Intro
In this episode I speak with Onslaught Six. He's currently crowdfunding the community magazine Ratcatchers, which features articles from multiple people in the Draw Steel community. We do talk about the magazine, the permissive license they're publishing under, but we start off with the space cowboy RPG he designed, how to find the right game for the right play group, and the OSR megadungeon he recently published, Ruins of Castle Gygar.
Oh, and by the way, before we start. I promised an interview with Hannah Rose this month, but because of scheduling I've moved it to next month.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon: Welcome to Goblin Points, Onslaught Six.
Onslaught Six: I am happy to be here.
Jon: Tell us a bit about yourself and also how you came into the MCDM slash Matt Colville community or sphere.
Onslaught Six: So, I am Onslaught Six. I am a thirty something game designer and failed industrial musician. I am the head honcho of Tidal Wave Games, which is a front to rob the tabletop RPG community of money to give to my friends.
Jon: Fantastic. I know you mostly from the MCDM Discord server and I've seen you put out homebrew and you also run Tidal Wave Games, but how did you end up in MCDM’s sphere or Matt Colville's sphere probably?
Onslaught Six: So, I will give the abridged version of how I got to DND. Basically, my father owned a game for the original Nintendo called Wizardry, which I actually have a manual for here. I keep it up here as inspiration.
Jon: Wow.
Onslaught Six: He had Wizardry 2, and it's basically a first-person, old-school dungeon crawler. It’s very similar to Nethack, and I was obsessed with this game because of its music and its vibe and all that. And about ten years later, when I was like like ten or eleven in the early 2000s I discovered that Wizardry was actually a computer version of this thing called a pen-and-paper RPG called Dungeons and Dragons and so I immediately became interested in trying to do that and I was like not anywhere that there was any gaming store at all. I live in rural Pennsylvania. I still do and it's better now than it used to be, but it used to be you could not find a Dungeons and Dragons product within fifty miles. it was impossible, and even if I could I was an eleven-year-old, I didn’t have any money and the third edition books that had just come out were like 35 dollars each.
Jon: Right, right.
And you needed three of them to run the whole game and my parents were not gonna dump 100 dollars on a hobby that the lonely kid who didn’t have any friends couldn’t engage with. Because I actually brought the Player’s Handbook one time at a Barnes & Noble. I was like, “The Dungeons & Dragons book?” And they were like, “Yeah, but do you have anyone to play that with other than your brother?” And I was like, “No.” And they were like, “Then you probably shouldn’t get it.” Like they didn’t tell me that they wouldn’t buy it for me but they did like, “You probably shouldn't get that, you should get something that you can engage with on your own” and I was like “Ok”, and that was sort of it until I briefly played a 3.5 game with some friends in the early 2010s but around 2018 I had gotten married and putting on a wedding is a big project and so after the wedding I was looking for a new project.
Jon: Ah.
Onslaught Six: I was like, well, I am done with this. And so my wife and I went to MAGFest, the music and gaming festival, which is a big video game convention that's in Washington, D.C. We used to go every year. We stopped going right around the pandemic for unrelated reasons, it just got too expensive and kind of a pain in the ass to go.
Onslaught Six: I still love all those people there. Anyway, when we went to one of the last MAGFests that we went to, I was like, “We should buy dice and start playing Dungeons and Dragons. This table down here has dice, we should just pick out some dice,” and she was like, “Is that expensive?” and I’m like, “No, they're like 10 bucks,” and so we each picked out a set. And then we went home, and like a month went by, and I went to my one friend. I always end up sitting next to the kids playing Magic: The Gathering. This happened to me in high school too, and it was happening at work, at my job, and I realized that I was once again in the position of being the guy who didn’t play Magic: The Gathering sitting next to the Magic: The Gathering kids. And I said, this can’t happen again to me. We need to find a hobby that I can engage with, and I was like, “You guys ever play Dungeons and Dragons?” and they were like, “I used to play 3.5 and I've always been interested,” and I was like, “Well, the starter set is like 20 bucks on Amazon, I can just buy that and we can play it,” and that basically was the launch of our campaign.
Jon: Nice.
Onslaught Six: And so maybe six months in, I was a player in this game. I was like, “I don’t know how to DM. You've played the game before, my good friend Francis, you be the DM.” And after about six months, I was like no offense to my friend Francis, I was like, “I think I can do this, and maybe do it a little bit better. How hard could it be? Francis is doing it.” He’ll laugh when he hears that. And so I immediately go online and I'm like, “How to DM, how do I DM Dungeons and Dragons?” and you know. This was like late 2018, which is like peak Matt Colville is the guy that you go to to learn how to DM. That is like right when that was like, every Reddit thread was “Oh, look at this playlist, Running the Game, go listen to this guy, he’ll tell you exactly what to do.” And I did. And Francis had to stop playing for a couple months to deal with some family stuff, and I was like, “Well, I guess I’m the guy now.”
Jon: Yea.
Onslaught Six: Right, and I immediately picked up Against the Cult of the Reptile Gods and started running it in 5e.
Jon: Wow.
Jon: And that was the beginning of a campaign that is technically still running today.
Jon: Wow, well that's impressive, running for them. One campaign for that many years. Mine never last that long.
Onslaught Six: We take a lot of breaks.
Jon: Oh, ok, ok.
Onslaught Six: And alternate things. Cause after a while, Francis came back and I was like, “Hey, I’m running right now, I’m in the middle of it. You can be a player for a while, I got to play in yours, you can play in mine.” And then you know a few months went by, and he was like, “When can I go back to my game? When can we go back to Barovia?”
Jon: Yea.
Onslaught Six: And I was like, “Ahh, here’s a good stopping place in like two or three weeks.” “Ok, great.” Then we did that, and then after that, that was when I declared the rule at that table. I said, “If you keep coming here, sooner or later you have to run.”
