Paranoia Perfected?

In looking over Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground – and its supplementary zine, Experience Points – I got to thinking about Paranoia again – for a new edition came out last year, and I’ve been slack about getting hold of it. But to properly talk about that, I need to talk about the game’s history. I covered that a while back in fairly epic Kickstopper article concerning the release of the previous edition, but a quick recap for anyone who doesn’t want to trawl through that article is probably sensible. The story so far…

• 1984: The 1st Edition of the game is released by West End Games. The core book is alright, but it’s really in the supplement line that the distinctive Paranoia style comes into its own.
• 1987: A tightened-up 2nd Edition of the game is put out by West End, a grand improvement over 1st Edition’s core book on all fronts. The early 2nd Edition line continues the game’s golden age, but eventually things go a bit awry when a series of misguided metaplot events see the game straying from its original concept (and the style of play it handles best), and the writers who best “get it” drift away from writing for West End.
• 1995: West End, circling the drain somewhat by this point, put out the “Fifth” Edition. The bit about it being the 5th version of the game when it was, in fact, the 3rd is the funniest joke involved by quite some margin – and given how stunningly un-funny it is, that should give you an idea of how poorly it is regarded.
• 2004: Having retrieved the rights from the wreckage of West End, the game’s original creators give Mongoose the licence and they put out the edition initially known as Paranoia XP until Microsoft suffer a lack of sense of humour about it. It’s an excellent return to form, most particularly because it recognises three distinct playstyles popular among Paranoia players – from slapstick “Zap” games to gag-light, satire-heavy “Straight” play, with the “Classic” style somewhere in the middle – and provides both clear guidance on how to cater to each of these.
• 2009: A 25th Anniversary repackaging essentially provides a slimmed-down edit of the 2004 core rulebook – now called Paranoia: Troubleshooters – and two other core books, Paranoia: Internal Security and Paranoia: High Programmers, bids at fleshing out styles of play alluded to in past supplements like HIL Sector Blues and Extreme Paranoia but which, it’s probably fair to say, don’t seem to have the same legs as the decades-old tried-and-true Troubleshooter-focused version of the game.
• 2014: Mongoose began the fractious, much-delayed, ill-tempered Kickstarter process which led to the release of the “Red Clearance Edition” (RCE) of the game in 2017 – a major system revision spearheaded by James Wallis of Alas Vegas infamy and Grant Howitt, whose preceding Goblin Quest was a fun fantasy take on Paranoia and whose subsequent Spire shows some influence from design ideas he worked into Red Clearance Edition.

As I outlined in my previous article, the Red Clearance Edition had a difficult beginning. It was subjected to extensive delays which caused no small amount of ill will; the Kickstarter backers were badly annoyed by the delays, and became outright furious when one backer was given a preview PDF to use at a convention but the same courtesy wasn’t extended to the backers in general, creating an impression of undue favouritism. In the process of mollifying the backers, Matt Sprange – founder and head honcho at Mongoose – laid the blame for the delays squarely and unambiguously at James Wallis’s feet. (Not, let’s be very clear, Grant Howitt – I say that not because I take any joy from slamming James Wallis, I’ve done that enough in the Alas Vegas articles, but because it’s not fair to include Grant Howitt in the blast radius here; at no stage did I see Matt Sprange express any dissatisfaction with how Grant had been handling his end of things.) In the annotated versions of the core materials that Kickstarter backers at some tiers received, Grant and James expressed dissatisfaction with Mongoose’s editing, proofreading, and quality control processes. Everyone was left just a bit sore-headed and grumpy by the whole thing.

That included me, especially once I got the final product, which ended up looking cheap and with a similarly uninspiring tactile feel to it; between the lacklustre hard copies and the somewhat shaky artwork (particularly on the cards and in the internal art), it felt like a tatty and half-hearted sort of product. The shift to incorporating special dice and a set of bespoke cards as key game components – not a Wallis & Howitt decision, the cards were apparently a Mongoose mandate – might have made a degree of sense if Paranoia were being repackaged as a pick-up-and-play game, something which could sit attractively and eye-catchingly on a boardgame shelf and be pulled out for a quick game when the mood strikes, but the apparent desire in the text for somewhat more sustained play, combined with the less than appealing quality of the final product, kind of combined to sabotage that. (Those proofreading and editing complaints Wallis and Howitt had don’t exactly add to the sense of a well-honed product either.)

