anyway.

Hey Vincent!

A small filmmaking tip:

Wear a color of shirt that is of a decisively contrasting (but still complementary) color from your background.

Otherwise, I see Vincent's floating head, plus his floating hand from under the screen every now and then.

Vincent's ... floating ... HEAAAAAD!!! WoooooOOOOO!

Will do, chief.

Aaah, I really hope this funds.

I have a question that might or might not be appropriate for video.

It only makes sense that a wizard's seclusium would contain a large arcane library, but I find that's very hard to present in a game. Does Orphone's tower contain a library and will it come with any systemic tricks?

The next two!

Lighting troubles in #3, there. Hm. Will try harder next time.

I would suggest reading the questions out loud and dubbing it over the screen display of the question.

I have a question. What the hell is behind the teal curtain?

Meg's stash, on some pretty badly leaning shelves.

Why indiegogo rather than kickstarter?

Well, James Raggi isn't in the US, so Kickstarter wasn't an option. I have no idea if he had other additional reasons or preferences.

I am looking for an excuse to fund this but I'd like to know - is it useful for any other systems?

Simon: It will be, yes.

It's going to be first and foremost a tool for creating fictional stuff. Think of Dogs in the Vineyard's town creation rules. They create a fictional backstory, nothing else; you could use them with another game's rules if you wanted to.

Orphone's Seclusium will be moreso. It should be useful for basically any game where you can play D&D the way I like to play D&D, if that makes sense.

Like, as GM, do you get to say things like this? "There's a gigantic silver door set into the living rock. It was cast in one piece, with a giant grotesque face in relief in the casting, and later on someone took a chisel or something and gouged a million rude names and sayings all over it. As you approach it, something thuds into it on the other side, and it groans under the pressure. What do you do?" If so, yes, you'll be able to use the stuff in Orphone's Seclusium.

It'll include notes and guidelines for representing this fictional stuff mechanically. Like, how hard is the door to open? How hard is it to keep it closed? The monster behind it (if it is a monster), how many hit dice does it have, and what attacks, and what special abilities? These notes will be geared toward Lamentations of the Flame Princess' rules, whose flexibility and minimalism I love, so if you're playing a different game you'll have to make the necessary adaptations yourself.

It'll be more challenging for some games than for others. Lamentations' rules for creating monsters are really easy, in particular, so for games where creating monsters is an involved process, you should be prepared to do all that work yourself.

@Vincent - yes, that's just what I do. I have the excuse I need.

One more:

I know that I left several of your questions unanswered. At this late date, not yet 2/3 funded, they might remain unanswered forever!

This is quite unrelated to the Seclusium, but, your answer made me think of something that I can't quite articulate.

I guess the best question is (you're in software, right?), where do you see the place of modularity in game design? Have you written about this somewhere? We all know how modern software designers fetishize modularity... (this is, of course, only half-a-joke.)

On my end, a hypothetical "Seclusium" roleplaying game where I can take the, say, "seclusium creation rules" and use them in various ways, with other systems or adventures or whatever, is far more useful to me than a system where I can't do that. Of course it is! (other people may disagree)

(None of this excludes or precludes in anyway the usefulness and importance of a system where all the pieces work together very well, of course. I'm not saying a hypothetical game with seclusium creation rules all tied into the whole game system is bad. And this probably all ties into your posts on subsystems anyway.)

- Alex

First off, whoo! Funded! I'm super jazzed.

Secondly, given your previous excellent analyses of sales, are you considering an analysis of backer levels/numbers and what that may tell you about your market?