The Tephra Pipeline July 23, 2015 11:00 3 Comments

We're laying down the rails! We have a lot of things in the final layout and editing phase, and I wanted to share them with you.

The best part is that this isn't even close to everything we have in the works. It's a long process getting new products from beginning to end, so I'm only sharing the items that are so far along that I am confident they'll see the light of day. Some of them are coming out in August, some in September, and some might not come out for 6-9 months yet. But we are pushing along!

In addition to these, we're always working to get out more merchandise and tools to enhance your game. So keep an eye out or join our newsletter, so you'll never miss an update.

Adventures!

Extra Credit

On hold indefinitely.

Extra Credit is a light-hearted adventure, in which you are enlisted by a Tordryoni University to go on a field trip. If this adventure doesn't make you laugh, it's probably because you don't have a throat. Written by Tim Bedard (the creative lead on The Golden Bandit).

Machinations

Released here.

This three-part saga takes adventurers through multiple levels, cities, and more! It's got an army of automatons, a giant airship, shock-troopers, a mercenary company, and more. This adventure has been in the works for years, and I'm excited to say that we are wrapping up the maps right now and just have a bit more art to finish it off. Written by Martin Solis.

A Big Misunderstanding

Released here.

Do you ever sit down at the table and you realize, "I only have 2 hours and I only have 2 players... none of my material is going to work!" Worry no longer, friend, because A Big Misunderstanding is designed exactly for these moments. This adventure is a quick and fun adventure, but what makes it really shine is its replay value. It has four very unique villains for you to choose from. Between that and a fully realized downtown for the adventurers to explore, this will be a game that you can play over and over again and it will never feel the same twice. This will be the premiere game for Austin Witt, but he's already written 3 other adventures that are in the final editing phase!

From Boot Hill

Released here.

I just finished the layout on this adventure last night - mix weird west, undead, and a bit of horror flavor and you've latched on to what makes From Boot Hill such a fun adventure. We spent entire sessions just exploring the ghost town, there's so much to do! New adventure by Patrick Regan.

Setting & Expansions!

These are some big books that I am elated to share with you. While we're getting to the point where we can pump out adventurers pretty quickly, getting out some of these bigger 100-200 page books is a challenge. But we're working on them! First in the queue:

Adventuring in the Outer Reaches

Still in progress, but you can find new races here.

Take your game into the chaos of old Paldorus, the crucible of the Izedan desert, or into the frigid wastelands of Siyesh. The world of Tephra's not a nice or normal place, and this book's going to prove it. Not only will you be getting a mountain of setting, you're going to see: a half-dozen new races, game-changing specialties, and a slew of new crafts ranging from turning yourself into a monster to building ancient Izedan ray guns. This is the book that you're courageous explorers have been waiting for!

The Industrial Carnage of Evangless

From the beautiful capital cities to the war-wrecked western lands, Evangless is the world's industrial juggernaut and a land in turmoil. New organizations, specialties (we love specialties!), and a ton of setting and adventure concepts will keep the adventurers constantly in the action. If you thought Evangless was a nice peaceful Utopia, this book will prove that thought entirely wrong.

The Encyclopaedia Automata

The playing guide only teased you with automatons. This book is going to obliterate the subject. We'll start by giving you all new ways to play automatons, letting you combine different elements together or build up giant automatons that you can pilot. Then we're going to introduce new automatons: magnetech automaton swarms, golems crafted from the earth, and aetherial manifestations, to name a few. We're going full-steam ahead into automaton crafting! New content largely written by Jeffrey Wood.

The City of a Single Law

There's a city that sits on the northern tip of Izeda. It's partially Evanglessian, partially Izedan, and entirely unstable. This is the city of Dis, and it's got only one rule: no person can own another person. This city-delving expansion is written by Gustavo Martinez.

For Narrators!

The Kickstarter Adversary Book

Now released! Click here for more information.

Yep, I'll be releasing the Adversary Book to the public soon - it's full of 50+ fully-built NPCs that you can throw into your game. It's surprisingly cool! This is entirely done - I just want to give our Kickstarter backers some time to enjoy it exclusively. That said, if you do  want one, you can get it with our Extreme Softcover Bundle. It's the only way!

The Narrator's Accomplice

Now released! Click here for more information.

And finally, the one I care the most about: the Narrator's Accomplice. This is the book that will take your games to the next level. We've got traps, environments, narrating advice, tools, house rules, rewards, relics, and a ton of monsters, otherworldly beings, scientific abominations, and crazed automatons to give you everything you need to take your Tephra game to the next level. This is the one that I am most personally invested in, as it's my top priority book. I promise: it is going to take your game to the next level.

Let me know what you're most excited about and what you want us to focus on next!

