Catalyst

Game Master Advice

With Catalyst getting ready for a second printing, we considered expanding the GM advice section. The subject is very nebulous and having a full-resource in the book would add a significant amount of text. While this may help some new game masters, it would be irrelevant to role players with any experience, people using campaign guides, or players with no interest leading a session themselves.

Rather than adding bulk to the book, we are going to add this section to the website. The content will be more Catalyst-specific than our ongoing role-playing advice blog. It will serve as a checklist for designing a campaign and some FAQs we've seen in our years playing Catalyst.

If there's any you would like to see or have answered, drop us a comment, tweet, message, or carrier pigeon note. Thanks.

--Alex

Back from the Tour

The CPG crew just wrapped up a couple crazy weeks of demoing Catalyst. Game stores across Washington and Oregon housed the "Cascadia militia" for an evening and let us sell our role-playing game. The public response was wonderful. Thanks to everyone who listened to our pitches and rolled some dice. We're always psyched to see people genuinely happy while playing Catalyst.

We'll probably do another tour soon and hit the places we missed last time (Bellingham, Olympia, Redmond, Vancouver). We've still got a second demo at Meeples Games on the 22nd. If you missed the first round, swing by. And if we missed your favorite game store, let us know. We'll go anywhere we can get an audience.

In the meantime, we're wrapping up the Catalyst stuff from the KS campaign, We just published "Fourth World", a backer-sponsored campaign set in Northern Arizona. Flagstaff is an amazing town and lends itself to an RPG shockingly well. Between the glorious terrain, railroads, Anasazi ruins, and Skydome (the best dueling arena), "Fourth World" takes full advantage of the high desert haven. Two more campaigns are being worked on now. Our conspiracy-influenced "Shadow Parliament" is going through playtesting and will likely be done within the month.

The player app is nearly ready for completion. I realize it's been on the precipice of completion for a while. Basically, when we didn't make our KS stretch goal to hire a developer, we made the decision to continue to make a complete app. This meant we have a part-time developer making a fleshed out, extremely robust and helpful app, instead of a bare-bones version.

Our next game, Drink!, should be ready for crowdfunding support by the end of summer. If you enjoy tasty beverages and want to help us playtest, contact CPG through Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments.

That's it, aside from a secret announcement pending some legal stuff. Thanks for the love Cascadia and beyond. 

--Alex