Cubicle 7 Announces Dark Heresy 3rd Edition… Sort Of

It’s Gen Con season, which means the RPG publishers are all making their big announcements, and Cubicle 7’s pulled out a big surprise in the form of Imperium Maledictum – an upcoming new Warhammer 40,000 RPG.

This is a bit of an interesting move, not least because they’d only recently expended energy into salvaging Wrath & Glory, the previous 40K RPG, going to the extent of putting out an entirely revised version of the core book because the previous version by Ulisses North America, whilst it was built on some pretty solid ideas, had some fairly major quality control issues. And part of the selling point of Wrath & Glory, from its original unveiling under Ulisses to Cubicle 7’s adoption and resuscitation of the line, was its scalability – thanks to its clever Tier system it could handle PC parties ranging in power from baseline scum to high-powered Space Marines, Inquisitors, and other movers and shakers. What’s the need for a new game?

Reading Cubicle 7’s press release doesn’t give a ton of details – nor would you expect such from an early preview – but there are some bits that stand out and make me inclined to make some guesses as to what the deal is here. Imperium Maledictum is directly called “the spiritual successor to the beloved series of roleplaying games started by Black Industries over ten years ago”. There’s a little ambiguity here; Dark Heresy in both its editions is definitely included, because Black Industries did publish the earliest 1st Edition products before Games Workshop shut it down; whether Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Black Crusade, and Only War are also intended is something where there’s a bit more wriggle room for, because whilst Black Industries did plan for some of those games to be part of the line eventually, they were shut down long before they were actually made.

Resurgent Wrath & Renewed Glory, Or Reheated Ruin?

The physical copies of Cubicle 7’s new Wrath & Glory rulebook have now emerged. For those who aren’t up on the backstory here, a quick summary: after Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop’s licensing arrangement died a death, the RPG rights to the various Warhammer settings were up for grabs. Cubicle 7 took the fantasy-based ones, and as well as Soulbound, their new Age of Sigmar RPG, they have brought out a delightfully flavourful 4th Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

Ulisses Spiele, however, took the Warhammer 40,000 RPG licence, and rather than keeping the lights on for the mass of different 40K-themed RPGs that Fantasy Flight had supported – Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Black Crusade, and Only War – they decided to put out an all-new game, Wrath & Glory, with a system intended to cover as many aspects of the Warhammer 40,000 universe as possible rather than going for a series of more focused games as Fantasy Flight had done.

With the design and development process handled by Ulisses North America, the first version of Wrath & Glory offered a promising start. The basic concept of tiered archetypes corresponding to different iconic Warhammer 40,000 character concepts, with the different tiers spanning power levels from low-grade chumps to top-tier superheroes, was basically sensible; furthermore, the designers made the sensible decision to not continue with the WFRP-derived system of the previous Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, which had always struggled a little to handle more powerful characters (WFRP having very much catered to the low-power end of the scale).

The perspective on the cover of the new core book never quite looked right to me.

That said, the Ulisses Spiele release of the game had its issues. The production values – particularly compared to both Fantasy Flight’s previous offerings and Cubicle 7’s WFRP material – felt a little lacklustre, a couple of ribbon bookmarks not quite hiding the slightly thin paper quality. Some of the art looked a little off; some of the game mechanics seemed either poorly explained, poorly tested, or outright poorly understood by the designers. (Dark Tides, the sole adventure pack released for the game, seemed to assume that characters would be advancing in Tier at a much faster pace than suggested in the core book.) A number of card decks were issued alongside the core book, which seemed to strongly hope you would make extensive use of them, despite some of them being a little half-baked.

In general, a lot of small things seemed to be a bit off, which added up bit by bit to give the impression of a product rush-released in a hurry. In addition, the core rules felt rather bland and thinly stretched-out, with not much meat in terms of setting material – an annoyance to many fans, since the plan had apparently been for the game to be a significant way to showcase what’s going on in the Dark Imperium (the chunk of the Imperium now cut off from the Astronomican’s light) but a bunch of the material developed by the Black Library’s authors for the book didn’t make the cut.

A mixed reception was followed by an abrupt disappearance – after the initial slate of products was released, there was a dearth of announcements of new material, previously-announced supplements didn’t seem to materialise, and everything got ominously quiet at Ulisses’ end. Fans noted that references to the game seemed to be disappearing from Ulisses’ website, and Ulisses didn’t show up with the rest of the Games Workshop licensees at 2019’s Warhammer Fest.

