1/5/07

All right, time for an update. Since we last talked we finished the play test of adventure five and it went very well. All the post mortem notes so far have been good. It’s going to take a bit more work for the GM. One of the biggest issues is just the power of the party. By the time they reach the 5^th adventure, they’re quite powerful and can circumvent many of the encounters in the later half of the adventure. In fact there’s one subplot that has all these ups and downs. The characters managed to stop every moment that had a good feeling while allowing all the down moments. Made the subplot into something very different than written. It was a fascinating experiment, really.

On another front, I finished writing the third product and turned it into Josh, the editor. There’s a lot left to do, the maps alone will make me bleed from the eyes, but I feel good about it. I also finished a sequel to the short story Ulcer. We ran it through my writing group tonight and Josh approved if for publication. He approved the third product as well, but he hasn’t read the whole thing, so really he’s only approved half of it.

It’s been a while since I mentioned it, I think, so here’s how it works. I’m the publisher but I’m also the primary writer. That means that although I’m in charge of most everything, I can’t possibly approve my own work. So although Josh is technically below me in the company, nothing gets produced without his stamp of approval. You can’t let a man approve himself. That way lies madness.:)

So now I’m at that awkward, exhausted moment that comes right after I’ve finished a huge, difficult document. I have to hit the deadline list and clear the decks a bit, start the House Rule contest and pay artists. That sort of thing.

Speaking of artists, we’re in the middle a small art crisis. I put out my call for artists for product four and only one of the usual suspects is available. I’ve found a local artist I think is quite good, so that means we’ll HAVE a product, but I could use a third. There’s an Italian gentleman that approached me a while back. I think I’ll e-mail him and see if I can pay him via paypal. That would probably make the ocean between us not as big a deal.

So that’s where we are. The HERO version of the final document for product 3 has the longest approval period, so it has the highest priority. I’ll put it together this weekend and try to have it in Steve’s inbox by Monday. Then the RM and HARP versions. D20 will come last.

Oh! The d20 version will likely have a prestige class for Dwarven smiths. If anyone’s read one of my reviews of a d20 product, you’ve probably read my tirades against prestige classes. Josh thinks this is the first prestige class aimed at an NPC base class and not an adventuring class. Josh thinks I’m thumbing my nose at the d20 community. I’ll let history decide. I’ve told him it will definitely have a +10 max base attack bonus and +1 divine spellcasting per level. :)

That’s all for this week.

12/25/06

It’s time for a Dev journal. It’s Christmas, but I’m at work, so I think I’ll bang one out before I get a bout of carpal tunnel and have to ice my wrist.

We released Tuesday. The last product fell off the new releases page Wednesday evening. Luckily, my plan worked. We had enough sales from volunteers that we made it onto the Hot Sellers list. Sales are decent. What I really need now are reviews. I’ll probably put a call out after people have had a little time to finish celebrating Christmas. :)

RPGNow claims that the backlist is king, and I can see their point. The first couple days, most of my sales were of the second product. Friday and Saturday, I believe I sold more copies of the first product (and a lot more than I usually sell). So I think that what’s happening is people are seeing the Hot List link and clicking on it. Then they try to check for reviews on Product 2. There are none, but the first product averages something like 4.8 stars with two fairly glowing staff reviews. So they purchase Product 1.

During Product 1 sales fell off about now as people looked for reviews and didn’t find any. This time, they have something else to buy. I even sold an Ulcer. :)

So far every sale but one has been on RPGNow, despite my efforts to get people to buy from my site. I’ve stopped worrying about it. Let RPGNow have it’s pound of flesh. Hopefully, I’ll make more money this way with more hotlist visibility. I don’t think people have ever seen four products with almost the same name on the hotlist at once before. The curiosity has to be a factor. Anyway, the HERO people should start buying soon, and suspect they’ll go to my store.

I want to thank everyone for all the support. I’ve had some great comments and e-mails and I have to admit, I feed on it just a bit.

Alright, that’s enough for Christmas day. I’ve finished the Dwarf part of the Dwarf book. I’m on page 46 now and will probably finish the draft of the Orc section tonight (it’s smaller). I’m not sure it will get its full proofread done before I do Christmas morning stuff and o to bed, but if not, I’ll finish that Christmas night. That’s good because I think I’ll need to be home with all my books for the section on adventure sites in Uzarâg.

Merry Christmas!

12/17/06

I admit it, I’m an idiot.

I was planning on releasing this morning (Sunday) at 12:45 AM (that’s when the 60 days were up on the HERO approval). You’re supposed to set up your products on RPGNow, upload your files and give them 24 hours to approve them and combine the file and the product. I did that Friday night, because when things are falling off the new release list, if it has multiple products on the same day, the product entered last is the last to fall off.

Here’s where the idiot part comes in. I assume that having a day off means you work on the computer 18 hours. That’s what *I* do. So it didn’t even occur to me that 24 hours might only apply during the business week.

Anyway, I suspect they’ll approve Monday morning, and even if they have something wrong, they’ll just tell me to fix it (that’s what they did with Product 1 when they took issue with me categorizing the product by the most popular category on the site as opposed to the highest page count in my bundle). I’m GUESSING they won’t get to it before I go to bed for the day, so I suspect the product will be live for purchase on RPGNow Monday night. I’ll put it up on Final Redoubt as soon as send coupons to the volunteers.

So. That’s out of the way.

As for the play test, we’re doing all right. I got a big laugh at the disaster at the end of Act One, so I need to change that text a little bit. The politics are causing just the kind of dissent that I wanted in the party. The players hate the guys I want them to hate, like the ones I want them to like, and are uncertain about the others. This might take a lot of notes in the adventure, because I think I need to give the GM about three-five paths through the middle of the adventure to suit the group and keep from railroading them. *My* group came up with a solution to one problem I didn’t foresee, and that will make it harder for the party in episode 6, but hey, if they’re clever enough, they get what they want, even if it hurts them later. :)

This weekend, from Friday Morning at 10 am to Sunday about the same time I got 4.5 hours sleep in two naps. So going into the play test Saturday night I was at something like 33 hours with only 3.5 consecutive of pillow time. I begged off running because I was so tired it was causing chest pain (not the heart attack kind, the stress kind), but about 8:30 the food coma from dinner wore off and I ran for two hours. We got done more than I thought we would and ended on a nice cliffhanger for the Christmas holiday. It’s theoretically possible we’ll finish next session, but as there are nineteen encounters left, all in a running rush, six of them containing big, challenging battle sequences, I don’t think we’ll finish until two sessions have passed. I’ll be happy if we complete Act Two.

Then one of the couples in the group gave me Expedition to Ravenloft for Christmas, and as you might guess from an early favorite adventure thread on another part of the Ironcrown board, I don’t think I can keep myself from offering to run that (the original is one of my favorite adventures of all time). In fact, I have a way in my head to leverage it into a big campaign where I’d run all the adventures in that 2^nd edition Ravenloft campaign (called convergence, or something?). I don’t think I’ll try to dominate the game group that much, but I’ll probably run Expedition to Ravenloft with that in mind (if the players feel like going through it) and then if they want to do more, I have about three to four years of material on my shelf. I’d have to throw the d20 xp system completely out the window just to get it all in. :)

Oh look. A tangent.

Okay, so enough about Christmas (I also got a Sea of Words which is a nautical dictionary based on the Patrick O’Brien novels. I’m so excited.) No really. Enough about Christmas.

Product 3 is coming, but more slowly than I’d like. I’m still way ahead of the publishing schedule, I’m sure, but I’m about a week behind where I’d LIKE to be (severe sleep deprivation didn’t help.) Right now I’m on page 31/39. I think the Dwarf section will mostly be finished tonight (there’s a fair chance I’ll finish it but not have time to edit, grammar, and style check before bed). I’m guessing it will end at 35 pages without art. That’s right where I want it to be. Why? Let’s talk page count theory.

I have a book in the works on the other three races (the Humans are covered by their own nations and in the campaign setting pretty well, and the dwarves here). Assuming about 7 pages on the front end of that one and fifteen pages per race, I have a 52 page book without art. Not bad. If I run short, I’m still looking at at least 37 (ten per race), but 52 is right around where I expect. Then there will probably be professions and/or training packages at the end (translation: prestige classes for d20 <prepares noose>). Anyway, with that in mind I can’t, under any circumstances, short the Dwarves. Everyone loves Dwarves.

So the first 9 pages of the book are business (title page, two TOC, two maps, 3.5 "hey what kind of book am I reading and how do I use it?" pages. Then comes the section on Dwarves, but there are about 8 pages of history of Uzarâg from the Dwarven POV. I love that, but I doubt I’ll have anything so specific historically to talk about in the race book. I expect any histories there will be minor, not enough to count on. So that has me starting the real stuff on Dwarves on page 18. So I have to get to 32 to feel like I’ve really given them their 15 pages. Looks like I’ll go over a bit, but I might have more NPCs as well because of the whole diaspora issue, so that’s a good thing.

Next will come Orcs. I’ll try to bang them out in less than 10. They aren’t appropriate for general player character use, so I’m not worried about them getting less coverage. Then there’s the Land, which I hope to deal with in 5-10. Then rules, which I’m shooting for 4. So that puts the book between 49-59 without art. Probably over 80 with (I’m just guessing, this one is art heavy) plus a 10 page map book, like one of those map tile products. That’s assuming I don’t go long in the other chapters, which is possible.

I’m very tired. :)

Anyway, just thought I’d update you. I’ll let you know the moment Product 2 is up.

12/6/06

Okay, this week has had its good points and its bad. I started the master document for product 3 a whole four days before deadline, which was good because the adventure (60 pages without art) and the sourcebook (I’m estimating 70 without art) look likely to be the biggest in the series (except for adventure ten, where the teaser plot is finally resolved).

Thursday I got sick with a stomach flu. That was right about the time I SHOULD have been finishing up Act Three, and it pretty much destroyed me. I got Act Three to the editor last night. That puts me four or five days behind where I’d like to be, which means that if I really break records, I’ll still cut pretty heavily into my HERO version document time and time for the editor. Still, the sourcebook has four parts and the last is the smallest, so I intend to send them each to the editor as they finish, so hopefully he won’t need more than one or two days for the last part and we’ll still be really close to turning into HERO on December 19^th.

Anyway, considering chaos theory and Murphy’s Law and all that, I think it’s going pretty well. My current deadline schedule has only two weeks for writing the master document (I knew if I built more time into it, I’d STILL go over deadline), but there’s room after it for me to catch up and get way ahead again.

I’m actually slightly more worried about art on this one. There’s a lot of art and I have a feeling it will be coming in right up until the wire. We’ll see. I built it around a one month deadline schedule and both the artists said they couldn’t quite do that. So keep your fingers crossed.

Oh! The d20 version went copper Sunday. That the lowest of the best seller picks on RPGNow. Basically, it puts us in the top 40% of sales on the site.

Anyway, I should be writing, not blabbing to you, so I’ll sign off now.

11/27/06

Ah, another week gone by.

I’m ahead of schedule again. I finished the play test notes last week and started Product 3 on Wednesday or Thursday. I’m in Act Two, which is LONG. Right now the adventure is almost 50 pages , heavy on combat. That’s a slow rewrite, turning my play test notes into a final master, so I’m not 50 pages in. I’m on 26, with all the remaining being the original notes. I’ll probably hit 30+ by the end of the night. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing went 64 pages without art. We’ll have to see.

I’m working on the Spacemaster Datanet as well. That too is going long. We’ll see how it ends up.

We did the second play test session this week. Finished the Teaser and moved into Act One. This one is pretty combat intensive too, maybe 4 out of 5 on the sword scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if the play test went long, but no one complained when I mentioned that, so no worries there. Right now my goal is to get it done before the next play test. :)

Wow. That’s about it. No big news. Did the art list for three. Sent out contracts. Sent a really bad open-ended contract to one former artist, then sent him an e-mail telling him not to sign it. Hopefully for both of us he’ll listen. :)

You know, I have that little "Dirty Little Secret of Storytelling" in every adventure. In it, I tell GMs to change things on the fly if it makes the game funner and I relate a story about how the characters screwed up my plans in one of the play tests and how the GM rolled with it. I couldn’t think of one for the third product, but I left the box in there. So right now, it just looks like I’m telling GMs to cheat.

That’s just an odd random thought.

I guess I’ll get back to writing.

November 20, 2006

Time for an update.

Except for Hero approval, the second product is all but ready. Basically, all the PDFs are done, as is the read me file. All that’s left is to do is to zip everything up, upload to all the relevant servers, and write the marketing copy. Essentially, a day’s worth of work (assuming upload problems, 6 hours without). So that’s almost completely to bed.

