The Daily Illuminator
December 1994
Dec. 31, 1994
Looks like it was a short flu. I feel bad but no longer wish to die. And
it's a beautiful day outside.
We decided to blow off the pickup, at least for now. The end-of-year sales
don't get new-truck prices down to where we need them . . . not and get
the type of truck Brenda wants.
And we want to keep Brenda happy, especially since right now she's
dealing with several tons of returned books (we changed bookstore
distributors, and that means the old one had to send back all its stock).
So she and her crew are spending their New Year's Eve going "This one we
can resell, this one is good only for convention giveaway, this one goes
to the recycle bin."
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 30, 1994
Yech. I have the flu. Everyone else is gone. The whole world smells
like paint. Derek is tearing out his hair in bloody clumps as he tries
to deal with the fiends known to men as "Macintosh mail-order dealers."
Joy and rapture.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 28, 1994
Are we going to get a fancy company car? Naaaahhhh . . . but Monica
went out today to shop for a pickup truck. Remember, this is a
Texas game company.
Rain yesterday and today. Not too cold, but very, very wet.
Thundery and dreary. Some of us are ready for spring. Unfortunately,
winter hasn't really hit yet. Gloom.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 27, 1994
Remodeling is now in full swing on the top floor of the building.
Constant thumping; huge clouds of dust. Much like a staff meeting.
In the words of the immortal Dave Barry: I am not making this up.
Today's paper reports that a company called Shieldworks Radiation
Protection Technology is selling a "Hat of Quietude," which looks like
a baseball cap but is made out of stuff that is supposed to block
radio waves. Specifically, it is for people who want to stop radio
broadcasts, cellular
phone messages, and so on, from passing through their heads. Apparently,
tinfoil is no longer good enough . . .
According to the article, demand has been heavy and the hats are back
ordered. The company number is 800-403-0255. If you call, tell them the
Illuminati sent you. I bet they hear that all the time anyway fnord.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 26, 1994
Very quiet again today. The only sounds to be heard were the little
chortles of glee as the mail was opened and the distributor checks for
INWO were admired, fondled, and reverently prepared for deposit.
Don't laugh. This pays for the paint and carpets . . . and for some new
computer hardware . . . and it pays to send INWO back to press so we'll
have some more to sell in March. Money is good.
Thanks again to all of you who bought our games this year - that's
your money we're fondling. And very grateful we are for it, too.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 25, 1994
Ho, ho, ho.
-- S. Claus, putting INWO in stockings
Dec. 24, 1994
Yesterday it was a madhouse. Today it's a tomb. A very scruffy, dirty,
junk-and-boxes-all-over-the-place tomb. Everybody is out of here on
vacation except me, and I'm going. Bye.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 23, 1994
The office is being torn into little pieces and stored in boxes . . .
It's a madhouse.
But it's a happy madhouse, because the first big distributor
payments for INWO have arrived. And the INWO web area
is growing rapidly. If you haven't looked at it yet, hit that link!
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 22, 1994
We got some interesting packages from overseas . . . a French version
of GURPS Old West, and the paperback edition of the
German GURPS Basic Set. They both look great.
Visitors today . . . Walter Milliken and "Archangel" Beth McCoy,
who are writing
GURPS IOU. They brought new text files, maple sugar and
chocolate fish, all gifts pleasing to the Illuminated Ones.
We spent a lot of the day packing. Over the next couple of weeks,
the offices will get a serious face-lifting . . . paint, new carpet,
plumbing that works . . . We're looking forward to all these things.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 21, 1994
Thanks to the very fast typing of Tyler Novak, INWO players can now
read a hypertext version of the rules on our Web!
Also, within a couple of hours (I'm typing this at 11 in the morning)
we will have our INWO tournament rules, in draft form, on the web.
We want your comments.
Office Xmas party today. Gift exchanges around here are always dangerous.
I'm not saying what I brought, but St. Gulik protect the person who
gets it . . .
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 20, 1994
As you may have heard, Interplay Productions is working on the
official GURPS computer adaptation. The project is being headed
up by Tim Cain, who is now maintaining a FAQ and
home page for the project right here on IO. As the project develops,
he'll post updates. Eventually, you should be able to see art, discussions
of game play, and lots more.