Jon: Oh, nice.
Onslaught Six: “Cause Francis ran and I ran, so Eric, you're going to have to run, and Andy, you're going to have to run, and my wife, you're all going to have to run sooner or later.” And they've all done it, so.
Jon: Wow, do they all keep running, or did they just do the once and figure out, “This is not for me”?
Onslaught Six: Well by that time we had sort of figured out that the best way for our game to run is in arcs.
Jon: Ok, yea.
Jon: I have longer arcs because everyone sort of agrees that I'm the best DM and I have lots of ideas and things that I want to do. Most of them are like “I have like one idea, what if we went in the desert and fought a dude in a big pyramid” Ok, that's like one arc that can last you like six or eight weeks.
Onslaught Six: Yea.
Onslaught Six: And then after that he's like, Ok I don’t want to do anything for a year and a half. Great, no problem this guy will run his Star Wars game for a while. I'll do this, we'll go back to the Doom Vault with Francis.
Jon: So it's multiple games too then, not just DnD all the time.
Onslaught Six: Yeah, well, over time we started rotating in other systems because, you know, my one friend’s a big Star Wars fan, and he’s like, “I found out there's a Star Wars roleplaying game,” and I went, “There’s been a Star Wars roleplaying game since there was Star Wars, bro, like since 1986. I have the West End Game’s books if you want to read them.”
Jon: Wow, ok. So at some point you end up starting Tidal Wave Games. I think 2021, if my research is correct.
Onslaught Six: Ah, yeah, that would be it.
Jon: Yeah, so what was the spark that made you want to start a company? An initiative? I don’t know what you would call it.
Onslaught Six: So, I think this year I have to legally declare it a company for tax reasons. Uh, cause I got hit with those 1099s last year.
Jon: Ok, this is American tax law, it goes way over my head.
Onslaught Six: Yeah, so last year I made more than 5,000 dollars, and so all of Kickstarter sent a thing to the IRS and a thing to me that is like, “Hey, this guy made more than 5,000 dollars, you better tax him,” and if I don’t do that, then I’m in trouble. And I don’t even get to keep that, which I’m sure we’ll get into.
So what happened is, right before I took over for Francis in my home game, I have some distant friends who live like two hours away, who I’ve been friends with since childhood. We go over there and we have some drinks and have fun and play card games and board games. And so one day they were like, “Hey, you do Dungeons and Dragons. I heard you play Dungeons and Dragons now,” and I was like, “Yeah, I’m having a lot of fun playing it. I could run it for you guys if you want.” I figured this could be like, we would go over there once every two or three months and play a short little game and everything would be hunky-dory. And after the second session, things really went off the rails in a bad way. It's a long story. There's a room in Lost Mine of Phandelver, which I shouldn't have been running that adventure for that group of people, it was not a good idea, because this is a lesson I learned, and I will put a pin in this and try to come back to it.
Basically, what had happened is, there’s a room where there are three bugbears, and they're playing football with a goblin.
Jon: Right, yes.
Onslaught Six: And you're supposed to feel bad for the goblin and attack the bugbears. Well, this guy who’s playing an elf paladin says, “I run up to the bugbears and I high-five them,” and I’m like, “You what?” He says, “I run in there and high-five them. Yeah!” And I’m like, “Ok, why are you doing that?” And he goes, “Oh, I’m racist against goblins.” And I’m just sorta like, “Ok, there's a lot to unpack here, and this isn’t the time to unpack it.” And it just went even worse from there. And also, they’d been attacked by the bandits who were hanging out in the town earlier, and I was like, “Ok, everyone roll initiative.” And one of my friends had said to my wife, “Are we fighting right now?” and my wife was like, “Yeah, duh.” And so she thought that my wife was mad at her and they were fighting, she didn’t understand the player–character separation thing.
Jon: Ahh ok.
I either failed to explain that. Another thing happened, they had gotten attacked by goblins on the street at one time, and this was her first combat ever, and she goes, “I wanna ask the goblin why they’re attacking us.” I, in character as the goblin, just say, “What do you think?” and she goes, “I don’t know, I’ve never played this game before!”
Onslaught Six: So that failed, and I was like, “Ok, well, one thing, I think the overhead of the game is too much,” because I handed her this deck of spell cards cause she was playing a druid. And you know, I brought the map and the minis and did all the fancy, you know, ’cause I wanted this to be big. I painted all the character minis for everyone and done all that.
Jon: Wow.
I’m like, “Ok, let’s diagnose the problems here. 5e might not be right for these guys.”
And I’ve long been aware that there are other editions of the game and other systems. But also, maybe fantasy isn’t the thing, maybe this girl isn’t very familiar with the tropes of fantasy. And the other guy, who was a paladin, thought it was cool to be racist against goblins, so I don’t think he has a handle on this either.
There’s got to be something else. And I’m like, “What does everybody like?” Well, we’re all Millennials, what about Cowboy Bebop? We all watch Cowboy Bebop. We know that: you go to space, you shoot bad guys, you take them in, you get paid. Great, perfect idea.
In a weekend, I had the first draft of our first game, See You, Space Cowboy.
Jon: Ah yeah, because I have seen this on Tidal Wave Game’s website, See You, Space Cowboy.
Onslaught Six: Yes, that's basically our flagship game.
Jon: Right, I didn’t read too much into the game, just kinda like the blurb on the page. It looks like you use different dice for the different stats or characteristics. It kind of reminded me of Savage Worlds.