I wrote the teaser and first act of the fifth adventure last week (or rather the play test notes, which is a sparser version). I think it’s going to rock. We started it Saturday but got started a little late due to a combination of dinner and pre-game character stuff. We got halfway through the teaser, and this one is pretty combat heavy, so two fights with critical-resistant creatures was good progress. In the past, we had another game running when I wasn’t play testing and so I felt guilty about going longer than four weeks. Now we’re just playing whatever we feel like on most weeks, so a slow start doesn’t worry me anymore (and I’m not taking time off work like I did on the other playtests to give longer feedback sessions and the like.)

So. Play test. Product. What else?

I put up a POD survey, but so far people don’t seem very interested in physical copies of the books, so I’m not going to stress about getting my POD ducks in a row (I can’t figure out how to do product 2 in POD anyway). I figure we’re at a point now in development where most people are just downloading and reading the products, not playing them yet (people need to find time in their schedules, after all). When people start running the adventures I expect the clamor will arise, and so now I’m just enjoying the idea that I might have one less worry on my plate.

Speaking of stuff on my plate, I think I might take time off in December. I expect to have product three written by the second or third week, so my thought is I should take my first break in . . . wow–a year and a half? . . . play Neverwinter Nights 2. Then go back to writing. I HOPE I can. If I have some sort of deadline trauma, it might not be an option.

Talking of deadlines, I decided I hate breaking promises. So I’ve decided to reset all my production schedules so that I’m delivering early instead of late. Don’t worry, the books are coming out at the same times, I just won’t feel guilty about it.

Essentially, I set the first release date as a writer, not as a publisher. So when I went in afterwards and set up a spreadsheet to track all the little things that need to happen for a book to come out, I found out I was 150 days or so behind schedule on the second product. Then we had the laptop problem and I realized that I was just winging it these days anyway, and that the year it would take me to catch up would kill me.

So I reset all the production schedules so that they flowed seemlessly forward assuming that I start writing product 3 a week from today (which is when I intend to start writing product 3). That puts me WAY ahead of schedule, and so I’m happy. I don’t work any slower when I’m ahead of schedule, so I figured it doesn’t hurt anything, and if I slip a week here and there I won’t lose sleep over lying to the fans (I haven’t developed that thick, missed-production skin most publishers seem to have). As a way of comparison, I expect product 2 to release on December 19^th (the day after the HERO timer runs out, IIRC). The actual set release date is now January 3 (so it should come out two weeks early or so). I expect Product 3 to come out somewhere around feb 19 (two monts later). The official projected release for that one is April 13^th. All of this is probably just my subtle way of slipping the schedule now, when my release is already delayed for approval, instead of during product 4.

See, I’m pretty sure I can get product 3 out in SOMETHING like 2 months. But product 4 scares me. Product 4 is the Bestiary. I might have to get every person I know who’s ever even played HERO working round the clock for 2 weeks just to do the HERO version. I know less people who’ve played HARP. For D20 I think I can get in the zone (I did a HUGE d20 monster piece once). So even if I get everything going in a smooth two-month schedule for product 3, product 4 might just break me and everyone I’ve ever met. :) So, might as well get the schedule redone now, when you’re used to bad news.

Product 5 might need prestige classes in the d20 version. I’m fighting the urge SO hard. That’s neither here nor there, I just feel like I’m in confession, so I’m mentioning all my sins.

Anyway, for those who’d like a run down of the official and suspected release dates, along with brief descriptions, (no marketing speak) here they are:

All titles after product 2 are tentative. I’m still looking for new ways to say "dirt" in a title.

The sourcebook on Felric’s Redoubt. Looks like 79 pages.

An adventure IN Felric’s Redoubt. 52 pages or so. It begins to let the characters see what the premise of the entire series might be.

Looks like the first 20 pages (after intro stuff) is just going to be all about dwarves. What their culture is like. Why they hit their hands with hammers on purpose. What’s going on with the royal line of Uzarâg after a thousand years of exile. After that we discuss Uzarâg itself and the orcs that live there.

Adventure in . . . you guessed it . . . Uzarâg. Characters find out they definitely have a good idea what the series is about. End of Act One of the overall story.

We’ve got a lot of little things different because of the whole infernal/angelic-blood-mixing-with-mortals thing. Here we take care of nephilim and Demons. Since some systems have less than 6 primary elements, we probably fill in holes like putting a light elemental into HARP and d20 (if they’re missing, I’m only assuming they are. I don’t RESEARCH my dev journals). This is the big book of baddies. Otherwise known as the book that finally kills me. :)

All hell begins to break loose in this one. The party begins a race beat the bad guy, now that they finally know his evil plan. My editor calls this my hammock adventure. It gets you from here to there.

The big book of Churches. Her we cover the Church, as well as all the other acceptable faiths (like the other savior-based beliefs and the Atavists.) I suspect they’ll be no room for pagans and demon worshipers. We’ll need to save them for a big book of evil churches.

The Last Hallowed Place (I ran out of words for ground, on Product 4, in fact, but I had another title for that one).

This is the act two twist of the campaign series. The party finds out what this series is REALLY all about.

After this, I’m not making promises. That doesn’t mean I’m not finishing the series, I’m just saying that the Sourcebooks are not written in stone from here on (the adventures have to be pretty firm, for plotting reasons).

Write up of another permanent Ulcer. This one should definitely happen.

The tone and drives of the adventures changed the last one. How do the characters deal?

Product 8. Official Release Date Feb 15^th 2008. Projected Actual Release two months after the last one.

Product 9. Official release April 15^th 2008. Projected Actual Release two months after the last one.

Product 10. Official Release June 15^th 2008. Projected Actual Release two months after the last one.

11/8/06

Okay. It’s been a little bit. I hate writing dev journals when I think an approval is pending. It feels like jinxing it.

Let me tell you how the approval process works. I send in the edited manuscript to ICE and HERO and they read it. My two licenses each have time limits. ICE is 10 business days. Hero is 60 days, period. If either company doesn’t respond within the time frame, I’m allowed to consider the product approved.

I turned in the last of the ICE products about 14 business days ago. They approved the first, but didn’t reply on the others (which I wasn’t worried about). I sent a polite letter this weekend and I didn’t get a note back saying that they rejected them and the e-mail was lost, so at this point, I’m considering the ICE manuscripts approved.

I sent in the HERO products 21 days ago. No response from them, even on the e-mail where I asked who to direct a check to (it’s time for their licensing cut). From the posts on the front page of the HERO site, Steve just got a new computer and he has a lot on his plate. I expect he’s swamped. Off the top of my head, that puts the 60 days as over right around Dec 17. So I think that’s the worst practical scenario for a release. Technically, though, if they reject they get another 60 days for approval, so there in a really bad scenario, but I don’t see that as likely. The only thing I can see them likely to reject on is a formatting error, and I would suspect they would have a quick turn around on those when I fix them. They seem like good guys from all my previous contacts.

Meanwhile, I’m almost done with the product. The Felric’s Redoubt map took forever. I think there are about 14,000 buildings on it, which speaks pretty highly for the standard of living in Felric’s Redoubt. It alone took more than a week.

I mostly finished the maps Thursday or Friday. Since then I’ve done the master pagemake and I believe I have final pdfs for the RM version of both pieces and the HERO adventure. I’ll do most of the HERO sourcebook portion after this, but I won’t say I’ll get it done tonight because often I have to export 6-10 times before I’m satisfied with the final product (I’ll keep seeing little errors I’m missing in the pagemaking itself).

Tomorrow is fiction day in my writing schedule, but I’ve chosen a project that seem likely to go quickly, so I should be able to do most of HARP tomorrow night. That leaves d20 for Thursday and the weekend to clean everything up and build the files. That means with approval (which I’m not counting on) I could go live around Monday. Still, I’ve taken a zen attitude toward it all.

My plan right now is to finish that then start the playtest materials for Ep 5 right after so I can playtest that next Saturday (in a week and a half). The group is bugging me about it.

After that, I’m going to write product 3 as quick as I can, so I can get it in to HERO for approval. :). If I can do it quickly enough, it might get done before they approve 2, in which case I’ll make up a little time.

Anyway, I thought you all might like to know. Oh, and from what I’ve seen with the Guild Adventurer release, my plan to send customers to RPGNow will work. Those of you on the e-mail list will here about that when the time comes. :)

Ta ta for now.

10/18/06

All right, time for an update.

I’m writing this from my laptop, sitting in my livingroom, watching a three-week old episode of CSI on Tivo. Only one of those facts is important to the company, but it’s pretty important. The laptop is up and running. My production rate is back to it’s former glory.

Temperature’s a little hot, though. I’m keeping and eye on that. On the laptop, I mean.

As for product two, here’s the skinny: It’s written and completely edited. I have it in with the copy editor, it will go through four total passes, but that should go pretty quickly. One of the passes is almost done, in fact.

Both the adventure and the sourcebook have been turned into ICE and HERO Games. ICE has approved the adventure, which is the one with the questionable content (a serial killer). Hero Might take a touch longer.

One of my artists flaked. Another took up the slack. He has three pics left to turn in. The cover is ready.

So here’s my schedule, not accounting for approval time from ICE and HERO:

Tonight and Thursday: put together the HARP documents from my notes. Turn those into ICE.

Friday and Saturday: same, but d20 and no approval.

Sunday and Monday: Maps (hopefully, but the city map will be pretty tough).

Tuesday: Start pagemaking.

That means that theoretically it could be ready to release in two weeks, allowing extra time for pagemaking and the like. Don’t know about approval, though. That could still be a hold up, but never fear. Things are humming happily along.

So, here’s the plan. I’m going to put out a question to many of you, about a week before release, asking for volunteers to buy the product on RPGNow. You see we are on the main site now (we qualified in one week). But on the main site, we have MAJOR competition (WotC and Monte Cook, for instance). New releases often don’t stay on the front page there for more than four or five days.

So we need to hit it hard. I’d like to get a nice big group of you to volunteer to get bundles there instead of my site. If we get enough of them, we’ll pop all four products onto the hot sellers list. If the main site is anything like the Edge site, that list is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s about the second thing people see logging on, and it’s the one that doesn’t change every time you refresh.

If you can submit reviews too, we should take off pretty well.

With that issue secured, I’ll be happy to have the rest of you buy from my site (where I make more money). But I don’t gain new customers on my site very often. Most of the company’s growth potential’s on sites like RPGNow. We get our new customers there, then move them over to the company site. :)

Anyway, there’s the plan. Those of you on the mailing list will get requests. Anyone who wants to volunteer that unchecked the "Add me to your e-mail list" box, PM me with your e-mail (or e-mail directly if you know my address.) :) I promise not to add you to the e-mail list.

8/14/06

Okay. Let’s talk about burn-out.

There was a time, back in the day, when I hadn’t learned to say no to a project. At this time I accepted the 1960s book for Spycraft, Stargate SG 1 RPG, The Shop book for Shadowforce Archer and Gamemaster’s Law for SM all at once (I think I’m missing and AEG in there as well). I didn’t have to write all the text in any of the books, but I had one month, I think it was in May, where I ended up with 165,000 words of quota (a normal sized-paper back is 100,000 words, and you don’t need to stat those). The AEG books came in first, and I think I did reasonably well with Stargate SG 1 (the stuff they didn’t like they’d asked for). Some of my work on the 1960s book was good, some of it not so good (but that wasn’t really burn-out, I learned some hard lessons about world building in that book). The Shop wasn’t great, I heard that it took more editing than normal to get it into shape. GMs law was so badly written that ICE thought I’d had a nervous break down. I took a second shot at it and they thought that was terrible too. So now you know what happened. The text is shaping up in the SM Quarterlies, but I’m having to edit it very heavily to get those pieces into shape. I don’t blame them, I burned-out.

I didn’t think it could happen to me.

I’ve never had writer’s block (not seriously). I’d never burned out before. It was kind of a cold revelation that I could literally work myself into the ground.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a build up to announcing a hiatus for The Echoes of Heaven.

My goal was to get two products done, bam bam, then do the fifth play test. At the rate I did the Ludremon appendix for the main book, that should have taken about two weeks for each product and by now I should be realizing that product three is way bigger than I expected and I’m going to miss deadline due to page count. (That hasn’t happened.)

After the main product released, I just couldn’t pull myself away from customer support and some updates as I got everything up and in the stores. When I did get to writing, I realized that I had almost nothing written for the adventure (it’s the only one that wasn’t at least half-done for the play test, as I didn’t want to write the descriptive text before I saw how the groups investigated the mystery). So that was painful. By the time I was done with that, I found myself averaging 2 pages a day instead of the 5-6 I needed to do. I was burning out, and this time I saw it coming.