Tim was the creator of the truly excellent StarGen
program for GURPS Space. We know the Interplay project is
going to be a success, because it's in the hands of a skilled programmer
who also happens to be a GURPS nut. This is good.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 19, 1994
Whew, my turn again? I've been at home working
on In Nomine the last few days -- it's going well, thanks. Jeff,
Steve and I sat down today and looked at the schedule . . . February
still looks like our month.
And, of course, INWO is going
strong, generating an amazing amount of traffic on the various newsgroups
that cover it, mostly people whining that their stores don't have it yet
or frantically trying to assemble a list of Rare cards before they do
something like trade away their Crystal Skulls for American Autoduel
Associations. (As an historical aside, we smugly felt like we'd covered
all our bases, and that assembling a true frequency list would be hard,
grueling, rewarding work -- forgetting completely that we'd just mailed
out a big bunch of Rare cards (see Steve's December 13th note, below) and
everyone who got one need only shout out its name and add it to the list
. . . doh!)
For those of you want a look at the future of INWO,
just check out its home page. We're webbing in some previews of the
designs we're examining for the Unlimited Edition, due out in March. Tell
us what you think. Send mail to inwo@io.com, I'm going to sleep.
--
Derek Pearcy
Dec. 18, 1994
I spent the last few hours reading the final,
edited, laid-out version of C.J. Carella's GURPS Voodoo. Good
book. C.J. subtitled it "The Shadow War," and that's what it's about . . .
the war we never see, between human spell-casters and darker forces. The
Crusades, slavery in America, the drug trade today . . . these were all
just moves in the Shadow War.
This will be out in January. Shea Ryan
is doing the illustrations, and they go very well with C.J.'s text. And
the cover will show Tim Bradstreet's idea of a street-tough Spirit
Warrior. I think you'll like it.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 16, 1994
It's Out! It's Out! Of course, the big
news is the official release of Illuminati: New World Order to the
teeming masses. We haven't heard any reports of gamers storming their
local stores en masse, brandishing torches and pitchforks, demanding their
INWO cards, but the day is early yet . . .
We have already seen the first posts on various newsgroups
from gamers who have bought their sets and are merrily ripping open
packages. It's not too early to start giving us your feedback -- we've
added a form for just that purpose on the INWO Home Page. Just follow the
links! I put two in this message -- if you can't find it, I don't
wanna know about it . . .
Time to go. Steve is hosting a party at his place to celebrate
INWO's release, and we're all knocking off
early to go have some fun! See ya next week.
-- Scott Haring
Dec. 15, 1994
What a lousy day of weather we've had today. Gray and rainy all day, with
thunderstorms moving in around 4 pm. They got so bad that we instituted
electrical storm procedures around the office . . . turn off and unplug
everything. But (and this is a big "but"), Illuminati Online has
an "uninterruptable power supply." I don't know what that means in
technical terms, but in practical terms, it means the net is still up and
running, and I can run into their offices and post today's Illuminator.
But that's not all that's going on, thankfully. We got a small package
from our printer with five advance copies of Pyramid magazine #11 today. This is
always a big moment for myself, Derek Pearcy, Jeff Koke, and other who
worked on the magazine -- we check and we double-check and we proofread
and we look at printer's proofs until our eyes go bleary, but when the
magazines actually get here, we still find things about them we don't
like. Derek is the worst about this, actually; I don't think I've
ever seen him happy about a product the day it comes back from
the printer, because he's obsessing over its flaws so much.
This issue was no exception, of course. This color screen here was a
little sloppy . . . the color didn't come out right on that ad . . .
where did all those little white spots come from? (Apparently, the guy at
the printing plant who stripped in the negatives had a severe case of
dandruff . . .). But after the initial panic passes (which takes longer
for some of us than it does for others), I can look back with a lot of
satisfaction. Really, this issue looks good. Real good. Cool
articles, great graphics . . . but you'll see for yourself soon enough.
The main shipment of Pyramid magazines gets here Monday,
they say. We'll ship them right out to distributors and mail the
subscription copies, too. Given the holiday mail and shipping delays, you
can expect to see the magazine in your mailbox and/or game store right
around the new year.
-- Scott Haring
Dec. 14, 1994
Brenda Hurst is back, alive and more or less well, after having
successfully sorted out the INWO
packagers. Everything has been shipped. And there was
great applause.
We've also signed our first overseas translation deal for
INWO . . . Pegasus, for the German
language.
