Con on the Cob kept us busy, but it also gave us a chance to meet some amazing people and play some amazing games. Join us as we interview one of those people about one of those games..
Knights of the Night
246 - Intereview - Clockwork Dominion
[Music] Hello, and welcome to this special edition of KOTN. [Music] And now, please enjoy episode 246, titled Clockwork Dominion Interview. [Music] All right, this is the KOTN crew. We're at the time of the cop, and here we are talking to Zeke. Zeke Koglin from Religory Games Studios. Producers of fine games, such as Clockwork Dominion. God's here with me in life, as well. Scott's been looking at the game at a by-port Dominion. We're out of them. We're running to which is, that's a good thing, right? That's a good thing. We believe this is the second time we've sold out, and I really need to buy more books, but that's a good thing. You know what? Maybe for our listeners who are unfamiliar with the game, maybe you can give us a brief elevator picture with the idea behind Clockwork Dominion. Well, there are two sides of Clockwork Dominion. There's the setting and the mechanics, because we didn't want to produce a game that didn't have awesome in both categories. So, the catchphrase on the book is, "Steampunk Roleplaying in a Victorian world of Gothic horror." Great. I got a thumbs it up. Well, after reading some of it, it seems to, I mean, it really does seem to capture that essence. I can see why Scott's attracted to him. Yes. The "Steampunk" quality of it is, and we really break that into a true "Steampunk." Right. I don't know if you're familiar with the literary genre of punk. Sure. Like cyberpunk, "Steampunk." Absolutely. A lot of people call that aesthetics. You know, like "Steampunk." All right. You should put goggles and gears on things. For us, "Steampunk" is, "The Steam" is advanced technology, and "The Punk" is dealing with unjust social systems. Right. So, we have a portion of the world that deals with what would advanced technology look like in 1896. We typically do not invent weird things. There aren't a whole lot of, like, mech suits running around. Right. For us, we take things that were legit in 1896. Things that were rare or unique. There were a lot of really cool inventions that people would take to their gentleman's clubs and be like, "Look what I did. I made a steel man that runs at nine miles an hour." People would be like, "Ooh." But we're going to take those things and we make them ubiquitous. They're just all over the place. We don't have to ask questions like a lot of "Steampunk literature." Like, "What if Charles Babbage invented the difference engine?" Because Schultz did about fifteen years later. And his within way ten tons. It was the size of a sewing machine. And so we use that for great story. The difference engine actually made it to the French royal society. And it was rejected because the typeface setting was unseemly. And no one would ever want to read what it produced. Oh my. Little things of history. But we take a lot of those things and we put them together. We're like, "What would happen if the gentleman who invented synthetic speech and the gentleman who invented clockwork automatons got together?" And now you have walking, talking automatons from technology of 1896. And the result of this is because we're not inventing anything terribly new. We did a job about five years in the future to pull back Zeppelin's because you can't have steam plump without airships. Right. You just have to. But the result is you get this feel of 1896. And it's still advanced technology. You don't feel like you're in a fantasy world. Which is for us really cool. And in the punk setting we kind of bring in a lot of things. There's all sorts of interesting things with the role of women and the role of minorities. That we kind of highlight a little bit in the game world. If you want to touch on that, that's all well and good. Use it. If you don't, don't. If you want to use the in-human bloodlines in the game to highlight those things, which is safer, you can go that direction. And so we get a true steam punk feel. Great. The gothic horror element of the game comes from what we call the pontus. Which is actually a Greek word that means under ocean. Pontus is a Greek sub-god. It just sounds really cool. Yes, it really does. It doesn't matter if there's actually a literary background. I actually like the analogy. I agree that it sounds cool. But I like when you take a little bit of history. Yeah, it is. That's right. And sometimes the listeners or people that are playing the game will look at it and go, "That's not real." And they'll do a little bit of research and go, "Shit." We did it as a result. We found a video of people on Twitch making characters and cooperative dominion. And they're choosing their bloodlines. And one of the bloodlines that we use are the Nephilim. And we use Nephilim straight out of Jewish scriptures. Sure. Genesis 5. The angels quit. They came down. They had children. And it's strewn with these biblical quotes in the books. And we're sitting there watching this. And this is the game he'd come out like four days ago. And so we're all like, "Someone's playing our game on Twitch." And the one guy looks at you and goes, "Oh, these Bible quotes can't possibly be real." And we're like, "Yes, they are!" Look at them. Look at them. So everything in the book is like that. We base everything on something, this kernel of reality. The catchphrase we use is one step from reality. So everything has this kernel of truth in it. And it came up in gameplay, or in really interesting ways. I had a fight with my editor. He came back and he said, "You have this invention, which didn't actually make the core book." Oh, you got a fight with your editor? I did. He says, "You have this invention in here called the Photophone." I'm like, "Yeah." It's a phone that transmits information on beams of light, like lasers. Well, the Photophone is a dumb name. Why don't you name it something else? I'm like, "I can't." Well, why can't you? Because that's what Alexander Graham Bell named it when he invented it. Oh, yeah. Got it. There's a lot of really obscure stuff in there that's actually real. Like, we have a little bit of alchemy, and how we explain alchemy in the game is, Thomas Edison really had a press conference in the late 1880s where he said, "I have discovered this supernatural energy called etheric force that binds all matter together." It sounds like a force. And they were going to unlock the secrets of God. And then six months later, he's like, "Electricity." I meant it's electricity. But we just don't print the retraction. And we throw that in there. And then in alchemy, someone was like, "Why did you have Sir Thomas or Sir Isaac Newton translate the emerald tablet to talk about alchemy?" He was like, "Because he did." So a lot of this is very obscure pieces of information that are real, that build a framework for a fantasy world that doesn't... You're aesthetic, that you're going for one step from a reality, which is really fantastic. What would you say differentiates clockwork dominion from other role-playing games? I mean, obviously, when you sat that down and said, "I want to create," or your group of individuals that you were working with sat down and said, "I want to create a role-playing game," there must have been some dissatisfaction with what you were doing weekend and we got with your own gaming. Or, just be interested to know, what did you try to drive into clockwork dominion that made it unique, different from anything else? I have a passion for history. And so I wanted something that was close enough that if I were writing, I could do historical research on Wikipedia and bring it in. That was a passion in mind. But the real things were, I wanted a Victorian horror that didn't use Cthulhu. Okay. Which evidently is super rare. Seems to be. But mechanically is really where we really wanted something that could do things that other games didn't do. We wanted a system where it was at the very least difficult game. I remember a D20 game I was playing where we were protecting a wedding from the onslaught of demons because it's D&D. And the host gets possessed and they're like, "What are you going to do? Are you going to fight him?" And I'm like, "No, I'm going to punch him in the face and do four points of subdual damage." And then when he reaches zero hit points, he will fall unconscious and not lead, and we'll deal with it later. And you're like, "Uh, okay." And it was like a lot of gaming systems in order to play the game and win. You have to do things that are so counterintuitive to what you would do in real life. We wanted to create a system that had some versimilitude. Right. That would involve real things. We wanted to eliminate conflict. This was my baby. 74 iterations of the initiative system to make it work. Who's counting? We actually, one of my gamers, iteration 34. I remember this very specifically. We're sitting in his living room and we're experimenting with this. He gets up and says, "This fucking sucks." And walked away from the table and I'm like, "All right. Time for iteration 35." Three, right. But one of the things that we wanted to get rid of was this kind of linear initiative system that most games tend to use where you're waiting for your turn to act constantly. I'm going to go get a bear and some, yeah. Right. I had a really dawned on me when we play tested the proto version of this game way, way back. And the early 2000s when this was just kind of a shelf hobby. Sure. And then we played D20 Modern. And when we played the clockwork proto game, everyone was like, "Glue to the table." Like, "Oh my God, what's going to happen?" And then the moment we went to D20, we actually had someone get up from the combat to go have a cigarette because he calculated how much time would be until he actually got to make a decision. And we're like, "That's not how combat's supposed to be." Right. Or gameplay. Yeah. That's an exciting part of the game. Right. Absolutely. So do you feel that's what really differentiates clockwork dominion from other role-playing games? Well, there are a couple of things, but my baby. Sure. And then the process is combat becomes the most exciting part of the game. People are engaged. We just had a player at the game we just ran where I was like, "What are your impressions of the system?" And he said, "I feel like I have constant agency. There is never a point in time in the game where I am observing what's going on." That's great. That's what we wanted. Yeah. Excellent. In regards to your influences, I mean, obviously, you just come out of thin air. You were driven in some ways in your co-writers as well. It sounds like there were a lot of eclectic things, including your history and all that stuff. Right. So a lot of the writers are myself, a man named Brent Concilio, a man named Nathaniel Dean. Right. Nathaniel writes for post-human studios and eclipse phase and that sort of thing. He has a master's degree in history specializing in the witch hunts of Salem. Oh, fantastic. So that comes into it. I have a bachelor's degree in religious studies specializing in occultism. And then Brent, when I first met Brent, he criticized me for the type of tea I was drinking, and then invited me to go fox hunting. So they say right about what you know, when you put the three of us together, what you get is the clockwork world. And in a very real way. Right. That's fantastic. Were there any movies or literature? I mean, do you have some things that you might have drawn from besides your own inspirations or your own backgrounds? Do you notice anything in the book to get inspiration for your campaign? I didn't see anything. Is there a place in there? Because I must have visited if there was. Like where your inspiration came from. A lot of it is we wanted a game where you could play bone shaker and Jane Austen with the same system. In clockwork Dominion, if you want to use the advanced social system, which again I love, but I think 20% of the play testers actually used it. But those who did loved it, it's that I want to marry up. We had a campaign where there were a group of people trying to thwart a Fay Lord's overcoming a parliament. He was secretly putting people in parliament so he could gain land rights to places in England so he could break the boundary between the worlds. Right. One player who was like this combat munchkin and the moment he realized that he could get the Lady Jane Dalton to marry him, his class would go up and that would make him more socially savvy in combat in the game. He spent the rest of the game saying, "I don't, whatever, you guys go to ferry and beat this Fay Lord. There's a ball tonight, the Lady Jane Dalton is going to be there. And if I could get her to marry me, I get a plus two to every social interaction for the rest of the game." And so it's interesting how the mechanics push people in different directions and different stories. That's really fascinating in the mechanics sense, that it seems that the uniqueness of your mechanical system for combat, and it also, but it also carries over to social settings as well. So it's really unique in both, in the two major areas of the game where it's combat, and hopefully if I think the game's being done right, there should be a lot of social interaction as well. That is, typically, we like to delve into both those arenas when we're running an adventure. And a lot of game systems don't cover that. I mean, like, to play a game like that, right now, there isn't a social combat system. It doesn't exist. I'm actually writing a social combat system for a new manera as an independent supplement, because we play new manera. We'll play all kinds of new games, then try to put it out there for our listeners to enjoy, and maybe hopefully drive some people to try it, if it sounds good to them. And I remember being so frustrated, you know, it's like one die roll, you know, and it's done. You either win or you lose, and that's not how a debate or a social combat or a social interaction should be, whether it's marrying up, which isn't really a combat at all, or whether it is trying to talk down the game. It can't begin. You should be able to talk the bandit lord into allowing you to pass if you give enough gold, or if you give enough respect, or if you pay enough difference to them. And that just doesn't be a strong part of a lot of games. It sounds like that's something that you really built in the clockwork dominion. One thing that we did not expect but happened was a lot of people who, it turns out they don't role play a whole lot. They really want to just kill stuff. They're like, "We're going to play a wandering band of murder go-bos." When you gave them the social public system that made sense to them, not just, "I'm doing 15 points of social damage to you, and when I get you to zero, I win." But something that had some verisimilitude to it. It turns out that there are a lot of people that are playing munchkins because they don't feel like they're very good actors. And they feel intimidated about role playing. When you give them a bare-bones system to use that makes sense to them, we have found that sometimes even the people who would never role play in a game start playing social characters. That's a great point. It really does. It's because if you could draw that out of them, even if they're talking in a normal voice and not trying to be overly flourishing with their language, but if you get them interacting as if they're their character, even if it's in normal dialect of 2015, when this is taking place, it is fantastic if you can draw that out of them. And I think we noticed that for the first time, maybe with fate and world of darkness, we started to gravitate away from D&D in our recordings and playing some different systems that may be allowed for some more social interactions. They still have their limitations. They do, but less so than... Yeah, we're going to have to kill our way through this particular encounter. Kickstarter is very ubiquitous as far as independent gaming companies and starting new systems or supplements. I think people would like to know a little bit more about the experience that you and your team might have had throughout the Kickstarter campaign. So could you talk about maybe how it started, what were some of the hurdles, things along that line? Like how it basically played out? When did the first idea of the Kickstarter come into play? Well, I've been designing this game for a while, and when Fan came on the project, his experience with post-human studios, he basically looked at me and he said, "You have to publish this game. I will help you. We will do this together. This game is too good to leave on your shelf and for people to play in your basement." And so I was like, "All right, well, we'll do this." But I really, at that point in time, thought, "We're going to raise a couple thousand dollars. We're going to produce one of those indie games that you've all seen that's some black-and-white pencil sketch from your neighbor on what looks like a first-dead dungeon in drag. It's a first-dead dungeon in a dragon's book with a soft cover with… When was this? 2013, 2012. Well, totally recent, okay. 2012, I think. We had the conversation at GenCon. Great. And he was like, "This is stupid. You need to do this. You've been funneling with this forever." And so we started to playtest it. We did a couple con games, and people were floored with the system. And we're like, "Okay, let's make a quick start roll." And then we made a quick start roll, and then people started acquiring it like mad. I think in the first year, we had 9,000 downloads. Wow. Is this from DriveThruRPG? Okay. And so then we're like, "Well, we should kick start this and get this going." And I was a little hesitant. I'm like, "We're moving too fast! We're moving too fast! The freaks!" And so we asked for $9,000. We made almost $30,000. Wow. And so we just sank all the fat into artwork, which if you see in the book… It's gorgeous. Yeah. And what was really awesome is that when we got people to sign on to help, we ran into Dirk Manning, who's an image comic writer. He wrote Nightmare World, and we ran into him in a shop. And he's like, "Your idea is amazing! I want to write fiction for your book!" We're like, "Alright, sure." And then we met Raven Momura, who I believe did some fourth edition D&D work. The name sounds familiar, and I noticed that she was one of the artists in your… Excuse me, I think he is the first one listed among the artists. He's a cover artist. That did the awesome picture. We had to wrap around if you opened the book. And then he just produced this artwork. He did the first witch finder before Raven kick-started, and we looked at it, and we were like, "Aww." He nailed it, right? This is going to be something bigger than anyone expected. And then, still, even today, I came with the books that were left over from GenCon thinking, "Let's a small con. How many books could we possibly sell?" All of them. All of them, apparently. Right, and one more, if you had it. I have a deluxe edition that's a more expensive one with a better paper. We can talk after that. Okay, we'll talk. We'll absolutely talk. So the kick-starter was Daniel's idea. How did it work? How did it evolve? Did you handle it? I mean, did you get someone to do the actual kick-starter page? Did you guys all collaborate together? Did it take off immediately? Did it take off immediately? It turns out we got really far. We've got our $9,000 in three days, I think. But we got together, and we realized what makes a good kick-starter. And so we need a video, and I'm like, "All right." And I do medieval reenactment in the SCA, which is... You meet wonderful and strange people in the SCA. It's well, yes. He qualifies for both of those. In fact, the three of us are also martial artists in different fields. That also plays into the combat system. Anyway, so I sit at the table at the SCA, and I'm at the beer after fighting, and I'm like, "I need someone who can make a video who can do that." And one of the nights down the table is like, "You know, I got a buddy who does a camera crew. Why don't we just show up at your house? This would be great!" And so the guy in our video that does the acting for the kick-starter video is actually at night in the SCA. He just brought his friends over who were professional shooters for one of the local news squads, and they just shot our video, and we just spliced it together. The music and the background is like music from my old college band, and we just put it together. We thought, "Well, this looks pretty cool." You know, maybe if you have a little dig this. And the artwork more things, because we knew where we were going to make a book. So we bought a couple of pieces, which put every piece of artwork we had up there. And lo and behold, people loved the concept, and we had the quick start rules already done. People started downloading and playing, and it just caught on the rest of history. Right. What would you say is, in an ideal world, or in your mind when you're imagining it, what's the future for both platformed dominion and for reliquary game studios? Well, a lot of that depends on how things go. Things continue to sell as well as they've been selling, and we continue to do cons. We have our first supplement that is currently being written. It's called the Cabinet of Curiosities, which is largely rules to help filter down some of the subsystems. When we originally put out the core book, we're like, "We don't know forever, we're going to put out another book." So we want to make sure that if you buy this book, it has everything that you need to run a game. And so there's a list of magical rights in the book for the magic system, which is ritual-based. It's very Victorian. It's not like spelt-slinging. But we're like, people are going to want to do more than this. So there's a whole system for making magic. There's a whole system for item creation, which is all very simple and function-based. It's not like game system doesn't care what it looks like. It doesn't care how it works. It just cares what it does, which people will really respond to. But there's a system for antagonist creation so that you can make your own monsters. And so it's kind of sandbox in that regard. And you can ignore those if you don't want to use them, but they're there. And so now we want to go through and put out this Cabinet of Curiosities supplement that says, "Well, here are huge list of examples of creatures and magical spells and how to use the item creation system to the best effect so that people that aren't really crunchy gamers can still have access to all the things the game has to offer." I think it's great. Everything's up front in that first book, and then you take it from there. How much of the book that you have now is like what you'd consider a player manual, just the rules part of it that you need to get going? The first three chapters are set. The first chapter is just a, here's your overview. These things are only like six pages, seven pages. And then the first chapter, which I guess is chapter two, is the Clockwork World, which is a meticulously recorded 1896 society. And then chapter three is the kind of supernatural cosmology. And then we go into rule systems and character creation, which are the two things characters should read. And then you get into technology, which is the subsystems that I was talking about. And then transcendental powers, which is you can play a character if you're a changeling. You have access to glammers, which are based in Grimm's fairy tales. You can play an agent of the church, which binders, which are like we're going to go seek out these dark mystical practices and make them disappear in the middle of the night. So there are like charisms, like they're the gifts that the deistic clockmaker God bestows upon people to make sure that the clockwork turns properly. And then there's the magic system. And so that's all in there. And then the rest of the book is advice on how to use those things. For the narrator, I believe is the term now to use for the person who's running the game. And then this supplement about how long before people are listening to this, and they want to know, is it putting too much on the spot? What's that allowed to say? Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. I'm not allowed to say. Well, no. I got it. The future. Yes. That's your ball park. Not so distant future. Great. That's what the supplement goes. What's it called? Capricutist. Capricutist. Is that going to be pretty much all crunch as far as, like you said, almost item creation? And I would imagine creatures are going to be in there. It's going to be an amalgamation of many things. Like a cabinet. Like a cabinet. Yes. Is that? So it's not going to have a lot of fluff. You don't think in that particular supplement? Or is it going to be really fluff? I do too. The fiction in the book is something that I really liked. Different people were involved in that, like, dirt manning from image comics and a couple of the people. Brent, aforementioned writer of the book, wrote a couple of pieces. I wrote a piece. We can include fiction like that in cabinet of periodontities and a little bit of player information. One of the things that I want to include is some of the memberships that we didn't get to include in the core book because we're of size constraints. Right. So we'll get to delve into things like the dramatic order of the Golden Dawn, which is huge in Victorian horror. And we just couldn't fit it into the core book at 328 pages. So there are some things like that. So it's crunchy, but it's story driven crunch. Which is a fantastic thing. As long as you do that successfully, I think that's really fantastic. As long as when you're talking about stories that the rules aren't hidden in the middle of the story, it's like, oh, I don't know. Darkness. And you have a good index, right? Yes. If you sell the core book, it's like five pages. Wow. That's very good. I've got all my questions answered. No, I got a quick story, though, that it's slightly embarrassing on my part. Michael and I are playing a game. Yes. Yes, right. In Scott's Census of Texas, it says, could you look for the game? Maybe if they're playing it, sit in on one. Mike shows it to me, and I'm like, there is no fucking way. This is a Kickstarter. I've barely heard of it. And there's no way that this guy, and in the middle of this, Mike's gone. And you're walking by with the banner. I'm like, okay, I'm a dumbass. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm here. Mike texts me. He's like, no fucking way. And so, I just... Two seconds later. Honey, sure. Picture of you walking by with the banner, good sense. Mike's working this week, and I'm like, I'm going to find some babysitters for the kids, and I am heading out there because I really want to sit down to learn more about this game, and it's possible to sit in because I'm really contemplating using it for our next story. She's not a big gamer. She's like, yeah, honey, whatever. You know, just find the babysitters, and that's fine. So, here I am, and I'm really glad that we got a chance to... My favorite is Elise. At least three favors for kids. I was like, I thought maybe your company would be here, I didn't think. I would be here with cannons. I had no idea. I had no idea because there was something Bostonian about some Googling I did. You know, maybe it was Nathaniel. Yeah. From the Northeast. He lives in Boston. Right. So, I was thinking, oh, you know, probably not, probably just some reps or whatever. But even then, I could just sit in the game. You go over estimate our company. You go over three people. You go over three people. Obviously. Now. Wait a minute. I met someone at the booth that wasn't one of you three. Oh, that's my wife. I know that. She's very nice, by the way. She's volume four. That's another story. Right. Good for her. So, yeah, it's been a real pleasure getting a chance to sit down and meet you. I can't wait to try the game, and I hope that all of our listenership, and we do hopefully play this game, that I drive even further access towards your company. Whatever that might be, we have a fairly sizable audience. Hopefully someone will get turned on to the game and the mechanics that we're using. And not to mention the fact that it sounds like it fits our playing style very well. Oh, that's true. Very well. We delve into the details. We get into the role-playing. We get into, I mean, most of our games are mysteries that you've got a solve-type thing. I think in the arcs of the characters. In the arc of the characters. I don't know. I'm just thinking. You're playing D&D, and I think our first combat was like the fifth or sixth of all. Yeah. And one of our listeners was like, yeah. And one of our listeners was like, you're playing it wrong, man. What the hell are you doing? It's a combat. You're supposed to be a bunch of, as you mentioned, murder hobo's. Why aren't you killing things? I mean, that's why they listen to us. That's what we like to play. And I think this game seems to fit very well. A little bit of a tangent, but based on something you just said, when you're talking about the feel of combat in a social situation, one of the things that we really tried to do was have characters fear combat without creating a huge amount of player mortality. Because we love character arcs. Exactly. You want your character to tell a story. When characters die, especially needlessly. You run into four orcs and you just happen to be here. And it's just like, oh, well, there goes my whole narrative. And so then one of the things that we had to go with was like, how do you make characters afraid without making them die? Right. Because we're all martial artists, we have this concept in the game called Guard. Right. I noticed that from the Quick Start rules. There's, I think, three tokens in front of you, and you can have your guard removed as the game goes on. It's based on your stats, how much hard you get. Okay. And when you're armed. But you have, like, usually the average is two. Okay. So three would be great. Yeah. But if you, like, as someone attacks you and is successful, you kind of watch your guard deplete. So if someone moves you and you move out of the way, it opens you up a little bit. Eventually your guard goes down. When your guard is down and someone hits you, they wound you. Wounds in this game are debilitating. Yeah, they are. For having rather quick start, they are absolutely debilitating. And so players tend to fear wounds. And so you can actually have situations. Like, like earlier when you said where there are scenes in movies that you wanted to be able to do. This is totally not steampunk. But I wanted to do lightsaber combat. Like, if you ever played at Star Wars role-playing game where it's like, I talk to you with my lightsaber, I do 11 D 20 damage. You know, like, that wasn't a duel. That was a slaughter. Right. Like, how do you duel? And so guard allows you to be able to fight. And then the moment someone's guard is down after a meaningful combat where no damage is dealt, players are encouraged to be like, "Whoa, you don't stop, don't tell him not." Right. And not just the guard, but I would say your initiative system as well, right? I mean, that being, I think one of the things that really turned me on, where I read the quick start guide, was the ability to interject into a combat. I flip over two initiative cards and I'm going to act right to seconds. And I'm going to make my idea, my weapon, something come to bear right now. First of all, obviously, if you said it keeps people engaged around the table, you don't walk away when you don't know what's going to happen in the next second. Which is how combat should feel. Exactly. And then it also gives the players agency to say, "I can do what I want to do. I might fail miserably at it, but I get to try to interject when I want." Instead of saying, "I roll a three, I might initiative roll shit." You know, I'm not going to act for another 45 minutes. If you roll over a 10, you get to act twice or three times, and then it's like someone else gets act five times, and you're like, "All right, it's a three, I act once, I fail." It's like, "Now I'm going to wait for someone to act seven more times before I can go." Yeah, I thought the initiative system was really something that jumped out at me as being so unique and so interesting. I can't wait to get to a table and give it a shot in real life. I like how you described the guard portion of it. It sounds more like a combat between two really good sword fighters. You know, they're not just going to go out there and hit. The other guy hits you, you hit him. No, there's a whole thing that happens where you're weak in him, you're looking for an opening. To me, it sounds a lot more realistic. Almost like a chess game where you're working. I mean, there are going to be situations where you can just beat the hell out of somebody. Sure. One of the coolest things that we had happened in one of the kind games is because guns bypass guard. What are you going to do? Like block a bullet? You won't cover if someone's going to shoot you. So we had a situation in one of the playtest games where the NPC draws a gun and he was using it for intimidation purposes. But every one of the tables double flipped and took cover immediately. And you're like, "In what game would that happen?" Yeah, right. Just reel it out of a weapon. That's life. Right. You mentioned the book being available somewhere other than drive-through RPG. Someone, do you know what that's going to be? I don't. We are in negotiations, and so I can't really speak about that because no one has really given us the go-ahead. Just kidding. I can only say that we're traveling down that road. And I would assume that announce would come forth from a Twitter or from your website, which you might want to announce now for the listeners. Clockwork@dominion.com. We'll have a link in the show notes. We absolutely will. And unless anyone's got anything else, I think we can thank Zeke for his time and for taking, not just your time, but the fact that you did it almost spontaneously. We walked up to you and you agreed to sit down with us. We really appreciate your spontaneity and your time. Well, talking about this, it's a labor of love. Fantastic. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for listening tonight to the Night Actual Play Podcast. If you'd like to send us questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us in a number of ways. From Twitter @kotn_podcast or by email feedback@kotnpodcast.com. And don't forget the iTunes reviews or our Facebook page, facebook.com/kotn.podcast. Speaking of Facebook, join like-minded folks at our Facebook fan page. And lastly, there's our blog page, kotnpodcast.com, where there's an Amazon link on the right-hand side. Thanks to ZenAudiosmith for the intro and outro music. Get your own music at zenaudiosmith.com. And join us next week for more mystery and adventure. Is this live or am I allowed to sing? No, you can say it. I will edit it to make you sound so fucking brilliant. I may take the particularly funny stuff and put it at the end though, so that's just so warm. I can't be a dick. It's good. Okay, do you want me to talk to the interview? Yeah, you know more about the game. The ending, Mike. He accidentally killed one of my characters. Not Mike, Michael, but Mike. Another Mike in there. And he was like, "Oh shit, my whole heart revolved around here." And it was like, "Well?"