Onslaught Six: Yes, so I took that from Savage Worlds. So there was a time period in the mid-2000s where I was devouring illegally acquired PDFs of games that I could not play with anybody because I was a lonely kid. It was 2005, so online talking to people face-to-face was not you know a viable thing yet. So I basically was reading these PDFs of these games and fantasizing about how cool it would be to play them someday with somebody. So I knew about the unique dice for your stats from Savage Worlds. Ghostbusters was actually my first roleplaying game, the West End Games Ghostbusters game, because we had found it at a yard sale. We were big board game yard sale house, anytime we went to a yard sale or flea market and there were board games, that was like “Let's spend 20 bucks right now and get 13 boardgames”
Jon: Yea.
Onslaught Six: And one day we’re like “And this Ghostbusters one, let’s take that.” And we get it home, and a few weeks go by, and we forget about it. Then one day we’re like, “Oh, we’re bored, it’s 1998, what can we do? Let’s play that Ghostbusters game.” And we open it up, and it’s just books and cards and a whole bunch of d6s, and we’re like, “Mom, can you help us with this?” And she’s like, “Yeah, let me look at the thing. And she goes “ What is this?” And she’s reading through it and she goes, “This is stupid, we’re not going to do this.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” And she goes, “Well, every player needs to read a book this big, and then one of the players needs to read another book this big, and there’s no board, you just talk about it. I don’t understand this, I don’t know what this is.”
Once I had done the digging through Wizardry and realized how it was an offshoot of D&D, one day I’m in the board game closet and I’m like, “A tabletop roleplaying game, this Ghostbusters game is a Dungeons & Dragons.” And that’s when I open it up and that was like that.
So one of the things in Ghostbusters is, everybody has their traits, which are like your stats, but then they have what’s called a talent, which you get to make up. So like Egon might have a six Brains, but then he’s like an expert in Parapsychology, which gives him an extra two dice. And I ripped that right off. I was like, “What if you just define what you’re better at for everything? You get to make it up.” Cause I thought that was cool.
So what are some of the things? So Muscle talents in See You, Space Cowboy? Pro Wrestling, Olympic Swimming, Yeet, Kick Open a Door, Kicking, Get These Hands. Stuff like that, right? You can make them as goofy or usable as you want to.
Jon: According to the site, you published also multiple supplements to See You, Space Cowboy.
Onslaught Six: Yea, it's a whole line.
Jon: Yeah, so you got that going, and then you’ve also recently released Ruins of Castle Gygar, but that’s an OSR thing, correct?
Onslaught Six: Yes, it's a megadungeon.
Jon: Right, yea ok. How mega is the dungeon. [Laughs]
Onslaught Six: It’s 12 levels and its 366 rooms.
Jon: Ok, that's pretty big. [Laughs]
Onslaught Six: Now, if you’re wondering about those numbers and why they’re very specific, that is how many months there are and how many days of the year, plus or minus a few. Because this was a project that started at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023. Started by Sean McCoy, who is the lead designer of Mothership, called Dungeon23. And the idea was, every day of the year, you get a notebook or a journal, and every day you write one room of your megadungeon.
Jon: Yes, I’ve heard about this.
Onslaught Six: I am one of the guys who finished it.
Jon: Ok, so that ended up being this megadungeon then?
Onslaught Six: Yes, and then I spent a year doing other stuff and also just typing it all up and doing all the maps, and getting it edited.
Jon: Oh, ok, cool.
Onslaught Six: And I took 2024 off from that. What happened was, I’d done it for the entire year in one project, this whole thing was one megadungeon. And so after that, I was sort of burned out on the idea of doing the thing every day. And I felt really proud of myself because I accomplished doing the goal. I was like, “Ok, I can do that. Now I don’t have to do that, so I can take a while off.” I tried to do another one where I was like, “I’m going to do a whole city over the next year,” and a month in I was like, “I don’t have enough ideas to do a city for a whole year,” so that got put away.
But then at the beginning of this year, I was like, well I kinda missed doing it, because I did it at my lunch break at work. I would have my notebook with me, and the first five minutes of my workday I would put my food in the microwave or whatever I had to do, and then I would take the notebook out and I would do today’s room before I was allowed to eat. And having a consistent time and day of the week that I did it, I only worked five days a week, so I would sometimes do two, or I would put it off for another week. If I was closer or had a weekend off or something like that, I would be like, “Hey, I’m at the end of the month, and the end of the month is three days away, what if this level only has 28 rooms? It's my dungeon.”
And then for level 12, I made it twice as big because I’m a masochist. But I missed doing it, and so at the beginning of this year I was like, “Well, let me just do it again. I don’t have to do a whole dungeon, what if I did something a little bit smaller?” And I was like, “I know, I’ll make one little area of a big dungeon a week, and that’ll be half the size. It’ll be like 115 rooms or something like that, and it’ll be like 16 areas,” which is what it came out to be. And that’s going to launch in August. That’s Monster Condo.
Jon: Oh, ok, nice. Are you doing a crowdfunder for that, or?
Onslaught Six: Yeah, going to have a Kickstarter in August.
Jon: Ah, nice.
Onslaught Six: I think it’ll be the sixth Kickstarter and seventh crowdfunder although since 2021.
Jon: Wow, that’s an active schedule.
Onslaught Six: Yeah, it keeps ramping up. Cause I used to do one a year, and then last year I did two, and I was like, “That’s a lot,” and then it just keeps going.
Jon: Wow.
Onslaught Six: I think if everything goes to plan, we might do four this year.
Jon: Wow, ok, well that is certainly ramping up. Wow.
Onslaught Six: Yeah.
Jon: I’m just wondering, why OSR basically for the mega-dungeon.
