Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Matthew J. Neagley wrote a nice review of Shock: over at Gnome Stew a couple of weeks back. People say nice things in the comments, too!

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Peter Watts comes up with a super-punchy Shock material. In this one, he notes that placebos are getting stronger over time. And that the logical conclusion is the prohibition of modes of thought that heal one’s body. Hot stuff.

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Captain Estar Goes to Heaven is an intense science fiction comic series, done over seven years. It feels like an 80s or 90s indie comic like Fringe, Grendel, or God’s Hammer. It’s about depression and trying to make the world as bad as you feel. Gnarly, Shock: style ending, too.

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A very nice gentleman named Jeremy just set up a page for Shock: fans on Facebook. To be honest, I’m not sure what capabilities that gives anyone, but I’ll certainly become a fan of my own game. Meet me there!

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Shock: Social Science Fiction is now available in PDF! It’s only $10 when you purchase the bundle, $13 by itself, and the hardcopy alone remains the same.

• Hardcopy — $21 + $5 s&h
• PDF — $13
• Hardcopy/PDF bundle — $26 + $5 s&h (PDF is only $10 this way!)

I hope this encourages new people to burn down their worlds!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Hey, everyone! Shock:1.2 pre-order PDF deal!

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In memory of a Shock: game at Dreamation last, I offer this, the flag of Shangri-La, a totalitarian state based on government-controlled reincarnation.

(I can’t for the life of me find my notes. If you could let me know that you were in that game, it would be great. I gotta give credit for the awesome creativity at that table.)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

 Rob Bohl, podcaster of The Independent Insurgency, just put up (well, OK, a few days ago, but I forgot to announce then) Independent Insurgency #6. We had a fun time talking about stuff from about 2 AM until around 4 at Dreamation 2008. You can hear us get gravelier and gravelier over the course of the conversation.

We talk about all sorts of fun stuff! We talk about publishing, we talk about giving and receiving critique, we talk about making design decisions and why I made some of mine. Give it a listen. It’s about an hour long, and you should count your blessings, because that’s edited down from about two.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Judd Karlman, designer of Dictionary of Mu, just played a game of Shock: with Powered Armor as the Shock and “post-traumatic stress disorder” as an Issue. It sounds like it was a pretty neat game, and he’s listed some of the Minutiæ from it. Minutiæ are, by definition, not talked about a whole lot outside of Shock: games in play, but they’re pretty important in action because they make the world more tangible and complex. I’m happy he’s put this list up!

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I just received this email from Vinny, one of the coördinators of Dreamation, a con I’m going to next week in New Jersey:

I have an interesting situation to report to you. So far, I have 4 people trying to get into [the first scheduled game of Shock:] and 8 people trying to get into [the second one], and we’ve barely gotten the bulk of event reservations yet. Um; what can we do? DREAMATION is too structured to just “thrown extra rounds of the game” into the convention. Do you have a second (or even a third) GM who can take additional tables? Is there any way to raise the max number of players from 3?

If you’re gonna be at Dreamation (and why wouldn’t you?) and can run a game of Shock: might you?

Let me know here or over at Story Games!

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Everyone who’s ordered Shock: from me up to today should be receiving their book in the mail in the near future. Sorry it took so long, preorderers; I’ve really only just gotten back on track after Gen Con this week, both with shipping and with the rest of my professional life. Man, that thing takes it out of me.

Let me know if you don’t get your books in the appropriate future!  Kaare, this especially means you.

This also means that I should bring up something important: Shock: is almost sold out again! I’ve got 5 copies and IPR has 6 remaining. That’s right, 94 sold in the last four weeks. I could learn to love that! I’ll be doing another print run just as soon as I can, but you know the way these things work. It could be a while. So if you’re planning on playing the game soon, buy a book before they’re gone into the land of hazy printer communications!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’d been stupid busy when the Indie RPG awards were actually going out at Gen Con this year, so while I was really happy for the winners, I wasn’t paying that close attention to the standings. It turns out, though, that Shock: was pretty far up there: 6th runner up behind Meg Baker’s 1001 Nights, Fred Hicks’ Don’t Rest Your Head,  Jared Sorensen’s Lacuna Part 1, Chat Underkoffler’s Zorcerer of Zo, and Luke Crane’s Burning Empires. Those are all games I’m happy to lose to! In fact, there were few of the 44 entries that I’m not proud to stand beside.

Thanks, John Kim, for running the awards. You’re clearly doing your job well, if those are the games I’m losing to!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Guys, I’m all out of Shock: 1.0 hardcopy. In fact, I sold one more than I owned (Sorry, Moreno!), so folks who want a stopgap copy of version 1.0 will have to get it by pre-ordering 1.1 through IPR. You can still pre-order 1.1 through me, of course, though you won’t get 1.0 to hold you off until then.

Thanks for all the orders!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’m not good at keeping my mouth shut, but I win a brownie for this one. Over the last 8 months or so while people were telling me about the unclear parts of Shock:, I was quietly listening and writing a new edition with the extraordinary editorial help of Ben Lehman and Cauley Greene. The new edition is version 1.1 and has gone off to press, so now I can tell people about it.

The new version directly addresses the stuff that was missing or unclear before, integrates the various hacks and recommendations that Matthjis Holter assembled, squishes some strange typos and grammatical choices, and tweaks a number here and there to make the game work a little better.

If you submitted a head for bounty, you can either pick your copy up at Gen Con (assuming no printing disasters) or I’ll ship it to you after the con. Likewise, the four reviewers during Sci Fi Week at RPGnet will each get a copy in thanks for their reviews, as promised.

