NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eosin the Red" data-source="post: 1478925" data-attributes="member: 168">Been a busy week. Real busy.My email has been on the fritz for the last 24-36 hours. Sometimes I get the normal flow of mail and sometimes nothing for hours. I know that I am missing stuff cause I sent myself 3 emails from work yesterday and those are gone. I also see some quotes on the various lists that I am on that reference posts I did not receive.Since I could not get at the email last night and I had to work, I ended up doing some research some for setting and some for publishing.I looked at several company’s submission guidelines and release forms. Some of them read like a legal enema and others are full of piss and vinegar. I really liked the stuff by White Wolf. My co-workers kept wondering why I would occasionally laugh aloud. Yep, it is that funny. I pondered a setting description or setting blurb. I checked out what other people put out and much to my surprise, NO ONE has a setting blurb anywhere (OK, 7th Sea does but it is well hidden). Kalamar also had one but it nearly put me to sleep and I like Kalamar!What to know what the Scarred Lands are like? Me too. I could not find it. Want a nice blurb about the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk? Me too. What about the Iron Kingdoms? At least they had something but the blurb told me exactly what I would know within seconds of picking up a product – Steam, machines, and no holds barred art.I am still pondering what this means. I need a setting for my non-businessy, business plan as bass ackwards as it may be.  Lack of sleep has turned me into a chump. This has more to do with the wife being out of commission than it does with anything else. I read several pages of veteran RPG writers and designers giving the whoozit about publishing, writing, game design, and grammar. I still don’t know the difference between loose and lose. I suspect it will say that on my grave. Thank goodness for editors. The advice is keen and cutting. If you want to get the skinny then head to places like S. John Ross’s website, then start looking at company submissions and art submissions statements. I just noticed something that is a big ole boo-boo. When talking with people, I figured out that I would need to bump my planned adventure from 32 to 64 pages if I wanted to see print. I did this. Now I realize, I am shy on art. I am going to need a hook other than just a standard adventure – i.e. give DMS something that they can reuse for more than just the life of the module. Finally, I just realized that if the writer (me) was in a hurt locker before, at this point he is FUBAR. It is like 3 or 4 days after posting my announcement and I am going to have to change the release date. Why does this suck? I am glad you asked. I had planned to squeak this bad boy into the ENNies and then cross my fingers and hope that it is good enough to garner some attention. Even making into the top 3 of any category would equate to real dollars in sales for a brand new company. I know that I did not buy Magical Medieval Society until it had won and I had “proof” that it did not suck. That proof or “street cred” is probably invaluable and now I will have to wait 16 months to see anything from it (the ceremony is in August and IF I was to produce something that made any cut but hit the street after May 31st then it will not be known until August 2005).This is a real fish or cut bait scenario I have found myself in. No answer is a good answer – so I turn to my trusty goal statement and the least acceptable level of success for me is to produce something that I am proud to have my name on. I think that means that the date is going to get kicked back but that raises all kinds of money issues.I am still working on “THE SETTING BIBLE.” Not so much adding things to the document as I am refining the ideas, increasing word precision and boiling things down to the bare minimum needed to convey what is needed. While doing this, I am wrangling with my partner about various names [I did mention that I was a name freak before didn’t I?]. I think I hit pay dirt today with some stuff on a race. Excuse the technical terms but I have an ELDER RACE who are SECRET GUARDIANS mixed with dose of PIRIAH ELITE [Think Vulcans, Mimbari, Middle-earth elves and the like]. I wanted them to be different than the often-lamented “Tolkien Races” but not so different that people did not “get” them. A little does of Celtic myth goes a long way in this case. While I am on that, we have nearly finished the first collaborative re-imagining of FRP using minotaurs. I am anxious to see how well it goes over. Steven did the initial write, then I edited and added in some text. Steven took my stuff did some more adding and subtracting then handed it over to an editor. There are still some minor issues with the piece but I can see the shine in the article already. Anyway, I head back to work tomorrow after a week of being mom, dad, and everything else. I should finally be able to get some writing done.PS - Thanks for the tip Morgish one. I will see about a tweak.</blockquote>

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