Cheers & Gears,

Daniel

Our Convention Schedule July 13, 2015 14:00 7 Comments

Cracked Monocle and Tephra: the Steampunk RPG are pretty well known in the Texas convention circuit. We've been to over 30 conventions in the past 5 years, from Ikkicon to Clockwork Con, A-kon to Comicpalooza, AetherFest to San Japan. We've hit up a lot of conventions, and we love going to them. I get tons of questions from our Texan fans about what conventions we're hitting up next, and people everywhere ask us if we're going to GenCon, Origins, Dragon*Con, or the GAMA Trade Show. 

Unfortunately, for the next little while, the answer is always going to be "No."

For years, Cracked Monocle has been very focused on going to conventions. It was like a drug: we can get in, play Tephra with a bunch of awesome people, grow, sell some books, and have a great time. But conventions were also immensely time-consuming and draining. 

In the last few months since taking over again, I've decided to not focus on conventions. I want to grow Tephra's product-base. I want to believe that people are playing Tephra at home and not just with us at the conventions. I want to spend those weekends writing and releasing great new material, not showcasing old stuff. 

However, don't write us off yet!

The famous Charlie Stayton of Cracked Monocle East will be hitting up game stores in his area and Mars Con in January. If he gets any other events, we'll be sure to announce them!

Then, the first convention that the new Cracked Monocle in Texas plans to hit up is ChupacabraCon. This local Austin con focuses heavily on roleplaying games, creativity, and new ideas. I love it dearly. I love it so much, in fact, that I volunteered to be their Media Coordinator.

(So if you hadn't heard about it until now, it's because I was doing a poor job. But you've heard about it now, so I'm doing a good job once again!) 

I'm sorry that we won't get a chance to play together for a while, but I hope you enjoy everything that Tephra is able to offer in the upcoming months. We're excited to release all this new material, and we hope that your home games benefit greatly from it!

Cheers & Gears,

Daniel

Planning by the Negatives July 6, 2015 11:00 2 Comments

I run a weekly Tephra game, and I've had a number of players say that the way I run games is unlike anybody else. That's not necessarily a boast. My games tend to be extremely political and I aim to have a high sense of realism while keeping a large cast of NPCs. My games will regularly go 3-4 sessions without combat, leveling is slow, and treasure is next to non-existent.

Last week, I had a customer complain: "I'm tired of losing. Can't we just win for once!?"

I thought this statement was funny. From my vantage point, they had just done a phenomenal job! In that session, I had planned for:

(1) The local nobleman to die of poisoning.
(2) The adventurers to be chased out of the mansion by a king-appointed private detective.
(3) For the butler that had been helping them to be hung for treason.

At the end of the day, they saved the local nobleman, they convinced the private detective that they were in the right, and they managed to chase the noble's advisor that had been slowly poisoning him out of the city. It was a hugely successful adventure... if you compare it to the disaster I had planned for them.

I don't plan good things. I plan my sagas to be like Game of Thrones episodes, where everything bad is going to happen and all the great characters are eventually going to die off in some horrible way. It's up to the players to prevent the bad things from happening, and they often do. But when you're accustomed to great victories, tons of treasure, and happily-ever-after, even the best of my sessions tend to be let-downs.

But take heart! During the next session, I had the surviving nobleman provide them with coin and supplies in exchange for saving him, and now they have a powerful ally in the fight to come. See, I'm not all bad, right?

Tephra: Back on Track July 2, 2015 16:59 9 Comments

TL;DR - Hey everyone, I'm back in charge, the Kickstarter is all caught up, Tephra's debt-free for the first time in three years, and we have a ton of material coming to you soon! Thanks for playing! 

I am proud to be back in charge of Tephra again.

Tephra's had a rough history, but it's primarily the story of a young 20-something's youthful neglect. A few years ago, I had a friend and artist tell me, "Daniel, you are the most professional person I know, for your age." I took that as high praise. Now-a-days, I look back at that and almost feel like it's ironic.

I began working on Tephra when I was 21, nearly 7 years ago. I was a few years into college, had plenty of D&D games going on, and I just liked world-building. Tephra was an extension of that. It was a few months after I started developing Tephra's setting that I decided to start building Tephra as a game. With the help of some dear friends, we made it happen.

In 2010, we started going to public anime conventions to showcase and playtest Tephra. That was a blast and addicting. While never easy, it was always fun getting people's feedback, feeling their excitement, and sharing our growing game with them. We never had much money; the cost of going to those conventions was something that was probably beyond what a few college kids could pull off. But we kept going! We kept pushing forward!

In 2012, the Tephra book was nearly done, and I decided to run a Kickstarter. I didn't need much - only about a few hundred dollars to cover getting an ISB number and some other start-up costs. When we put up the Kickstarter, all we wanted was a $1000. We honestly didn't even really think we'd hit that. (I mean, we wanted to sell our book for $30 to $40, and none of us could afford to buy the very book we wanted to sell.)

