry. The weird has been discussed in that context a little bit by some philosophers, like Kristeva who I think you know. Even Lovecraft, right, he was notoriously very racist, so his weird is also that. So, how does that aspect of the weird affect your writing and your understanding?

CA: Yeah I feel it kind of falls into the same categories as the unknown and the mundane and wonder. Maybe this is then a negative connotation of wonder. Um, but I feel it's still the same idea. You've got the mundane, the normal life, and then you've got what exposes it, that it is mundane. Because it's unknown for the people that are living it. So for example in Eco Mofos, you've got the magic from the Punks, and a lot of Wasters don't like magic, I feel in the universe as David once explained. So the wasters are the mundane and the punks are the weird, and the magic is the unknown. So yeah. I feel it's the same tension that's happening in the others.

DJ: Yeah, I think so. What is wondrous for the Punks, is scary for the Wasters and those are both two sides of wonder. That's interesting… Yeah there's a lot to think about with that one. So, last question, so the flip side, we've mentioned the weirdhope aesthetic which is associated with Eco Mofos. Which is, I think, a very interesting aesthetic that combines the weird with some hopefulness like the wondrous fantastic post-apocalyptic world of Eco Mofos. So, what about hope? Not just as a fictional device, but also in people in communities who are making and playing games together. 

CA: I think hope is very important in our world. I think there's a lot more hope in the world than we usually see. And I think it's important to expose that so that other people also become hopeful in what they are doing about the future of the world. In our games I think we can give out a really strong message of hope, kind of also mimic the world a bit to show that in Eco Mofos. That life goes on and there's always room to grow and build a world that is better for everyone. And what I want to say is that I really like the community of Copy/Paste co-op and because a lot of us write modules for Eco Mofos and other games, but David Blandy and Daniel Locke, have given a lot of us the opportunity to also publish our modules with them. Which I feel is also an expression of hope, because it's very difficult to publish modules on your own, and this way it lifts someone up, gives a spotlight. It's important I feel. It's something if I ever write my own game I want to continue also. 

DJ: Yeah I think hope is an expression of a lot of things, including giving and sharing reflects a hope that you can impact the world in a positive way. If you are negative or nihilistic, you don't have any hope that anything you do will change things so you don't give or share. So, I guess do you have any final thoughts or comments?

CA: Not really, it was nice to have this interview, I’m excited to read it.

DJ: Yeah thank you!

Zine Month Postmortem: The Prelaunch Centered Campaign

This year my Zine Month project, Dead Internet Theory, funded $1910 on BackerKit. Last year my project Roguelike Megadungeon funded $1934 using Itchfunding. You'd think these two campaigns with their nearly identical funding amounts would be similar, but they had some surprising differences. I'll try to do a quick look at how they were different, and what can be learned. Disclaimer: I am not a knowledgeable industry insider. This is mostly a note to myself while its fresh in my memory. 

The graph shows the difference. The Roguelike Megadungeon crowdfunding campaign's funding (blue) climbs steadily over time with a few surges, while the Dead Internet Theory amount (red) has a big jump at the start, a long flat part after that until half way through the month, and then a tail that curves upward toward the end of the campaign. Talking with the agent from BackerKit while setting up my campaign, and from the native resources provided by BackerKit, the Dead Internet Theory funding pattern is standard. What makes it so different from the Itch funding curve, is that BackerKit allows you to collect emails before launch using a pre-launch page, while Itch doesn't. While Itchfunding, I always saw more immediate results when I made social media posts, because I didn't frontload all those backers with a pre-launch page. During the first half of the campaign on BackerKit I sometimes promoted with no effect, and even lost backers! 

My biggest take away is that pre-launch follower count and base pledge value determine your campaign. I had about 100 followers at time of launch with a base pledge tier of $20. I made about $1000 in the first two days of the campaign and ended up funding about twice that in the end. More or less exactly how the BackerKit agent told me it would go.

So here are my thoughts for a campaign planned around prelaunch followers: 

Create a prelaunch page that collects emails 6 or more months in advance and promote that as much as you can. Make the goal equal to or less than your follower count times your base pledge tier divided by two. Plan the scope around that. Push back the launch date and rework the prelaunch page if needed. Spread out stretch goals over the same amount of money as the funding goal once over. Promote your launch, and then save energy for the second half or even last week of the campaign. 

System and Stop-Flows

In the recent blog post, Rules are not neutral!, Humberto Tramujas describes Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work. "Some artworks are intentionally structured to invite participation and interpretation. These works are not closed, fixed narratives but open systems allowing multiple paths of engagement." A open work rule system is then like a prism that can invite in, reflect and transform flows of play.

TTRPG play is a flow of imaginary events, punctuated by pauses in the fiction to make decisions and dice rolls. Moments where play stops are where the flow of play is redirected. What you do during pauses in play and how long you stop for are the most contentious issues in TTRPG design and discourse. There is a relationship between the two, where the series of in game events call for adjudication, and where a decision leads to changes in the fiction. 

Stop-flows are places where flows are redirected, separated, and transformed into new flows. In the case of TTRPGs they can be mechanics, lore, or really any arbitrary way to make a decision. Flows can be restricted and redirected into a limited set of behaviors, but they can also be redirected release new creative flows of play. 

Flows of fiction travel through people as we tell and create stories, and through culture, as playstyles rise and fall in popularity through rulebooks, actual play streams, blog posts and subcultures. These flows of course are paired with flows of money and merch. The flows of money are a central part of the greater ecosystem, giving it structure and imposing the most profitable flows over and through people. Flows of culture that depended on flows of money stamp out "open work TTRPGs" which in contrast invite and generate a multitude of new flows of fiction.