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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StupidSmurf" data-source="post: 2768049" data-attributes="member: 35893">Nothing illustrates the point of just how low-end the gaming industry is in terms of payment, than this:Dragon Magazine pay rate: .04 a word (that is, if I recall correctly...at least it was that a about ten years back)Inc. Magazine pay rate: $1.00 a word. (ten years back) When the editor told me the rate I'd be getting for the article I wrote for them, it blew my mind.Face it...freelance writing in the RP industry will only get you some pocket cash unless you hit it really big, and even then, financial security is not a given. Witness this entire thread. Most of the time, it's a labor of love. Even those writers who've gone off to do D&D novels (which I've always always always wanted to do....) don't have it easy all the time. I've talked with a few that have told me that writing D&D novels is a freaking nightmare.Now, I'm not dissing the RP writing gig completely here. I'm glad I've done what I've done, and my ego enjoys the little dribs and drabs of recognition that pop up every so often. And I certainly look forward to doing more. But Mister Reality visited me once and said "You'll never earn a good living doing this...aim for the bigger stuff."Tangent: Recently, I had occasion to use our friend the Internet to look up some stuff about the old Torg game. I did a bunch of TORG stuff, including the module that ended the entire campaign, and the only two gaming novels I've ever written! Well, one of the search results yielded an old bulletin board discussion, easily about 8 years ago, that seemed to imply that a group of gamers out there actually had banded together to actively hate me, for the stuff I did for (and supposedly TO) TORG. Never mind that what I did wrote precisely what the editors told me to (yes, it's the old "I was just following orders" explanation that I used to defend my participation in the reviled-by-many Castle Greyhawk adventure anthology! Hey, go with what works, no?). It was at that moment, reading a bulletin board that ceased to be relevant almost a decade ago, that I realized that I had truly arrived as a game writer...it's when you get a group of people who actually take out the time to hate you, then, yeah, you're complete  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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