Onslaught Six: Well, initially I was sort of at the same time as doing that, gotta remember this is like two years ago, I was like, “Well, I was getting burnt out on the See You, Space Cowboy stuff, because there’s only so much you can kind of do with it in my mind.” The anime’s 26 episodes and a movie, and they made like 13 of a live-action show that I thought was pretty ok! I ran the first Kickstarter in February of 2021 for Zinequest, that took a whole year to get that book done. And then I ran the you know, city setting the next time, the cybernetics catalogue the next year, the adventure anthology the next year. That’s four years of my life spent on this thing. It didn’t take them that long to make the show it’s based on! They didn’t work on the show that much, right.
So I was kind of like, how can I do something else with this? Cause the core system is fun, and you can kind of hack it if you completely change the equipment list and adjust a few things. So I was sort of working on this like dark, dungeon-crawly fantasy hack of it, it was really low magic and had all this weird, idiosyncratic stuff in it. And then I was like nine months in, and I just asked a question to a bunch of people I respected. I was like, “If I had a huge megadungeon, do you think it would sell better if it was my own weird fantasy heartbreaker system, or if it was just Old-School Essentials?” And they were like, “If your goal is to make money, you should just make it Old-School Essentials. You can always do the weird version later when it’s like a guarantor thing or whatever. But if you really want to do that, just do Old-School Essentials.”
And I respected that they were honest with me about that. And I had been thinking about it anyway, cause I had hit a lot of roadblocks with the system. The system wasn’t going to be done before the dungeon was, I knew that. And I was like, “Well, I could do the dungeon, then put it off until the system is ready, then it becomes this whole problem.” And I was like, “If I just do the OSR thing, it will be fine.” That and I also feel like you can run any OSR product in 5e if you’re willing. You can sell it to 5e people. ’Cause here’s the thing: 2d6 orcs is 2d6 orcs wherever you are. Right?
Jon: [Laughs] Sure, fair
Onslaught Six: Right, at least in my opinion, you know. You could run it in Draw Steel, it would be a weird slog but you could do it.
Jon: [Laughs] Well speaking of Draw Steel, cause at some point I assume that you caught wind of Draw Steel and became interested in that game.
Onslaught Six: I was like reading the Patreon post when they were like “Today we tried rolling 2d6.”
Jon: From the very beginning then.
Onslaught Six: Yea, I was like, “Dude they flew out James Introcaso and Hannah Rose to the place to try playing out the game” I was like showing Francis at work, I was like. “Look they have pictures of them on the minis, there doing it wow”
Jon: So, what initially kind of got you hooked on Draw Steel? What was it that made you want to play Draw Steel?
Onslaught Six: I mean, I have been sick of 5e for a while, right? For a lot of the same reasons everyone else is, not necessarily some of the most idiosyncratic bits of Draw Steel that depart from it, but definitely like-. as I sort of work on my own OSR thing, just because I like to tinker. Atop of everything else, I just like to have ideas about game design and mess around. One of the things that I wrote is no interrupts. And what that means is, one of the things that upsets me about playing 5e, especially at this level with all the cruft that the system has. me, I really value speed. And when I play 5e, I have everyone’s AC written down on an index card on my screen, and I don’t ever declare, “Ok, this goblin is going to attack you,” and then I roll, then I see how much damage he did, and you know. I just go, “The goblin hits you for six damage,” like right there. And so the player goes, “Um, actually no he didn’t, cause I have this thing,” or, “I do this other thing,” or, “Actually I can confer disadvantage because I am over here.” And it’s like. “I already told you, he hit you for six damage. I’m done. I did my turn.”
That happens a lot at my game. It comes up. And it started to wear on me, among other problems. Like, you know, everyone has their own particular set of like six or eight spells that they hate at their table. And then the thing is those six or eight spells are different for every single DM who runs 5e. Cause you hear some people complain about spells and you’re like, “Nobody ever takes that spell in my game.” Mike Shea at Sly Flourish is constantly complaining about shield. His players multiclass to get shield, they do all this stuff. One guy has ever taken shield at my table, and he has never cast it. It’s not a problem for me. But a guy got ahold of a cube of force one time, and I had to invent a guy who wanted to trade him a more powerful magical item in exchange for his cube of force, to get it away from him, cause it solved every encounter.
Jon: Wow, ok. Yeah, true. I’ve also only had one player take the shield spell, and they mostly forgot to use it. So they had it in their spell list constantly, but they completely forgot that it was a reaction, so they never ended up using it.
Onslaught Six: Yeah. Shield “It gives me a shield, right? Then I have a shield for like +2? That’s how that works, right?” Sure, buddy. Yeah. Takes a whole action too. The more they posted about the game, the more interested I became. Because not just that it fixed problems that they had or I had but the original ideas that they had just really inspired me.
Jon: I really like the idea that they’ve had all throughout the design process, that they want to come by ideas honestly. They might end up in the same place.
Onslaught Six: They may reinvent the wheel, but at least they reinvent it.
Jon: Yeah.
Onslaught Six: It was my idea to reinvent!
Jon: Because in the end, they ended up with the main action, the kind of side action, and movement as the three things you do on your turn, which is very similar to 5e, or kind of similar to Pathfinder 2’s three-action system but they came there by their own process.
Onslaught Six: Dude, I really liked the earlier one where movement was a maneuver.
Jon: Oh, right, yes.
Onslaught Six: I loved that.
Jon: It is interesting.
Onslaught Six: I get why they changed it, but I would have totally been ok with, like, “No, you get to do two cool things and you can’t move.”
Jon: You ended up being interested in Draw Steel. If I remember correctly, you also have done a bit of like homebrew for Draw Steel already.
Onslaught Six: I was briefly working on, I wanted to do a Magic User, and that’s what I wanted to call it, I wanted to call it The Magic-User, and I wanted to really lean into like the weird 1974 wizard aspect of it. Like, my initial list of powers was the original OD&D spell list, and I was going to be like, “No, he’s got Alter Self and these specific ones, and we’ll try and build them out and see how that work.” And one thing, the system wasn’t really done yet, so I think we only had the first three levels or something like that for everything.