And the SyQuest disk for GURPS Magic
went out today . . . this will be the second printing of the second
edition. Special thanks go to Jeff Gaines, who sent us a lot of little
bug reports at the eleventh hour. We dealt with them . . .
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 13, 1994
At last, the INWO Rare Card Giveaway
happens . . . the small catalogs finally came in, and the
envelopes are being stuffed right now.
If you missed the word on the giveaway, check out the INWO web area and read all
about it, see the pretty pictures, and so on and so on.
T minus two and counting . . .
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 12, 1994
Well, the lumbering beast that is
INWO continues to
close in on us. Tonight at the office, we had our first group game and
here are the results, as promised.
The players were (in order of play)
Jim McCoy, one of the Servants of Cthulhu; Derek Pearcy, heading the
Network; Jeff Koke, as the Bavarian Illuminati; Steve Jackson, fnording
the Discordians; and Scott Haring as another splinter sect of the Servants
of Cthulhu. It was a long game, over three hours -- although, like last
time, some of that comes from us sitting there staring at the
table and mumbling, "I can't believe it's actually done," rather than
planning a move.
Scott won in the end, though both Jeff and Steve came within a Plot card
of victory. Scott's deck was Cthulhu as done by Coppola, chock-full
of Violent, Criminal groups like New York and the Loan Sharks: the
Podfather, as Jeff dubbed him. Jim, the other Cthulhu worshipper,
fulfilled his destructive nature in a more abstract fashion as the
Weather God. Within two turns, Jim (with a +4 to destroy, just for being
Cthulhu) had the Cycle Gangs (+2), the Robot Sea Monsters (+4), the
International Weather Organization (+2, +6 to weather-related Disasters),
the Semiconscious Liberation Army (+4), a Weather Satellite (+8 to
weather Disasters) and the Loch Ness Monster (+4) on
his payroll. All in all, he had a +32 to smite Places with his arsenal
of Tidal Waves, Hurricanes, Meteors, etc. Jeff's Bavaria controlled the
media and its wide range of Personalities, Steve went after Wierdos, and
the Network somewhat feebly aimed for Space and Computer groups.
Both the Podfather's New York and the Network's Japan fell to Jim's
mastery of Earth's weather, though Bavaria's Clone Arrangers were able
to provide sufficient relief for New York that it was able to cobble
itself back together . . . in time to welcome a falling chunk of rock
the size of Long Island that turned the whole area into a giant, smoking
crater. Such is life.
The Discordians, declaring Jake Day, made Stonehenge Weird. Inspired,
Cthulhu turned it Peaceful as well, painting it pink and then (adding
injury to insult) inflicted an outbreak of Giant Kudzu upon that
parliament of stones like England has never seen. It was saved by the
Harmonica Virgins . . . in time to welcome a falling chunk of rock the
size of Long Island that turned the whole area into a giant, smoking
crater. Such is life.
Ronald Reagan started his car one morning, only to have it explode out from
underneath him. Luckily for Bavaria, a passing Clone Arranger intern
caught his head as it fell from the sky, sealed it up in a jar and
plugged it in. His wife, Nancy, was saved from two consecutive Hit and
Run attacks by her more-than-able Bavarian-supplied Bodyguard. Ollie
North wasn't so lucky; his destruction at the hands of the FBI was
simple and irrevocable. But Bjorne was beyond the mundane trivialities of
Assassination -- he became Immortal!
New World Orders stymied group takeovers by doubling Resistance, reducing
the power of Government and Straight groups. But other annoyances
plagued us as well. More Giant Kudzu. More Meteors. More Giant Kudzu.
EVEN MORE Giant Kudzu. We'll be eating Giant Kudzu sandwiches for a
week. ("What's for lunch, Scott?" "Erm, Giant Kudzu . . . soup?" "Doh!")
It was a long game with good decks and good players -- and real cards,
finally. It gave Scott several good ideas on how to handle tournament
play, and the first draft of our offical tournament rules should be
posted to the net in a few weeks.
T minus three days and counting 'till you can find it in a store near you.
Unfortunately, a distributor in Georgia has already made the mistake of
selling INWO to stores before its release
date. Though all the copies that snuck out have been returned to the
warehouse, let me be the first Steve Jackson Games employee to
officially deny the existance of Giant Kudzu creeping towards Atlanta .
. .
