Precinct Omega

Visions of the Future (literally... ish)

I have been sooooo sick.

Quite seriously, I have been about as sick as a person can be without requiring hospital admission.  This year's 'flu virus came and hit me with the sick-stick hard and repeatedly and brought along its best mate, bacterial chest infection, for good measure.  My lung capacity dropped to an estimated 30% normal.  I basically stopped sleeping for three days because my body knew I would drown in my own lung froth if I didn't stay conscious.  Oh, ...

Which narrative would you like to hear from next?

With the first two stories out, which narrative would you like to hear from next?  Back to Colyn Gryre and the Martians?  Do you want to know what happens next to Don Carter on Earth?  Or perhaps you'd like to see more of the enigmatic Skymaster Paiyou?

I have many more characters to introduce, though.  If you'd rather I move immediately to one of those, say the word!

Zero Dark: The Novel 1 - 2

Don Carter made his way through  the dense undergrowth with the patient care of a lifelong hunter - a proper one, who relied on his skills to survive, he reflected, not your rich-boygirl tourist hunters looking to impress their friends with their killer instincts who most often just chucked up on the floor at the sight of blood.

He paused often, listening and glancing upwards.  The monitor drones didn't tend to linger here, close to the city walls, but this was where they came...

Zero Dark Design Blog 4 - Allies

There's no limit to how many heroes you take in a game of Zero Dark, but I tend to find that 3-5 is the sweet spot.  Beyond that, and you'll find that some heroes just don't do much because it turns out you don't need their particular skills, and if you're playing co-op, there's a lot of downtime for those who aren't activating their particular hero.  It's a lot like an RPG.  To have a good game, you need an interesting party, but if the party is unwieldy the game tend...

First Artist - David Sondered

I'm delighted to have commissioned talented digital artist, David Sondered, to paint our front cover illustration.

David has a terrific CV in the gaming world and I've been a follower of and collaborator with him on other projects for over a decade.  Unfortunately, he's current recovering from an operation, so the finished work isn't going to be with us until mid-February.  Also, David doesn't come cheap and I am a firm believer in paying creative professionals a fair wage for...

Winner!

The winner of the first Monthly Mini Draw is...

STEFAN GREEN

Stefan wins a miniature of his choice costing no more than $10 and suitable for Zero Dark (I leave plenty of leeway in terms of what counts as "suitable") which I will paint to the very best of my ability and ship to him.

In the interests of full disclosure, Stefan is, actually, an IRL friend of mine.  He was generated entirely at random (I used a dice app) and I swear no shenanigans ...

Zero Dark Walkthrough 1 - Basic Play

I've popped this video onto YouTube, forpublic consumption.  Future videos will be on Vimeo to begin with, for patrons only to see.

Suffice to say that I am no video-making expert.  This is pretty basic and it still took me most of the day to make, so please bear with.  However, I think it covers the essentials pretty well.

Zero Dark Design Blog 3 - Putting Together a Team

We all love a good heist movie, don't we?  My favourite bit is the early chapter - usually done as a montage or series of short, choppy scenes with a unifying musical track - when the Boss puts his team together.  Whether it's Ocean's Eleven, Hogan's Heroes or Justice League, you get this sense of a diverse group of characters, each with their own particular strengths and weaknesses, who come together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.<...

Zero Dark: The Novel 1 - 1

'What do you think they're going to do with her?'

Colyn turned away from the window.  He had seen Lison coming up behind him, reflected in the thick duraglaze of the observation room's exterior wall.  She was already dressed for dinner in an elegant pink gown that drifted from hips to floor and moved languorously in the point-three gravity of the ship's passenger section.

It was the question on everyone's lips, right now.  It had been asked so many times Co...

New Backer Rewards!!

I feel like patrons backing at $5 and above really deserve something a bit more than the warm glow of satisfaction.  So I'm going to start a monthly raffle.

Patrons backing at $5 and above will be automatically included in the raffle, starting at the beginning of December.  The winning patron will be allowed to nominate a single miniature suitable for a hero, Boss or ally in a hard sci-fi or ultramodern setting, costing no more than £10 and I will paint it to my usual high pe...

Fiction!

As part of developing a consistent setting for Zero Dark, built upon the foundations of Horizon Wars, I've decided to start writing some regular fiction.  I'll try to keep it in manageable chunks of 3-4000 words, and expect to publish at least one new section per month, although it might be more frequent.

This isn't a novel.  Each chunk should stand pretty much on its own.  But they will be connected by a large cast of recurring characters.  Which c...

Beta v0.6 is here!

It's like Christmas came early or something!  But you all need to thank new patron, Stefan.

Stefan helped me with playtesting and proofreading an earlier version of the rules, so he already has a version not dissimilar to the one you all got last month.  So I thought, seeing as how we has not only been good enough to throw me some patronage and I am the first thing he has ever Patreoned (is that a word?  It's a word now) I thought I needed to pull out the stops a...

Quick Update (November)

Hi, folks! Quick update on the latest version of the beta:

So, I have a lovely thing called cubital tunnel syndrome (or carpal nerve entrapment). This means that spending long at the laptop is very painful (especially given that my day-job involves spending a lot of time on the laptop already!). I'm still working, but a little more slowly than planned. You will still have your updated beta by the end of the month.

The upside is that painting doesn't hurt at all, so I'm doing...