Jon: Oh right, ok.
Onslaught Six: And so I was like, “You know that’s not going to work.” And then the other thing was that I wasn’t playing the game. I still haven’t really played the game very much because that very first playtest packet that went out with the big tower with the hobgoblins, I think.
Jon: Yes.
Onslaught Six: I ran that for my players and they were like, “Wow that really cool” and then the second one that came out maybe like six months later or something like that, I brought that to them and at the end I was like “So what do you guys think” and they were like “yea that was fun, it was fun don’t get me wrong. But like we had to relearn the game all over again cause they changed so much stuff are they going to keep doing that?” and I was like, “yea they're going to keep working on it for like another year” and they were like “Can you just bring this when they ship you the book, and then we’ll play it.” and I was like “That's completely fair, you guys don’t want to have to deal with that.” That's been it. I also was going to at one point convert over this big hexcrawl adventure that I have a lot of material for because I've been running it. And I just, that got away from me. it is what happened, because I have so much other stuff going on. Cause one thing that i’ve learned about myself that i’m deeply neurodivergent, i have ADHD, i’m somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I don’t have good enough insurance to figure it out or get medication. And so what I've learned about my process, is that I have a long term attention span of about ten days.
Jon: Ok.
Onslaught Six: Like, I was first noticing that it was, like, a week and a half I would be able to work on one thing before something else shiny would catch me. I was like, “I’m just going to, like, keep track of this for, like, a month, going to write every day what I work on in my little Discord to myself that I have,” and I noticed, I’m like, “It’s ten days. I have an attention span of ten days.” So what I do is I have tons of projects going. Right now I have Ratcatcher going on, I’ve got Heartbeat High School, which is my solo dating sim journaling game that funded on Kickstarter earlier this year that we're going to deliver next year. I’ve got Monster Condo, which is the next OSR thing. I’ve got the next See You, Space Cowboy module that, at the beginning of the year, swore up and down I wasn’t going to do. That lasted till April before I had an idea.
So that's, like, four, five projects that I'm just, like, juggling around with ideas for. And ten days, is in the grand scheme of things, not that long of a time. So if ten days go by where I’m sort of messing around with a thing that’s not going to come to fruition in a long time, that’s ok, whatever. Unless I have a huge deadline coming up, which I can push through. Because I had to do that for the end of Castle Gygar, where, like, for a month straight I had to just be like, “I have to work on Castle Gygar. I know this one thing is more interesting to me right now, but I have to actually also be an adult and, you know, do the thing.”
Because I work a normal job. I work overnights at one of the largest grocery store retailers in the world. And what that instills in you is, “Ok, you just have to get this done today.” It’s like this East Coast work ethic thing where it’s like you’ve got to get up, and you’ve got to go to work, and your feet are going to hurt, and it’s going to suck, and you’re going to be exhausted, but you’ve got to get it done, because that's how you survive.
Jon: Right.
Onslaught Six: And so, yea, I can push through, I'm an adult. But for the most part, if I have a large swath of time with no real deadlines, like, I got Ratcatchers Magazine 99% laid out, all it needs is changes for edits and balance stuff.
Jon: Right.
Onslaught Six: But that's not gonna affect where the layout is very much, maybe a line or two here or there. That's already done, way ahead schedule right? Like I have had projects that don’t do that until months after the Crowdfunder but I wanted this one to be really tight and have it almost done.
Jon: And speaking of Ratcatcher, which is partly why we're here, and you graciously let me have a preview of the magazine that you're going to crowdfund. But by the time the episode is out, the crowdfunder will be live, I think.
Onslaught Six: Yes, it will be ongoing. I think we’ll be 5 days in, and it’s running for 14.
Jon: Ok, yea, I’m very intrigued by the design, or like the style of the magazine. Because it gave me, I think, it’s like an 80s vibe, which I really, really liked.
Onslaught Six: Yeah.
Jon: What was the inspiration behind that kind of direction for the design?
Onslaught Six: Well, so, the first thing I want to do is address the name. Because I heard this come up on stream the other day, where Colville was like, “That’s not a Orden thing, that’s my novels.” And I was like, my philosophy is two things: number one, someone was gonna get to it; it might as well be me.
Jon: Fair enough.
Onslaught Six: It was inevitable that someone would pull that off the shelf and decide to use it, might as well be me. And associating it with my kind of idea, I imagine it as lofi, which harkens back to that 70s and 80s feel that you got, which is also very OSR-inspired. But I wanted it to be exclusively black and white. Probably most of the art is going to end up being line art.
Jon: Ooh.
Onslaught Six: From what I've seen, I would imagine it being- and also we don’t have a lot of money to pay for full color, right. That keeps it cheaper, I want it to be cheap and accessible. I want you, when you get the magazine to feel like you can throw it in your bag and if it gets ruined it’s fine, I’ll go get another one. It's going to be like 15 bucks.
Jon: Right, ok, yea.
Onslaught Six: Right, and also, I want you to be able to print the PDF at home if you're in a position where maybe that's not good for you, if you're in a foreign country and you're concerned about shipping or whatever. Or you're just like, “Uhh, maybe I just want two of the things from this issue of Ratcatchers, so I’ll just print those out.” So the Draw Steel books, I assume, are going to be like full 8 1/2 by 11. Ratcatchers is going to be a zine, that in half, right?
Jon: Right, ok.
Onslaught Six: So you can print a full two-page spread on one piece of paper, right. Sideways.
Jon: Yea, Nice.