If you want to get yourself a copy ASAP, you can order Shock: 1.0 from my site now (or Indie Press Revolution, of course) and you’ll get not only a copy of 1.0, but a signed copy of 1.1 when it’s off the press. You’ll be able to pick it up from me at Gen Con or I’ll ship it to you.

The price of the book will be going up once this promotion is done, so get your copy before that happens!

Enjoy the Future!

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Sci-Fi Week at RPG.net was fantastic. There were four reviews of Shock: and, if you haven’t seen them, here they are.

• Jono DiCarlo’s Actual Play as review. Of the four, this one is the most comprehensive, coming as it did from real play instead of a reading of the text.
• Ed Heil’s review.
• Trey Palmer’s review, which is oddly more positive than the rating he gave it.
• Aaron Stone’s review.

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Somehow, I missed this when it first went up: The Forager Blog: Ron on Sci-Fi, Sean on Sci-Fi. This article is written by Jon Hastings, a player of Shock: and interesting guy. In it, he talks about my definition of science fiction (which, instead of writing in prose, I wrote as a game) and Ron Edwards’ take on it. Lemme quote Ron because he says some really nice things:

Anyway, to someone whose thinking inclines in the above direction, Joshua A. C. Newman is bucking for hero status. He is the only person with the guts to tackle this issue in RPG terms…Shock is a first, a de novo, an innovation. But more than merely an innovation, it’s not only what I wanted, but what I needed. In this day and age, I am not going to get science fiction consistently anywhere else. The person typing this post is Shock’s target audience.

… that is, Ron and I see this exactly the same way.

Now, I love SF short stories. Naturally, I have a great fondness for those read in my youth. Some authors really felt like they were talking to me. Bruce Sterling was one of them; he’d always thought about the same things I’d thought about and thought about them further. Ron, though, is ten years or so older than I (though you wouldn’t know it to look at him), so it comes as no surprise that he pegs optimal sci fi about ten years earlier than I do.

And that’s great. Because Shock: is for making your science fiction. It doesn’t reproduce science fiction. It’s a tool for making your own with your own aesthetics and your own moral connundra. It is not the product of scholarly study of science fiction; rather, it’s a technique I developed to make science fiction. I’m a designer, not a writer (a fact noted by so many), so I designed a science fiction system so I could tell the stories I wanted to tell.

This last point here came from a discussion I had with someone on RPGnet. In it, he asked me if I’d read his favorite couple of authors. I hadn’t. Later, he told someone else, when asked about Shock: that “the author doesn’t seem to know as much as he thinks he does.” Another person expressed concern that my sources listed were all “older” authors (Bruce Sterling is an old author! That makes me feel old!) That baffled me: one’s ability to build fiction is not based on how much other fiction one has read, it’s based on the number of stories told. I wrote Shock: so that those stories could have a structure — one that I recognize in the stories I like and one that I think works very, very well — and you can bring your aesthetic and moral machinery to the table and enjoy the process of creation.

Shock: is for your stories. Build what you want to build.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Jono DiCarlo, the owner of one of the most interesting jobs in the world just wrote a review of Shock: for RPG.net’s Sci-Fi week and reposted it over on his blog.

Synopsis: he loves it. From the review:

My closing thought is this: because a game of Shock is built around real-world issues that you care about, your game is going to be a little deeper than just entertainment — it’s going to be a story that’s about something… In Shock, I think we might finally have an RPG that does what the best written SF does — help us learn to cope with the rapid social and technological changes occurring in the modern world.

He mentions the confusing text in his review, of course. Another reviewer said that he wished that he’d seen the Compilation of Tips, Clarifications, and Explanations put up by intrepid Shocker Mattijs Holter, so I offer it here for anyone who may need it.

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Over at RPG.net, there’s a goodie a-cookin’ for science fiction game fans, Sci-Fi Review Week.

This is the part where you come in. Have you played Shock:? Do you have something to say about the experience? Awesome! Do so! Have you not played Shock: but are curious about it and want to write a review of the text? Sweet! I’m here to facilitate that.

I’m here to facilitate that in a particular way, actually. Shock: hasn’t been available in PDF form (except to one guy who asked nicely when he bought the book) until now. Email me for a review PDF and I’ll happily send one along with the understanding that you will write a review of it for publication during Sc-Fi Review Week. As with the error bounty, those who review Shock: will be at the top of the list for the next version of Shock: when it’s released.

Chris, the guy organizing the thing, has written a little article about how to write a review. What he recommends is great. I look forward to reading what you’ve got to say!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Hey! Check it out! I’m in excellent company again!

At KublaCon out in California, they give awards for the best of several types of games. One of the categories is “RPG/LRPG: Best Game That Doesn’t Include Elves or Vampires” and I find Shock: just under Chad Underkoffler’s Zorcerer of Zo and Jason Morningstar’s The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. I can’t tell if I’m second runner up or if we’re tied, but I’m not contradicting that roach. Last time I did, it told me to do something frightfully shameful.

There’s nothing saying that there couldn’t be elves or vampires in Shock: of course. But I won’t tell if you won’t. And it looks like Jason’s pointed out the same thing.

In any event, I’m happy to be on the same page as these guys.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

 Shock: Social Science Fiction has landed again at Indie Press Revolution. It looks like my printer woes are ended for the time being, Publisher’s Graphics having swooped in and done a good job for a good price.

The new matte laminate is very nice to touch and the illustrations look good. Let’s hope they don’t get bought by Alphagraphics.

(The image at the top of a post is modified from a picture by Kane Quinnel of lightning hitting his house out of a clear sky.)