So I’ve stopped kicking myself. If the artists come through, I shouldn’t slip any farther. The second product should release just about two months after the first. I wanted to make up time I was late on the first one, but better that it come out at two months than I lose product three completely. I’ve gotten some paper model stuff to print and build for miniature play. When I ran Run Out the Guns! a week ago, I let myself get caught up in a four-hour collating session of all the character sheets. Keep plodding away, don’t kill yourself. The company needs you writing more than writing fast. That’s my mantra right now. (Actually, it’s more than one word, so I guess it’s a sutra.)

So. Now that you know all that, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that things are going well. I finished the first half of The Last Free City sometime more than a week ago. All weekend I couldn’t get time to edit it before sending it to the editor (it’s the writer’s version of cleaning before the maid gets there). Work was hell. I had a date on Monday. Went to sleep right afterward. Slept 14 hours or something (did I mention work was hell?) Finally on Tuesday I think I turned it in to Josh. That gave me no time to prewrite my fiction for writer’s group, which left me writing on Wednesday at work during the busiest day of the year (57,000 conventioneers hit Salt Lake on Tuesday and Wednesday). I wrote a stunning 9 - 10 pages, then after work watched reality television until my mind stopped twitching and shut down. (Buy more product and I won’t have to keep going to work). Thursday I started writing again and now I’m plugging along, on page 32 or so (with no art, so 35 or so with art). My GOAL is to finish it by Thursday, but if I don’t, hey no sweat. Hang loose, dude. Stress leads to burn-out, but no stress, no worries. The only one who can cause me stress is me. We don’t even have enough customers yet for a real customer support disaster (well, we probably do, but it would have to be a big one.)

So how’s the book? I think it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I was really worried it was going to suck, and the adventure is still going to be hit miss with some people (since it’s a murder mystery). The main book though . . . I really felt like I hit my stride writing about Ludremon in product one. I don’t feel like I’ve lost any of that, and the subject matter makes me emotional. You know Stan Ridgeway’s song Camouflage, or the Ballad of the Green Berets? Only two songs that choke me up every time I hear them and The Last Free City gives me room to indulge that. You might have noticed that Aeld and Felric’s Redoubt have that whole heroic tradition thing, like the Norse and the old Anglo-Saxon stories. Gives me a lot of room to write legends about men with too much heroism and duty to be contained in a single life. Probably takes me back to my Grandfather, who didn’t sacrifice life or limb in WWII but certainly sacrificed his sanity (for a time at least) and perhaps his soul.

So maybe the book’s just for me and everyone else will find it ho hum when they read it, but the poet that lives in every writer keeps insisting to me that this emotion and passion will come through. And if it doesn’t, I think the complex interlocking city plots are kinda cool (or at least they are so far, I haven’t gotten to the court yet).

So things are good. Not breaking any speed records, but I think the text is sound. We’ll see if I hit my writing goals this week. :)

Until next time.

7/31/06

Been a little while again. That whole getting-the-product-out and handling all the initial questions thing has taken up my time. Now I’m back in full writing mode and I thought I’d start updating you again.

This isn’t something you should admit as a publisher, but I promised I’d be honest. There isn’t much money in writing games. So our goals are oriented around feeding the family, and I have to tell you, that isn’t an exaggeration. We’re coming up short every month by exactly the food budget.

Now, this isn’t a sympathy play, I just wanted to put things into perspective, so that I can talk about how the game is doing without doing something tacky like talking about actual dollar amounts. I wouldn’t even do this much, but I promised to talk about the stuff other publishers won’t. Like food stamps. :)

We have done well, for a new company. Phenomenally well, in fact. On our main website, in the first two weeks, we sold about 3/4 of my estimated first-week sales maximum. I based this maximum on page views on the ICE website, so I’m happy with those figures.

On RPGNow, the numbers are easier to judge. They stick you on the Edge site when you start, and that is essentially Dante’s Marketing Hell. No one goes to buy there as everyone starts on the main site. The only hints that Edge exists is the link in the top right corner and the hot sellers from Edge list on the right side. If you search for my product there, you GET NO HITS. There’s a Message of the Day feature, where you buy advertising, but it places the ad at the bottom of the main site. I think that I average less than 1/3 of a percent of views to click-throughs from a message of the day. Maybe a fifth of those add me to their wishlists.

So things were pretty bleak the first few days on Edge. I sold one HERO copy (I think from someone who found their way there from the HERO forums instead of my site.) A handful of CC3 symbols. I talked to a guy here at work and he gave me LOADS of marketing advice, none of which was useful, because he didn’t understand the industry, but I was able to get a gist out of him, and turn that into a marketing plan that would work.

So I asked for volunteers on the opt-in list for people who’d be willing to comment on RPGNow. I asked for honest comments and sent them over there. I then submitted the setting for review among the RPGNow staff reviewers.

Sales picked up as all the volunteers bought. Then the comments came in and they were great, maybe too great. I began hoping for a less-than-five-star review. People take them more seriously. But the sales to the volunteers were enough that I started popping up on the Hot Sellers lists (it isn’t that hard on the Edge site). I started getting the click through from that which I hadn’t gotten from the Message of the Day.

Anyway, pins and needles. There is a formula they use to determine when you qualify for promotion to the main site and I used that as a marketing guide (well if this is worth 2 points and this worth 1, the first must be more important). Around Thursday night I qualified for promotion (I don’t know if I will be, they only do it once per quarter, and I’m new, but I have the points). Also Thursday that first Staff Review came in. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect review if I’d written it myself (in fact, I’m sure I couldn’t have done that well). The things he criticized were perfect, the praise was lavish. Sales picked up.

I’ve been checking my other ratings. By Friday night I was #1 rated Edge publisher by comments. Also that night I hit #1 Edge vendor by number of sales (it helps to have 7 products or bundles). Sunday morning I hit #1 Edge vendor by dollar amount.

So things are moving. D20 is outselling everything else, which is surprising for two weeks of sales, since my ready-made audience is in ICE. You guys need to pick up the sales. Remind me who my favorite customers are. :)

So my goals for sales are as follows, in order:

1) Completely pay for the house food budget for two months (the rough product cycle) off a single product.

2) Get my self a couple hundred dollars a month on top of that for things like a weekly movie, an occasional dinner out, and gas (dear God I pay a lot in gas). Maybe a book purchase (dare I dream). :)

3) Hit the level where my artists are being paid at least e-publishing rate for art.

4) Hit the level where my artists are being paid print publishing rates for art.

5) Hit the level where I can make a print version of the book my first release (probably by the labor of the Chinese workforce).

6) Make enough that I can quit my job and move to monthly product cycles.

7) Get an office and some form of real fulfillment for shipping.

The order of these might change. For instance, 6 becomes much easier if I can secure this three-book novel deal I’ve been working on for a while (it seems a lock, but is taking forever). At that point 6 fits in between 2 and 3.

And all my sales figures go crazy when I start subsequent product sales, all of which have a lower price point.

So there you go. People don’t like to give their customers an idea of how rough the industry is, but I promised you’d see it all. I can tell you that my d20 sales are right around half the yearly average for an e-product. That gives you an idea of the industry.

I have to go to WorldCon this year, so that’s going to sap resources and pagemaking time. I might drop off the earth for a week. Just so you know. I’ll be trying to convince the editors of some writer friends of mine that they need to publish my comedy, because I am the funniest writer on earth. It’s a hard sell. I’m doing enough sales, though, that if one other check comes through, though, I’ve paid for the trip (yes, that does mean we don’t have a food budget, but that’s why God made white rice). Maybe next year GenCon.

So, now that I’ve shown you the trials and tribulations of my life, product.

I’m working on product 2. I’m still behind because of my failure to take into account the lead time I need for approval from HERO and ICE, but I’m going better than I feared. I’ve finished the adventure The Festering Earth. I’m working on the sourcebook now, The Last Free City. The adventure is into editing. The sourcebook will hopefully only take a week.

Then it’s my plan to move straight into writing 3 while I do edits and conversions on 2 in my spare time. If I can get 3 done before WorldCon and 2 out right around on schedule, I’ll finally be turning in product to HERO 60 days in advance. Then I’ll bang out the production of 3, hopefully catching up on the two weeks late I was with 1 and when the dust settles for that, I’ll start playtesting 5 and then straight into finishing 3 and writing 4 (which has the bestiary, and will be one of the worst conversion projects, per page, of all time). I just reread that, and it sounds like I wrote it on cocaine.

Whew! Now you know where things are. If you haven’t bought to product, go buy it. If you have bought, buy copies for all your friends. I have cats to feed. :)

5/29/06

Okay. It’s been a little while. I’ve been busy, as you might imagine. Let’s see if I can remember everything that’s happened.

I turned in the entire document to the editor and over two and a half painful weeks he edited the whole thing. Somehow that didn’t break his will to live completely. Then there were the painful days of me inputting all the edits. I’ve since handed off to the copy editor and I’m getting edits back daily. The book is done. It’s about 130 thousand words total (adventure and campaign setting). That’s about the equivalent of a 400-page paperback novel, by way of comparison.

Art is doing alright. Brian Hailes has turned in a lot of art. He has three interior pieces left to turn in (they are due Tuesday) and the cover. From what he’s said, I’m expecting him to turn in the cover a little late. Two or my other artists are running later than that. One of them still thinks he’ll get me the stuff in time, but the other isn’t answering my e-mails. I doubt I’ll ever see a piece from him. However, he only has three pieces, so I think we can do without. ICE likes to do about 10% art, I believe, meaning that if you have 100 pages of book there’s about ten pages of art sprinkled throughout. I’ve been aiming at the same thing, but the e-publishing standard seems to be more like 1/16th than 1/10th. I should have about 11-12 pages of good, solid interior illustrations. Add to that about 10-15 pages of map art and the currently 220 page document will come in well over 1/16th. As we build into future projects, we;ll have art sitting around for reuse as well.

Oh, add another piece to that. I found a great digital piece on Lucifer. The artist doesn’t feel right about selling its use because she’s given it away a few times before, so she’s offered me use for free. It’s really a good piece, so I’m happy to use it as an image of Bamon before the fall.

Also on art, I’ve found this new artist who’s quite good. She signs her work Callender and I’m very happy with it. She’s much better than she seems to think she is and she draws to deadline. She’s really saved me.

So for the second product, I have more like 9-10 pages of art necessary (and maps can make up a lot of that). I’ll probably shoot for the ful 9-10 pages though. Both Brian and Callender have agreed to work on it and Callender has set no limits to the size of her art list. I should really send her presents. I might have another artist for it too, but I’ll get to that later.

I’ve turned in the product to HERO Games. They’ve approved the adventure but not the main book yet (I expect that will take a week or two at least). I need to turn in the RM and HARP versions by about Thursday, I think. That shouldn’t be a problem.

I have to learn how to page make. I have to get CC3 and do all the maps. That’s going to take a lot of June. Also in June I have to write the second product and all that entails. I also need to do the play test for episode 5, but that’s can wait if everything else is too rough. If I can get the second product written in June, everything in subsequent products should be much easier. I’ll have the pagemaking down and all the master documents made. There will be less maps and the like as well.

Now, that doesn’t account for ALL my back-breaking work. This week was Conduit, the biggest SF con in Utah. I had a fairly light load of panels (I was scheduled for four, did five). I had four hours of The Echoes of Heaven demos. The rest of the time I hung out with Howard Tayler (www.schlockmercenary.com), Dan Willis (Dragonlance Author), Newton Ewel (Palladium and HERO artist), and Lee Modesitt (No introduction needed). I also spent a good deal of time hanging out with Brandon Sanderson (If you haven’t read his book Elantris, you are only hurting yourself) and Sam Longoria (Ghostbusters, Terminator, the Abyss, Spaceballs, and 2010 among others--his IMDB credits give you no idea how much he’s actually done on these and other films). We took Sam out to eat twice. The man is as entertaining as a tank of nitrous oxide. Sam and I have a bit of a history. We were Guests of Honor together at a con a couple years back and we traded stories all night long at a wrap party afterward (to a rather large audience). It’s one of my fondest con memories.

Here’s my favorite thing that happened this con, though. Not to downplay the rest, but this was completely unexpected.

Howard and I had been hanging out and shilling Schlock Mercenary books (mostly Howard, I was the imposing one in the back) when Howard had a panel come up. I decided to go with him. The panel was "Collaborating with Authors." When I walked in Helge, the coordinator of the writing panels, saw me and asked me to join the panel because he didn’t think the Sandman artist was going to make it in time. So I’m sitting on the panel, talking sagely about art direction to give the other side of it, when I mention that I’m pretty much just telling them stuff that Jason Hawkins told me. :) All of a sudden the middle panelist says, "I’ve worked with Jason." I blinked and said, "With ICE, or on one of his solo projects?" "ICE," he says. I crane my head around to see his name for the first time. "Kevin Wasden!" I shout. "You did my Blaster Law and Future Law covers!" We kept coming back to that throughout the panel and I made sure that everyone in the room knew Blaster Law was the favorite cover I’ve ever had.