Finally, the hammer dropped: all material for Wrath & Glory and other Warhammer 40,000 RPGs abruptly disappeared from the DriveThruRPG storefront. A day or so later, carefully co-ordinated press releases were made by Ulisses North America and Cubicle 7; Ulisses North America was stepping away from Warhammer 40,000, Ulisses Spiele (their parent company) was going to content themselves with handling German language translations of the game, and design and development of the product line would now be lead by Cubicle 7, who’d also be publishing the English-language books.

I suspected at the time that Ulisses North America had overextended itself, taking on a product it wasn’t ready to do justice to, and had decided to prune things back. This may be correct, though I note that since then UNA are planning to put out a new edition of Fading Suns, and I wonder whether there might be an issue there. Whatever the behind-the-scenes story is behind UNA, Cubicle 7, and Games Workshop agreeing to rearrange things like this – as the IP owners there is simply no way this switcheroo happened without Games Workshop’s approval at the very least, and it’s very possible they initiated the process in the first place – the fact of the matter is that Cubicle 7 has how consolidated all the Warhammer RPG licences into their hands, and with the release of the printed version of their revised core book, the game is effectively getting a second edition.

Note how the update gives them the chance to bring in the new Warhammer 40,000 logo.

The new book is not just a spruced-up reprint of the original; the game has had a root-and-branch rewrite and reorganisation. The system is broadly the same – you can take any of the (extremely limited) amount of support material that Ulisses produced and use it with this edition of the game no problem – but a lot of the criticism of the original release has been accounted for, and further rounds of feedback from the initial PDF of this revision was taken into account in the print run. Some terminology has been changed to better reflect the underlying intention, some sections have been expanded and clarified, other bits have been yanked outright.

Kickstopper: Backing Away From the Edge

Atlas Games seems to have undertaken a slow process of updating their 1990s RPG portfolio via the medium of Kickstarter. Following the campaigns for a new edition of Feng Shui and Unknown Armies there came the inevitable and long-rumoured bid to revive Over the Edge.

This seems, on the face of it, to be a somewhat challenging prospect. Jonathan Tweet’s not offered much in the way of new Over the Edge material in recent years – indeed, before this Kickstarter it had been well over a decade since any new products had come out in the game line. Whereas when it first came out it genuinely represented a bundle of fresh new ideas both in terms of RPG system design and setting concepts, a quarter of a century has passed by and the field has evolved extensively since then.

Heck, a certain amount of that evolution was at Tweet’s own hands. In terms of really pushing the envelope in terms of how loosey-goosey you could make a traditional RPG system and how avant-garde a setting you can get, Everway arguably left Over the Edge in the dust. 3rd Edition D&D, which he was the lead designer on, may have had its flaws, but it does at least represent one of the most major system shake-ups that D&D has had since its inception, and yet at the same time succeeded far better at selling audiences on its reforms than 4th Edition did.

Whilst 3.X could hardly be said to be a revolutionary system – it’s basically TSR-era D&D with a swathe of ideas borrowed from Rolemaster, especially in terms of characrer generation – there’s no denying that it was an influential one, in part due to the glut of D20 knock-off products yielded by the OGL. Thankfully, the tide has receded and the floodwaters have sunk in recent years – to my eyes, it seems like the RPG game design ecosystem is much healthier in terms of diversity of system than it was at the height of the D20 craze – but the end result is still a generation of gamers who one way or another have had their attitude to system shaped by 3.X D&D – either through their embrace of it, or through their reactions against it.

On top of all that, away from Tweet’s own projects other games seem to have rather stolen his thunder in terms of some of the more unique setting and atmosphere aspects of Over the Edge, with Unknown Armies absolutely nailing the postmodern weirdness angle (especially in terms of the occultism-tinged aspects of it) and the various World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness games taking the whole “urban environment in which weird stuff goes on in the shadows” concept and wringing everything they could out of it.

Is Over the Edge redundant, then? Or is there cause to believe it can be revived? Let’s dig deeper and see…

Breaking News: The Confederacy Falls Again In Deadlands

So, Pinnacle have kicked off a significant spring-cleaning of the Deadlands setting, and as part of this they’ve kicked off a metaplot event called the Morgana Effect, which has provided them with an excuse to go back and retcon some aspects of the setting. The big news, as extensively explained by game creator Shane Hensley, is that whereas in the previous version of the setting the Confederacy survived the Civil War, in the new version of the setting it fell.

Given that the continuation of the Confederacy – in an unfortunately sanitised non-slaveowning form that made an absolute mockery of the Confederacy’s cause, at that – was one of the main problems I’d previously had with the game, obviously I find this development very welcome, and this decision makes me markedly more likely to both play/run Deadlands in the future and take a look at the revised game line, even if I prefer the old system to Savage Worlds.