Onslaught Six: So you’ll be able to just, like, keep it. You can do that and turn it sideways and put it in your Draw Steel book and just bring it with you, or your DM notes folder or whatever, and sorta keep it that way. So that introduces a lot of weird constraints, because we're dealing with page sizes that are much smaller than the Draw Steel pages. We also don’t have the final layout. Everything that I'm doing is based off what we have from the backer PDFs and stuff, and also Twitter previews and, like, screencaps from streams and stuff like that. And I’m like, “Oh, it’s going to have a line here, I should put the line there.” It’s that, and I wanted it to be lofi, down and dirty. Matt describes Draw Steel as a AAA RPG. Right, it's a AAA product, it is the highest budget, highest whatever. We're like a mod you get on Steam for that game, right?
Jon: Ok.
Onslaught Six: Right, maybe the textures are a little janky, and maybe everything won’t work 100%. We did our best, we're under a lot of constraints as well. But we want to get you something. We want it to be like really cutting edge, we want it to be right now, it’s for now.
Because the thing is, I imagine our audience is people who have been playing with the Patreon packets, which don’t have the layout and are, like, just plain text on white background. So we're sort of emulating that in a way that is just like, you’re an adult, you can make up the difference, right?
Jon: The design and layout that you have, at least for the things that I’ve seen, I really, really like it. The text is like, very clear. The headers are really clear.
Onslaught Six: See, that's all me too, so this is just an ego stroke.
Jon: Well, in that case, fantastic work. I really enjoyed just looking through it, just as a piece of art.
Onslaught Six: So when I funded See You, Space Cowboy, originally I was going to have a friend of mine who had layout experience and has, as we internally call it, The Adobe. Right, you have The Adobe, you could do the layout. And then their life made it so they couldn’t do that layout. I waited way too long. I was like, “I could get this book done in six months if my friend lays it out.” Well, six months came and went, and it ended up taking a year.
Nobody was upset, and we delivered it just fine, which is great for me that nobody got mad at me, was upset, and decided that they were never going to buy anything from me again. So I had to do it, and Affinity Publisher, which is one of my recommendations actually, had a 50% off sale. And this was version 1, so it was even cheaper than it is now. I think I paid, like, 25 bucks.
Jon: Oh, wow. Ok.
Onslaught Six: And I was like, “I’ll just see if I can learn this thing.” And so I used to be in a band, it was really more of a solo project, it wasn’t a band. And I was in a band with my wife called Reapers; we were a Mass Effect-themed synthwave band. All the stuff is still up there, by the way you can buy it if you want. I still think I have some CDs laying around. But I did all the layout and graphic design for that in Paintshop Pro 5 from 1998.
Jon: Wow.
Onslaught Six: So I have the eyes for it, I just didn’t have the tools. And so, as soon as I had Affinity Publisher, I was like, all these problems that I had laying out text, where text would not be right, text would be too long to fit on the number of lines, and I would have to do all this janky, weird stuff to move it. In Affinity, it’s just, you do it. It has the tools to successfully do that, and within, like, a couple of months, I had the first draft of See You, Space Cowboys done.
And that I just learned how to do it. I looked at how other books were laid out that I liked and thought had good layout, and I emulated that. And over time, you know, I’ve been doing it five years now, something like that. I just learned the program, and where all the things that I need to do are, and how to use the baseline grid and line things to the grid, and how to make text fit where you need it to fit without looking completely stupid, and do all the fancy tricks.
Jon: I was looking at the contributor list basically to this issue, and it’s, I mean, it’s a lot of names that I recognize from the MCDM community.
Onslaught Six: Yea, I know, I don’t know what I did. That’s insane. I’m like Chris Hopper, who's working on the real book, is contributing to this; Pesto, who also I believe worked on the real book, and would, you know, be a get even if he wasn’t.
Jon: Yea. Yea. Yea.
Onslaught Six: He's right there.
Jon: I also recognize Sam McGurran’s name, who’s also done both homebrew and, I also think, some video stuff. Oh yea, and I see you also got Dojikaan doing some artwork, which I’ve had on a previous episode of Goblin Points.
Onslaught Six: There’s a picture of a mimic that he drew that is bonkers.
Jon: He does fantastic work. I’m a big fan of his artwork. So, the magazine you’re going to do a physical run of it in addition to a PDF, is that correct?
Onslaught Six: Yes, yes, the goal was to always have physical copies as in-stock as possible.
Jon: Oh, wow.
Onslaught Six: Given the limitation of what not, this first run is going to be limited to 200 copies for a lot of reasons. Castle Gygar ended up being 350 copies, and trying to get that out earlier this year, towards the back half I had to break down and have a bunch of people come over to my house and help me.
Jon: Ok, yea.
Onslaught Six: Just cause the stress of doing that, I kinda didn’t expect to do that many. Now that I’ve done it, I can mentally prepare for that and give myself more time to do it too. Because the thing is, I had said, “Ok, everything’s going to be shipped by this date,” and then, because there was so much of it, I literally could not keep up with that and had to recruit some folks. So I’m limiting it, the first run is only 200. The other reason for that is I don’t know if this is going to be a success.
Jon: Wow, ok, yea.
Onslaught Six: Plain and simple. And so constraining it to 200 gives us a lot of flexibility with that. It tells me basically exactly the upper cap for how much this can make, right? Now obviously PDF sales are going to be on top of that, but PDF, in my experience, PDF sales are always lower than physical sales.
Jon: Ok
Onslaught Six: At least for my products, and so I can assume that will be true, especially because I price the two things competitively. The PDF for this is going to be- it’s either eight or ten dollars. I might have bumped it to ten and been like, “Screw ’em, they’ll pay ten,” but it might be eight. I’m pretty sure it’s eight. I think I went back on that. And the physical will be 15. So, like, when the physical is only that much more, there's almost no reason not to get it, just ’cause, you know, I’m already putting in my credit card information and doing the thing. It’s under 20 dollars, right? That is a sweet spot price point that I think will get a lot of people on board to check it out.