But it blasted off. I launched the Kickstarter, sent out over a hundred private messages to people on Facebook, and was in bed around 4am. When I woke up the next day around 10 or 11 (I miss those days of sleeping in), our Kickstarter had already blasted past $1000 and was solidly in the $2000s. By the end of the first 24 hours, we were over $4000.

It was a crazy month, watching that Kickstarter swell and grow like it did. I had no concept of what that money was like, and when I the Kickstarter ended at nearly $23,000, I was dumbstruck. Friends might remember me during that month, constantly trying to rebudget and rebuild the math. I felt like it didn't work (haha, I was right), but I just couldn't get the numbers right. I distinctly remember telling my roommate when it hit $16,000 that "I ha[d] no concept any more of how much money that [was]."

Needless to say, I made some errors with running the Kickstarter.

It took me about 6 months to fulfill the "harder" part of the Kickstarter - I shipped the Playing Guides to all of my US backers. But the custom Adversary Book and the international backers, well, that was more difficult. First, I had no idea what my shipping costs would be and the international backers took me off-guard. Second, the amount of work required to finish that Adversary Book took not only me off-guard, but my entire development staff.

Now, I want to tell you about how we powered-through and overcame all the odds. But that story would be exactly that: a story. Near the end of 2012 I started to lose hope, and midway through 2013 I was getting pretty burnt out.

That's when I moved to Austin. My lease was up in San Marcos and I needed to get away. I moved to Austin and looked for a new job, and I found a great one. It added a great deal of stability to my life and I learned quite a bit about logistics and running a business, skills I desperately wish I had possessed a few years prior.

In early 2014, I resigned. I felt like I had done enough damage to Tephra and I was tired. Things were out of control and I didn't know how to salvage it. I felt like it had gone as far as it could with me at the helm. My friends, Jeffrey and Alex, graciously took over. They held down the fort and tried to grow Tephra, but I was of no help to them. A few months ago, they came to a similar conclusion: they had done as much as they could with Tephra.

It was sad, but it was time to move on.

...or was it?

This last year has helped me grow a lot. I've learned a lot of things from working my day job and I've gained a lot of stability. I feel more grounded than I ever have. So when Jeffrey and Alex let me know that they were calling it quits, I felt excited: now was my chance to take back over and fix everything.

And that's exactly what I've been doing.

Though I work a full-time job and have a great social life, I am on the warpath to get Tephra moving again. What I discovered was a huge swath of content that our teams had developed that was just sitting around. I had stores and stores of writing, specialties, augments, crafts, setting, characters, EVERYTHING... all of this unpublished material just waiting to see the light of day. So that's exactly what I want to do: bring that material to you.

But there was one thing I had to do first: I had to finish the Kickstarter. And I have. Okay, okay, I have a few more people who need their books (I am tweaking the adversary book for them), but everything else is mailed. I am happy to say: it's finally over.

Today is the first day in over 3 years that Cracked Monocle and Tephra are not in severe debt. And I aim to keep it that way.

Now for the growth part.

Get ready to see more and more!

Daniel

Did the Golden Bandit really just try to steal an entire Clocktower? May 1, 2015 12:45

The Golden Bandit (& other Rangston Adventures) has just released!

We've been working on this little doozy for a while. Rangston's a troubled town in Western Evangless, where the law isn't well enforced and inventors just want to have fun. It's a place where people like the Golden Bandit can pull off heists so spectacular that they involve stealing a whole clocktower. It's a place where cattle barons and Brimstones fight to keep everyone under their thumb.

I've never been happier with an expansion release. Not only is Victor Helton's newest art spot-on, but this adventure also comes fully-packed with a ton of ideas, adventures, and people to use in Rangston. And if that doesn't get you, then how about the full list of background stories and a new craft: Widgets?

But what really tickles my fancy is that this book's creative lead also made a cool tune to go with Rangston. You can check it out on our Soundcloud.

Cheers & Gears

Mementos just got a Lucky Update! April 29, 2015 15:33

One of our classic favorites, Mementos, just got an update!

I've always had a weird love for Mementos. It's unusual. It's not one of the normal ideas; this isn't "crafting a sword" or "building a rifle." This is taking a normal every-day item and "crafting" some lucky or unlucky traits into it. It lets you take your character's lucky signet ring, and suddenly it has all of these reality shaping "powers" that only exist at the table.

But Mementos can also be used for some pretty intense tricks. Let's say you're a beta rifle crafter. Now you can take your beta rifle and make it a memento. Then you can bind it to yourself, so even if you lose it or it gets destroyed, it'll somehow coincidentally wind up in your possession again. Mementos isn't just quirky, it's powerful!

So what's new with Mementos? We've just updated some of the formatting and added 8 new lucky and cursed items for you to use in your game (or just for inspiration). And they cover every level, from the easier trinket to Lord Hazard's Signet Ring - a kingdom-shaping lucky ring.