Hensley, I think, does a good job in his Facebook post of explaining why the Confederacy was there in the game in the first place, and why he’s made the call to remove it now. Initially it was meant to be a pawn for the Reckoners to use, but with the intervening time the setting’s been developed to the point where the CSA is redundant – there’s other factions that can play its role just as handily. Game materials directly dealing with the Confederacy were actually thinner on the ground than you’d expect, and so it doesn’t actually do that much damage to the setting to have the Confederacy defeated, particularly when one notes that nothing stops tensions between North and South continuing to be a thing in the setting, just as they were in the Reconstruction era – it’s just that the South doesn’t have its own government and army any more.

And most importantly, Hensley has recognised – perhaps late, but still recognised – that there’s been an ongoing cost to having the reformed CSA as part of the game. And as he puts it, “it’s one I don’t have to pay…someone else does. And I don’t want that.” As long as it remained an option in the game to play a dyed-in-the-wool CSA loyalist – even one loyal to an anti-slavery CSA which stands in jarring contradiction to the CSA’s actual values – that’d make some uncomfortable at the gaming table, inevitably and with good reason. Removing the option makes the game more fun for those who don’t want a loud and proud Confederate being one of the “heroes” – and I think Hensley has realised that if denying someone the opportunity to use the game as neo-Confederate wish-fulfillment loses him customers, those are customers that he’s entirely happy to lose.

As it stands, the Civil War is still a bit counterfactual in Deadlands; the CSA lasts longer than it did historically, dragging on another 7 years until a brutal defeat in 1871’s Battle of Washington in the Deadlands timeline. Post-Morgana Effect, the Battle of Washington is now the point where the CSA collapsed entirely. Frankly, I have no problem with this treatment of it, even if they retain the point about the CSA abandoning slavery in the mid-1860s. In this setup it’s possible to spin that as a feint – a cheap trick to get some motivated fighters to the front line as things got increasingly desperate, with the CSA leaders planning to reimpose slavery should circumstances permit.

What’s most important about it is that it means the Confederacy is out of the picture as of the assumed starting date for Deadlands campaigns. It’s one thing to say “The Confederates abolished slavery, but too late to turn things around for them, and so the CSA collapsed.” It’s a beast of a whole different stripe to say “The Confederates abolished slavery, and as a result they survived the Civil War and forced a stalemate with the Union”, and a whole other thing to have that Confederacy present as a feature of the setting, and a whole other thing still to have it be a viable faction for player characters to support.

Ultimately, none of the great Western stories we still love today – conventional, spaghetti, or Weird – ask us to accept ideological loyalists to the Confederacy as heroes, so not offering that as a player character option in Deadlands is no great loss – and if anything, throwing that bit of politics out there just confuses discussion of the game and distracts from the supernatural horror and mayhem which is the game’s stock in trade. So let’s raise a glass at the saloon to Pinnacle, for finally correcting course on what’s been a long-standing point of contention with the game line.

An X-Edition of an X-Traneous Game

Let’s take a look at two trends in geek-adjacent culture in the 1990s: The X-Files was massive on television- a show in which an ensemble of characters in a modern-day setting investigate supernatural gribblies lurking in the shadows – and tabletop RPGs were going through a phase of being very keen on modern-day settings replete with supernatural gribblies lurking in the shadows.

Given that the Lone Gunmen play D&D at one point, it seems likely that the X-Files creative team weren’t ignorant of RPGs, and given that RPG publishers were hog-wild for licencing anything and everything back in the 1990s – West End Games made RPGs of Tales From the Crypt, Species and Tank Girl, for crying out loud – it’s not entirely clear to me why there wasn’t an official licenced X-Files RPG, particularly since Call of Cthulhu‘s perennial popularity proved that investigative RPGs are a viable niche.

If I had to put a bet on it, however, I’d say it came down to the larger publishers who could have conceivably afforded the licence failing to move quickly enough, by which time smaller publishers proved you could fill the gap without really needing the licence at all. Sure, without the licence they couldn’t use the specific lore and characters of the show – but for the purposes of an RPG where people will likely want to make their own player characters anyhow the characters are less essential, and I’d argue that the background lore of the X-Files is the least valuable part of the IP. The show always got by more on its mysterious atmosphere than it did on the actual answers to those mysteries; so long as you hit something acceptably close to the atmosphere of the show, it’d be good enough for most gamers.

