In this episode, Judd Karlman, writer of The Dictionary of Mu and my
guest on my first episode, was kind enough to interview me about my
game, Misspent Youth. Misspent Youth's tagline is "Teenage rebellion in a
fucked-up future" and is a game about friendship and standing up to
authority. It's coming out in ashcan form at Gen Con 2008 and it's the
ashcan edition that we talk about here. It was a pleasure to talk to Judd,
who is my oldest friend and someone I'm very glad to know. I'm grateful
to him for doing me the honor of allowing me to piggyback on his renown
for my self-aggrandizement.

This episode is 54.8 MB big and 59:45 long.

00:59: Jennifer Rodgers did the cover art for the game and Joshua A.C. Newman (writer of shock: social science fiction et al.) provided layout consultancy.
01:56: The Adobe website has a lot of good tutorials to learn the InDesign layout program.
02:11: I stole layout ideas from the seminal punk 'zine, Maximumrocknroll.
03:01: Tell me about the game
04:10: Clockwork Orange (film or book) meets Avatar: The Last Airbender meets Ocean's 11 (2001)
04:24: Why did you design it?
05:06: A problematic game of Cybergeneration at Dreamation 2006 helped birth MY
06:28: Covert Generation, a game somewhat similar to Misspent Youth, came out at Gen Con 06 and got me nervous!
07:49: Other designs, such as Obvious Monstrosities--the werewolf game--that arose from the process
09:43: The very first playtest, with Andrew Morris (designer of the free RPG Unistat), and the crappy version of the rules
11:00: Misspent Youth's system is a version of craps that is easier than the one that crackheads play
11:47: Who I stole from: My Life with Master, Dogs in the Vineyard, FATE, World of Darkness, Burning Wheel, The Shadow of Yesterday, and Cybergeneration
14:20: Judd, Joshua, Andrew, Tony Lower-Basch (designer of Capes), and I played in a seminal-for-me game of My Life with Master which Michael S. Miller (designer of With Great Power) GMed
15:00: What got dropped in the design
17:17: Joshua Roby's game, Full Light, Full Steam inspired some now-gone mechanics after I listened to an episode with him of Master Plan
18:50: carry: a game about war by Nathan Paoletta
20:32: Primetime Adventures
20:34: The hardest thing to fix
28:10: The most useful feedback
30:42: Epidiah Ravachol (designer of Dread) and Nathan helped me with a thorny design issue.
32:06: Mickey Shulz (of the Geek Girls Rule blog and podcast) ran the one game that was run without ever having played it with me and found helpful problems
34:27: The Ashcan Front
37:30: The editing process (Tom Mazorlig and Adam Dray)
40:52: Use of art in the book
46:25: The game is being printed by Publishers' Graphics.
49:31: How do you define success?
50:42: Nathan's game Annalise
52:55: What if you can't get to Gen Con? How do you get a copy?

Closing song is Letting You by Nine Inch Nails, from the freely-available album The Slip

Logo courtesy of Daniel Solis: http://danielsolis.com/