Gooz Sneak

While we're on a GOZR kick, here's a new piece of art for the next book. Maybe for the comic, maybe for the game book. I dunno. I'm making all this up as I go along.

 

GOZR Comic Talk

Currently working on a comic book script for GOZR. I've had this idea since day one to use the hooligans from the cover as characters in a comic. Not sure when it'll get done, but I can say that the fires of inspiration are burning brightly and I have a complete story sketched out. Just need to smooth out the script, then draw it.

Oh, here's the names of the usual suspects. Right now only a few of them have distinct traits I can even speak about. Urkkol seems to be my lead character, with Aju as his right hand guy, Butter Jam as a kind of wild card ally, and Foz as the weird inscrutable wizard. The rest are revealing themselves to me slowly.

Some of them may die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

So what is this comic about? Well, gooz, of course. The story I'm working on, titled "The Beacon", is about Orkkol leading his team of gooz adventurers on a mission to recover a lost artifact for a powerful gooz magistrate. I'm channeling my inner Richard Corben + Jack Kirby, if I can.

GOZR Rising (slowly)

As I said previously, I've been on a GOZR kick. This means I've been working on pages for the second book: GOZR Rising! As with the original, I'm keeping it organic. I make notes and list table contents in a spreadsheet where applicable, but mostly I'm drawing it on the canvas as it enters my head. Because in my head is where the gooz live. And, I'm told, they also live at some gaming tables. A fact that gives me comfort in the long, dark nights.

No schedule on this. It'll come as it does and eventually I'll have a book I can put out there and smile about while you all scratch your heads and say "Why the hell would anyone do a game THIS WAY??".

Goozing Around

Lately I've been on a GOZR kick, which is very nice because I do love the game. I'm super proud of it. The system is nice and simple and it works. The book itself, which is the most important thing for me as a creator, is a labor of love and I'm happy to have completed it.

I'm not the kind of creator who gets hung up on one thing and feels compelled to "support it". I'm happy enough to never do another GOZR project and do other things instead. But it just so happens that my muses have aligned under an ugly banner and I'm their slave at the moment. Niiiice.

Here are some little character sheets I doodled in a wee sketchbook. I started with one and ended up with a handful and counting. Here's a trick to see if I really love a game's aesthetic: can I do a million iterations of its character sheet? Obviously the answer is yes for old school D&D and it's many clones. I've also done a handful of Troika! sheets. But now it seems that GOZR hits the sweet spot. It has a discrete number of "bubbles" to draw: Cunning, Magic, Prowess, Hit Points, GOOZ, Defense, and WIZ. Each of these items has a shape and purpose and I can easily move them around on a sheet.

When I'm less familiar with a game, or it has a lot more moving parts, I find it difficult to get the vibe and make a character sheet. This why you don't seem me doing a ton of various game sheets. I need to understand a game and really get it to make a good sheet.

Aside from character sheets, I'm also working on new pages for the inevitable GOZR Rising! I'll share some of that next.

GOZR Lulu Copy

I got my print proof of GOZR today! It looks pretty slick. However, my main issue is that Lulu charged about three times as much for these as they cost from Ka-Blam. I am not sure why. So I've ordered some copies from Ka-Blam too. When they come in I'll compare the quality and then I'll know. In the end, unless Ka-Blam has went downhill since last time I used them, I'll probably just use them for POD.

Blue Gooz

Here's a blue gooz with their spiffy helmet.

The game is finished. Now I'm considering the ways in which to publish it. Current thinking is to get it printed through Mixam and sell via Etsy. This feels like a fairly simple way to move forward. The reason I haven't went POD, which I do prefer, is because of the lack of the ability to print inside covers.

I could go with a comic printer, like Kablam or ComiXpress. But then I'm outside of the insular TTRPG community.

Still thinking.

Basingstoke's Butterfly Knife

There was a very crucial weapon missing from GOZR. A mistake I have now corrected.

What's a sci-fantasy full of ugly gooz going to be without a god damn butterfly knife?

Thanks to Chuck Whelon, this guy has a name:

Basingstoke

GOZR is RISING

OK, time to let the Doomslakers B/X book simmer for a bit while I circle back to fuckin' GOZR!

The pages are back on my drawing board for hopefully final edits. Maybe I can put this bastard out into the wild soon. I had taken a step back from it while playtesting was happening and in order to give myself some breathing room. Now I'm feeling it again and things are looking up for the ugly gooz.

During playtesting, I would update the document with rules tweaks and clarifications and name each iteration alphabetically. I am super duper thankful that my friends Andy Solberg and Dyson Logos each ran GOZR for different groups and provided valuable feedback. I was a player in Andy's game, which as a real stress test for the system as we adventured around Andy's wonderfully silly Gooz York. I think Dyson's playtest, which I wasn't in, was more directly based on the Den sequence from Heavy Metal - probably the chief inspiration for GOZR in the first place.

GOZR Cover Art

I have been working. Here's the cover art for GOZR, posted right here for the first time. And exclusive to the blog! I managed to get this exclusive from myself and it wasn't easy. I can be a real asshole to deal with.

I like it. This is the vibe. This works. I was dreading doing the game's cover because I didn't know what to draw. I could dream up some fantastic scene and that would be fine but this is the "core" book with the rules so the cover kinda needs to say "play me". And I think this does.

Current status is the game is mostly finished but still will have to get some editing and stuff. So I find it hard to say I'm "almost done". In terms of pages, I have 90% of it finished. I'm working on an intro page, a page detailing map entries, index page, and character sheet. Then that will wrap it up.