-- Derek Pearcy (dpearcy@io.com)
Dec. 11, 1994
Over on the IO side, Cary Camden has been working on a script that will
automatically generate a Web home page for any user. I got to beta-test
it . . . and now I have a home page. Check it out! The URL is
http://sj.sjgames.com/. In a couple of days I'll
stick a picture in there.
Have I mentioned recently how truly neat I think the Web is? I
know . . . kid with a new toy. But this may be the "killer app" for
the Internet. It will make the net truly useful to enough people,
and interesting to enough more, to pull it off the gosh-wow
pages of slick magazines, and into a lot of daily lives. I hope.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 9, 1994
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Maybe it was the cold front that swept through Austin last night,
bringing the first real signs of winter we've seen yet. Maybe it was the
Tree of Lights erected in Zilker Park. Then again, maybe it was the
shipment of INWO
Starter Sets and Booster Packs that
ground the day's work to a halt around eleven. Steve played Santa in the
shipping department, handing out cases of complimentary employee
copies, while the rest of us showered each other with torn shrinkwrap and
danced little jigs. Piles of torn Booster Pack wrappers gathered in the
corners of our offices, and deck-building ensued.
Next Monday night will see an inter-office game of deception and intrigue.
No, it's not another product planning meeting, it's the first company-wide
game of INWO with real cards! We're all pretty
jazzed about it. Jim McCoy probably has the most cards; he opened three
Booster Pack POPs and three Starter Set POPs -- a grand total of 2,280
cards. Yow. Check out the Daily Illuminator three days from now for the
results.
In other news, Jeff Koke is putting the finishing touches on
GURPS Psionics, and it looks great. Thanks
to Jeff, and the interior artist, Dan Smith, it ranks with the
best-looking books we've ever done, many of which were also Koke/Smith
collaborations. It goes to the printer Monday, and ships at the end of
January.
One more thing -- after the card game went away, we decided to make some
t-shirts to commemorate the occasion. Today we got the TEAM
INWO shirts, and everyone who played a part in producing the
game will get one. Makes it easier to spot the guilty when the revolution
comes. And for our customers, Andy is finding out what it would cost to
make up a shirt for each Illuminati group, bearing the
logos that appear on the cards. We'll keep you posted.
T-minus even fewer days and counting 'till you'll have cards in your
hands. Since we've insisted that distributors not sell the game until
December 16th, some have arranged to open their
doors at a minute after midnight, starting the INWO
craze as early as possible. Be there or . . . well, I guess you're square
either way, standing in the cold at midnight, waiting for cards. It's not
like it's the new REM or something. But at least you'll be with friends.
-- Derek Pearcy
Dec. 8, 1994
We post-mortemed Principia
Discordia today -- which is to say, a group of us (Steve, Andrew
and myself, this time) sat around in Steve's office with copies of the
book, flipping through it page by page and pointing out its flaws. A
post-mortem is something we like to do for every project, but if it's
either something we don't feel is going to be reprinted Real Soon, or
something we feel we already learned our lessons from, we've been known
to let them slide. But there we were, pens in hand, ready to attack the
cold corpses of PD before us.
There is an inherent problem in trying to post-mortem a book that
purposefully exhibits anti-social tendencies -- what's messed up, and
what's the way it "should be"? Most of the book, we decided, is the way
it should be. It is, after all, a book about chaos. Some of the pages
needed straightening, though it would have been Discordian of us to pick
some pages at random for the printer to unstraighten, and the mental note
was made to replace the ads in the back before the book's reprinted.
Which will be soon. Right now, Principia Discordia is
sold out so, we're planning for it to ship in May. Also, for those of
you who wish we hadn't left St. Gulik (or the Sacred Chao or whatever)
out of the Limited Edition, there may even be an offer for a unique
INWO card inside. (Hey, it wouldn't be true to the
spirit of the day if I didn't mention the card game somewhere. It's
all we can talk about around here. Just try to get a word in edgewise about
angels.)
-- Derek Pearcy
Dec. 7, 1994
"Hey," said Dana, our National Sales Manager,
walking into the end of the Creative Staff meeting. "If we don't get some
help labeling these envelopes, they're not going out today."
Which was
bad news, seeing as how much of the rest of the day had geared up towards
getting the 3,500 envelopes full of Illuminati: New World
Order cards out to retail stores, timed to arrive before the
actual game. Andrew Hartsock, in a great print buying frenzy, had some
specially printed envelopes (soon dubbed "INWOlopes" by Steve) made up --
and if you can talk your local retailer out of one, the INWOlopes may very
well be collector's items soon.
