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As many of you have heard by now, Michael Bramnik, the Director of Evil Genius’ organized play program (E.G.O.), is leaving Evil Genius for other horizons. We’re going to greatly miss his expertise, vision, good humor, and puns (such puns!). However, Michael leaves us with a great program and app in place, a full season of terrific adventures already plotted out, and a wonderful community of eager volunteers and “Friendly Local Game Stores” (FLGSs), all of which are ready to carry out his vision and to make Everyday Heroes a world-wide gaming experience.
I’m Eric Nelson, Senior Editor for E.G.O., and I have been working with Michael behind the scenes at E.G.O. for a few months and, now that he has left, I have stepped into Michael’s role as the Director of E.G.O. enthusiastically. Fortunately, because Michael was doing the work of several people, both Producer Bryan CP Steele (Pacific Rim, Kong) and I are shouldering the duties together for now, which makes this transition easier. Bryan has graciously agreed to temporarily lead the creative side of the program while I take over operations. He will be working with the writers and artists to ensure that the amazing season of adventures that we have for you stays on track. For the time being, this will let me focus on both operations and growing this amazing organized play program until I am comfortable managing all of it.
Accordingly, my major task at the moment is to organize and coordinate our volunteers and stores, to establish clear lines of communication and operations, and to harness the enthusiastic support that we have received. The ground game for the E.G.O. program comprises the Evil Goons (who offer and run games), the FLGSs (which host E.G.O. events), and the Evil Minions (who help coordinate and facilitate the events for FLGSs and Goons). To support that ground game, I’m putting in place some state or regional “Assassins” who will work with the Goons, Minions, and stores in their areas to help them find what they need. The Assassins will also work with their respective “Lieutenants” (such as Jester and Klaus, who have taken on responsibility for the eastern and western U.S., respectively), and I will be working with them all to facilitate the entire enterprise.
So, now for a couple of exciting announcements
All Hands: We’re scheduling an all-hands meeting on our Discord channel on Thursday, February 8th at 6:00 p.m. Both Dave Scott, CEO of Evil Genius Games, and I will be there. This meeting will give you all a chance to meet me in person, and to ask any questions that you have about the program. The meeting will take place in the Evil Genius Discord Server in the E.G.O. Volunteers Meeting Room. If you’ve been accepted by the program, you should have access to the room. If you don’t have access, please reach out to me at ego@evilgeniusgaming with your Discord handle and I will add you.
Office Hours: I’m also announcing weekly office hours when I will be “hanging out” in the E.G.O. Meeting Room on Discord. You’re welcome to stop by and chat with me during these office hours. I will be there and available Tuesday and Friday 2:00-4:00 p.m. (PST), beginning Tuesday, February 13.
As we finish getting the crew fully on board, at their places, and the sails set, I want to thank all of you for your generous participation and support. We have a clear course charted ahead for wonderful adventures, and I am honored (and more than a little humbled) to be helping us all get there together. So, if I can borrow a line from JourneyQuest…Onward!
Eric Nelson
Organized Play Manager
Hello there, and welcome to another episode of E.G.O.-Maniac Mondays – the weekly series of blogs keeping you up to date on the Evil Genius Organized-Play (E.G.O.) program!
I am very pleased to confirm that all four of our initial E.G.O. adventures went up for sale on our website last week right on schedule thanks to our amazing team, who you can read about in last week’s blog. We also posted volunteer (Goons & Minions) information, our E.G.O. code of conduct, and our E.G.O. “GO” (Gameplay Options) which goes into detail about a lot of the things this week’s entry will cover. You can find links to all of these pages on our main Organized Play page on the Evil Genius Games website!
We know that our players come with different experiences from other organized play programs, ranging from The Camarilla back in the 1990s all the way to modern-day Pathfinder Society or Adventurers League; but some of you are just getting into this for the first time, and I’m sure some of you are wondering, “how does all of this work?”
Organized play is a way of having a permanent gaming group that you can find anywhere in the world our games are played. Instead of needing to find a party of 4-6 players to balance character ideas with, as well as a Game Master whose schedules always align with your whole group’s, E.G.O. lets you attend games on your own whenever you want. If you show up every single time, or only a couple of times a year; both are just fine! Because all games are published adventures, all you need to do is to find a game you want to play and a character that hasn’t played that specific one just yet (see “repeating adventures” in our Gameplay Options for more information). The GM takes care of the rest through the Everyday Heroes Dispatch web app!
Everyday Heroes Dispatch is a revolutionary new system that sets E.G.O. apart from other organized play groups. Instead of tracking experience and gold on paper, or asking GMs to report game information into central databases, our app does it all from your phone, tablet, or computer. For now, it only tracks character name, archetype, class, and how many Milestone Points (MP) you’ve earned, but in the future it will be able to do much more! By using Dispatch to sign-in for games, your GMs can send information to us about how your games go, award MP to your characters, and also tell us what decisions you make during play. This last point is vital, since this info will be used by our creative team and authors to shape the very game world you play in!