Now let me explain a little bit of the industry and the psychology it creates (in my opinion). You have authors and you have artists. I’m sure (although I have no proof) that many one man band style companies have problems with art because the author is also the art director. In any sane corporate structure the artists and the author never get to speak to one another. It’s a recipe for destruction. The art director has to be unbiased and that’s the hardest thing in the world for the author. I THINK I’m pretty good (the fact that artists are agreeing to do a second project is a good sign) but there are still hitches. Let me relate an example.

I send out the art lists and the artists send me thumbnails and I reply with things like, "Oh goodness, I forgot to tell you that the five prophets weren’t all Human." This step insures that if Illustration isn’t right, it’s not my fault (it’s not cool to reject a piece because you gave bad instructions). So I get a thumbnail from Brian of this corridor that’s supposed to look like smooth stone that’s melted like wax and then reformed. I get back the thumbnail and I realized that I never said it was smooth, unbroken rock. In the thumbnail I have masonry that’s melted and reformed. I wrote back with something like "Great, but it’s not worked stone, go ahead and do the illustration with that in mind." I didn’t tell him it wasn’t MASONRY, and worked stone was too generic a term, so I get back basically the same thing, just with more irregularities than the original. So the author kicks in and says this isn’t right, I can’t use this, it contradicts the description of the location. I get frustrated and write him something like, "No, I said it WASN’T worked stone. I don’t know what to do about this." Then the art director in me barely managed to make me write, "I’ll think about it and get back to you," instead of rejecting the piece. Now I’ve sent out an e-mail that’s going to make the artist feel like he’s failed me, when it’s my fault I wasn’t clear. That’s not a nice way to treat people. It took ten minutes for me to realize that I can absolutely use the art, I just can’t put it next to that description in the book. It doesn’t mean the art is useless. I’ll just find a page where it does work or move it do the other book where it can just look interesting and not lock onto a specific location or adventure.

So that’s why it’s a good idea to keep artists and authors separate. If I didn’t have this business at stake, I’d never be able to act even this reasonably. Authors have put hundreds, maybe thousands of man hours into their work. To have another creative person come in and start tinkering can be amazing, but it can also be a slow match in a powder magazine.

So Kevin meeting an author for whom he did a cover has to be a rare event. Let’s look at it from the artist’s point of view. Kevin seems like a really good guy. He takes his work seriously and he seems like the kind that really respects what he’s illustrating. He’s putting MUCH less time into a project than the author. He KNOWS that this is the author’s baby and he’s got the very sobering responsibility of representing that baby to the world. They don’t see the writing first. It’s his COVER that draws him in. That’s an awesome responsibility. I don’t know how many artists take it seriously, but I’d bet good money that Kevin does.

So that’s the psychology I think worked behind our meeting. The fact that he’s done my favorite cover made us instant friends. I feel like I OWE him for doing me right and though we haven’t discussed it, I’m think appreciates someone noticing. This isn’t the kind of gratitude he’s likely to get very often.

As I said, I can’t say what’s going on in his mind, but I suspect that this was why he was so damn nice to me. I really don’t deserve it.

Anyway, he stopped by the Schlock Mercenary pit a couple times after that panel to say hi and to tell me that he’s willing to consider work with Final Redoubt. No matter how many times I reminded him that he’s WAY too advanced in his career for us, he kept saying that he’d to talk about it anyway. Last night I received an e-mail saying that he’s been to the site and wants to be involved. He’s busy, so I won’t hit him up for a cover and strain that generosity, but I’ll give him some interior pieces and feel blessed that he feels so good about the product and the company.

Anyway, that was my warm fuzzy for the con.

The demos went great. Everyone who played them became stoked before I even started the adventure. I don’t think the actual DEMO part of the demo sold anyone. It was all about the Ulcers. One of the demos DID sell the group on Rolemaster though, so I’m glad I didn’t just stop when I had the sale. :) Still, next two cons I think I’m going to ask for a presentation on the setting. The type where I stand in front of the group and just sell them on the product.

Anyway. Enough for this week. I should be able to post more regularly now.

5/14/06

Okay. So I didn’t write a journal last week. It was crazy.

The final document, the setting and the adventure, without art, is 226 pages long (It probably took 40 hours to rewrite). Way longer than the 32 page document and the 32 page adventure we promise for the same price. So there’s a lot of value there. But I had to rewrite it and that took forever.

Let me tell you a bit about how we’re working.

First I produce a draft copy of the master document. This is a first draft and by the laws of first drafts it is terrible. So then I have to take this big old steaming pile of document and I have to turn it into something legible.

So I rewrite it as a second draft. When I finish this I cook it with grammar and style checkers. What’s left is a document that’s about as good as I can make it without setting it aside for many months and letting it simmer in the subconscious. Frankly, we don’t have time for that.

So I turn that in to my editor. He reads it and copy edits and edits for style all at once. Then he turns it back over to me.

Now here’s the crucial point. Scott is the Line Editor, but he had to pull out of the company for time reason. I still give him his Line Editor credit because I bounce all ideas off him and shape them with his guidance, so nothing begins work without his permission. Now I’m the publisher, but I’m also the writer, which means I can’t make these decisions by myself. I’m not objective. So Scott, the Line Editor, helps me shape every idea before I write it.

But he doesn’t have time right now to read it all. Not on deadline. Not with his current work schedule.

So at this point it comes down to the editor. He’s the only other person that’s read every little bit of the document, not just play test stuff. He’s also in one of the play tests, so he’s got the most comprehensive view of the piece. So when he hands it back to me I ask the crucial question:

"Do we publish this?"

I don’t know what happens yet if he says "no." Other than the fact we don’t publish it.

I input his edits if he gives a thumbs up. This is the Master Document. I hand it off to my HERO guy, (the one who is better at powers and formatting that me) with all my HERO version notes. So he can make it make sense. Then I start work on the HARP version of the Document and the D20 myself. All the system-specific stuff is marked with <<throughout.>>

I hand the Master Document to my copy editor to go through. It’s her job to make certain Josh caught as many typos as possible. It’s also her job to make sure I didn’t make any new ones. If we have enough time before deadline, I input these before building all the separate versions. This is the Finished Document. From here we build all the other versions and we hand those in for proofing, but now she only has to proof anything in <<>>. She gives those back and we finalize all of that. Then we send them to HERO and ICE for approval. Hopefully all the art comes in about that time as well.

So on this product we’re behind deadline. Mainly because I was working off writing deadlines without considering production stuff. I blame the government.

So I gave the editor everything and I gave him a deadline schedule that’s certain to break him. He finished the adventure this week and gave me three chapters into the setting book at Writer’s Group Thursday. On the way there I asked the go/no go question and he gave me a "yes." On the adventure of course.

So Thursday Night I input all his edits and did about half of the HERO conversion. Friday night I did the other half. Saturday at the play test group (we aren’t play testing right now) the HERO guy and I talked about how to improve the process in the future and he looked over all my inputs, marking any typos he saw (mostly skewed columns).

So tonight I put in all those notes (should take ten minutes) and I build a preliminary PDF and send it to HERO. They are supposed to have 60 days, which will put us past the release date, but Steve said he’d try to get it through in time, so I’m hopeful. The only fear is it hasn’t had its final copy edit. He said if there are too many typos, he’ll have to reject on that. We’re hoping we caught enough to make that not an issue.

So now I need to start work on the second product and the HARP version. D20 can wait a bit. It doesn’t need to be approved.

I won’t be out from under these deadlines for a long time. :)

Oh, last night I did edits for a fiction piece I’m working on for a certain game publisher. If that comes through, I hope to have a book deal soon.

4/30/06

Done and done!

Five minutes ago I finished the first draft of the main manuscript. Four days ahead of schedule. Woo hoo! Do the happy dance. Do the happy dance.

I plugged that into what my deadlines should be and I’m only 83 days behind on documents. I picked up three days or so. So I’m happy. I’m going to take five minutes to breath then begin all the stuff I’ve been putting off while hammering out this document. It’s huge. I’ll need to cut a good bit or no one will sit at a computer long enough to read it, but it’s done. I expect to have the entire thing in my editor’s hands by the end of a week.

Then I just have to finish my deadline lists, get back on artist wrangling, find one more illustrator, get all the different system notes together, plot episode five, get the store online, finish business registration stuff, and probably do a few more things I’m forgetting. Then I can start writing the play test for episode five and the product for episode two. Hopefully in the next day or two. But those are different deadlines. Hopefully all the variety of stuff exploding at once will recharge my brain. At least I’m not doing any more English sounding last names. Those were driving me crazy there at the end.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, Ludremon, being our default country also speaks our default language. So words that actually mean something in their language are translated into English. After naming hundreds of people for the city write ups (most of them just in character lists) I’m pretty sick of people named things Like Kelaney Smith, Hil Tailor, and Gelgany Gelganson.

Oh, I should mention, since I’m about to bury my editor in terrible, terrible word count, there won’t be any previews involving, well editing, for the next two weeks or so. I have one he already did. Then I’ll probably do one on concept art. Then, with artist approval, I might do one on prelim thumbnail art. Hopefully by then, a preview on the Ludremonian people will 1) be a nice change, and 2) already be edited since he’ll be done with the document. We’ll see. He’s not being paid much so I can’t break him. Now if we make a lot of sales, I can throw him a bonus, so everyone buy five downloads each. It will still be less than many WotC books. Remember your players need copies. And your family members. And your pets could use copies too.

Okay, enough shilling.

One of my artists came through gangbusters this week. I asked for thumbails of a third of his art list (by the amount of work it would take him not a simple piece count). When he sent me a thumbnail of the cover, I thought that this was all I’d receive this week. Then he barraged me with maybe a third or half of his art list on top of that. I thought he was going to be the one that was hard to get things out of due to stuff going on in his life. I was DEAD wrong.

The other one definitely has stuff going on in his life. I still need to touch base with him and find out what’s going on. He seems pretty professional though, so I’m not worried.

That still leaves me about three pages of art shy. I might e-mail Brian tomorrow and ask if he wants more art. This is the huge page count product, so after this things calm down. 6-9 pages total, including maps. Probably 6 pages spread between the two. Plus a product or two down the road we can add in reuse pieces as they fit.

Don’t get me wrong, the thumbnails weren’t perfect, but I think 99% of the time it was my fault. Things like me not mentioning the Five Prophets were five different races. That’s why we do thumbnails first. :)

We finished Ep 4 of the play test Saturday. I learned one thing, try not to do the last three encounters of an adventure all on their own. We had our big Ah-ha! moment the week before so we lost it’s momentum carrying them into the end. Plus, the last monster needs to be tougher. Despite the party being seemingly convinced the fight was unbeatable (which is good) it only took them about two rounds to win. Actually, the problem might be a simple scaling issue. They had seven people in that fight and the thing just ran out of hits. Everything else seemed perfectly balanced, it just died before it could really start wooping butt. I might just put a note in there about increasing hits for larger parties.

We started playing with elemental corruption ideas after the game . . . nothing to do with the adventure, but they know I wrote half of Fire and Ice. I’m thinking about incorporating that somehow into the next episode. Some elemental corruption and some elemental items might be fun. I’ll see if I can work it in.

Okay. This is probably as long a break as I can take. Don’t forget to enter the house rules contest.

4/24/06

All right. I’ve fallen back to deadline.

So I’ve lost my extra day and I MIGHT have to work on my birthday, but I don’t intend to. I should be able to make up the difference tomorrow.

Here’s where I am. I’ve finished the entire proper of the main book. I’m in the appendices, in the first appendix in fact. The only thing is that the first appendix is a bonus sourcebook, the one on Ludremon. This is scheduled for 32 pages because that’s the minimum I’ve set myself for a sourcebook or an adventure, but I EXPECT to go over. So if I’m going to make deadline, I’ve set myself a goal of four pages a day for this section. 48 pages seems like the length I’m likely to hit.

So I was about a page short yesterday when my boss relieved me from work. I should have been able to make it up, but I met tonight with my HERO System guru to stat tweaking. Out of me, my business partner, and this play tester, I think I come in 3^rd in HERO expertise. This is despite the fact that this campaign setting started as a HERO campaign I ran not long after 5^th edition released, and for more than a year (two maybe? I don’t remember).

I think I just leaked the name of our fourth system.

Not that it’s much of a leak. It’s all over the website now. I just know that a lot of you don’t check the website. Why would you, I post everything on the forums first. :)

Anyway, that’s the other news. I signed the contracts to the final system on Friday.

What else?