So the last part of the day consisted
of a group of people upstairs, stuffing cards (and a cover letter) in the
INWOlopes, Dana sealing them up in Direct Mail, with the rest of us on the
floor in Editorial frantically sticking labels on (to INWOlopes and each
other). A fine time was had by all.
Scott started his first edit pass
for GURPS Places of Mystery, which he claims is very,
very cool. Check out the playtest files in
/usr/files/Gaming/SJG_Playtest/GURPS/Places_Of_Mystery. Pyramid,
and Scott in particular, received high praise this month from
Dragon Magazine in its review of the adventure gaming magazine
market. During the aforementioned INWOlope stuffing, Dana took some time
to do a dramatic reading for those less-fortunate of us who don't get
their own personal copy of Dragon. And, once again, a fine time was
had by all.
-- Derek Pearcy
Dec. 6, 1994
Jeff whacked himself on the forehead today and made the observation that, what
with all these pretty cards sitting around, we could probably get a game
of INWO going! He and I assembled our decks, and around
4:00pm the battle began.
It was a classic duel, the Bavarian
Illuminati versus the Gnomes of Zurich. The Gnomes' Suicide Squad
plundered Bavaria's Hidden City, but ended up being turned into so much gooey
redness by Thor's Hammer; Japan and Hawaii were assaulted by unseasonable
weather leaving Japan devastated for the remainder of the game; control
of the Pentagon flipped twice, Bavaria lamented the lack of action
tokens, Zurich cursed the existance of duplicate Midas Mills, the Earth
shook . . . and the Gnomes, even in the face of Bavaria's might, pulled
out a victory. We almost spent more time looking at the cards than
actually playing with them.
Our shipping department received 50,000
cards today for our mass mailing to distributors, retailers and
customers. Before the end of the week, tens of thousands of
INWO cards will by in the hands of the Pentagon-less
Post Office and on their way to someplace near you. T-minus
11 days 'till it hits distributors, and counting.
-- Derek Pearcy
P.S. We shot some footage of the Very First INWO Game
With Real Cards, and tomorrow I'll web some in. So come back!
Dec. 5, 1994
Brenda's in Michigan now, and Booster Pack
packaging is proceeding apace under her small, iron fist. We're still on
schedule.
And as an aside from all our INWO
ramblings, the bluelines for Pyramid Magazine #11 came in today.
FYI: Bluelines are the proofs a printer produces (using blueprint
technology, thus the name) of a book before it goes to print. With minor
alterations, Andrew packaged everything up and sent them back. We're
expecting the finished magazine in our hot little hands before
Christmas.
-- Derek Pearcy
Dec. 4, 1994
This evening Brenda Hurst gets on that big silver
bird and flies to Michigan to supervise final collation of the
INWO Booster Packs and the drop-ship to distributors.
Everything still seems to be on schedule.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 2, 1994
A new toy today - and one desperately needed. We bought a modern,
programmable, plain-paper fax, to replace the Old Faithful desktop
model that had been here so long we'd worn the numbers off the buttons.
It will be very, very good not to have to struggle with replacing fax
paper rolls, or with making copies of that evil curly fax paper, or
with calling people to say "Err, your fax didn't come out . . .
And no more will Dana or Suzanne have to sit at the hall table, re-faxing
the same thing to 70 or 80 different distributors over and over and
over again. (Yes, we have had a fax-modem for a long time, but the
thing had problems of its own. You don't want to know.)
Plain paper faxes actually save paper, too - and the bond that we are
using in the new fax is recyclable, which works out better all the way around.
-- Steve Jackson
Dec. 1, 1994
As you can see, we've moved the old columns into a separate area, so
the accumulated text won't fill up your buffer every time you try to
read the Illuminator.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .
It looks as though yesterday's INWO adventure won't
even push our ship date back. We might hear differently tomorrow, but
it looks all right today. And Dana had a very happy afternoon, sending
all here distributors the "Here's how much you're about to owe us!"
faxes.
And my signed print of Zeleznik's "Galvanik" painting came back
from the framers. This is the one that - some day - will be on the
cover of Necrovore. Cyborg skeletons riding
cyborg-skeleton dragons in black space . . . great stuff. It will
look really good on the wall. When we have walls again.
-- Steve Jackson