Mars concept

Martians are practical-minded survivors, mildly paranoid and obsessive about always having the right piece of equipment. Unfortunately, the higher gravity on Earth means they have had to scale back the amount of equipment they can carry compared to their typical load-out on Mars, and have even stripped back their customary heavy armour to something more manageable on the homeworld.

They still tend to be ludicrously over-equipped, by both Terran and Venusian standards.

Udated Beta is incoming

I'm just putting the final touches to the current beta document.  You should be able to get your hands on it in the next couple of weeks.

Initially, it won't be very printer friendly, because I want to show you the proposed page formatting and layout for the final, print verion.  But I will create a printer-friendly version, too.

What's changed?

Oh, wow.  See, this is a tricky one to answer because it's both "lots" and "not much".  It's "...

Venus concept

The planetary factions are highly diverse, so there's no restrictions on what mini represents what faction, but I thought you might like a preview of the briefing sketches in doing for an artist.

This first one represents Venus.

Venusian culture has gone off on a very different path to either Earth or Mars. Its people value aesthetic beauty and self-reliance, and have a body language that mystifies those not used to it. As a result, they don't value eye contact or facial express...

Fourth Faction?

So, guys, I've got Mars, Venus and the Terran Survivors as broad factions for the game who will all, in due course, get their own special rules as well as suggestions for miniatures that can represent them well.  Each of these is diverse in their own right (factions within factions as the leaders of the various worlds disagree over how to deal with the mysteries and challenges of the Fallen Earth), but I'd like to bring in a fourth faction and I'd love your feedback, dear patrons, on whi...

Custom Control Deck

One of my plans for Zero Dark that should be realized, because it's broadly "affordable", is a custom Control Deck.  Of course, to play, you only need any normal deck of 54 playing cards (and it's important to me that this should remain the case).  But I see a lot of value in giving players more options via a custom deck.

This concept would include:

1. Custom art.  As well as customized suit identifiers, each face card will be a unique piece of orig...

Back in the Saddle!

Over the Horizon is basically done, just as soon as I can persuade Wargame Vault's artificial intelligence to accept my manuscript (there's a thing with the bleed margin that I just can't seem to sort out, but I'm working on it).

That means it's all hands to Zero Dark and I'd love to hear if any of my patrons have made it to the tabletop with the game, yet, even just to try out the mechanics.  I want to try to record an example of play for you all, but I do need t...

A brief intermission

I'll be a bit quiet here for a couple of weeks. This is because I'm working on getting Over the Horizon laid out in InDesign for release ASAP, and I've just secured a deal to be the UK distributor for Strato Minis so I'm a little busy. But I have an update to the current beta ready to go at the start of November for you guys. Only question is what the formatting looks like by then.

What would you like to see next?

Once the rules are finalized by the end of December, I'll begin working on the supplements to expand on the core rules and bring new options and ideas to the game.  These will be exclusively available to patrons until I have enough material to publish an entirely new book (like Over the Horizon for Horizon Wars).

I've no shortage of ideas, but as patrons, you get a significant say in what comes next, so let me know your thoughts.

Example of Play 1

At the request of one of my awesome patrons, I put together a two-page example of play.  I have to warn you that, as the game's designer, what I do on the tabletop doesn't always reflect what it says in the version of the rules you may have in your hands at any given moment.  So if, for example, the behaviour of the Red Force is different, or the exact calculation one does to work out the target number for, say, cautious movement is a little off, just bear with me.

There are a...

Business Card template

As promised, here's the business card template to print your own business-card-sized team rosters and share them with your friends.

I also have a design made for Horizon Wars, so let me know if you'd like to get hold of it.

Zero Dark Team Roster Cards

A thing I've tried to do with every game I've ever written is to make it so you can fit your "army list" on the back of a business card.  It's not just a funky marketing tool that encourages people to actually keep your business cards and use them, it's also a good piece of mental discipline to ensure that I keep the game itself compact and accessible.

Some people think I dislike complex games.  Well, if you've already become a patron and downloaded the current beta manuscript...

Zero Dark - Aide Memoire 0.5

There's no denying that Zero Dark is a tricky game to get your head around at first glance.  So I put together this basic aide memoire.

Longer term, I plan to release a bespoke card deck for the game, with not only the standard 54-card deck, but also all of the robot programs and aide memoire cards for Bogey actions, EWOp Bogey actions, Bogey stats before and after domination and most of the rest of the info on this aide memoire, here.

If all goes to plan, I'll even produce a...

Zero Dark Beta 0.5

So, here we go: the latest beta of Zero Dark, a game that's been in development in one form or another since... well, since about 2010, I think, but it's been a serious project in its own right for the last two years.  Earlier beta versions are kicking around, but ignore them.  They're old and wrong and bad and every time I've played the game I've learned something new and made changes which made the game better.

The attached is, however, unfinished.  That means it has a ...

Lurching into a semblance of life!

My Patreon page - which previously had all the life-signs of a month-old corpse - has lurched into action now that I have a business model that actually makes sense.

With Zero Dark just a few months away from release, I'm fine-tuning the content and planning for the future and, by backing Precinct Omega for no more than the price of a cup of tea once a month (I'm not even asking for coffee!) you can be part of that conversation.

In fact, that's a really good way to think ...

December 2015 patron supported

Thank you so much for the support this month!

November 2015 patron supported

Thank you so much for the support this month!

October 2015 Patreon supported

Thank you so much for the support this month!