And yea, I’m limited that first one too, 200. Now, if, and hopefully when, it’s a success, I can, you know, get that reprinted because the printing is actually one of the cheapest things in the production pipeline. When I make my budgets, the cost for printing is about as much as I pay my art director on See You, Space Cowboy.
Jon: Huh.
Onslaught Six: I actually have an art director, it’s crazy. Which, again, they do a lot of really, really great work for me and make the books 1,000 times better. But they are my art director, so twice a year I can give them a couple hundred bucks.
Jon: I also wanted to mention, which was a very welcome surprise, I should say. When I first see the cover art, which is also great and kind of sets the tone immediately, then I opened to the next page and it goes Ratcatcher Magazine Creator License 1.0, and what I'm reading is what I assume is an adapted license from the MCDM creators license.
Onslaught Six: Yes, we actually just wanted to use the Draw Steel creator license, but then Pesto was like, “I don’t think you can.” I think the literal terms of it specify that it's MCDM. You can’t release something under the Draw Steel creator license because you don’t own Draw Steel. And I was like, “Yeah, that’s a good point.” and I went back and forth on whether I would use Creative Commons or not, and I figured this was the easiest way to do it.
So basically, you'll be able to redistribute all the text that’s in Ratcatcher freely, however you'd like, as long as you include that little bit of text, just two lines that say some materials are from Ratcatcher Magazine, et cetera., et cetera.
Jon: Basically, why?
Onslaught Six: Here's the thing, I would make it public domain if I thought I could get away with it. All of my books, I wrote a sort of manifesto on my blog two years ago called The Public Domain Statement. I believe that modern copyright law in western society is a sham. I believe that corporations have put a stronghold on art over the last 100 years that is choking the lifeblood out of Americans and western society and our ability to freely create. When copyright law was first established in America, it was seven years after publication date.
Jon: Right, yea.
Onslaught Six: Right, you would put something out, and you’d have seven years to monetize that before everybody else could go, “Ok, it’s mine now, I can do whatever I want.” And, you know, through various whatnots they’ve extended that out now to lifetime of the author plus 100 years or something ridiculous.
Jon: Yea, yea.
Onslaught Six: It's nonsense. I grew up with Spider-Man and Venom. Why can’t I make my own Spider-Man and Venom comic book? The way that someone who in the, you know, 1920s grew up with, I don’t know, a character from…
Jon: Frankenstein?
Onslaught Six: Frankenstein, well, Frankenstein was its own thing, but in the ’50s nobody owned Frankenstein; it passed into the public domain. So they were like, let’s remake Frankenstein in the ’50s. Well, let’s do it in the ’70s, the Hammer horror movies. We’ll remake Dracula, you know. Steven Spielberg could make his own Peter Pan movie in the 1990s, right? Why can’t I make a Spider-Man movie?
Jon: Right.
Onslaught Six: I'm not allowed because Disney say so?
Jon: Basically, yea.
Onslaught Six: Like, like that sucks. That sucks. And that’s the reality of the law that we live in. You have to play the hand that your dealt, but all of the See you, Space Cowboy line and all that literally says on the front page, well not the front page but the front credits page. It says all texts within this document will become public domain on January 1st 203x, ten years from the original date of publication.
Jon: Huh.
Onslaught Six: So literally public domain ten years from now. For all of my personal projects, Ratcatcher won’t be that because we aren’t allowed to do that. But basically I don't want this stuff to just die here.
Onslaught Six: Right.
Onslaught Six: I want it to live on. I call Ratcatcher a community zine because I don’t have an article in it. I did the layout, and I did all the cat wrangling, and I’m fronting the money, but I didn’t write my own so I couldn’t be like, “Here’s my little thing I’m going to sneak in there.” I came from the community, I went to the community and I said, “Who’s got stuff that they can put in it?” And a whole bunch of hands went up and I went, “Great, let’s all get together and make something.”
I didn’t want their things to just be there because, number one, I could go under, this could all go crashing down. I could make a series of horrifying mistakes and a year from now there will be no more Ratcatcher magazines, there will also be no more me. I will be stuck working my dead-end job forever, because of a series of bad decisions I have made.
Right, and so I wanted the authors to be able to take their thing back in the most ethical and legal way possible. So I’m like, well, if you want to take your mimic article and expand it out and release the mimic for Draw Steel, you should be able to do that. I shouldn’t own this thing, I shouldn’t hold it hostage from you, the guy who did all the work, right?
So there’s that, and also other people are going to be like, “Boy, I need a mimic for my adventure, but I don’t have the time to design one, or I don’t know how to because I’m an adventure designer, not a monster designer.” And then I’d have to pay someone to do that and do all this stuff, and it’s just going to be a huge pain in the ass.
Wait, there’s a mimic in Ratcatcher. I hear Ratcatcher has a mimic. Oh, this is perfect. And they can just copy and paste the text, put it in their own layout, and boom, it lives on. And all they have to do is credit Ratcatcher Magazine.I probably should amend that license to say you have to credit the original authors. That’s a good idea. The other thing is it doesn't cover the art similar to the MCDM license, and the agreement I have with the artists is I don’t actually own the art either. They retain the rights to their art and can resell it.
Jon: Nice.
