Buy it at the Unstore!

Game Text and Editing: $0

I wrote the game myself. Ryan Macklin provided some excellent structural advice, but due to poor communication on my end, our schedules got all fucked up and I wasn’t able to fully avail myself of his editing prowess. More’s the pity, but the advice he gave me radically changed the structure of the text for the better. Additional editing was farmed out to my heroes Vincent Baker, Graham Walmsley, and Jonathan Walton out of the kindness of their hearts. I sent out the PDF with preorder, with a note that asked readers to be on the lookout for typos and inconsistencies, and they responded with unimagined vigor and usefulness. Smartest thing I’ve done with this project.

Printing: $27.50 (as of this date)

This is just simply the costs to print prep materials for conventions and playtests. Since the actual print run money is not coming out of the $1000 (more on this later, including the stupidest thing I’ve done with this project!), I’m not counting it here.

Art: $211

This is the most money I’ve ever spent on art. Hell, just the font family I used for the text cost as much as the art. If there’s one thing people are saying right now about Blowback, it’s that it looks great. I’m really proud of the gorgeous full-color interiors, and the only thing that made them possible was the amazing photography collection at iStockphoto. Now, I’m probably a bit biased because I’m a contributor to iStock and the site has been a significant source of income for me over the last six years, but they beat every other stock photography site I’ve looked at for cutting-edge, outside-the-norm, artistic photography. I was showing the layout to my friend Eppy, who exclaimed at one point, “You found a HOSTAGE SITUATION in stock photos?!” Oh, I did. I did indeed.

Layout and design: $0

Something else I’m proud of: as with all 2SP games, the gorgeous layout and ornamentation is all in-house. Shreyas and I worked hard, sketched stuff, I told him what I wanted and he figured out the templates to make it work. Then I actually massaged the text, figured out what went where, etc. Shreyas made all of the fantastic hexagonal/halftone ornaments you see throughout the text.

Playtesting: $160

This includes the admission to two cons and gas to and from Dreamation. I’m including it because this is where a lot of the initial playtesting got done, and it was instrumental in the development of the game. (I’m not including lodging for Dreamation because we’ve got a place to stay in Morristown.)

Promotion: $486

This is $446 for a booth buy-in with Design Matters for GenCon and two exhibitor passes, and $40 for media for a trailer I didn’t have the time or energy to put together. This was a mistake, of course.

Total: $884.50

The other approximate $120 went into unforeseen expenses with It’s Complicated temporarily, and will probably be paid back into online connectivity and iPhone support in the fall.

So what went wrong?

I said I’d talk about printing more, and let me tell you: I really fucked up. I’d decided a while ago to price Blowback at $24, since the per-copy cost to me was about $6. Well. I got the proof for It’s Complicated back, and it looked great— but the paper I’d chosen, while perfect for IC and its relatively sparse use of color, really would not have worked for Blowback and its really intense layout. Since the quote I had was based on using the same paper as It’s Complicated, I contacted Kim at 360 about upgrading my paper to the next heaviest weight. Well, turns out I was already using their best standard paper: the next rung up is 80# matte coated. Gorgeous paper, but it ups my  per-unit cost from $6 to $10.

But I look at the prices of comparable books coming out (mistake #1), get cold feet about Blowback, (mistake #2), and decide to keep the price at $24 despite a nearly-doubling per-unit cost (mistake #3) out of concerns that people wouldn’t buy the book if the price were closer to $30.

Which has lead to an ulcer-inducing nightmare of frustrating math. I’ve gotten a ton of preorders, but the more preorders I get, the more it takes up the print run I was planning to do. But if I increase the size of the print run, the preorders I have won’t cover the cost of the print run. And normally I might be able to move some money around, but new expenses are cropping up literally daily, since I’m getting married in nine days. Oh, and I have to have the final PDF with the final order in by Monday.

Is the game profitable?

On top of my giant pricing mistake, when I signed up for Design Matters I was completely scatterbrained and forgot that they do 100% profit sharing at GenCon instead of direct sales— despite the fact that I had a long talk with them about it two years ago at GenCon ‘08. That’s completely my fuckup. Unfortunately the difference between what I could potentially make back on direct sales and what (if growth patterns bear out for DM2010) I could make back through 100% profit sharing is approximately $1200. That’s a ton of money. Since this whole experiment is one in transparency and “Hey! What does it look like when you make a game on this budget, and what does the profit look like?” it screws things up a bit. That said, I think Design Matters is fantastic and their model is great for ensuring that edgier games which might normally be risky to bring to a big con get the eyeballs and promotion they richly deserve. It’s just easier to say that when you’re not looking at your own bottom line, which makes me feel like a money-grubbing jerkface.

Long story short: in a hypothetical world, could Blowback made a profit? In its sleep. In this specific world, can Blowback make a profit? God only knows.

Character sheets: Professional and Civilian
Operation plan (for use by the team and The Agency)
The Agency’s Job worksheet

When you’re a spy, your job is your life— literally. You have no friends who aren’t expendable, no ID that’s not fake, no possessions except those that can be stuffed in a suitcase or left behind without a thought. But when you’ve been blacklisted, with your assets frozen and passports flagged, you lose everything, and everything changes. Your training tells you a couple things: find a place to lay low, figure out who you can rely on or exploit, and do whatever it takes to get back in.