The play test. We didn’t finish. I thought we would but two things conspired a bit. The dinner was about an hour late (that’s one battle there) and we took longer to get started than normal (another half battle). You see, one of the players from the beginning of the play test came visiting, but he currently lives only as a life-kept toe in the pouch GerikGnome. He was killed by one of the Ulcer effects in ep 3 (though more because he was leaving than anything else). So he was there with his girlfriend and that meant we had nine PCs acting every round. There’s probably another battle lost right there, which would likely have gotten us to the end.

Quote of the night? GerikGnome again, a pyromaniac: "What do you mean? I LOVE trees. They’re the bringer of fire!"

GerikGnome is actually the bringer of fire, but don’t tell his character that. He might get ideas.

I probably lost another half battle to resurrecting the toe. I can’t say how. It would involve spoilers.

It was a good session, though. They had the final reveal of the story, shouted in a frustrated voice that brought the entire room to silence. A good reaction. I think this is the best adventure yet (and I really like number one). I’m not sure they ever figured out who the real bad guy was. I mentioned it in passing, but I’m not sure anyone heard. They lost that bit of knowledge charging the fight a session ago. I guess they must know, but we really lost the impact of it. Still, as I harp on in my adventures, the story should bow to the characters not the other way around (most of the time, at least).

Oh, and Xennex broke his magic sword. Now he just has the two +20 nonmagical short swords I let him buy during the festival in the Elven-Dwarven Alliance. I don’t think he’s as happy with those, though. The Dwarves thought that any short swords they made would be for Elven women, so the swords came with knit cozies covered in puppies. And they are named Love and Marriage.

So they have something like three encounters left, then denouement, which should be brief. Only two of those encounters are fights, but one of them is BIG, so we’ll probably not be swimming in free time at the end of the session Saturday.

So.

I found out that I don’t need final art to get approval on the products. So I’ll probably get the main book into HERO Games about the middle of May. That’s late for the June deadline (about two weeks short) but they tell me that they can often do better than 60 days. I hope to turn in completely finished products to ICE at the end of May. So everything’s still on track.

Oh, and I worked out new deadlines, one that gets a final product done 90 days early for HERO Games. By that schedule I’m between 117 and 87 days behind. So I’ll need to hop right into the next book when I’m done (maybe a week off for editing and pagemaking). I figure I can catch up in 4 books. Then if you guys buy enough copies (and tell all your friends and bug the people at your local stores) I might eventually be able to quit my job and go to a monthly schedule. If I do that, we’re looking at falling thirty days behind again. :)

No one has entered the house rules contest yet. That means your chances of winning are quite good. Submit soon and submit often.

4/17/06

Hey, all. Great week. Let’s get to the update.

I found a new concept artist, I probably mentioned that, and he’s given me some good work on armor, which is a happy thing. So far we hadn’t been able to produce armor concepts that quite satisfied. Now, some people are going to think our armor looks like D&D concepts, and it does in the fact that it doesn’t look like historical armor designs. Anything that goes in a different direction is probably going to be labeled as looking like D&D. I thought about that a lot in the very beginning, and I decided that I’d rather not look like historical armor and risk people drawing the other conclusion. Our architecture is probably going to look enough like historical Europe that I want something more interesting in armor and fashions.

Speaking of fashions, he’s working on those too. I haven’t seen any of that, though. I’ll either be able to use it or I won’t, so I’m not worrying about it. It will come in sometime early this week and I’ll throw it into an Artist’s Bible in time for them to start work on real illustrating.

Let’s get all the art stuff out of the way. I’ve put together my art list for the main product and it’s big. I’ve doled it out two the two artists and I have three pages of art left. Since that’s three out of thirteen, it’s not a terrible loss, but I might have to flush out the book with some clip art. I have one more lead on an artist, but he just got married so he isn’t answering e-mails. If anyone knows an artist that’s willing to work for royalties, let me know and point me somewhere I can see their art. Since this is an e-publishing startup, working for royalties is the same as working for peanuts, but it’s a credit and I’m giving ads to the artists like someone suggested on the forums (thanks for that). I’m already established as a game designer, so I’m looking to build other people’s careers at this point. And make some money of course. The couple of years I wrote full time were wonderful. :)

Where was I?

Writing!

I’m ahead of deadline. This week I finished chapter 4, skipped chapter 5 (I’m not putting it in the first book . . . no room). Then I wrote chapter 6 (power groups). Then I wrote chapter 7 (Religion). Of course I had a lot of text already, so chunks were rewriting, not new text, but at times that made it harder. For instance, I had 17 pages of material for chapter 7. I needed to do three pages of that a day to hit deadline, but I had a lot of writing of new material in the beginning. I didn’t know what the final page count was going to be, so I had to stick to my three pages a day out of the 17 to know I was going to hit deadline. At the beginning, that meant one day where I had to do 9 pages, just because I had so much new material to write that I was covering very little of the existing text. I might have said this before, but professional writing is about being draconian to yourself on deadlines. I’m always two weeks late. I know that. I tell my publishers that and I plan accordingly and I’m always actually on deadline. Anyway, hitting deadline is about realizing you have to hit 9 pages in one day and still doing it. I’d be willing to say that 90% of all people fail as game designers because they can’t hit a deadline. I’ve lost a lot of cowriters to that, even among established designers.

What was the point of all that? Oh yeah. I’m one day ahead of deadline. That gives me a day to completely screw up (which is nice to have) or, if I can keep the lead, I finish the day before my birthday and don’t have to work on that day. :)

So what do I have Left? Here it is with projected page lengths:

Chapter 8–People. 5 pages (I want 15 but I can’t have it.) This will be a chapter on life in a feudal structure, mostly. Because of size constraints it will probably be mostly dispelling myths and recommending the Gies books for further reading.

Chapter 9--Legendary People and Places. 0 pages. I just don’t have room. One of the biggest complaints about PDFs are they are too long (and I’m looking at 200 pages in the first product as is).

Chapter 10–Miscellaneous. 5 pages. That’s just where I want it. I cover things like metals, and Ulcers and some big magic items (like the Fell Hammer.)

Appendix 1–Ludremon. 32 pages. Here we outline a country for the characters to adventure in while they wait for more sourcebooks. While I have enough info in Chapter 4 to adventure around the world, as a GM I personally like to had one really well-designed area. Some might have figured that out about me, especially if they’ve looked at my ghost writing work. Basically, this chapter is a bonus sourcebook.

Appendix 2–Character Creation and Sourcebooks. 5 pages. Maybe. This basically deals with all the information that wasn’t included in Chapter 2 (Races). Essentially, this chapter is all about me answering questions like, "Can I use Fire and Ice in this world?" (The answer is yes.) Really, the big deal here is dealing with issues like playing a Mentalist. Mind reading can’t determine a person’s guilt or innocence, and so I have to talk about the implications of that so people can decide for themselves whether to warn away players from the profession.

Hmm. What else. Oh, yes, the play test.

Picture this. A field of waving grass. Seven bad guys are charging you (I’m keeping it vague to avoid spoilers). The rogue has decided that he doesn’t have enough space to hide for the ambush, so he’s going to attack. GerikGnome, reading his intention, screams in horror, "Go to ground, man! They only get a prone bonus if you fail your hide!"

It was a good play test day. Exhausting, though, and all because of one fight. It was actually a nice anatomy lesson on how things can go wrong in a battle. Again with the vague. There’s a mechanic in this battle of the fourth adventure that will keep most characters out of a battle until they throw off a certain restriction. That vague enough for you? We have 6 characters plus the healer and a street urchin NPC. The encounter was set up so they are fighting an equal number of foes. The urchin don’t count. So that’s seven bad guys.

First round: GerikGnome throws a ball attack and realizes that he can’t practically score a high enough critical to hurt the bad guys (they aren’t medium-sized). The three tanks charge up and hold off all seven bad guys long enough for the others to bring in their own brand of pointy death. Unfortunately, the Bard and the Rogue can’t throw off that restriction I told you about. So the tanks weather the first round of attacks and are blasted by stun and other critical effects. Bad.

Second Round. GerikGnome spectacularly fails a SCSM and blasts himself out of the combat. The healer manages to get the main tank back up, cause she’d gone down. The bard and the rogue still can’t get into play, and this is the point in combat where the Rogue usually drops one bad guy from an ambush, freeing up one of the tanks to switch from tanking to killing. This starts the cascade where one tank can kill their remaining bad guy and flank a bad guy on another tank and this is the beginning of the end of the combat.

But it doesn’t happen.

Third round. The Healer manages to get GerikGnome back into play. GerikGnome fumbles another SCSM. I can’t remember the results, but I believe he just lost the spell and the pp.

Still no bard and no rogue.

The tanks are blasted to near death. We’ve already spent two fate points. GerikGnome is asking politely about whether he has to spend another when the party wipes. Effectively, these guys are fighting two to one odds with creatures only slightly lower level than them. They can’t get their assets into play.

Round four. The rogue manages to get rid of his restriction and lose himself in the trees (or the livestock, I can’t remember). GerikGnome casts his spell and rolls a natural 66. The players are weeping openly now. I roll randomly to determine what spell he accidently casts. Now I can’t tell you what spell it was without a spoiler, but it was 18^th level and the table says I can ignore range restrictions. I decided that was enough of a precedent that the spell went off, even though he’d normally have to roll open-ended to cast it (hey, it’s an unusual success after all). Still, it might not have gotten past the bad guy’s RR but GerikGnome rolls a 99 base attack. Bam. One shot kill.

At this point, by the way, they’d done 33 damage to one bad guy and taken a couple hundred themselves.

That was the watershed event. The Bard managed to get into play the same round and controlling songed a bad guy. Now there were five bad guys fighting four tanks. The Rogue killed one the next round and after that it all came around.

But by the end of the play test, I was exhausted.

The funny thing is, when everything was going wrong, they were all telling me the fight was too hard. I had to remind them they’d had pretty much the exact same fight the week before. They’d just gotten all their assets into play in that fight. It was challenging, but I don’t think it occurred to anyone they might lose.

Anyway. Act Two of the adventure has location- and event-based encounters. They have two locations left and two events left, and then they are in Act Three. I suspect Act Two will take the first hour of play this weekend. Then there are some things to do in Act Three, but they should move through that with a purpose.

I quizzed GerikGnome down on what he thought was going on in the adventure’s mystery, and there are only two things he missed. One he missed because one character decided to charge a conversation before listening to hear if there was anything important to be learned. The other they had the week before, but they’d abandoned the theory in favor of another. It becomes obvious in the next event, so I’m not worried. The mystery aspect is nicely in hand. The next event might be harder if they haven’t gotten it all by then, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

Anyway. Everything’s good. If all the art comes in on time we’ll hit deadline (there is a possibility our fourth mystery system version might come out later than the other books, their license has a longer approval period).

If one of you recommends an artist to me, he might end up batting clean-up.

Anyway. Until next week. I’ll post a preview tomorrow. I might do a concept art preview next week if I have all the art nicely in hand.

4/10/06

Wow. A good week.

Let’s start with production. Last Sunday I finished the fourth episode (enough to play test--I don’t need complete text to run the adventure, just the descriptions, stats and enough notes that I know what’s going on). So I started looking at deadlines.

So far, I’ve been moving forward at a comfortable pace. I know that art is my big bottleneck, as well as our fourth license, and so I haven’t rushed. However Sunday I did an outline of the book by page count and came up with more than 200 pages. I realized two things. 1) I have more than 90 pages left to do. And 2) I need at least one more artist. I tapped a new guy to flush out the concept art and he knows some people so we got the second one covered (although you all better buy the product, because the art slice of the pie is slicing thinner and thinner :) ), but for the first one. . . .

Well, I did some math. I need to have the first draft done of everything right around the end of this month. That gives us about a month and a half to edit, then proof, then fold all the different stats into the different products and page make. I have two weeks of screw-up time figured into that and one month on art, but that’s still cutting it close.

So, to finish the 90-106 pages I need to finish by right around the end of the month (if I work my current schedule through my birthday, I finish on the 4^th). To hit that I need to do three pages a day. I also need to be doing previews and journals during this time, and more important, giving final text of finished chapters to my editor so he can get a jump on it. He’s volunteering, so I can’t let myself break him.

Three pages. That doesn’t seem like much until you realize that’s in the finished product. The entry for Uzarâg, for instance, is more than two pages long and it only counts as one in the finished book.

So, since my last journal, I’ve done twenty-four eateries in the Gazetteer. I have two more. Tonight, I should be in chapter six (I don’t have room for the info I have set aside for five in this book--I’ll save it for a later "Big Book O’ Belkanâth."). That’s probably 20k words in one week. (Not counting the 9,720 of fiction I did as well). I’ve done more, but not while I was working full-time.

