I'm unsure about the title for A Need To Kill.

Here's the thing. The title used to be A Reason To Murder. This enabled me to phrase the relationships like this:

The relationship between Person X and Person Y was [INSERT RELATIONSHIP].
But it was worse than that, because [INSERT WORSENESS].
But even worse than that, [INSERT EVENWORSENESS].
But the full horror of the relationship is [INSERT HORROR]
...which gave Person X A Reason To Murder.

See? So the title of the game occurs on the relationship sheet, which is cute.

I'm worried about Inspector Chapel's Mystery Scenes in A Need To Kill.

Basically, they perform their function. They:

1. Give Inspector something to do, which is a bit different and special.
2. Provide a levelling device, so that it's not possible to completely walk over the other players: if you've got so much Influence the other players can't investigate you, the Inspector can.

However, there's an inevitability about them I don't like. It's very, very rare that one of the Inspector's Mystery scenes fails. Sure, the odds should be stacked against you, but not that much.

OK, so on day three at WarpCon we went through a playtest of Graham's A Need To Kill.

With time constraints we didn't play through the whole game blow-by-blow: we played a round of Act 1, a round of Act 2 and then a roll-off of the Denouement.

Overall the game is solid, and it creates a web of inter-related characters right out of a Christie novel. There have been some changes since the first playtest at RopeCon so it was interesting for Matt and me to see the differences.

I imagine there's a few games to playtest at Conception: I'd like to playtest A Need To Kill; Iain will have Stitch, I imagine; Andrew will have Six Bullets; Rich will have his extensive range of Umlaut supplements ("Umlaut Rockbook: Glam!").

How would you feel about informally designating one slot, each day, as a playtest slot? Perhaps the evening. We could decide that there'll generally be a playtest going on each evening: there's no obligation to keep the evening free, but we'd make an effort to ensure everything got playtested.

Talking to Iain over the weekend, I'm starting to doubt I have anything to sell at Dragonmeet.

Blackguard is coming together slowly and pleasingly and would be the major candidate to release. It looks great, which helps. However, it's coming together more slowly than I expected, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable releasing it as an ashcan.

A Need To Kill has had a couple of good playtests, but just hasn't been tested enough.

The improv book, Play Unsafe, will be ready, but I don't want my only product to be an improv book.

I'm fiddling around with covers. I quite like this. What do you think? It's a bit rough, of course.

A Need To Kill cover

Graham