Wolfgang Baur's Open Design #3 down to Ghouls vs. City-State

[trollwad]

go ghouls

 

[Firedancer]

IIRC, last update was that Ghouls was slightly behind, but it was way too close to call.

And now its just pipped ahead.....c'mon you misbegotten bone-chompers....

As man-thing said, the inclusion of other OGC is good to see. Just from the early posts on the ghouls line you can see what the patrons can bring; 1 person cannot read and recall as much as so very many, and there is a lot of 3rd party products the patrons can help Wolfgang draw from.

 

[Monkey King]

As man-thing said, the inclusion of other OGC is good to see. Just from the early posts on the ghouls line you can see what the patrons can bring; 1 person cannot read and recall as much as so very many, and there is a lot of 3rd party products the patrons can help Wolfgang draw from.

There's at least three products that will see significant use; the "Open" in Open Design does really come with an attempt to highlight good stuff from all over.

What is the voting between the 2 options like at the moment. I am interested in The Empire of the Ghouls, but not so interested in the City-State of Zobeck.

Empire of the Ghouls is currently up by something like 112 votes to 100. Oddly enough, the people who donate to support the projects tend to get what they want. Projects that don't attract patrons just.... don't get written. It's self-selecting.

I'm probably most interested in all of the essays that you have written so far. If I did come on board I would need to become a Patron of the Arts in order to get access to all of the essays you have written to date, correct?

The essays are just freebies that the patrons of each project see as they are completed. They shuffle off into the dustbin fairly quickly. Some find other homes. Every patron sees all the essays from the project they support.

 

[JoeGKushner]

And now its just pipped ahead.....c'mon you misbegotten bone-chompers....

As man-thing said, the inclusion of other OGC is good to see. Just from the early posts on the ghouls line you can see what the patrons can bring; 1 person cannot read and recall as much as so very many, and there is a lot of 3rd party products the patrons can help Wolfgang draw from.

One thing I thought interesting about the use of OGC monsters is that he includes full game stats for the monsters instead of just the abbreviated ones unlike say... Red Hand of Doom where the spawn were kinda crunched up in the back.

And since it's PDF, it's not a 'bloat' problem like I felt some Necromancer products where when they made extensive reuse of OGC monsters from the Tome of Horrors.

 

[Glyfair]

How much do you have to contribute to obtain a printed copy?

The cost of whatever patronage method you choose, plus Lulu's fee (at cost). For Castle Shadowcrag, the Lulu.com cost was less than $10 for me, with media mail shipping.

 

[Soel]

Cool. Only somewhat interested in the Ghouls adv, but I'll keep watching as many of the other ideas sound great.

 

[Glyfair]

Cool. Only somewhat interested in the Ghouls adv, but I'll keep watching as many of the other ideas sound great.

Much of the vocal support I've seen has been for this adventure. I guess most of the city state fans are the silent types.

If I had to place money, I'd expect the ghoul adventure to be the one. Of course, that assumes either reaches their greenlight total. The patrons have set a high bar by choosing these high page count, high workload projects.

 

[catsclaw227]

I signed up a couple of days ago, but I voted for the City-State.

After reading the expanded/revised outlines, I must say that I am leaning (ever so slightly) toward the City-State of Zobeck. There are a lot of adventures out there, with APs on the rise and the past two projects being adventure settings. I think that if Zobeck could be structured like a mini-setting with one or two small adventures set in the region, then you will get some good crossover.

I posted my comments about the priests and paying for services here, and though this seems like something we’ve seen before, it’s definitely not a “been-there-done-that” idea. There are other ideas like this one that can we can pepper Zobeck with so that it has small adventure seeds (sidebars or something), 1-3 page adventure frameworks (like mystic eye’s foul locales series), and maybe even a 24 or 32 page adventure.

I was enamored with the general structure of Necromancer Games’ Lost City of Barakus because it acted like a setting, yet it was a loose collection of adventures. Easy to fit into a homebrew, yet self-contained enough to serve as a region with its own personality.

Anyway…. These are my rambles, for what they are worth. I could toss out some thoughts if we go this route.

I look forward to either project though, for sure. Now, I still need to have Lulu print and send my patron copy of Castle Shadowcrag.

 

[Capellan]

I voted City-State myself, because I think it counds like an awesome project, and I generally get more use out of sourcebooks in the long run. However, if Ghouls wins I still know I'll get a top-notch adventure out of it, so I've got no real complaints either way.

(and since it runs from 8th-12th, Ghouls winning would mean I had the option to be very lazy and run a campaign that consisted of just it + Slaughtergarde, some day )

 

[Erekose13]

I'm going to be joining the ranks of the patrons within a few days (once I've got enough cash in my paypal) but I had a technical question to ask. It would appear that the entire Open Design site is built using Live Journal. Once a donation is made and patrons are granted access to the private section is the entire thing conducted via LJ? or are users taken to a hosted site? I ask because my wife is an avid LJ user and is always logged in on our home computer. Will I need to get my own LJ account and be logging in and out of accounts to participate?