For the rest of the book, I probably have only ten to fifteen completely unwritten pages until Appendix 1. Appendix 1 is the chapter on Ludremon, the country I’m detailing for an initial play area. I have that slotted for 32 pages, the minimum size of one of our country sourcebooks. What I’m saying that out of the remaining 82 pages, I’ve already written maybe half so I’ll have some easy days of heavy editing but little or no new writing. Those will keep me sane.

Now: developer angst.

I promised I’d give you a look at the goings-on behind the scenes. One thing that a game developer will rarely share with you is their fears that a product will suck. It’s probably bad for business. But I promised, so. . . .

I was terrified that Act Two of the fourth ep. would be terrible. I had this deep terror that it would be a terrible combination of Dragonlance 2 and Dragonlance 10. In fact I told the other DM, who runs things between play tests, to be ready. I thought there was a decent chance that after the first day of playing in Act Two it would be so bad that I’d have to toss the whole thing and start over. So I tapped him to be ready to run this Saturday if this last weekend was that bad.

Luckily, it wasn’t.

In fact the most negative thing a player said was, "It was frustrating, but fun." Since it’s supposed to be frustrating (that makes the payoff better if it’s done in moderation) I consider that a roaring success. By the end of that session, people were figuring out was going on well enough to start building working theories on how to destroy the Ulcer. They read this, so I won’t tell you if their right, but I will tell you they are exactly where they’re supposed to be, which is another small victory.

And another interesting thing: I thought the structure of the adventure was quite original. One of the players pointed out that Robert Jordan did the same thing in one of his books. I’m man enough to admit that my subconscious can steal ideas from other author’s. I think the story is good even if the mechanic isn’t original (after all, what is?)

We have a little less time this week and a little less than half of Act Two left. We might finish, might not. I think it will be close.

Anyway, more next week.

04/02/06

OK. Good, good week. I’m very happy with things.

First of all, SM Quarterly. I finished it and turned it in. There are some editing hiccups, naturally (I’m terrible at proofreading myself), but Heike had only one major question and I answered that easily. She even seemed to leave the verb grepped inside. I thought for sure I’d get a question on that. Evidently unix lingo has pervaded more than I thought. :)

So that’s good. I suggested a new title for it and Heike liked it so it probably won’t be called the quarterly. I’ll let them announce the new name if they decide to go with it, though.

I got the concept for the cover, after all but rejecting the logo. The full color version of everything won me mostly over. My business partner, Scott, asked for a change. That’s been done and I haven’t heard more. I’ll talk to him on Monday and find out his final position.

After that, I sacrificed my newly granted day off, Thursday, to Ep 4 of the campaign. Of course, by day off I mean that I only spend 5-6 hours on writing-related activities that day, so it might be a misnomer. At any rate I spent a whole lot of that sleeping, but managed to write a good bit of Act Two of the adventure. Friday night at work I finished all but the last physical location of Act Two (which the characters have to earn access too, so they can’t get there at the beginning) and about half of the events. That way, they could do anything they wanted this weekend and I wouldn’t run out of material. I didn’t get to Act Two, but I’m glad we had the option.

Because of the LDS general conference, we didn’t start until about 8:30 and ended about 11:30. We did three encounters tonight, but the middle one probably took two and a half of those three hours.

So let’s talk about fate points and total party kill.

I’m probably recommending that people playing with these adventures in RM use fate points (Channeling Companion.) I started using them after we lost two characters in Ep 2, both off of single lucky attacks. The first one was kinda the characters fault (sorry Ang), at least she purposely put herself in the risky situation (and didn’t parry, although I can’t say that was the worst decision, considering the Obs involved at the time). The second one was all but a vengeance kill. It came out of nowhere and the player had little warning. Everyone failed their sense ambush maneuvers.

Anyway, I use Fate Points now. I don’t tell players how many they have and I don’t tell them when I use them, but basically, when I fudge a roll to save a player’s life, it isn’t arbitrary. They are losing an asset that they must earn back through noble deeds.

I have three house rules that I use, despite the fact that this is a play test. I already talked about parrying multiple foes. The other two involve how I handle Background Options (I do it a little differently, but when I converted talents to the real rules for the demo, only one character lost any real power and I’m pretty sure he fudged his rolls a little). The third house rule I use is in fate points. I would drop this one, but I actually need it more in a play test. What I do is in addition to the normal fate point rules, I use a fate point to stop a character’s death. Basically, when a character is bleeding to death or being eaten by zombies or whatever, I spend one of their fate points, the character stabilizes, and the foes leave him for dead. That way unless the whole party wipes, they’ll make it. I need this in the play test because when I misjudge a battle’s difficulty, it’s the character’s action that save them (their past actions, earning their fate points) and not me just claiming a do-over at the end of the battle.

So. Tonight’s battle. A 12th level party with high offensive power and very good magic up against three times their number in wolves. Yep, just plain old wolves. Should have been a cakewalk. I sent them against a slightly tougher battle last weak and the use of Spell Mastery on a elemental ball spell basically ended the whole thing in one round (the battle went on but the bad guys were stunned and reeling and the rest was mop-up.

So, you think that this would be an easy battle, but tactics can so change a situation. First of all, they had the blind girl on watch. Sounds like a bad idea, but actually with her Spatial Location Awareness, she might be one of the better people. Still, I penalized the roll -20 to see the wolves before they attacked. Even if I hadn’t, it would still be a Sense Ambush or a Situation Awareness (Watch) which it’s unlikely a party has very high, so that’s probably where I’m adjusting the difficulty of the encounter. She got a partial success, just enough to convince her she had indigestion.

So. A battle where the total enemy levels is some 75% of the total party levels, you’d expect an easy fight, but that all changes when the first attack comes while everyone is naked and sleeping. Three attacks on a prone character with little or no OB. Suddenly everyone has 3+ rounds of stun. It went down hill from there. The only thing the Healer did the entire battle was take all the wounds off the spellcaster twice. Even then they probably all would have died if the wolves weren’t corrupted, allowing the paladin’s aura spells to work. (Ulcer wolves).

So. The person on watch lost no fate points. I think everyone else lost at least one (except the henchman, a street urchin who rolled high enough on his alertness and made it into a tree for the whole fight, shouting helpful top-down advice like, “Clear the circle!” and “Ball spells!”). The bard, the healer, the dwarven paladin, and the gnome spell-user all lost two fate points. The bard spent one to stop dying and let the wolves deprioritize her and another when the gnome called in close air support on her position. The dwarf and the gnome spent both of theirs on 96+ crits from random wolves. There’s a highly-technical military term for this situation. It’s “Charlie Foxtrot” and it means, in polite translation, “Weren’t we just taking a nap a moment ago?”

Anyway. They stopped one or two no-fighting encounters away from Act Two. If any of the play testers are reading this and wonder why I looked like arguing when Amanda called the game to an end, it’s because I was weighing the odds that those last encounters would only take five minutes. At the end I decided the odds were only fifty percent. We might have an argument about the best course of action.

So we ended there.

Tomorrow: Act Three. Should be easy to write and if not I’ll finish it Monday. Then back to the gazatteer and one entry a day.
Plus I think I picked up a new concept artist last night. I’ll find out more this morning. Either way, I’m gonna do our last concept art push over this last two weeks so we can have two months to do the art for the first product. Hopefully a month for the art and a month to put out art related fires, “There are no cheerleaders in the Echoes of Heaven! It’s not that kind of fantasy.”

Bets on how many fate points we burn next week?

03/26/06

Ok. Interesting week.

I’ve done a lot of work on Spacemaster Quarterly this week. By a word count I am about 60% done. By a page count it’s more like 71%. So I should finish it Tuesday or so. Then that will be off my schedule. I’m happy with it so far.

I also wrote the Teaser and Act One of Episode 4 this week. Just-in-time game design (we started the play test today.) We finished the Teaser and more than half of the first act. It went as well as can be expected, but I discovered a major issue with the Teasers.

Right before we started, one of the players jokingly voted that we skip the teaser. Now if they are joking about it, there’s probably some truth to the sentiment, so I’ve been thinking about it all night. I actually should have expected it. The structure of the teasers have two major strikes against them, and I need to make them much more interesting to compensate. Well I haven’t. I’ve been structuring them like fragments of a single adventure when I need to be turning them into a series of reveals that will be enough for the players to forgive other aspects that might diffuse the tension.

So I think I can do it. I’ll have to rewrite the ending of the last teaser as well as the one we did today, but I think I can present the players with a situation where they are looking forward to the next Teaser. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to rewrite each of them from scratch to make them so interesting that this makes up for their tension deficiencies.

This is, of course, why we play test.

Act One went much better. It started with some down time that allowed the characters to unwind a little, then events cranked up and now they are marching forward toward what can only be certain doom. The mood was good, the player interest was good, we would have played longer if a car hadn’t knocked out a local power line (with pole), plunging the house into darkness. After that there was a distant explosion that we never identified. Then all the sirens. Anyway, that kind of wrecked the momentum twenty minutes from the end of our time slot.

BTW, someone on one of the lists suggested a Pavlovian experiment. They put forth that you give the game theme music and use that music to get everyone into the mood. I tried it. Now every time I play Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna, they snap right into game mode. In fact one of the players told me she heard the song playing in the background of another piece and she immediately started thinking of the game. On the bright side, she thinks of it fondly. I still have a negative reaction to Billy Joel’s Nylon Curtain because I listened to it about 10 times playing the original Might and Magic until I was sick. :)

So there’s that.

On another bright side, Ep Four is a bit of a Horror adventure and I got a lot of comments about how creepy the Teaser was. So that part, at least, was decent.
I’m not obsessing. Honest. This is my process.

All right. Until next week. Maybe then I’ll be able to report more entries finished in the Gazetteer.

03/17/06

Okay, this wasn’t a bad week at all. I outline Ep 4 completely and I updated most of the characters for the main play test group (there are a couple that aren’t RM players and it takes me less time to do all the characters than it would to help any of them with one). That works fine for us, anyway.

I just finished (about ten minutes ago as I write this) the seventh national entry in the Gazetteer chapter for the week, which isn’t bad since I’m posting this a day earlier than last week. So, I made that goal.

We did have one major possible setback. The fellow who is doing our concept art and logos and the like, as well as a lot of out interior art and covers got a book deal. He hasn’t answered my e-mails on the matter yet, but I’m thinking that with the increased writing and art requirements for this illustrated book, his deal with us might change a bit. I’m very happy for him, but now I probably need to find another artist who is forgiving of our pay structure (which doesn’t involve any money up front).

We’ll see how that works out.

I’m going to have to take the week off of writing the main book. I have the SM quarterly due soon and it’s 9k words. It shouldn’t take up all my writing time this week (it better not), but I also need to prep Ep 4. I’m 8 days out from starting it in play test. I need to finish raising that last PC (about fifteen minutes) then I need to write the teaser and act one by the first week. There are also six characters that need full stating because of the structure of the adventure before act two. In fact, it’s a bit like a mystery in structure, so I’ll have to have all of Act Two ready before I start it. It isn’t linear like a dungeon (at least the location-based portion isn’t). So there’s no room to slack off there.

And I’m thinking of giving myself Thursday nights off, after my writer’s group. Maybe finish playing Morrowind and my Neverwinter add ons. Help keep my sanity so I don’t go crazy and start playing Everquest II again.

That’s pretty much it for this week. I have my first full nation write-up coming up in a preview in a couple weeks. It’s the writer’s bible version so the entry in the main book might be more compact, but you’ll get an idea of what the nation entries might look like.

03/11/06

All right. Last week I told you a bit about my schedule. Let me give you a description of how that can go terribly wrong.

Friday and Saturday were pretty bad at work. I managed to complete one entry in the gazetteer on each day, but that was it. On Sunday, I completed one as well, but on Sunday our wake-up-call computer went down at the hotel. Now, my boss isn’t very computer savvy and the people who fix it were in a meeting all morning, so it was 10:30 before I finally managed to end the phone calls at home and feel like the box would be fixed without them calling me five times during the day. However, no writing done for the Dark and Hungry God on Thursday.

Monday night I woke up feeling terrible. I have this minor internal condition, let’s just call it “allergies.” My allergies were acting up that night making me feel sick to my stomach and the lack of sleep just amplified everything. I called in sick to my Shadowrun game and barely moved from the couch except to nap. No writing, the Dark and Hungry God is getting hungrier.

Tuesday I felt better, but I was trying to synch up my laptop so that I could write a little at the Warhammer game when I realized my server is down. Without a server you have no authentication and without authentication, no file swapping. As a stop gap I burned my Echoes of Heaven Directory onto a CD and flew out the door. I got to the game an hour late but I was able to do a little writing during the chatting and when the others were fighting. When I got home, I didn’t have much time to try to troubleshoot before sleeping. Still, the Dark and Hungry God is getting hungrier.

