I'm still months away from putting pen to paper with Crucible, but I think about it a lot. Just this morning, I brainstormed some of the naming conventions for the setting, which is one of the ways I scour the dusty halls of my brain for big picture concepts. This is a process that's been ongoing since early in Spycraft 2.0 design, when Scott, Alex, and I started talking about developing toolkit settings for the game (the big picture thinking, not the naming conventions). In my experience, big picture thinking is one of the best ways to approach a new setting. Functionally, it lays the foundation first, or as Rob Vaux likes to say, it puts the horse before the cart. Practically, though, and at least in my case, it leads naturally to detail development. I start with the big stuff and start asking questions, trusting that the answers will lead me to the details. If anything, I have to focus half the time on staying big picture as long as possible. All of this is tangential to my point today, though, so I'll get back on track.

I had a few ideas about Crucible today. I jotted down probably twelve notes or so, and I may add another half dozen later. Of those, only 3-4 are stuff that I'm sure will go in the final product. I'll keep the rest, but they may wind up in something else. The reason this is noteworthy isn't the ideas themselves, but the fact that it proved to me once again why Crafty Games is cool. You see, when I worked at AEG, and as I've worked on various freelance projects in the industry, I've pegged the "average" development window for n RPG supplement at about six weeks. That's concept to completion. We're talking, "I have an idea" to "Look! A manuscript" in a month and a half. A core book might quadruple that. Maybe. Six months. For an entire game.

I haven't kept it a secret that Spycraft 2.0 took eight months from the start of active design to sending it off to the printers. We had the benefit of our first edition experience, and we'd collectively and independently been thinking about the new edition for some time, but that was all the design time we got as a team. Having built three full game lines from scratch and having partiicpated in several more, I'll go on record with this: anything short of a year for a new game isn't even remotely sane. But producing as you're supposed to isn't profitable, at least not if you're operating like a real company. When you've got salaries, insurance, rent, and other overhead to worry about you can't spend a year exclusively on anything. Still, I think the average crop of RPG products out there shows you what happens when you don't.

In Crafty Games, Scott, Alex, and I are trying something different. By the time I start writing Crucible, I will have been kicking it around for a good two years, one of them pretty actively. Farthest Star is similar and Ten Thousand Bullets has been in on-again, off-again development for almost five. The ability to, say, throw out the first 20-30% of your ideas to get warmed up? No amount of hard work can make up for that. Already I'm seeing a clearer picture of my little horror variant than I have with anything since SFA, and that product was a veritable zeitgeist of positive energy. We got really lucky there. I'd rather not have to with Crafty's new stuff. It's far more important ot give each product the room it needs to breathe a bit before it shouts. It's not going to save a book when someone doesn't like the genre or the setting and doesn't want the tools, but that person's not the market. The goal is to make the best possible products for the folks who are.

Back to the big picture...