Onslaught Six: In whatever format they want. All of the art I assume will maybe end up as stock art that you can go and pay a couple bucks to get and put in your own thing. And that is really useful because just cause something is drawn for Draw Steel doesn't mean that it can’t be used for other RPG material right? That great mimic drawing that we were talking about can go in any fantasy d20 book. And so that’s gonna be a source of income for the artist and part of why i’m doing that is this initial run we don’t have a lot of money, cause I can only front so much. Like I took the profits from Castle Gygar and I reinvested back in my business, I don’t just take that money and run away. I pay myself the least of anyone out of my collaborator list. Right, For the first couple books I didn’t pay myself anything, I think I skimmed about 100 bucks off of shipping for the first See You Space Cowboy. Cause I was like “Shipping I think will be this much” and it turned out to only be this much, it was like 100 bucks. I’m like “That goes into my bank”.
Jon: Seems fair to be honest.
Onslaught Six: But so my point is, that's the other thing. I’m fronting a little bit of money, and I'm saying, “Hey, I can pay you guys this much, and if this fails to fund, that's what you're going to get at the end of the day.” But I think it will succeed to fund, cause I think our goal is pretty low, and anything we get above that goal, I'm going to redistribute to the contributors equally.
Jon: Nice, wow.
Onslaught Six: So that's the other thing, this being a success means that everyone who worked on it gets paid, not just me. Now, after the Crowdfunder, then I get to reap the PDF sales later on and any of the reprints of the other stuff. That's the nature. I’ve got to make that money back, that couple hundred bucks that I'm investing to begin with.
Jon: Sure, sure.
Onslaught Six: Cause I also presumably have to pay out for the next one, and that might not fund.
Jon: Right.
Onslaught Six: I hope it does. I think it will. I think we're on track to succeed, cause I think there's 90 followers right now or something crazy.
Jon: Wow, okay, that's impressive.
Onslaught Six: I think that might be more followers than Heartbeat Highschool. Sad for my anime girls.
Jon: And also, I think there's a pretty good track record in the Draw Steel community so far to be willing to spend money on people doing bigger projects.
Onslaught Six: Yes.
Jon: So, I’m hoping that continues on Ratcatcher because from what I’ve seen so far, including articles in the magazine, I really enjoyed it. And I’m really looking forward to seeing it laid out with the art.
Onslaught Six: Yea, I think with the art, it’s gonna look really good.
Jon: We’re nearing the end of our time, actually.
Onslaught Six: Yea, jeez.
Jon: This has flown by. But I always ask my guests to bring some recommendations, anything that you want people to be aware of or check out. So, what have you brought?
Onslaught Six: I have brought a collection of things: the original Wizardry games on the NES, check those out. The art is by a Japanese guy named Jun Suemi, which I’m probably mispronouncing. It haunted me; it still haunts me to this day. I actually bought an art book of that from Japan for like 50 dollars. Just because it’s this beautiful watercolor monster art that they transformed into NES sprites. It’s amazing.
I’m going to shout out my favorite band in the whole world, “You Bred Raptors?” This is a trio of musicians. It is an eight-string bass player, an electric cellist, and a drummer. I first met Pete, the bassist, when he was in a video game cover band called “This Place Is Haunted” in 2009 at Setsucon in State College, Pennsylvania. Anyone know what I’m talking about? I will laugh. But they have multiple albums; they have a YouTube channel. They used to play in the subways of New York City under a grant. They’re amazing. It’s all instrumental music, so you can just put it on and vibe if you need to.
Buy Affinity Publisher. It’s 70 dollars. It goes on sale like three times a year. just do it, just buy it. It’s 70 bucks. I know that’s a lot of money for some people; we’re all trying to buy Nintendo Switch 2’s right now, but do it. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent in tabletop gaming. I would use this just to lay out my own prep now.
Jon: Wow.
Onslaught Six: Like, I use it, I just have fun screwing around, and I make all my own character sheets now. Even for games I didn’t even make. The first thing anytime I want to game, I redesign the character sheet in Affinity Publisher. Just cause I like doing it, I like using the program.
Jon: Wow, no higher praise can be given, I think.
Onslaught Six: Yea. And the last thing, if anybody joins my Discord, which you can find a link to on tidalwavegames.com. In the public access channel I have a pinned post which is all the approved YouTube video essayists for all your very long YouTube needs. But I will shout out particularly Tim Rogers of Action Button, Hazel, and Cathode Ray Dude. Look those people up. Tim Rogers does multiple hour long reviews of video games. His Tokimeki Memorial review changed my life, and it may change yours. There’s a ten hour long Cyberpunk 2077 review on that channel. Hazel is like Tim Rogers but for old anime. She's amazing, and I love her. And Cathode Ray Dude just talks about old computers and weird tech stuff but like really obscure stuff. He's like, "Hey, I set up a 90s phone system in my office, check it out."
Jon: Nice. Thank you so much for coming on, it has been, I mean-
Onslaught Six: Anytime, let’s do this again in six months.
Jon: Well, I would happily do so. Time has flown by this whole hour. So, again, thank you so much for coming on, Onslaught Six.
Onslaught Six: Next time, I promise I’ll actually talk more about what’s in Ratcatcher.
Jon: Part of that is me; I was so entranced by your stories that I completely forgot.
Onslaught Six: I got ’em for days, dude.
Jon: Thank you so much for coming on. It was really great having you.
Onslaught Six: Stay gold.
Outro
Thank you so much to Onslaught Six for coming on. I'm really excited for Ratcatcher Magazine, especially after seeing the license and the philosophy behind making the magazine. If all goes to plan, there might even be a next issue in about six months' time. Fingers crossed.
Paying patrons can submit question for upcoming guests. Link to join can be found in the episode description.
If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on tips@goblinpoints.com.
Links to the MCDM Discord server, the subreddits for MCDM and Draw Steel, the YouTube channels of Matt and MCDM, the complete link section, and this script is in the show notes. It's also on goblinpoints.com.
Next episode is on the 5th. That'll be the news roundup for June. See you next time. Snakkes.