Wednesday, last day before the Dark and Hungry God. Wednesday can be good for me. If the day is light, I can write half a weekly fiction goal during that shift. Add to that some three-four hours of writing and proofing at home and I have time to do all my weekly fiction writing in one 24 hour period. However this Wednesday we had an entire convention hit town. Last time this happened I got into a fight with the Maintenance Man and practically quit my job. I know I’m going to be working my ass off and I know that I’m not getting home on time (I have to wrap up with the audit, and I can’t leave until it’s finished). The Dark and Hungry God ain’t getting fed.

But I don’t just write novels, I also write short stories and I have one I’ve wanted to write for a long time. The idea is I want to do a story primarily in second person imperative. Now, there’s no way to sustain this for long without annoying your reader, so I wrote that this week instead. Since you could read multiple chapters at writing group but not multiple stories this is the perfect solution. I don’t lose the week of critques and yet I’m done writing in 45 minutes including a second proofing.

That night I finished on time but my relief refused to come into work (he actually refused). My boss came in to relieve me, but he had to buy breakfast in the morning and he couldn’t do that while watching the desk so I sent him out before I left, making myself an hour late after all. Then I went home, finished the entry of the gazetteer that I had started Tuesday, printed for writing group and passed out.

The next day I did some mail errands, ate, then went to writing group and fed the Hungry God. That night I spent all night rebuilding my file infrastructure to work peer to peer (this shouldn’t take long, but essentially I had to delete all offline files and recopy across the network and that took about fifteen hours.).
So, bottom line. Only five entries completed in the Gazetteer this week.

03/03/06

All right. Let’s see.

This week was all about trying to catch up from last week, which was all about recovering from the week before, which was all about the convention. The bright side is that there wasn’t a play test any of those weeks. If there was, I might not have accomplished anything at all. :)

Actually, worse than having a play test is prepping a play test and I’m going to have to start that pretty soon (as soon as I figure out enough to start.) In the meantime, I’m trying to get as much work done on the main book as possible.

I’m in the middle of the hell chapter, the Gazetteer. Let’s face it, it’s the most important section of the book but from a writing standpoint it’s the most annoying. There are so many entries and so many details that you can run out of things to say really quick.

This week I finished five entries in the Gazetteer. I intend to set myself a goal of seven entries a week from now on. That gets me finished with this chapter in just over five weeks. The problem of course is that we need to start play testing ep. four pretty soon. When I’m prepping one of those it takes a lot of my time. So the big question is trying to find the time to do both.

Let’s give you a little example of my writing commitments during the week.

Every Thursday I have my writer’s group. That takes about six hours when you figure in travel time and it’s the dark and hungry god in every week. To get ready for writer’s group I need to write an average of one thousand words of fiction a day, starting about Sunday (I do a lot more than that per day because there are days I don’t write, but I average 7k a week.) Now I can do 1,000 words in about forty minutes, figure an hour when you add in all the little things that distract. Of course right now I’m writing a comedy. Those are much more difficult. Figure one and a half hours. So that’s ten and a half hours a week, plus an hour of rewrites right before the group. Seventeen and a half total, and that’s absolutely inviolate in my week.

Add to that the game design stuff. It takes me about an hour and a half to do a single entry in the Gazetteer (about 650 words--those take longer). Another ten and a half hours, that puts me up to twenty-eight hours a week. Add to that two hours to get the preview ready (one hour to write and rewrite it, one to gather in the copy edits, whip it into shape and post it). Then one hour for my developer’s journal. That’s thirty-one now.

Add to this about five hours a week of writing related e-mails and two hours of other general editing tasks and I’m up to thirty eight hours. That’s direct writing-related stuff.

Now I’m working on a project with Black Library right now, so add to that about six hours of play in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay each week. This is also the best time for me and my Final Redoubt Business partner to talk, so we usually talk about three hours afterward, working out business details. Then there’s the play test. Even when we aren’t doing that, we have another game and I’m not exactly going to build good relations with those people if I refuse to play with them when it doesn’t advance my company. :) That’s about six more hours.

Then I have a real job on top of that.

I’m not telling you all this to complain, I just thought you ought to understand, especially if you see my production drop when I get my prep time coming around. Things are busy here. If I didn’t get my recreation from the play test and warhammer games, I’d go completely crazy. :)

Anyway, more next week.

02/23/06

Okay, obviously we missed last week, both the dev journal and the preview. The reason, of course, is the symposium. Not only did I not get to anything myself, but two of my editors didn’t turn in copy edits on the preview.

So, Life, the Universe and Everything. It was LONG. I did eight panels and events but one of them was a four hours writer’s workshop with WotC writer Dan Willis that took four hours.

The demos went very well. Schlock Mercenary (www.schlockmercenary.com) writer Howard Taylor even praised it in his blog. He actually mentioned me several times but he hasn’t linked to the company website yet (Howard). He’s probably my easiest connection into an expanded audience, so I’ll keep ribbing him until he does it.

We also talked about working together on a future product. That would be fun, I hope it happens. Howard is a hoot.
Lets see, I did a panel on the cost of technology with Kevin J Anderson. Kevin invited me out to lunch afterward (we know each other from Writers of the Future) but we were foiled by plans from the committee, who’d set up a lunch appointment for the guests of honor (I was just a special guest this year.) After that I did two gaming panels, one on storytelling where I got to plug the dramatic purpose feature of the Echoes of Heaven adventures (someone speak up if I haven’t talked about that before). The other was the going forward with your game idea panel. More plugs. Both of those were with veteran game designer Scott Clegg.

Saturday my day began with a panel on immortality with Dave Wolverton (aka Dave Farland, the Runelord Series, the Courtship of Princess Leia, Jedi Apprentice and many, many others). I didn’t have a lot to add to that panel so I spent most of my time making jokes. Especially soylent green jokes. I mean, how often do you get to make soylent green jokes? After that I had a Campaign Cartographer (www.profantasy.com) demo. It had a decent turn out. Finally I did a panel with Dave and Brandon Sanderson (Elantris, which you MUST read).

Some time during that day I was kicking it in the green room with Brandon and Dave. Brandon was telling me how he wanted to put a dream writer’s group together with me, Dan, and Writer’s of the Future winner Eric James Stone. He was telling me how Eric couldn’t clear his schedule for that. I told him that to be in THAT writer’s group I’d give up my only night off. Then Dave said, “I hope you only do it once a month so that the people in Saint George can come.” Brandon and I snapped around instantly. (Dave lives in Saint George. So doe Tracy Hickman, but he wasn’t there.) To get a writer that big in a writers group? Oh yes, we would do any schedule he wanted. Anyway, I don’t know if that will happen, but boy it would be a hoot. (Did I just say hoot twice in one dev journal?)

Kevin and I finally got our lunch on Saturday as well.

Anyway, that night I drove Kevin and his wife Rebecca Moesta to the banquet. We had a pleasant evening and I dropped them off back at their motel afterward. Finally, I went home and crashed because I had to go back on graveyards the next night.
What’s the moral of this story?

I didn’t get any writing done this week.

 02/11/06

 Running a little late this week, as you probably guessed.  I’ll have to make this quick, I have a lot of stuff to do before Life, the Universe and Everything.  Pagemaking and the art wrangling and the like.

On the writing front it wasn’t the most productive week, at least as far as an outside observer could tell.  I wrote one country for chapter 4 and spent the rest of the time on conversions for the demo.  The first time you do a conversion (or the first time after you haven’t done one in a while) it takes a long time.  Anyway, that’s done.

We finished the play test on Saturday.  It went pretty well, I had all the tension and excitement I wanted, even though we were starting cold that evening (we were right in the final battle when we started).

An interesting note, the characters managed to miss every piece of major treasure in dungeon.  One of them was hidden pretty well, the other too they didn’t bother to look for.  They didn’t grab the body of the main bad guy either, but they were in kinda a rush at the very end there.  Anyway, they missed a lot of armor and the guy who plays the Dwarf in the party was slightly put out. :)

Anyway, we’re on a break for about a month, playing the normal game of the play test group.  Now I just have to figure out what happens in 4.  It’s a hammock adventure and that’s about all I know at this point. :)

Well, I think I’ll keep it to that this week.  You should hear more from me on Wednesday.

02/01/06

Hmmm.  Lets see.  Where to start this week?  Probably at the play test, so I don’t get in trouble again.

Things went well.  They covered a lot of ground and finished act two of the adventure.  There were a couple of moments that creeped them out, and that was good.  One of them I didn’t expect at all, so that was a pleasant surprise.  They got to the climax about four and a half hours before the deadline, although they think (until reading this, at least) that they got there just in the nick of time.  No problem with that.

So next week we finish the third adventure, for better or worse.  Big act three fight, should be fun.  I’m curious to see how it all plays out and if they do anything that will result in total party kill. :)

On the writing front I went through and assigned all the major world stuff to various countries.  This includes things like wonders of the world, headquarters of church orders and demon cults, secret societies, and colleges (the ones that I know about at any rate.  There are universities that will be general places of learning that will come up as I write the individual nation descriptions.)  Then I wrote up the first two nations.  This was a bit of a breakthrough because I’d dreading it but it actually worked out to be pretty fun.  At the current average word count, the gazetteer chapter will be 40-60 pages.  That might be long enough that I don’t have to use a butchered history chapter.

But that couldn’t last.  LTUE (Life the Universe and Everything)  is coming up at BYU.  I need to run demos there, so I spent Monday night putting that together.  I think it will play pretty well, but I’m still a touch concerned about the ending.  The demo is actually the teaser from the first adventure and it has gone over gangbusters in playtest, but in the first adventure you get to the end and then segue straight into Act One.  (Like with a television episode, after the commercial break).  The people discover everything that is going on slowly, sometimes painfully.  As it stands at the end of the demo, I just had to write a little speech that explains it, otherwise, the cliffhanger at the end will leave them wondering what just happened (great for a cliff hanger, terrible for a demo).  I’m not sure if that will have the same dramatic impact.  Still, I don’t have a better idea for the demo, so we’ll see how it plays out.  It will be alright, I just don’t have the same level of confidence as I do of the first adventure as a whole.  Might take a rewrite or two before I get it just right.

That was the RM version.  I’m almost done with the HARP conversion (I just have to design the one new monster in HARP).  That leaves me with d20.  After doing the d20 Shadow World conversion, I could do that in my sleep.  I’ve turned it over to my business partner to do the conversion to our fourth license, the one I haven’t been able to announce yet, and he assures me it will be done in plenty of time.

Speaking of that, Tuesday morning was a good day, so good in fact that I couldn’t sleep until after 2 in the afternoon.  In the morning, we received approval on our fourth license.  As soon as our contracts are cut I’ll announce that.  I also received a pass from the profantasy people on my world map.  I was waiting on this because they were hesitant to do any cross promotion until they saw if my mapping skills sucked.  Evidently, they didn’t. :) I wasn’t worried on this one about the approval, I’m a mapping savant, :) I just was afraid that with CC3 in the works I wouldn’t get approved until WAY too late to do any good.  There are a lot of CC2 users out there.  That’s a big market.

On a personal note, I had my best first rejection from a pro magazine ever (actually, it’s probably tied for best.)  Hitchcock’s.  So, things are happy in the old Defendi casa.

Hmmm.  Anything else?

Oh!  I found out that Costco has about the best printing prices I’ve ever seen (for single posters).  Their photo department will print a 20x30 poster for 9.99.  I need to get the main map printed by them in time for LTUE.  I’d looked into other places, but there had been no one I could afford in the time allotted (I’m budgeted pretty tight due to travel costs and restaurants and demo disk production.  I’m taking a fiction editor from WotC out to lunch, probably on the first day.)

Okay.  I think that’s it.  Unless one of the play testers tell me I’ve forgotten something.

01/25/06

This week was demographics madness.  I finished the main map, did a one page version with only capitals and larger text and prepare the poster map for symbols.  Haven’t started the poster map, though, that could wait until after we release, so it’s low priority.  I’ll have to go back and check the one page map, I think I changed at least one of the capitals during my work yesterday.

So I’ve put aside agonizing over how long to make the history chapter of the main book.  Now I’m working on chapter four, the gazetteer.  That sent me headlong into demographics.  John Ross has a great website called Medieval Demographics Made Easy (http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm).  I spent a lot of time there this week.  Luckily the site is useful to me, because despite the post plague population figures, The Echoes of Heaven is a post plague world.  If I forget, someone remind me to post a preview on the Gray Death some week.  Still, all that you really need to know to understand demographics is that the Gray Death is a plague and that magic can’t heal it.  At least not God’s magic.  A direct miracle could, but they are few and far between in The Echoes of Heaven.

