Okay, back to the Adventure Generator for ETU. I’ve already discussed the Party and Research generators. Today’s remarks cover the Day Tripping generator. Day Tripping involves the team getting away from college by going into Pinebox, exploring Golan County or some similar day trip. Within a few hours drive of the university students could find adventure in Louisiana, East Texas, Austin, Houston, or Dallas. This could be a trip to the beach, to one of the many rivers or lakes, or simply exploring the woods of the Big Thicket.

The generator offers many possibilities and may lead to further generators to flesh out the event. Other sub generators include Love Interests, Special Items, Big Thicket/City adventures, and of course Special Events.

As always, the suit determines the disposition of the event, whether its dangerous, involves love interests or other things. Types of generated events range from attending a dance at the local VFW (Veteran’s of Foreign Wars) or swimming at the Lost Pond, to a trip to Pinebox Pawn for a special treat! (Evil Grin). If a Joker is drawn, expect an extra-special event or occurrence. These could be anything–a natural disaster, a fire, psychics, voodoo, or a creature encounter.

Last week I wrote about 2007, explaining where things went off track and how we pulled ourselves back up and ended the year with several positive accomplishments. Today I get to talk about what we see ahead for 2008. Actually, this is a little bit premature. Although I’ve served as 12 to Midnight’s president for a couple of years, our company is truly a group effort. Everyone contributes, and everyone has a say in the company’s direction. Our annual strategic meeting is January 12, and today is only January 7. Regardless, while the details may change I think the broad outline will remain the same.

The first title we’ll be releasing in 2008 will actually be under the Silven Crossroads banner. Our long-overdue fantasy+technology title, SteamWorks, is currently in layout. This title will not be making the crossover to the Savage Worlds system, but d20 System fans will find a lot to love with this book.

We are still writing ETU: Degrees of Horror and still taking suggestions for a better name. Other than SteamWorks, this book is our focus until the first draft is complete. Several chapters are already written, and in typical 12 to Midnight fashion I can tell you we’re over-delivering on content. ETU will easily have enough adventure hooks to run three campaigns without ever touching the plot points. ETU is being written for the Savage Worlds system. Whether it ever makes the jump to another system remains to be seen.

Once ETU has entered the editorial cycle, some of us will focus on other short-term projects. For instance, this year we will most likely release three new Pinebox titles: 12 Hours to Midnight (the 12 part serialized adventure), The Prodigal, and House on Dale Island.

Until we have our annual meeting, I don’t know our convention travel plans this year. I know Ed Wetterman will be at a Savage Game Day in Austin, TX on January 19, and some of us will be at AggieCon in March, but other than that we have not yet set a schedule. If anyone who runs a con would like someone from 12 to Midnight as a gaming guest, just contact us in the forums.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ll be transitioning to a new webhost toward the end of the month. This is a big upgrade for us. The new server has more than six times the storage capacity, runs newer versions of PHP and MySQL, and caters to e-commerce sites. That means our store, the Midnight Cellar, will be even faster than before. The store, the main site (which you’re reading right now), and the forums will all move to the new server. However, we’ll still be 12tomidnight.com. The move will undoubtedly result in some down-time, but we’ll do our best to keep it to a minimum and warn you in advance.

Regarding the store, we hope to build upon what we’ve learned last year and make the store even better. Right now we’re using Google Checkout for all our payment processing. We would greatly appreciate your feedback. How’s that working out for you? Are you avoiding purchasing from the store because other payment methods aren’t available? Did you have technical difficulties? By the end of 2008, we hope to also bring you a whole new selection of genre-related items. Rather than limit ourselves to downloadable RPGs, hopefully by mid-year you’ll also be able to check out hard-to-find game props, novels, movies, and music.

That’s a very brief overview of what you can expect this year from 12 to Midnight. I can’t begin to tell you how much your support and enthusiasm has meant to us. All of us have full time jobs outside the RPG industry. 12 to Midnight is a labor of love, and you’re the ones who make it enjoyable. Your e-mails, forum posts, reviews reassure us that we’re not just whistling in the dark. You keep bringing us light, and we’ll keep populating the shadows. Deal?

With the death of the old year and the birth of the new, we frequently find ourselves examining the year we just left behind and the months in front of us. As in previous years, I’d like to share with you my perspective on how 12 to Midnight fared in 2007, followed next week by a look ahead to 2008.

The year started off looking like it would be our brightest yet. We released our first fantasy adventure, Marsh of the Wild Things, and had several more titles written and merely awaiting their turn in the editorial cycle. However, these titles we put on the backburner because we had an even bigger project in the works–a 12-part serialized adventure by Ed Wetterman. We planned on following that up with several other adventures at a rate we had hitherto been unable to match. Unfortunately, we still can’t claim to have matched that schedule.

Yet, as I said, things started off well. For the last months of 2006 and the first several months of 2007 Ed was a writing machine. I mean it. While I can’t say he was tireless, he was certainly a real pro. Like a marathon runner, he pushed through the exhaustion and kept on going. You see, our goal was to release one new installment a week each week for June, July, and August. In late Spring, Ed completed all 12 installments–nearly 300 pages of material–and we began playtesting.

That is where things started going wrong. It became apparent that some of the middle episodes were confusing until put in the context of later episodes. That may not sound too terribly bad on paper, but in practice it meant that players felt frustrated and confused for three episodes until everything was explained in the fourth. Leaving players frustrated was not an acceptable outcome–even temporarily. After having worked at our full time day jobs then coming home and working another several hours every night for months on end, it was as if we’d come in sight of the marathon finish line only to have it moved another four miles. We were exhausted and crushed, and we just couldn’t keep up the momentum. 12 Hours to Midnight is an excellent adventure, but the rewriting of those three episodes was not something anyone could stomach. We released a new Pinebox adventure, The Beast Within, but for the most part we were all past burnt out. Work on other adventures mostly ground to a halt for several months while we recharged our batteries.

Part of that recharging involved traveling to Origins. For some of us (including myself), it was our first experience at a national gaming convention. I’m just a simple guy from Texas, and I gotta say Origins blew me away. I loved meeting so many online friends and making new ones. It was wonderful to put faces to names I’ve gotten to know over the last four years. I know that I can speak for all of us when I say that Origins did a lot for helping us get back on our feet. We left with great memories and renewed purpose. I’ll get to the renewed purpose part next week.

This fall and early winter were all about building up our momentum. First, we brought own two new members to the 12 to Midnight team. Neal Hyde joined as a writer/editor and was followed shortly thereafter by Brendan Quinn as webmaster. Brendan worked magic behind the scenes and brought our very own store online by the beginning of October, in time for our annual Halloween sale. This was one of the projects that we started at the beginning of the year but were just stretched too thinly to complete. Brendan really jumped in and exceeded our expectations. We also brokered an agreement with Silven Publishing to carry on their titles and the Silven brand after they closed shop. This has added more than two dozen titles, mostly fantasy, to our catalog. We released Ed’s Midnight Tales, two freebie adventures in a new series called Bites of Midnight, a freebie e-publishing guide, and launched a major charity initiative called the Midnight Charity Project. The year ended with a very busy month as many of these projects finally bubbled to the surface near-simultaneously.

 I think it is safe to say that 12 to Midnight has regained our momentum and the year 2008–the fifth year anniversary of our first release–will be our best year yet. Tune in on Monday to learn why.