Delta Green, for instance, adeptly recognised that the vein of conspiratorial paranoia and supernatural horror that The X-Files were built on complements the cosmic vertigo that’s the basis of the Cthulhu Mythos (or at least the good bits of it which aren’t based on racism) nicely, and also worked on the basis that if you already have a system which works well for investigative RPGs and can handle a modern day setting, you can do The X-Files in it.

(OK, strictly speaking the earliest Delta Green materials preceded The X-Files – but in practice, that meant Pagan Publishing were perfectly placed to pivot the subsequent material to to cater to the X-Files niche and had the jump on everyone else in that respect.)

And then there was 1996’s Conspiracy X, which, as you might guess from the title, wasn’t exactly shy about what it was trying to do. Whereas the more recent 2nd edition is based off Unisystem – of Witchcraft and All Flesh Must Be Eaten fame – this review’s going to take in the first edition, which had its own bespoke approach.

PSA: Don’t Touch Shadowrun As Long As the Colemans Are At Catalyst

So, the 6th Edition of Shadowrun is emerging, and it looks likely that there’ll be a certain amount of controversy and probably at the very least a bit of an edition war over it. (Its sudden announcement and the short time span between announcement and release, without much of an apparent playtest period, and the sloppy editing on many recent books from Catalyst Game Labs were, in retrospect, probably red flags.)

But that said, I regret covering 5th Edition core and Anarchy to the extent that I already have on this blog, regardless of how 6th Edition pans out. The problems of 6th Edition may well turn out to be yet another symptom of a significant illness at the heart of Catalyst Game Labs: namely, that some years ago it emerged that two of the firm’s co-owners (Loren L. Coleman and his wife) had pocketed a substantial amount of company money and used it to build an extension on their house, and had only managed to avoid getting run out of the company and/or criminally prosecuted because of the near-cultlike loyalty paid to them by other major figures in the company. This resulted in, among other things, masses of freelancers not getting paid for their work – freelancers who in some cases could have really, really done with that money, in a “I need this to get by” way as opposed to a “It’d be real nice to have a slightly bigger house” sort of way.

I’d completely forgotten the controversy, because it happened at a time when I wasn’t paying any attention to Shadowrun at all and consequently I only paid passing attention to it when it happened. Courtney over at the Hack & Slash blog has covered the controversy in three blog posts which bring together most of the significant evidence, and it’s enough to convince me.

As I understand it, Loren Coleman is still one of the people calling the shots at Catalyst. As long as that’s the case, I’ll be avoiding any Catalyst products. When Catalyst was tested in the balance, Catalyst was found wanting: specifically, Catalyst’s head honchos decided to side with their personal friends, the Colemans, despite a sustained and long-term pattern of siphoning cookies out of the cookie jar on their part, by retaining them in the company and by not prioritising obtaining money for the freelancers (through legal action if the Colemans wouldn’t put their hand in their pockets themselves) above and beyond making sure that the Colemans didn’t suffer any negative effects of their own awful behaviour.

Given the industry’s reliance on freelancers, I increasingly feel like I’d rather spend money on publishers who actually make a point of paying them. If the old regime were still in charge at Chaosium and still indulging in their infamously slack payment habits, I might feel the same about them; as it stands, part of the reason I’m such a keen advocate for the new regime is that they’ve made paying their debts and doing right by their freelancers an overt priority going forwards.

I can’t trust that Catalyst won’t leave their freelancers high and dry again in the future – if not because of another Loren Coleman hand-in-the-cookie-jar moment, then because of some other crisis where the company leadership decides that the personal comfort of them and their friends takes priority over their contractual obligations to freelancers. And when you add to that the way Coleman just plain got away with it, well, it sticks in my craw to think of my money going to Catalyst as long as he’s involved.

Chivalrously Giving It Another Chance

So I’ve previously made it clear that I consider 1st edition Chivalry & Sorcery to have been a bit of a botch, and that the revisions which came with its second edition to be too little too late to save the game line. Whilst commercially speaking the game did end up going into the wilderness shortly after the publication of 2nd edition in 1983, and never quite recovered its former niche despite several attempts at reviving it, I’ve recently had a chance to give 2nd Edition a closer look and I feel inclined to be nicer to it than I was in my previous article.