Mementos is available here for just $1.99, and it's a steal!

Remember: If you buy the file from us, if we ever update the file, we'll update you too. That way you always have the newest file. Game on!

Free Adventure Concept: She's Gonna Blow! April 26, 2015 23:30

Are you running out of freaking awesome adventure ideas? I know my well sure dries up on occasion... so here, have an adventure concept. Don't worry about paying me, this one's on the house:

She's Gonna Blow - Free Concept Adventure! 

 

 

Proven: Monocles CAN Protect You! April 7, 2015 16:00

The deliciously funny Zachary Weiner has released a new kickstarter, and it is simultaneously the most ridiculous non-sensical illogical kickstarter I have ever seen... while being completely freaking awesome. 

May I introduce the Gentleman's Single-Use Unlubricated Monocle:

This is entirely ridiculous, but I can't help but support it. 

Site Tweaks & Character Sheets April 6, 2015 14:00 1 Comment

Have you been over to our Tephra website? It's a pretty hopping place for all things Tephra. Unfortunately, it hasn't been touched much in the last year. But I'm changing that!

I've been going over it, updating things, and making it a more accessible website. I even found some dead links (uh oh!), but they're all alive and working now. 

The craziest thing I discovered was that our character sheets were no where to be found. How has anybody been playing Tephra without character sheets!? Thankfully, you can always find our character sheets in the back of your book. But now you don't have to. Just go on over to this page:

You'll be able to download not only three versions of the character sheet, but also the automaton sheet, a map of Rilausia, and a bunch of fillable cards (for specialties, augments, and crafted items). It's useful stuff!

If anything isn't working, let me know! Send me a message at Daniel@Scheme.Works and I'll take care of it. 

Stop Giving Cracked Monocle Money April 4, 2015 14:24

In hindsight, I could've phrased that title a bit better.

If you are tired of giving Cracked Monocle money (or, more likely, you've purchased everything we have for sale and you still have mountains of money left over), you could always fund somebody else's dream of owning a deathray.

That's right, a deathray. Or, at the very least, a giant laser cutter. 

See, there's this local group in Austin:

I'm at least 90% sure that they classify as super heroes in some way. And if not super heroes, they're at the very least delusional artist. It's often the same thing, right?

They are trying to get an amazing laser cutter. And there are a ton of cool perks that go with that. Interested in checking it out, funding their dream of world domination, and getting some cool stuff for it? Check it out here. 

Tephra has a Subreddit! April 3, 2015 11:27

I will admit, I'm not a reddit user. That largely stems from the fact that I barely give myself enough time to check my emails, see what's going on in our forums, or keep abreast of anything happening in the real world. So when I found out that some of our fans had created a Tephra subreddit, I was pretty pleased!

You can probably guess that I have no idea what it takes to make a subreddit. I'm still working on figuring out how to "log-in." But I'm sure that most of you are reddit aficionados (because I read something about reddit being one of the highest-trafficked websites ever), so stop on by and say hello. I'm sure the dedicated souls who built that subreddit will appreciate a bit of company!

You can check out the Tephra subreddit here.

Best Tephra Release EVER! April 1, 2015 21:07 1 Comment

It's April Fools' Day, so obviously that title is hyperbole.... right?

Well, not entirely.

I'm here to celebrate a few things! The biggest and most important is the smashing release of our newest free supplement, the Anti-Graviton Magic 12-ball! This little gizmo will introduce tons of physics-breaking awfulness into your already chaotic Tephra saga. If you didn't know how to ruin everybody's gaming experience before, this thing will surely do it! And the worst thing about it is that, when you read it, you'll start to think, "This thing is kind of legit. Maybe I should use it?" Then, you'll come to your senses and realize, "NOPE!" And you'll be right! 

Now that you've settled down from your excitement over the Magic 12-ball, what other exciting things are going on? 

Well.... what if I told you that we are now selling the Tephra Playing Guide? That's awesome, right!? Wait, you already have that? No no no no, I meant the PDF. Yep, the long-awaited Tephra Playing Guide is now in PDF form. Get it here!

What else could possibly be new? 

I'm glad you asked! 

You've always wanted Aether. I know you have. Well now's your chance: the 5-star awesome Aether system is now available in a surprisingly cheap PDF form. You should grab it here. 

By now you're wondering, "Daniel, is that all you have to talk about? New product? I'm not made of money, so stop trying to sell me things!" To which I respond: "Why then are you reading a blog on a webstore?" 

But let's put aside my inherent snarkiness and instead gaze over to the top right, where you will see a link labeled "Free Stuff!" in the navigation bar. Yep, that's free stuff. Nope, there's not much there right now. But there will be! For now, though, go enjoy decimating your sanity with the Anti-Graviton Magic 12-ball. And those other cool PDFs we have up for sale.