Black Gate

Ok, could Kickstarter be any more popular than it is right now? I’m thinking no… I mean, if we were looking at a bell curve, beginning in 2009 with Kickstarter’s launch, the top of the bell should be right here, right now.

As I was moving through Facebook yesterday, a place where until November 2011 I’d never heard or seen a mention of Kickstarter, I counted 9 different threads among sites I frequent either pushing a new Kickstarter or asking questions about the platform.

It’s kind of crazy, and yet when the gravy train is running, anyone out there would be a fool not to jump on board, or so all the property flippers from 2006 would like you to believe.

Still, I digress, as this post is about something other than the proliferation of the platform.

This fine Saturday, one in which I incredibly DON’T have a Kickstarter to peddle, I’m going to talk a bit about getting ready for a Kickstarter.

As I mentioned in my last post on the subject, a video is now an even greater key to a Kickstarter’s success, and the days of one-on-one testimonials are dying faster than the people of Portland in the TV show Grimm.

But before I reiterate my discussion on videos from two weeks ago, I really want to take you into the world of Kickstarters, fulfillment, and what it takes to not only get one going, but also how to wrap it up and get it out the door after all the ‘crazy’ ends. This process will take a couple of weeks, so bear with me, but it still begins today with the question I got earlier this week.

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I can’t tell you for sure the first time I saw a succubus, but I’d lay money that it was in the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. The image there, done by David C. Sutherland III, has been the subject of much debate over the years [Supposedly it’s based on this picture of Sheila Mullen, a Playboy Playmate from May 1977], but one thing no one can argue is whether or not it’s sexually inspiring to teenage boys. For that, the answer is an obvious YES!

This sexuality is certainly the key to making the succubus an Iconic Female, and there is little doubt that countless images of feral succubus abound in any fantasy setting worth its salt. For my own fantasy gaming succubus legends, I have a couple, but I suppose my most famous comes not from the succubus herself, but from a succubus’s torrid affair with a Drow wizard that produced an Alu-demon known only as Mithelvarn’s Daughter. This character inspired a deep affection for Alu-demons which first appeared in Monster Manual II and were drawn by Harry Quinn. That tome described them as the offspring of a mating between a succubi and a human, and that these progeny are always female. Cambions, for all you playing a copy of the home trivia game, are the product of a human female mating with a demon, and they are always male.

Still, other than D&D trivia, what do we really know about the succubus other than she’s inherently hot? Well, I did a bit of digging, and what do you know, I found that there is a reason, other than sexual attraction, for me to like a good old-fashioned succubus.

You see, as far as I can tell, Succubi are really old, like the dawn of history old. When you start reading society keywords like Mesopotamian or Babylonian, you know you are getting serious about a demon’s age. In those cultures, they had references to a dream-haunting demon named Lilitu, but it isn’t until the early Jewish faith breaks onto the scene that we find Lilith, the presumed first ‘modern’ succubus, mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud. Here, Adam, product of God that we know in the Christian Bible, takes Lilith as his first wife since she was created from the same earth as he. It isn’t until he breaks with Lilith because she refuses to become subservient to him that Eve is created from Adam’s rib, and therefore a part of man instead of his equal.

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You hear strange things sometimes in this business, rumblings, rumors, and empty promises, but I have to say one of the best of the past year was a possible FASA reunion for what would have been the company’s 30th Anniversary at GenCon this August.

I mean, can you imagine it? Bradstreet, Deitrick, Laubenstein, Nelson [all three of them], Aulisio, Berry, Marsh, Harris, MacDougall, Holloway, Elmore, and countless others all sitting around a booth with countless Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Star Trek, and Battletech memorabilia and artwork? I mean, even Jordan Weisman would probably show up so someone could write him a check for something.

It would have been a lofty enterprise, and I can’t imagine the line waiting for signatures at that station, or the books that would be held in the hands of the throngs of fans. I run the fan page on Facebook for both Laubenstein and Deitrick, so I know they were into the idea, but unfortunately it fell flat after initial interest in the idea came forward back in September 2011.

Still, thinking about all the incredible artwork these artists put out in their tenure made me grab down one of my absolute favorite FASA supplements, House Davion and the Federated Suns, for the Battletech RPG.

I did a post last year about John Wick and his creation of the ‘Way of’ books for 1st Edition L5R and stated that there was only one other collection of gaming supplements that could match them for incredible written content. Those, of course, were FASA’s House books, and as a historian I still get giddy about reading a thousand and eleven year alternate future.
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It’s been a very interesting two weeks since I posted up a little article on Saturday in my Kickstarter spot here on Black Gate. Usually, all my Kickstarter posts are met with a HUGE lack of readership or interest, most posting no more than two hundred reads, so I decided it wouldn’t be horribly impactful to post an article I titled The Pillaging of Kickstarter?

When I posted it at 12:01 AM on a Saturday morning, I had no idea that when I’d wake up the next day it would already be at over seven hundred reads. The article created a perfect firestorm of venom and vitriol spat in my general direction from every single soul who decided to comment on it, and let me assure you there were more than a couple.

My premise was that companies shouldn’t be on a grass roots movement crowd-funding platform like Kickstarter because it hurt smaller projects. That argument was flatly burned at the stake by all comers, but I was intrigued by the fact that no matter how villainous I seemed for saying what I did, there was no one with actual numbers to back their theory any more than I could back mine.

By Thursday that week my article had over two-thousand views, and some of my initial arguments had been refuted by inXile’s participation in a couple of things, first they were actually backing project with pledges on the platform, and second inXile CEO Brian Fargo had initiated a call for a program called Kicking it Forward in which 5% of total sales income from products produced on Kickstarter would be returned to the platform in the form of pledging.

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Yeah, so I saw John Carter, and like everyone else that I have heard saw it, I love the movie. In fact I was so taken by it that I decided I had to start a new thread in Art of the Genre, so appropriately the lovely and fierce Dejah Thoris will be the first icon in this series.

Now it’s both funny and sad to say this, but the marketing of the female lead in both science fiction and fantasy has been, and will ever be, the epitome of male chauvinistic. My wife loves nothing more than to rail against the infernal machine that is the business in which I’ve chosen to make my livelihood from [or lack thereof], but it’s hard to fight such a powerful Goliath.

So, I move through this art business as best I can, trying to navigate the turbulent waters between what is overtly offensive to women and acceptably sexy to all viewers. Since the business model, however, is geared toward young teenage boys, you can see how it’s difficult to try to sell anything other than sex.

Thus we find images of Dejah Thoris sprawling in half-naked glory all over the internet, and yet when I saw John Carter I could have stood up and cheered for Disney’s take on the showing of flesh in this particular film.

Dejah, as beautiful as she was, didn’t flaunt anything the men of the move didn’t as well, and I was twice as taken with that fact that although John Carter of course went barbarian bare-chested as any slave should, that red Martian warriors wore armor that fully exposed their midsections, no matter if they were male or female.

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