Thieves Can't

I think this was funnier to me last night, but that Zach nailed the art. I love it when he uses negative space in the backgrounds like this.

There might be some strangeness from the website in the next few days. I’m getting ready to push my staging site live, and when I do that, there will be a store, from which you’ll be able to buy our PDFs and comics – probably in “Pay What You Want” form for both, and where I’ll also be selling printed versions of both (the comic being the harder of the two because, yaknow, color.)

Part of Kickstarting the comic was always going to be “Get the comic into stores.” Part of what I have learned with comics is that:

1. Big publishers have zero interest in our project. To date, not a single publisher has responded to my query letters. That’s not unusual, and even though I find it annoying, it really is an industry standard to ignore propositions you’re not interested in, so please don’t send anyone mean tweets or whatever because of this.

2. Indie comic stores are generally interested in 1-2 copies, but have universally told me that they won’t buy those copies from me and that those copies are more likely to decay on a shelf than to sell.

2a. The caveat here is that if I can get the comic into a Diamond Comic Distributors’ catalogue, this changes, since customers can ask for the comic and it becomes easy to order.

2b. But Diamond Comic Distrubutors is among the people who ignored my queries. Again, please no mean tweets. I promise this is normal.

3. It’s just going to be easier to have a relationship with a printer and sell stuff on the site.

There is some back-end stuff I have been doing to make our site a place where our fans can buy our stuff without having to go through middlemen like the DMs Guild and Patreon (though we’ll still be on both), and that stuff is almost ready for human consumption. If you arrive on the site over the next few days and something doesn’t work right, please pop over to reddit.com/r/thievescant and let me know. It’s most likely something I’m working on or that will fix itself in short order, but I’d much rather hear about a problem I know about than not know about a problem.

Masterwork is with Lynn for editing, and with some testers for sanity checks. I’m pumped.

Let me tell you a bit about the system, which is the first part of my own RPG that is being sort of… grown out of 5e.

The 5e works right now, players pick their weapon from a list of somewhat limited options, and then usually stick with that weapon until such time as they find a magic version of it.

In Masterwork, there are three tiers of weapons, with each tier capable of dealing more damage and having various collected effects. The tiers should sound a bit familiar: simple, martial, and specialized. These represent how many properties (which we call Mechanics Tags) each weapon can have and the size of the damage die, with specialized weapons getting the best of both worlds.

Separate from Mechanics Tags are the weapon’s intrinsic Style Tag, which determines damage type and the stat used to attack and damage enemies. These most drastically affect gish classes, with kensai monks and hexblade warlocks getting the shorter end of the stick, so Masterwork is shipping with some special rules adjustments to help them out.

This tag system lets players and DMs build custom weapons that don’t exist in the PHB and that aren’t necessarily well-represented by the items that exist. It also allows players to create objectives for their equipment as a form of character progression, and gives them a way of quickly expressing their desires to crafter NPCs should they decide to commission a weapon.

This is necessarily a bit crunchier of a system for managing equipment than D&D 5e players are perhaps used to, so it’ll also come with some printable tools for helping players keep track of their equipment and what it does.