The big differences between the two editions of the game are less to do with game mechanics and more to do with writing approach. 1977’s 1st edition of the game was a difficult read not just because of the absurdly shrunk-down text, but also because it was actually quite bad at explaining its fundamental assumptions of play. This isn’t wholly the fault of Wilf Backhaus and Ed Simbalist; back in 1977 the tabletop RPG market was only three years old, people hadn’t settled on a nomenclature yet, and Backhaus and Simbalist seemed to be coming from a gaming context which had a bunch of local quirks and features which they’d assumed everyone else would be able to follow because they didn’t appreciate just how few common assumptions and practices existed at the time. Indeed, they were writing at a time when the boundary between RPGs and wargames had not been very clearly enunciated at all, and 1st edition Chivalry & Sorcery wanted to offer both type of game all in one book as part of its “grand campaign” concept.

When the Lights Go Out All Over Europe

The Price of Freedom, weird little oddity that it is, was designed in many respects as a response to the first edition of Twilight: 2000. Both games have some important parallels: they both attempt realistic takes at a somewhat fanciful political/military scenario, said scenario setting up the assumed starting point of play for the player characters, and said scenario also making it necessary for characters to take a survivalist attitude.

This is a bit of a niche model for running an RPG, but equally it’s not altogether surprising that someone should have looked to Twilight: 2000 to see if they could mimic its success. For make no mistake about it: the first edition of the game was a huge hit. Marc Miller’s Far Future Enterprises, inheritor of the GDW legacy, offer some evidence for this: their guide to the product line includes, amongst a wealth of useful data, figures on how many of each product were printed, which tends to track reasonably closely to sales levels (since products which did not sell did not require so much in the way of reprints). The core set of 1st edition Twilight: 2000 had some 97,518 copies produced.

This is incredibly healthy by tabletop RPG standards – it’s not D&D levels, but very few games reach that order of magnitude, and by comparison GDW produced just shy of 250,000 copies of the Classic Traveller core rules when you add the various different formats they sold them on. When you consider that Traveller was the top-flight science fiction RPG of the era until it was eventually overthrown by Cyberpunk and Star Wars, it’s clear that there’s strong evidence for the contention that Twilight: 2000 was the market leader in the military RPG niche – and to a large extent it was that niche, with more or less no other attempt at a military or postapocalyptic tabletop RPG approaching its success.

Kickstopper: If There’s Onyx Path In Your Hedgerow, Don’t Be Alarmed Now: It’s Just a Spring Clean For Changeling

While it’s not true that Kickstarter is the sole route by which Onyx Path brings games to market, it’s certainly true that it’s a major foundation stone of their business strategy, and that by this point seeing them pivot away from using Kickstarter at all would arguably be more newsworthy than them launching yet another one.

With repeated Kickstarters comes mistakes and accidents, and from those comes lessons. Backing an Onyx Path Kickstarter these days is a bit more of a certain prospect than it was in earlier years. Previously, Rich Thomas had followed his creators-first instincts by allowing project managers to largely structure their Kickstarters as they chose, which led to some wild variations in results. Some books came to Kickstarter with at least the first pass of the text already prepared and ready for backer inspection, thus substantiating that the time-consuming part of the writing process was more or less done and what remained consisted of writing stretch goal content, editing and tightening up the text, and getting that layout and artwork action going prior to producing the PDFs and hard copies. Such projects were rarely very late.

Other projects took a different tack, launching prior to the text being completed with the expectation that they would be resolved in good time. In some cases this led to major delays and no little controversy. Wraith: the Oblivion‘s 20th Anniversary Edition only recently managed to ship its deluxe copies to backers, with the project massively delayed due to project lead Rich Dansky having taken on a new full-time job unexpectedly; Exalted 3rd Edition was both extremely late and had a controversy-laden design process, with the two original lead designers eventually leaving the project under a cloud of mutual recriminations.

These days, Onyx Path runs a tighter ship, at least when it comes to Kickstarters – realising that whilst the company might afford to be indulgent of creators’ bouts of writers’ block and other such issues when it comes to products developed entirely out of the public eye, Kickstarted products inevitably give customers a bit more insight into where things are – and customers can’t be expected to extend the same patience to creators indefinitely, especially when the question of “Why doesn’t Onyx Path step in and help the creators get on with it?” is outstanding. Now, Kickstarters don’t get greenlit by Onyx Path until there’s a manuscript to share with backers during the crowdfunding campaign, and in general the process is much smoother.

From the perspective of, say, a Changeling: the Dreaming character, this may represent a loss of innocence, a banal imposition upon the creativity of project heads. From the perspective of a character in Changeling: the Lost, this is a welcome addition of stability in opposition to the chaos of Arcadia…