We hope to have a video tour/tutorial of the Dispatch app available in the near future – stay tuned!
As for the adventures themselves, we are extremely happy to have the following games available for all of you to play:
- E.G.O. Plot 01 – Seeking Redemption, by Michael Bramnik: An introduction to the world setting of Everyday Heroes and the REDEMPTION organization.
- E.G.O. Plot 02 – Moving Right Along, by Bryan C.P. Steele: A chance for your heroes to have a bit of fun with some street racing while working for REDEMPTION.
- E.G.O. Assignment 1-01: Meat: the Enemy, by Shan Wolf: The first true assignment for REDEMPTION, investigating reports of strange monsters cropping up all around the world!
- E.G.O. Assignment 1-02: A Heist-Minded Plot, by Alex Speidel: REDEMPTION asks the heroes to perform a daring museum heist in order to stop an evil organization from doing it first!
With the publication of our rules and initial adventures plus the launch of our Dispatch app, it’s been a busy week! For those of you who are just joining organized play for the first time, though, rest assured that it’s not nearly as complicated as it might look at first glance. Imagine that our Gameplay Options are just a simple rules supplement from a GM, guiding you through character creation and also what options you can use from which books – because that’s really what it is, for the most part!
Beyond that, if you haven’t joined our Discord server yet, please do so – we have an ever-growing population of players and Evil Minions who are always looking to talk about characters and games with anyone who wants to hang around with us.
If you’re already starting to play E.G.O. and have some fun stories and/or pictures from your events, please send them to [email protected] if you’d like to see them featured in a future blog! Happy gaming, and thank you for continuing to join your E.G.O.s to ours!
Hello there, and welcome to E.G.O.-Maniac Mondays!
This is the first in a weekly series of blogs keeping you up to date on the Evil Genius Organized-Play (E.G.O.) program, and all the fun things we have in store for our players and retailers! Stay tuned! the rules for E.G.O. character creation will be LIVE on our website soon!
While we originally planned to release two of our Plots and two Assignments on Wednesday, January 24th, we had a tiny technical error that needs to be cleaned up, which will result in one of the Assignment adventures coming out a day or so late. All of the others are slated to be out on time, ready for our Goons (GMs) to run with! Over the course of the next week, we’ll also begin onboarding our Evil Minions (volunteers) and getting them equipped with everything they need to help get our program off the ground.
Just like the best RPG sessions with a new team of Everyday Heroes, the best way to start something like this is with character introductions—and we do have some real great characters here who have poured a lot of time and energy into making E.G.O. a reality in an extremely short amount of time. Without these people, this program would not exist!
- Faith Elisabeth Lilley is our Chief Product Officer. She’s the brains behind our Everyday Heroes Dispatch app that is vital to running E.G.O., and also our tech products that will enhance your E.G.O. experiences in the future.
- Paul Timm is our Project Manager and Art Director; the glue that keeps us all together over here, and also one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet at a gaming table!
- Sigfried Trent and Chris “Goober” Ramsley are the designers of Everyday Heroes and have been absolutely amazing in making sure that E.G.O. has the rules and development support it needs to launch as its own entity.
- Charlotte Irrgang is our Graphic Designer, who takes all of the images, words, and resources we throw at our adventures and makes them look beautiful for our GMs and players to enjoy.
- Eric Nelson is the E.G.O. Editor, who helps ensure that the games that reach your table are as awesome as possible, linguistically speaking. Awen Rowan-Nelson proofreads, and tightens all of the bolts before things go out the door.
- Ivis K. Flanagan is our Convention Coordinator (who also pitches in to help develop some of our adventures from time to time), who will be making sure you have many opportunities to play E.G.O. Assignments, Plots, and convention Schemes at GaryCon, UK Games Expo, Origins, and more!
Finally, Matt Francella is the E.G.O. Cartographer, whose maps will be featured in all of our organized play adventures. Matt has a keen eye for detail, and even outside of E.G.O. games, you’re going to love using his maps for your games! If you want to pick up high-resolution copies of Matt’s maps from our E.G.O. adventures, head over to his website at https://www.mattsmaps.org/everyday-places/.
And for me—you can catch the “Introducing E.G.O.” blog or my recent Interview with Gaming Divination to hear me talk a bit more about myself and our program. Riding the proverbial whirlwind, I am the producer of the E.G.O. adventurers (wrangler of authors and stories) while also setting up the volunteer-side of things. I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more from me in the weeks ahead. If you really want to read more about me beyond the above links, you can find a list of my works in the RPG industry here: https://canisdirus.carrd.co/. If you need to reach me for anything related to the program, please send me an email at [email protected].
As we launch into the very first week of the Evil Genius Organized-Play program, we truly hope you have a great time with the adventures and systems we’ve set up for you to experience. Make sure to keep track of your best (and funniest) game stories, too—I want to hear all about them, and feature them in our future E.G.O.-Maniac Monday blogs!
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