Craig Mod has written a profoundly beautiful and informative essay, “Kickstartup,” about how—and why—he used Kickstarter to republish his book Art Space Tokyo after it had fallen out of print.

If you read nothing else this week, Craig’s essay deserves your time. He has achieved and effectively communicated what’s frankly profound insight about using Kickstarter not simply to fund some project, but to jumpstart larger, grander opportunities.

With Kickstarter, people are preordering your idea. Sure, they’re buying something tangible — a CD, a movie, a book, etc — but more than that, they’re pledging money because they believe in you, the creator. If you take the time to extrapolate beyond the obvious low-hanging goals, you can use this money to push the idea — the project — somewhere farther reaching than initially envisaged.

[…]

[Y]ou’re not just raising money, you’re also building a community of supporters through the fundraising process.

Why is this relevant at Gameplaywright? Because anyone paying any remote attention to the business of RPG publishing these days knows that our markets are small but devoted. These models of publishing are already taking off in tabletop gaming (e.g., Happy Birthday, Robot!). In many ways, the tabletop gaming business is a step ahead of traditional publishing in learning and applying these forward-thinking guerilla publishing lessons because our markets were always small. For us, it has been and remains a battle of necessity.

“Kickstartup” is both wisdom for game creator-publishers and a beautiful piece of writing, web design, and product promotion. And it’s inspirational, on top of all that:

My hope is this article helps at least fifty other creators accomplish something similar. Fifty creators achieving our meager level of success means unlocking over $1,000,000 in money to flow into creative and socially important projects. All the successful projects on Kickstarter are indisputable proof that this is possible.

Do read it, and expect more on this topic in the weeks to come.

Another week, another question from my tumblelog that I think is best served by hearing multiple voices sound off on the subject. I could sound off on this alone, but I know some of you have approaches that I haven’t thought of, so let’s hear them. This time, it’s a question of GM style and tactics, applicable to a wide variety of games:

How do you reward character development or revealing character history in a game?

// What’s your answer?

The nominees for the 2010 ENnie awards have been posted. These RPG-oriented awards do a good job of looking into some of the specific disciplines of RPG production (best writing, best production values) that more general hobby gaming awards like the Origins Awards just can’t address. Their award process, based on hard-working judges who’re elected themselves, is also a good one.

The ENies are awarded each year at GenCon. One of the ways that the ENnie staff raises money to support the awards is to auction off “Geek Dream Dates” with industry notables. As a GenCon Industry Insider Guest of Honor, yours truly will be up for auction this year. In addition to the good times of hanging out with my bad self during before and during the awards, I’m sweetening the pot with the promise of a game critique sometime in the coming year and a signed copy of Things We Think About Games. Fantasy Flight is also kicking in a copy of Horus Heresy. I’ll post more information about the auction when the ENnie people do.

Chris Sims has a post up today at Critical-Hits.com about how RPG designers and developers often use canon badly, inventing background and backstory for their games that’s pointlessly limiting, unfun, or worse. His section on how to do canon right—”Defining Differences”—dovetails nicely with Justin Achilli’s recent worldbuilding post about defining the core of what’s weird in your world and leaving the rest of it alone.

Chris’s piece is definitely worth your attention if you’re a developer or designer, and provides an interesting bit of publisher-level perspective to GMs and players as well.

Justin Achilli put up a great blog post yesterday—“Worldbuilding: Keep It Weird, Part Two”—about a 90/10 technique for spinning creative projects in a way that helps you hit both “accessible” and “intriguing,” which is always a bedevilingly shifty target.

The 90/10 rule states that when executing a given concept, 90 percent of that concept should be what your audience expects, and 10 percent should twist that expectation or provide a permutation that throws the situation for a loop.

Check it out.