The Shadow of Yesterday News
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The Shadow of Yesterday online praise
From a thread on the Anvilwerks forum:
As I play with a group of gamers with a good representation of both genders, and a fair amount of gay, lesbian, and transsexual players, it’s nice to actually hold up a game like TSOY whose sex politics are above the watermark for most RPG’s (which are sadly about on par with a viking attack). For all the progress that’s been made in liberalizing the world of RPG’s, most mainstream games are still sadly very white, very Eurocentric, and very heterosexual in their depiction of characters, and indeed the entire world. Your writeup for Oran is yet another example of TSOY’s attempt to address gender/sex politics in a way where “mature” doesn’t simply equal “explicit content,” like it does in a vast majority of the gaming world. Thank you for a game which is as thoughtful as it is exciting.
I feel super-proud and glowy right now.
The Shadow of Yesterday available in Finnish!
Eero Tuovinen of Arkkikivi, a Finnish RPG publisher, and his brother have translated my game, The Shadow of Yesterday, into Finnish, which is awesome enough by itself. They got all new art for the Finnish market, and really made this thing shine. The interior layout’s better than the current English version, although don’t think I didn’t learn some tricks from them.
But even better, this is a Creative Commons success story. Eero contacted me a while back about my license on the game, and asked if he could translate it. That’s perfectly allowable within the license. Because the Finnish market is smaller, he worried about using the commercial license I had, so we negotiated that he could use a non-commercial license for his translation as long as I could incorporate any changes back into English. And now, there’s a CC-licensed text of The Shadow of Yesterday in Finnish on the web! How cool is that?
Best e-mail ever
As a publisher, the most fun thing that can happen to me is when I get an e-mail from someone just saying they liked one of my games. It’s even better when it’s someone I don’t know. Today, I got the best ever:
From: devildragonXXXXX@hotmail.com (edited for despamming)
Dear Mr. Nixon,
I love Shadow of Yesterday and me and my friends play it all the time, well…at least when we get the chance. We had a great session of TSOY last week and this made me want to write you. I would first like to say that you are a great game designer. I look at the news on Anvilwerks.com and The Forge all the time and I like what i hear. Third I love the idea you posted on the Forge about a ninja game ‘Steel Shadows’, I have always wanted to play a good ninja game and I hope that it goes well and that you can complete a top notch game. I would like to say one last thing, I love the idea of a clan that the player would create, it just sounds very inventive, that is also the reason you don’t see more games in this genre, because no one ever come’s up with new and inventive idea’s for ninja games.
P.S. – my character in TSOY is a Maldorite Ratkin named Rune, he loves to use his stealth abilities. Thank you for this game again.
Man, awesome. The rest of you game designers have a high bar to meet now.
Online surprise of the day
So, someone I don’t know who goes by the online name Loki has a DIY interview in the Escapist. And one of her favorite games is The Shadow of Yesterday. (Dogs is in there too, Vincent.) And she’s Korean. And, hey, I used to, about five years ago, speak Korean, too, and I’ve been trying to get it back.
Anyway, I got all proud when I read that.
TSOY in hardcover
Hey, I got my proof of my hardcover version of The Shadow of Yesterday back from Lulu today, and it looks fantastic. Check out some sweet photos of it.
It is, of course, available at Lulu.
Hey, free game
The Shadow of Yesterday revised has finally been released as a free Creative Commons-licensed text. You can find it at:
http://www.anvilwerks.com/src/tsoy2/book1–rulebook.txt
The “World of Near” section will come later. It’s not altogether that different from the first edition, so I decided to go ahead and release this. It was like five hours of work just to give it to you for free, seriously.
Sales questions
So, I’m reading Vincent’s weblog today and I find out about his incredible sales. And I’m all like, “What in the world? His game is incredible. I mean, incredible. But my game, The Shadow of Yesterday, has a great ruleset, is very accessible, and is a neat look at fantasy and it sells about a third to a quarter of Dogs in the Vineyard. I mean, the dude is selling 1 to 2 copies a day of a game about Mormons.”
So, how is he possibly doing this? What’s the marketing technique?
Here’s my guesses:
- Great actual play posts. I don’t know how to get more of these. Maybe I should run more of the game myself and actually post about it.
- His awesome weblog. He posts incredibly insightful stuff about role-playing at least twice a week. This has to draw people to buy his game. I only wish I could do this – I don’t think about theory that much and can’t figure out what I’d say that hasn’t been said or isn’t a direct post about a game in development.
So, hrm. I’m kind of jealous right now.