4ollowing the Path [Monday Meeting Notes]

Monday Meeting

Here we all are in the first week of January, 2015. Wow. This is Onyx Path‘s fourth year of existence.

Did I say wow? WOW!

First off, my thanks to all of you for your support so far; I hope that our efforts to return your trust with the sorts of awesome games, fiction, and other projects you expect have made you as happy as they have us. Maybe an indicator is that just before the New Year, and I’m talking minutes, our Onyx Path Facebook page topped 5000 likes, which is incredibly heartening. Although, oddly enough, that was just the tip of the iceberg: all last month and still into this one, all of our FB pages for our various gamelines have also been flooded with “likes”. I dunno if that’s because folks have been on holiday breaks and are just liking things in a frenzy, or if Facebook changed their algorithms, or our outreach efforts are achieving critical mass. I don’t know why, but it’s great! Also in the good news from last year department, I’m told by Impish Ian Watson that we released 41 products and about 155 different t-shirt designs.

We have even more in store in ’15 and I’ll be talking about those plans later this month.

Next, here are a couple of reminders: the Deluxe Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition Kickstarter ends tomorrow! Please check it out if you’ve ever wondered just what made Wraith: the Oblivion the legendary game line it has turned into these last decades. We’ve had a great time mixing it up with the equally legendary Wraith developer Rich Dansky, and with backer support we’ve added a huge chunk of extra text to the book, and have been able to create a Wraith 20 Quickstart: the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased”, a Wraith 20 Fiction Anthology, and a new product expanding on the really scary parts: the Book of Oblivion (BoO). With 24ish hours to go, who knows what else might be added.

And today we also are starting the New Year, New Game sale at DTRPG with $15 Starter Bundles for Scion and Geist. Plus a number of White Wolf and Onyx Path core book PDFs 15% Off!

I know that I’m constantly going on about how much we appreciate your support, and I do worry that maybe it seems like a marketing line. The fact is though, we really do look on our community and the way we, as creators, are connected to you all, as incredibly important to every phase of creating our projects. The ability to have the kind of rapport we have now, as opposed to the great grey fog that separated us during the White Wolf days, is really a boon to our creative processes. Which is why we work really hard to include you in all our various processes; from Kickstarters where you can tell us which added material to create, to the Open Dev Process in all of its forms.

The hard work I speak about isn’t just the listening and talking to our community, though. The hardest part is keeping ourselves open to communication, even when in the midst of a constructive conversation someone jumps in and tears us a new one. Which I bring up because it’s a topic almost every one of our developers and writers and artists and editors (and one creative director and publisher) have had to deal with and which we talk about a lot. How to maintain enthusiasm and the creative urge in the midst of negativity. Some of the means is simply to stay disciplined about communication and how to pull the good from the nasty. And some of it is to have various communication venues with various amounts of protocols for how we trade ideas.

Many of our creators post on other non-Onyx forums or on their own social media and we ask that they make it obvious when they are speaking as somebody “officially” working for Onyx Path, but otherwise don’t try and lock in controls on people and sites that aren’t ours to control. We post regular warnings about not thread-crapping on our Facebook pages because we don’t think edition warring in a thread about how much someone loves a game line is productive, but don’t really moderate so much as try and keep discussions factual. And then there are the forums and blogs here where we have our posted standards that we think enable better communication; both within our fan community and from creators to fans and back. Each venue has a different “safety factor”, I guess, in terms of the kind of communication our folks can and should expect to be able to have, and they can choose where to engage based on that.

Interestingly, we’re not the only ones to be thinking and posting about this, and I’d like to share with you these points and this link to the original blog, which I think really encapsulate a lot of my thinking on how we run our forums and blogs. They’re from the talented pen of John Rogers (Leverage and The Librarians) on his Kung Fu Monkey blog, and I’ll hit his high points and my take on them for our Onyx Path site here:

1.) I tend to swear.

So do we. Some of that is for effect while writing, some is because we are passionate about what we do. Mostly, it’s because we try and talk straight, without pretense, whether in a creative meeting, or with you, our co-conspirators in these worlds we make.

2.) Argue to your hearts’ content, but please be respectful of each other.

Seriously. We are all joined by our love and passion for these games, and there ain’t that many of us that we should be trying to verbally destroy each other.

3.) It doesn’t have to be a question.

This is pretty much just for newcomers to our community, as our regular posters know that anything interesting is worth posting about here- and we love to read tangents as much as straight up “explain this” posts. But it does speak to the difference between an active community that’s comfortable hanging out like we love having here, and a place that is designed only to settle rules questions.

4.) Us writers, you fan.

This is a really important point, and I was wondering just how to phrase it, myself. I touch on the issue above with the idea that our creators can only function creatively in an environment that fosters said creativity, but it’s harder to provide that when as a company, Onyx Path is so engaged with you all. On our side, we asked you for feedback, and we just need to understand that some of that will legitimately be negative feedback. On your side, and this is something we often see during an Open Dev Process discussion (or after an Advance PDF gets comments) when a developer explains why the change being demanded by a poster is not going to be made, is the idea that ultimately our creative teams are actually the ones whose reputations and incomes are on the line. Or as John Rogers said in his blog: “Our choices are our choices and we earned the right to make them, even if you don’t like them.”

As we enter 2015, I think these points “frame the space” here on our site in a way that we can use to create that zone that continues to allow a real back and forth of ideas with our creators. It’s a good guideline on how best to express our thoughts and feelings about the worlds we’ve all spent so much time living in.

And now, the first Updates of 2015:

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM ROLLICKING ROSE (Projects in bold have changed listings)

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

W20 Pentex Employee Indoctrination Handbook (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Book of Secrets (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Cursed Necropolis: Rio (Mummy: the Curse)

Secrets of the Covenants (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition) – In Open Development

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

W20 Changing Ways (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Demon Storytellers’ Guide (Demon: the Descent) Extension to writers was given.

Beckett’s Jyhad Diary (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

“Sardonyx” System Rules (Base rules set for Scion and the Trinity Continuum)

M20 Anthology (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Redlines

Mummy Fiction Anthology (Mummy: the Curse)

Arms of the Chosen (Exalted 3rd Edition)

W20 Shattered Dreams (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Mage: the Awakening 2nd Edition, featuring the Fallen World Chronicle (Mage: the Awakening) – In Open Development

W20 Novel by Mike Lee (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Beast: the Primordial core book (Beast: The Primordial)

V20 Black Hand: Guide to the Tal’Mahe’Ra (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

Wraith: the Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition

Second Draft

Development

V20 Red List (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

V20 Ghouls (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

World of Darkness Dark Eras- Vampire chapter (WoD Dark Eras)

Promethean: the Created 2nd Edition, featuring the Firestorm Chronicle (Promethean: the Created)

Editing

V20 Lore of the Clans (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

Sothis Ascends (Mummy: the Curse)

M20 How do you DO that? (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exalted 3rd Fiction Anthology (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Development (post-editing)

World of Darkness Dark Eras core book (WoD Dark Eras)

Exalted 3rd Edition core book- From Holden: “Final file (ch9: panoply) to come in later today. Meanwhile, many Bothans died to bring you these crunch chapters..” (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Fallen World Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Mage: the Awakening)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE