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We’d already been working on M-Force for a while before the GAMA show, but after we got back we kicked into high gear to make sure we could get the book out in time for Origins. M-Force, for those of you who don’t know, is our Monster Hunting game. It’s one of my favorite games we’ve created. Unfortunately, the game we released was not the game we love. Part of the problem was inexperience–we kind of wrote a generic game book that didn’t include a lot of information that was helpful for playing the game. In their place were a bunch of equipment lists and things like that, because somewhere along the line we decided to try to make M-Force appeal to mainstream gamers. That was the last time we made that mistake. Part of the reason we haven’t re-released M-Force (yet) is because we want to do it right next time, and QAGS 3E is part of doing that.
Another problem with M-Force was the book itself. Most of the special characters (fractions, asterisks, etc.) printed wrong, making a lot of the rules unusable without errata. Also, the color wore off the book covers if you looked at them. We later discovered that part of the problem was the printer. SupaGenius had found a printer in Louisville. I kind of suspect that this was due to SupaGenius not getting quotes in time for a real printer to finish them in time for Origins, but at the time it seemed fortunate, since it meant a shorter printing timeline. We later discovered that some of the problems were due to the “printer” not being a company that normally printed books. They specialized in legal documents. Later we also discovered that it was mathematically impossible for us to make a profit on either of the two books they printed, even if we’d sold every single copy. Fortunately we only printed 500 copies. We were led to be believe that this was only the first half of the print run, but it later turned out that it was all we could afford.
If I try to give a full account of how bad Origins was, I’d need to talk about it for the next 10 installments of the series, so let’s go back to bullet points:
- Once M-Force was sent to the printer, we still had a lot of things to do for Origins. We actually paid some ridiculous amount of money for our own booth, so we needed to get everything prepared.
- One idea we had was to give an M-Force badge to everyone who bought a copy of the book. This was initially just going to be a laminated card with the M-Force Logo and some writing or something. Then SupaGenius decided it needed to be more like an ID card, with pictures and personal information. He spent most of the time leading up to Origins working on variations on the M-Force logo for people to choose from, leaving Carter and I to do the actual work.
- Carter and I would occasionally suggest testing out the whole “create a personalized badge in our con booth” system to make sure it actually worked. SupaGenius was sure it would and thought that was a waste of time (he felt his time was better spent making an M-Force logo with a Santa hat or some shit). When we got to the booth and set everything up, it didn’t work, in part because the printer that SupaGenius had gotten from a church (we’re 50/50 on whether the church knew about the loan) needed a special cable. I think we finally got it working sometime Saturday. This might have also been when we broke my boss’s digital camera, which cost me several hundred dollars to repair.
- When SupaGenius wasn’t working on logo variations, he was working on some kind of fucking Whose Line Is It Anyway? card game that he would not shut up about. I ‘m not going to say the name of it because I only have so much blood and I’m already boiling off enough of it here.
- The trip to Origins, which should have take 4 hours, involved a trip to the middle of nowhere for unclear reasons (we later worked out it was for SupaGenius to get money from his wife’s parents, because he was broke), a new driving game based on observing what a bad driver SupaGenius was, and for some reason like a 4-hour stay in a motel 2 hours from Leighton’s house in Columbus. So Carter and I at least were already pretty grumpy even before SupaGenius disappeared right as we started to unload the truck.
- When we got to Origins, we found out that SupaGenius had failed to schedule any games. So we’ve got a very expensive booth and nothing in the con program. We ended up running games in the open gaming areas based on sign-up sheets at our booth.
- Once Corporate Sugar Daddy arrived, we started comparing stories. It turned out we were all getting different information from SupaGenius about how much M-Force had cost, whether more would be printed, how much money we had, etc. Around the time we were realizing something was really, really wrong, someone who worked for one of the cons we’d been attending told us how sorry they were to hear that we were going out of business. This was less than an hour after SupaGenius had told some of us how much money we were making.
- Then Monster Box happened. We’ll need to change formats here.
EXTERIOR: Columbus Convention Center. Five men stand near a railing on a second floor courtyard.
SUPAGENIUS: …so what we need is a MONSTER BOX!
[SUPAGENIUS continues talking, but his words are slowed down and distorted so as to be incomprehensible. The camera pans to each of the other men in turn. They all look shocked and confused.]
LEIGHTON (Voiceover): What? Monster Box? Did someone just say we were going out of business? What is he talking about? Is it a box with a monster in it? Or is it a box that’s a monster? Does he think he just invented the mimic?
STEVE (Voiceover): We could just throw him over the railing. There’s a street below and he’s not going to dodge traffic for long. It won’t get us the money he seems to have stolen or lost back, but it will definitely be better that listening to him babble about this fucking Monster Box thing.
CARTER (Voicevoer): Am I having a stroke? I feel like I may be having a stroke.
ROSS FULTON, OCCULT DETECTIVE (Voiceover): You know what I could go for right now? Tacos. Tacos fucking rule.
I honestly have no memory of what happened in the immediate hours following Monster Box, but I feel confident in saying that SupaGenius would probably be dead and some of the rest of us in prison if he and his wife hadn’t had some kind of unspecified emergency that involved them leaving early. Once he was gone, we started comparing stories in considerably more detail and realized beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a lot of money unaccounted for. More on that next time.