GOZR Page Added to Website

If you have a burning desire to understand what IS a "gooz" and what is this GOZR thing I keep posting about then fear not for I have finally added a GOZR page to my website.

GOZR: Gooz Bravo

Here's one I drew randomly. Most of the other bigger pieces have been planned out a little bit. This was just on the fly. But I dig it. I think it's a nice character illustration.

GOZR: Sun Son

The wizard has summoned something hot tonight.

GOZR: Kickgunfight

 

GOZR: Smokin'

 

GOZR: Beak Hunter revised

Some slight revisions to this piece. I think it's better now.

GOZR: The Dusk Riders

Here's another GOZR image that came out pretty OK. I love the background in particular. I'm really really into this shit right now.

This is how I see sci-fantasy in my head.

Here are a couple of process pics.

The wild wastes lure gooz adventurers who want to scavenge the old ruins for goods and artifacts. But staying out past sunset is a serious risk. Ptera-pteras are bolder at night, they say. And worse things.

GOZR: Beak Hunter WIP

WIP "Beak Hunter", an art piece for GOZR. Looking like this will be a 48 page book. My current idea is to publish it in comic book format (size, saddle stitch) and then follow up with a 20-24 page adventure book. I wanted to include the adventure stuff in the main book but Lulu has a 48 page cap on saddle-stitch and this motherfucker HAS TO BE a floppy comic book format.

Of course I realize I can get a fatter book by going a different route with the publishing. But I'm not interested in that level of investment and piddle work. I just really wanna do my thing and put it out there in an easy, accessible format. So you'll have it in PDF from DTRPG and in print from Lulu. And I'll probably PDF it at Lulu and ich.io as well. You'll be able to get it easily.

Ideally... you'd get your self a copy or two of the thing in print so you can slap it down on the table and encourage flipping through it, bending it, and using the shit out of the book. I might even start out offering signed copies only for a time. For the hardcore collector types who like that sort of thing. Dunno. Still early in the game.

GOZR Chaos Doodles

I made a little collage of snips from GOZR pages in sketch or doodle stage and the other random bits that go into this project. Since it is a hand-to-pen-to-canvas creation, I can't really script or "write" it in the traditional sense. I can and will change everything as it hits the canvas. I change what I might have noodled out because I realize it is bad or I don't have physical space for it all or I want it to look differently.

I know. Who the fuck creates a game this way? It's a game. You play it, with people, probably at a table or online or whatever. It needs clarity, rules, clarity of rules. The answer to your question is I don't know. This is an experiment.

The chaos of creation!

One of the design principles I adopted at the start was repetition of important ideas. So maybe there's a key rule about how armor works and instead of having it explained in one place I repeat the rule 2 or 3 times throughout the text. This reinforces it but also makes it much easier to find the rule if you need to be reminded.

An outgrowth of that idea was to embrace happenstance elements. For example, there might be a little table of artistic skills your PC could possess. It isn't on the actual character creation pages because I didn't think of it at that time. So instead it might appear on a random ref page or just off to the side somewhere. If you, as a player, find this table you can roll on it. If not, nothing is really lost. It's just there if you want it.

I did that with gooz names too. I have multiple gooz names tables scattered through the book. This helps players find a cool name (or a lame one) and definitely will help the GM name random NPCs the characters bump into.

Let's test it. "The twisted alley seer scoffs at your comment and says [clattering of dice roll] 'Fools! I, Tadd the seer, cannot be intimidated!'". Yeah. So Tadd says.

Gooz Bravos

I have this page for GOZR with stats for a few common types of gooz you might encounter in Goozer City. I had the common gooz and the alley wizard and then it dawned on me I needed the common scoundrel, the gooz who is kinda like a PC but not. I decided "bravo" was a term I never used before and it fit. A bravo could be a thug or a thief or a merc.

Quick rundown of what the actual fuck I'm talking about:

GOZR is a hand-lettered, art-heavy RPG project I've been working on here and there for about a year. The core inspirational nugget are the goons that Den works with in the Den sequence of the movie Heavy Metal and Richard Corben's generally awesome weird looking characters. My idea was what if these guys inherited the earth and all the pretty people were dead? Sci-fantasy.

Regarding the stat block:

Threat = Pool of points the GM can spend to let the enemy circumvent the rules, such as taking extra actions or resisting magic.

DEF = Defense, soaking damage.

HP = Hit points.

Size = Duh. "G" means gooz size, or human if you will.

Pack = How many you might encounter.

Dmg = Damage.

I came up with this stat block early in the process and I like it. It's simple, six items you can easily remember. And it covers all the necessary bases for a game like this to function.

More on GOZR as it unfolds I'm standing at around 40 finished pages right now. The original target was 32 and there are still a few more things I need to get around to so this might end up in the 48 page range. Which... is kinda nice. Short enough that you find shit easily.

GOZR: Recent Events Table

In this post I showed a full page table of recent events to kick start a GOZR game. Somehow I fucking lost the page. I know, how in the actual FUCK do you lose something you spent hours working on? I dunno. But I damn sure did. I've scoured my files and backups and came up with nothing. So I must have not named this file correctly to begin with, then I deleted it thinking it was junk.

Shoot me.

Anyway, I did have a fairly robust JPG of the file and I managed to blow it up, tweak it, and added some cool bg graphics to spice it up. I think the result is better, though I'm still pissed at myself. As a general rule, increasing the size of a raster image is a shitty idea and you should never do it.

Kids, don't do as I do, do as I say.