KickFail: Welcome to Mortison, U.S.A.

RPG Kickstarter projects are such a mixed bag. Generally, those with products at or nearly complete deliver a few months late. Frankly, even the best organized projects are delayed by weeks or a few months. Rarely one actually shows up on time. Welcome to Mortiston, USA: An All American Zombie Apocalypse by Scrying Eye Games is not one of the rare or uncommon ones. The delivery is now 15 months beyond the original delivery date of June 2012. To be fair, I did get the PDF of the supplement around the due date even though I already HAD a copy of the PDF.

What I haven’t seen is the softcover, the hardcover, or the miscellaneous perk items (Extended Electronic Package supplements, minis, postcards, or additional map sets). I received absolutely nothing beyond what I could have gotten without backing the kickstarter project. Backing this particular Kickstarter project was foolish. In hindsight, the amount raised was never going to cover the costs of the promised materials.

Where it all went wrong based on sporadic updates… (in no particular order)

• From the start
• Printer problems
• More printer problems… but oh yeah order a softcopy off our website
• Cover problems with the printer
• Woops, burned all that cash going to conventions
• Oh shit, its over budget.
• Hang on, we are working on another solution (meanwhile we’ll issue a different product release on our website)
• Personal Illness
• Holy shit, businesses have to PAY TAXES?!??

I grew tired of re-reading the various updates. When you are digging a year into your email archives to figure out what’s happening, you know the project is going nowhere fast. Taking an overall look, it is pretty obvious that the common mistakes were made by a small publisher — a) underestimate costs, b) over promise on non-core rewards, c) fail to manage the core deliveries and likely d) burn through raised funding on other affairs not related to the project.

I do not expect to see anything beyond the original PDF. At a tad less than $3500 worth of funding, getting a softcover out the door was speculative. A hard cover a bit beyond speculative. The stretch goals were absurdly beyond reach for the funding. I back projects for the core gaming material not the extra oddities.

Three bad conventions trashed our budget, both for the business and personally. In three weeks we’ll be doing the taxes for the year. We’re using our own money to get the printing done and shipped out.

It might be time to punt. Use your own money to refund what you cannot deliver. In fact, it is probably cheaper to issue a refund than it is to continue down the path of futility.

We aren’t planning on doing any more Kickstarter’s. I’ll admit it makes me feel better to know larger companies like Steve Jackson Games and Reaper can have such major problems, too. The Kickstarter process just takes away too much time from everything else we should be doing.

Uhm, say what? It’s hard to issue an update every few weeks about some delay or another? What exactly is your billable time worth? If it is so valuable, I’d suggest going back to that, earning some cash, and refunding the funding population across the board. As for not doing anymore kickstarter projects, I commend you for not double dipping into the well. No matter if it was incompetence, ignorance or extremely bad luck, you have proven you cannot deliver on a project. I’d gladly blackball any new project you launch.

As promised, everyone will get everything. When we hit that “SUBMIT” button, we agreed to do that, and we will. Very late, but we’re still going to get everything out. Since we got burned for the first batch of Kickstarter edition books, the costs have gone up and so has the shipping. International shipping has almost doubled for some areas. The costs of the special edition books and shipping now totals to just over 300% of the initial budget.

Shipping ALWAYS goes up. I doubt it went up 300% in a year. You planned poorly. As for getting burned by a printer, it happens. Most businesses vet partners before engaging in business with them. There are multitudes of honorable printers in the world. You chose poorly.

You should just acknowledge failure on the project and return the money. Money you likely already spent but if, as you stated, you can spend out of pocket, it will be far cheaper than trying to deliver a product. Most businesses make poor choices on one occasion or another. Businesses that stay in business do not continue to throw good money after bad. Especially when they have spent other peoples money.

Either way, Scrying Eye Games is dead to me.

Quick Thoughts: Welcome to Mortiston, USA

I wrapped up reading Welcome to Mortiston, USA over the lunch hour today. Overall, I was quite pleased with the work.

78 pages, Available June 8th

Mortiston is first and foremost a modern setting supplement. While it is billed as a generic zombie apocalypse setting, the zombie element is not significant. If you are looking for detailed zombie apocalypse back story along with the uprising as a focal element, Mortiston will fall short. In fact, game masters can easily ignore all mentions of zombies and just use the locale as a setting for any modern apocalypse setting. Just shift the zeds to some other invader or group and the supplement will work out of the box.

The author, Mark Cookman, focuses primarily on people, interesting places, and the shifting dynamics within the small city. He strikes a great balance of detailing important personas and locations while allowing the GM to add as much detail as desired. The non player characters are presented in detail. Each and every major survivor has a good history with interesting hooks. The trope of skeletons in the closet is a bit overused but doesn’t detract significantly from the focus of the work. Mortiston supports five different systems. Stat blocks are presented for each NPC for every supported system inline with the text. While the multi-system support is admirable, I would have rather seen the stat blocks for each particular individual in an appendix rather than inline. About 1/3 of the page for each character is devoted to statistics.

Locations, like characters, are well represented. Each location is detailed on an individual page containing not only a description but also loot worth items across the timeline. Characters present in the locations based on the timeline are also discussed, which really helped pull together the people presented in the character section of the book. Many locations include a relationship table for the differing groups within Mortiston. However, the groups are not detailed until the subsequent section. As I was reading, I kept wondering why the table was present. It is a useful feature but I’d have preferred having the group dynamics detailed prior to the locations. What really left me wanting was the complete lack of individual location maps. No location is represented in map form. The descriptions are detailed but every GM is going to need to sketch out a set of maps to aid players.

The faction/group section of the supplement doesn’t show up until near the end of the book. Throughout the characters and location sections, factions are mentioned in passing but the linear reader has no idea of the general groupings in town. The section should have prefaced the characters and locales. Especially considering it is a brief 2 pages. Likely an oversight of editing with comprehensive knowledge of the environment.

The last major element of the book is both at the start and at the end — the Timeline. Day one is presented at the start of the book while Z+1 and subsequent events are not detailed until the end. For a reader, I understand the split because the initial Z-day timeline provides a great hook. As a game master, its bothersome because I have to flip between two discrete sections to correlate the details. Not a major negative but I’d have preferred it consolidated (even repeated) in one location within the book. Especially for the PDF — pages are cheap in PDF form. Not so much in a printed work.

I like the overall work but minor fiddly bits bothered me. The overall premise of Z-day seemed too busy. Four major events occur in one day. While they are correlated, I kept thinking it didn’t need to be so complex. The premise is one entry point. Absolutely nothing prohibits me from modifying the introductory events to meet my style of play. The author dictated on numerous occasions that the GM would need to fill in details. Shifting the introduction was not one of them but I’m certain he’d take no offense to changing it.

Zombies are almost completely absent in the book. For a zombie apocalypse setting, the token mentions are completely peripheral to the work. Odd? I thought so but the dynamics of the survivor groups make Mortiston more interesting. Survivors are the menace not the undead. Still, I would have liked to have seen more influence on the zombies in the overall work. Especially during the early days after the onset. My take is not the intent of the author. Early on he mentions zombies are just “icing”. Take that for gospel. Zombies are a very minor element.