[Atomic Robo] The Robo Has Landed

Pictured: Atomic Robo, existing as a physical product
you can hold in your hands and everything. 

Has your copy of Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game arrived yet? Well did you preorder it? Of course, at this point you could just buy it, because it's out and in stores. You are running out of excuses, in other words.

In all seriousness, it's been extremely gratifying to see ARRPG getting such a great reception from people online. I spent more than two years neck-deep in this game, so it's really rewarding to see tweets like this, or this, or this thing here, or this other bit over here plus this frankly embarrassing praise, and so on. I guess what I'm saying is that the approval of strangers is very important to me, and then on top of that I'm obviously not able to be one-hundred percent sincere about any of this because it's so genuinely affecting. All of this boldfacing is actually part of a defense mechanism against emotional vulnerability. So... thanks!

Anyway, if you're still waiting for yours to show up in the mail, or even if you aren't, you can while away the empty, meaningless hours listening to a couple recent Robo-oriented (Roboriented!) podcasts.

Late last month I was on Useless Drivel talking with Rob and Matt about a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to:

• A radio show I had in college (that apparently had a MySpace page)
• The Thrilling Adventure Hour
• GI Joe, sorta
• The Heroes of Three Crossings
• Crimson Skies
• The Shieldwall minis wargame and the War of Ashes RPG
• The Kerberos Club
• Jadepunk
• OSS 117
• Luchadores
• Atomic Robo
• Legends of Anglerre (sad face)
• The not-at-all-secret origin story of the Atomic Robo RPG
• Why this blog is called "Spirit of the Blank"
• Living the dream

(I mention on this podcast that I'm going to make those Crimson Skies Fate dogfighting rules available, and that's still my intent, but they're not up yet. End of line.)

And just a couple weeks ago, Atomic Robo scribe Brian Clevinger talked Robo and the Technocracy with Ryan Macklin on Master Plan. The focus of the conversation is RPG licensing from the licensor's point of view, and also Brian corroborates my ARRPG origin story, which is kind of a relief.

On a related note, Ryan and Tim Rodriguez are running a Kickstarter right this very moment for Backstory Cards, so go get in on that.

BONUS PODCAST RECOMMENDATION: The last episode of Nearly Enough Dice (episode 141, for future generations) has a very nice, unapologetically glowing review/unpaid endorsement of ARRPG. The episode isn't completely Robo-centric or anything, and neither I nor Brian are interviewed on it, but still, it's good. Especially if you're like "ARRPG sounds pretty cool, but I dunno, I need someone with a Scottish accent to convince me," then this is -- it's the podcast for you. It's almost eerie how precisely they've tailored this episode to suit your exact needs. You'd be foolish not to listen.

[Strange Fate] The SRD Has Landed

Hey, so this is very cool: RPG.net user thecosmicgoose has extracted the OGL bits from The Kerberos Club (FATE Edition) and made a system-reference document out of it. Now, admittedly, it's basically two chapters from the book with all the non-OGL stuff excised, so it's not exactly pretty, but hey, what do you want? No doubt the it'll be subject to some prettification later, and by someone other than me, because man, I do not know what I'm doing on that front.

Anyway, the SRD is here. Check it out and have at it!

[Atomic Robo] [Kerberos] GenCon Events! Again!

I Googled "gencon logo" and got this.

A while ago, in a moment of benign "The sky is falling!" confusion, I incorrectly warned about the imminent opening of event pre-reg for GenCon. I was wrong, I apologized, and, as a nation, we all moved on. Now, though, it's on -- that thing I was talking about in the previous sentence (see above) starts tomorrow, May 20th, at 9 am PST.

To help get you ready for that, here are the dates and times of the FATE games with which I will be involved in some way.

First, the Atomic Robo RPG sessions, run variously by myself, Morgan Ellis, Andy Blanchard, and Chris Czerniak:
Thursday, 2:00 pm
Friday, 2:00 pm
Friday, 2:00 pm (another one)
Saturday, noon (changed from 2:00 pm)
Saturday, 2:00 pm
And also another one for Saturday, 2:00 pm

They're all at the Marriott in the Indiana Ballroom, as part of Indie Games Explosion, a subsidiary corporation of Games on Demand. So there'll probably be more ARRPG games available on demand, as well.

I'm also running one session of The Kerberos Club (FATE Edition) on Friday at 2:00 pm. It's called "A Past from the Blast," and, to recap, the blurb is as follows:

Danger! Intrigue! Explosions! It's all in a day's work for the Strange members of the Kerberos Club, who answer the call when a series of bombings spark panic in the streets of London.

That one's also at the Marriott, in Ballroom 2, if I'm reading that correctly. Let's hear it for centralized gaming.

It'll be very interesting running both of these systems at the same convention. In many ways, the world of Atomic Robo feels like a kindred spirit of the world of the Kerberos Club -- if you advanced the setting of The Kerberos Club forward several decades and changed a few (admittedly big) things, you could end up with Atomic Robo. So I guess it only makes sense that the versions of FATE that power these two games have a similar relationship. Some of the design goals for ARRPG owe a lot to Strange FATE, and some elements of the latter have been carried over whole-cloth into the former. I'm looking forward to it. Look forward to it with me, won't you?

UPDATE: And a few hours after pre-reg opened, everything's sold out. That's encouraging, right? If you missed out, buy some generic tickets and keep hope alive.

[Atomic Robo] [Kerberos] GenCon Events!

Friendly reminder: Today's the last day to register games for GenCon, so if you haven't gotten on that, get on it.

Another friendly reminder: Pre-reg begins tomorrow, I believe. No it doesn't! Brace yourselves anyway.

If you're eager to check out Atomic Robo's progress, we'll be conducting the first public playtests at GenCon in August. It looks like we ("we" being Andy Blanchard, Chris Czerniak, Morgan Ellis, and myself) will be offering six scheduled sessions between us:

• Thursday, August 16th at 2:00 pm
• Friday, August 17th at 2:00 pm (two sessions)
• Saturday, August 18th at 12:00 pm
• Saturday at 2:00 pm (two sessions)

And possibly a Sunday game as well. Odds are also good that you'll see some ARRPG games at Games on Demand, too.

You can find all of them in the schedule as Atomic Robo: Sneak Preview. Not an evocative name, maybe, but it gets the point across. The blurb's the same for all of them:

Action! Science! Robots! Playtest the new RPG adaptation of the hit indie comic book series Atomic Robo, coming soon from Evil Hat. No experience with FATE or higher-dimension mathematics required.

But that's not all!

I'm also running a FATE Kerberos game on Friday at noon called A Past from the Blast. I am unreasonably amused by that title, partially because it's almost clever, and partially because I'm not actually sure what it means yet. This is how I design convention scenarios, folks!

Anyway, the blurb sure makes it sound like it's about something:

Danger! Intrigue! Explosions! It's all in a day's work for the Strange members of the Kerberos Club, who answer the call when a series of bombings spark panic in the streets of London.

(Any similarities in format between those two blurbs are entirely coincidental.)

Lots of good gaming to be had at GenCon this year! See you there.