But you don’t have a wealth of developed assets any more: you don’t have a network of co-workers and false identities and owed favors. All you have, all you are, is you. So you make nice with the few people who’ll have you, and rely on them more than you should— but if you’re too cold or uncaring, they’ll turn on you. And if you care too much, the people who are after you will exploit them to hurt you. And if you cared about them at all, you wouldn’t care about them even a little.

When you love a spy, whether it’s your boyfriend or daughter or army buddy or brother, it’s like being a member of a religion you didn’t sign up for. You’re just supposed to trust them: when you don’t know what’s going on, when you’re being lied to, when you see the person you care about act like a monster— you’re supposed to believe. And you have to believe, because a crisis of faith could mean damnation for both of you. You have to assume the best intentions, because if you blow his cover or undo her handiwork, you could both die.

But as much as your boyfriend or daughter or army buddy or brother might play God, it’s your job to bring them back to humanity. It’s been a long time since they’ve felt truly loved, and without someone to care about you, right and wrong becomes awfully blurry. When you’re paid to play a monster, sometimes the role catches up with you— so they need you. You need to believe in your loved one so that no one dies, and you need to be vigilant so that they keep their soul. And just hope to God you don’t get broken in the process.

Blowback is a game where you play spies blacklisted after a job goes awry, and the people who care about them. You can play this game with 3-5 people, and while playing it as a single game session is fun, it’s designed for long term play. It’s heavily inspired by the American television show Burn Notice and movies like the Bourne trilogy. As much as Blowback is about pyrotechnics and car chases, it’s a fish-out-of-water premise: spies stranded without their agency, normal people swept up in intrigue. And, like all multiplayer games, it’s about relationships— how much can you ask of someone, how much can you disappoint them before they turn their back on you?

The production of the game was funded with a generous grant from Lester “Wordman” Ward, as the first DivNull Lark. Final costs will go up on the Blowback blog later this week. Spoilers: with GenCon booth costs I believe I’ve gone a bit over, but it’s amazing what can be done with $1000. Preorders will hopefully pay for the initial print run, and following sales will fund the iPhone/iPad play tools planned for later this year.

The specs:
9×7″ perfect-bound softcover, approximately 60 pages, full-color throughout. $24 (plus $5 shipping) gets you the book, plus PDF (which will start going out this evening), PLUS a manila folder stamped TOP SECRET with everything you need to set up your first game: location rundown (New Orleans, Louisiana), character dossiers, the first job, and ideas for later jobs.

The New Orleans folder is only available to pre-orders! There will be a new job folder available with the game at GenCon (if all goes well).

But enough about that, you probably want pictures:

Does every PC have to be involved in the big mess-up? In Burn Notice, only the main character was… For “bang” potential, I was thinking at least two need to be part of it, and the others have to have a serious past with those characters who were involved in the burn event, but does it only work when everyone was involved? (followup to that would be, “If so, what about civilians”)

All the Professionals were on a team. If a player wants to come up with a reason their character wasn’t there, that’s cool, and their absence might be enough to get them banished too. The major thematic difference between Blowback and Burn Notice is that all of the Professionals have been exiled– not just one. It works pretty well, and sort of cements the team aspect from the very beginning. Civilians are definitely not involved with the big mess-up (hence them being Civilians).

I’m having trouble understanding the Diversion skill: On the thread of Burn Notice, who would be good at only diversions? This seems to be almost a skill that can be replicated by the other three skills (particularly provocateur and commando). Thoughts on this? What are some things that happened in your other playtests that fell under the Diversion skill but not others?

Diversion is basically the stealth version of Commando, right. Where commandos go in guns blazing, intimidating people, head-butting goons when they run out of ammo– Diversions are indirect. They plant caches of weapons, they use explosives. I think that Fiona is more Diversion than Commando. Blowing up a building? Sure, that might be commando. Knowing how to make a complex explosive? I guess that could be Pavement. Making a complex explosive device rigged not to blow, but that looks like it’s fine, and also follows the signature demolition style of another wanted demolitionist? THAT’s Diversion. I hope that makes sense.

It seems that if you Go For Broke, there’s a high chance that you’ll get really screwed, put in a rut that you can’t dig out of: Say for example someone who has a 4 or 5 in a skill that rolls all failures… seems to bury them in a hole (with a future -4 or -5 modifier to the NEXT roll, which likely no one in the group could ever roll enough dice to get out of) they can never escape. Or am I missing something?

On page 10, in the sidebar there’s a heading called Becoming a Liability. You can overcome being a liability by getting rescued– a team member with a bigger pool can rescue you, but they’re operating with your penalty. This means it’s best to get rescued as part of Mission– so that you can steal additional prep dice and stuff. Civilians are more likely to become liabilities due to their smaller die pools, so the penalties there are also more likely to be small. It’s harder to rescue a Professional, which I think is thematically appropriate.

Of course, I have done a crap ton of playtesting at this point, and no one has ever become a liability. So it’s all theoretical.