I started this because Scott (my business partner) mentioned a few weeks back that we need to address how much healing magic there is.  It doesn’t take a whole lot of dedicated healers running around to greatly alter the way a society works.  So I sat down and hammered out some basic numbers, how many people join the church (1 in 10), how many of those can cast spells (about one in 400).  That gives me a place to start, showing me that it takes about 4,000 people to kick out a 1^st level religious spell user.  I built a more complete treatment from there.  I’m sure to preview that.  Probably in a week in a half which means two-four weeks until you see it.

So then I built a spread sheet around the information Ross had researched for his website and threw in some stuff of my own.  I already know how many notable cities there are per nation (the map) and so since then I’ve made a page for each of the 40 or so political powers and I’ve been plugging in numbers until I figures that make sense.  I finished the country of Nolinos last night and that leaves about 10 countries.  An evening’s work when I get to it (Probably tonight).

Its been a good process.  Not only has it revealed to me certain issues, such as the fact that the free city of Felric’s Redoubt can’t possibly produce enough food to feed its inhabitants, it’s also pointed out some troubles on the map.  So far I’ve found two completely unamed cities and one that was named twice (different cultures, so I couldn’t reuse the name, alas).

So, when I’m done with that I’ll go back over the map again.  The first time I used the largest settlement symbols for every community.  I’ll have to go through and compare actual populations to the map and adjust symbols accordingly.

Oh, I also discovered that the river feeding the capital of one of the largest nations actually flows down and out through the second or third worst ulcer in the world.  That’s going to make for some interesting fall out.  We’ll see how it develops in writing.  Right now I see a city the size of Paris holding maybe one third Paris’ 13^th century population (One third of 80,000 that is).  I haven’t worked all the implications through yet.

On another note, things seem to be progressing well with our fourth and final license.  I hope to be able to release an announcement in the next few weeks.

Also working up toward Life the Universe and Everything at BYU.  Have demos set up there now.  I’m doing a campaign cartographer demo as well so I’m working up a dual demo disk of sorts.  I probably mentioned that last week, but its moved forward some more.

1/18/06

Another good week.  I finished the main map and now I’m looking to see if I need more.  You see, the main map is a little cluttered.  It’s ideal for a printing of about 3x3 sheets of paper, and I’m thinking I need two other sizes.  One, the one that will take longer, would be more like 5x5 or 6x6.  Basically, I’d shrink all the text and the symbols by half and redo them.  That would leave more white space and a little room to fill in things other than the biggest cities.

The second map is one that can be put on one page.  I’ve been asked to put the books out through a POD publisher and I don’t think I’m going to find a POD publisher that has a good map solution.  That means the printed copy in the book will have to be formatted for one page, as seems the norm with most settings this last year or two.  I’ve printed the original map on one page. *I* could use it, but I have the best eyes medical science can buy.  Even then, there are a couple city names I can’t read.

So I’m thinking about keeping the symbol size the same on the one page map, but deleting the river names (there isn’t room for them), taking off all but the capital cities (or the biggest city for nations with a moving capital).  Then labeling just those cities.

It’s a plan at any rate.

I’m also thinking how I will make the dungeon and interior maps look more professional.  I have some ideas.

I’ve set up demos at the local convention at BYU.  I’m also demoing Campaign Cartographer there.  I think I’m going to make up free demo disks that include all the Echoes of Heaven previews (to date), the demo adventures and all the maps I have lying around, for this world or for others.  The idea is to be able to hand them out for free and see how much business I can generate.

I just realized the artist is late on with the brand logo.  Hmm.  I’ll have to ping him on that.

We got exactly one battle done at the play test this week.  It lasted three hours.

Twenty orcs, an open room, and a doorway.  Three party members decided to charge into the room.  It was, as the military would say, Charlie Foxtrot from there on out. :)

They won.  It wasn’t a hard battle, really (54 levels of good guys against 80 levels of bad guys.)  If they would have set up at the door, it would have been over in 45 minutes.  They just didn’t.

Anyway.  Quick survey.  If you’re reading this on a board, post.  If not, e-mail me.

In Rolemaster, how many of you allow characters to parry multiple foes?  I’ve fought two guys at once and it doesn’t seem as hard to me as RM makes it (no to say it isn’t hard).  It always seemed to me you should just split your parry bonus up among the bad guys, and that’s what every group I’ve played with has allowed.  Still, what do you guys think?

Also, how many of you would be interested in POD versions, at a normal printed book price, if you could get the pdfs for 3-5 dollars?  Tell me for which system too (HARP, RM or d20)

Just curious.  With the Pod Versions, you might have to download and print the maps if you want big game-table versions.

1/11/06

Alright, it's been a good week, although it doesn't feel as productive as it really was.  I accomplished the normal tasks, wrote the next preview, sent out material for ICE approval and got it back.  Input copy edits.  One of my copy editors went nuts on the edits but it was all really good stuff.  I'm thinking about promoting him (not that there's a pay increase or anything).

The main thrust of new work this week were the map symbols.  Simon over at Profantasy suggested that I create a new symbol set to draw CC2 users to the company website.  I hammered on them all week, creating city symbols for Dwarves, Elves, Halflings and Gnomes.  I like the Dwarves and the Elves best, personally.

But that took TIME.  I had no idea how long it took to make symbols.  I probably spent forty hours on the task.

That isn't every symbol I'm going to do.  I'm taking a break to work on the main map.  When its done, I'll do some flooring symbols for the dungeons, so that if someone wants to print them in miniature scale, they'll look good.

I also wrapped up a few NPCs in RM.  There were a couple that hadn't been fully written up during the playtest of the second adventure.  I didn't think the caharacters would actually attack these people so I hadn't fully statted them.  Now all the characters are statted.  In RM at least.

We didn't get as much done on the third adventure's playtest this week as I wanted.  I arrived to find that the people who were hosting hadn't finished the day's move (they were changing houses), so we started some three hours behind schedule and we probably only got an hour and a half in the remaining three hours or so.  Everyone was tired.  Still they're in the main part of act two now, dropping orcs with slumber mists and trying to winnow as many of the  number as they can before the general alarm goes off and they have to fight everyone in the keep.  I expect an epic battle this Saturday.

I had a "doh!" moment, though.  I forgot that ulcers blocked divination spells.  Its funny, 'cause I mentioned it at the game, I talked about a lot of the implications, I even mentioned how the walls set off the Paladin's detect enemies spell.  Still, I forgot that this meant detect enemies couldn't see through solid ulcer-matter.  Doh!

But it didn't effect anything.  Their tactics would have worked just as well with a little sneaking and cracking doors (the spell just needs an opening, it doesn't have to be huge).  In the end, all they really learned was that the keep has four or five levels to it.  If that was a real spoiler, I wouldn't  be writing it here.  They could figure that out wit a little math and observation.

Anyway, not a bad week.  This week:  Maps!!!!

1/04/06

I thought I'd start this thread so that you all could see where we're at and maybe get some insight into the trials and tribulations of a start-up publisher.  I thought I'd start by giving you an update on where we are so far.  These are meant to be my thoughts on paper, just a glimpse into things.  So, be warned.  I'm going to ramble.  These aren’t copyedited. :) Plus, anything I say in here is subject to change.  I might touch on stuff that hasn’t gone through the license approval process yet.

We've been playtesting the setting for about two years now in multiple systems.  Its been going strong and we've been having a lot of fun.

I’m going to start with a note on adventure structure.  We wanted the adventures to be usable by anyone.  They all follow a straightforward plot, but we foresaw two problems, at least with most adventures we've seen.  One, they don't have enough help for a beginning GM (I don't know how many times I've groaned through a new GM beating us to death with a published module).  Second, the structured plot of a module tends to bind people in and makes them frown upon going off-script.

So we've organized the modules according into the three act structure and we've included boxes along the way that describe the dramatic purpose of each section or encounter.  The purpose is two-fold.  One is to help people who don't have a firm grasp of plotting to see under the hood of our game design.  The other is to free up the GM for going off-book.  It doesn't matter what the players do, if they skip something, the GM can glance at its dramatic purpose and find some other way to fill a hole in the plot.  Let me give you an example:

You've seen it in most every piece of adventure fiction you watched or read.  First the good guy runs into a group of bad guys that he can beat easily.  He does so, trouncing them fully.  Only after this romp encounter does he meet a real challenge.  The reason in fiction is that a audience member attaches their wish-fulfillment fantasies to the hero in this first scene.  Only after they’ve done that and fully invested in the hero’s success (they’ve identified with the hero, become his surrogate and vice versa) can you challenge the hero.  If the hero hits a dangerous scene after that and looks about to die, the audience is really on the edge of their seats.  They’ve become him, you see.

The same is true for RPGs, but more so.  The early romp that makes us feel good about ourselves and our characters only heightens the threats that are forthcoming after that.  If you cut the romps and go straight for the big threats, the players are more likely to feel beset-upon and resentful.

So you have your dramatic purpose of the encounter.  If you skip an encounter you don’t have to try to second-guess what purpose it served in storytelling (even plotting experts can screw this up on the fly).  Its’ right there for you and you can invent something else that accomplishes the same thing.

As for the overall construction, you have a Teaser, Act One, Act Two and Act Three.  The teasers all take place in an alternate point in the character’s history and tell a parallel plot.  They won’t be for everyone, but they’ve tested well so far.  We can usually complete an adventure in about twenty hours of game play spread over four weeks.

So, where are we at in the overall writing?  I'm developing multiple documents at once.  First of all there is the official playtest of the adventure campaign.  We've already playtested the first adventure, [i]The Throne of God[/i].   It looks to weigh in at somewhere around 48 pages.  Its actually completely written in the RM form (The HARP and d20 versions haven't been done yet, but they should go fast when its time.  Just a matter of plugging in the data from those versions into the master doc.)  We haven't commissioned the art yet.  I'm pretty happy with this one.  I think it’s a nice introduction to the setting and the Church and all its infighting.  It introduces ulcers and I think gives a GM a good feeling for how they act in application, even if a GM decides not to run the adventure series, they can get good use of the adventure.  They'll get it with purchase of the main setting book, so there's no extra charge.

Plus, the teaser has done very well at all the playtests.  I’m thinking about making the first teaser the demo adventure for down load or use at Cons and the like.

The second adventure, The Festering Earth, is very different from the first.  It’s a murder mystery dealing with a serial killer.  This is the piece in the worst current shape because the playtests needed to write it.  A murder mystery is too in-the-moment for a comprehensive pre-write to do much good.  Right now it’s a big pile of stats, character write-ups, crime scenes and timelines with little or no structure.  When it comes time to finish it, it will be like writing it from scratch.

We are in Act Two of the third adventure right now, On Corrupted Ground.  It takes the party into a permanent ulcer that formed over a fallen Dwarven kingdom.  It’s going well.  (Personally, I decided that there was no logical way NOT to have a fallen Dwarven kingdom in the setting.  So many other kingdoms have fallen, the Dwarves would have fallen at least once as well.  Of course, that invites Moria comparisons so I decided that instead of avoiding the issue I’d attack it head on by sending the characters there and just trying to make the place unique enough that everyone forgives the fact that Tolkein did it first).

I think I’ve mentioned in the Press Release that each product is a source book/adventure bundle.  The source books that go with those are, in order, The Echoes of Heaven Campaign Setting, The Last Free City, and The Lost Kingdom of the Dwarves (I’m thinking of changing that one to tap into the bad guy who lives there a bit more, but I haven’t tackled it yet).

So, for The Echoes of Heaven Campaign Setting, I have two parallel documents.  I’m developing the main text of the product at the same time I develop the writers’ bible.  Hopefully, this will make future products move faster as there’s a good deal of pre-work done.

I’ve taken a break from writing to do symbol sets.  Since it’s a PDF product, beautifully rendered maps translated into jpgs are going to present printing and download-size issues.  Right now it looks like we’re going to do every map in Campaign Cartographer.  Then if we get different maps for the books that’s fine, you can still download the originals, grab Profantasy’s free demo and print product and print them in whatever size you like.

This also gives us the benefit of doing battle maps.  For years I’ve done all the adventure maps in Campaign Cartographer and printed them in miniature scale (when we were playing at a table, at least).  We would then piece the rooms together as we went and it made for great visual aids.

Anyway, I want to give something back to the CC community on this one, so I’m making different symbol sets for the races in the world.  For instance, I just last night finished a Dwarven city set that you place on the symbol of an existing mountain or hill that looks like the entrance keep to a Dwarven city.  I’ll do the same for Elves and the underhill races (Halflings and Gnomes.)

So that’s where we are.  I’ve got about 100k words in the bag so far, spread out over five products or so.  I’ve got concept art coming in (I’ll try to talk about that in a future entry).  The first bundle, not counting layout and art, is about half to three quarters of the way done.

I plan on posting preview pieces on the site.  Look for the first in the next couple days.

Send mail to Webmaster@RobertJDefendi.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2005 Final Redoubt Press
Last modified: January 05, 2007