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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="BiggusGeekus" data-source="post: 2025996" data-attributes="member: 1014">A very long story. Short version: A long time.  I just shut up about it until now.  Thanks to ENWorld's artisit-at-large Allen Palmer for helping with this project and keepig mum for longer than he realistically should have.Long version: Back in 1999-2000 I did a fansite for Planescape Torment that's archived <a href="http://torment.db-forge.com/ouch/index.shtml" target="_blank">here</a> and has tons of ads now.  On the message boards several people got to talking about fantasy timelines.  If you've played Torment you know that the timeline spans thousands of years.  That works for Torment but you see it all too often in a lot of fantasy settings: thousands of years go by with not much happening.  That irritated me, so as a counter point I wrote up a possible fifty year history to show how people would be much more concerned with current events than the affairs of people long dead who were only now rising from the grave, etc., etc., etc.People liked it and suggested I develop it.  So I did.  My first idea was to put up everything on a website.  This was a very dumb idea because blogging software wasn't developed then and I was doing everything by HTML.  I was constantly rearanging pages and maintaining the site was more effort than it was worth.  I had about 30,000 words written and I was going to quit when who should have moved near me but an old college buddy with a PhD in GeoPhysics, by the name of Kulander, whom we shall call "Ku" for the remainder of this diatribe because that is how he is known.Ku was working for the US Geological Survey and had about four months to master their software.  He didn't want to experiment with the real USGS files so, guess what, he decided to map my world.  Or at least a chunk of it.  Ku has very developed ideas about game worlds that encompas entire planets.  He preferred to do a solid map of one small (1000+ miles) area.  That map now graces our website and takes up 6MB ... a file size that made our computers crash when we brought it up back then.  So I couldn't edit my own map file!We pushed the map issue to the side and began writing.  I was still uploading to the site, which was stil a dumb idea and Ku was giving me his edits.  Along the way we were joined by someone he knew, Eva, who did some of the elf stuff and she came up with the idea for the Stargazer PrC that depends so much on the constalations of the world.  Incidentally, Eva has THE BEST movie review for the Dungeons & Dragons movie that I've seen.  It's <a href="http://www.jabootu.com/d&d.htm" target="_blank">here</a> if you are interested.Then Ku went to law school, which took up a lot of his time.  Eva wandered off and did Eva things (I've never actualy met her, she's a cyber-buddy).  I fell in love, proposed, got the girl preggers, married her, moved into a house, had the baby, and then got threatened with termination at my job because my boss didn't understand what was taking up so much of my time.Somewhere in there we got Larry Elmore's permission to use one of his works for the cover art and Victoria Jones to do some lovely grayscale pieces for us.  Don't ask me how I pulled that off.   I don't really remember.So then I pulled everything together and realized ... realized ... realized ... that everyone else in the industry does their layout before buying over a thousand bucks worth of artwork.  Important tip there, guys.  So I shrunk everything down to 10pt font and used what I could, where I could.  But I needed more.  This is where Allan Palmer and Rachel Blackburn saved my bacon.  They kicked in some nice peices and I highly reccomend them for any future projects anyone here has.   Allan posts on ENWorld and can be found in the artist's forum.  Rachel's work is <a href="http://www.the-whispering.com" target="_blank">here</a>. So then it was about five years later.  My computer could now pull up the Murchad's Legacy file without crashing.  Then the folks over at RPGnow and RPGmall helped me out more than they should have and I got some good last minute advice from <a href="http://93gamesstudio.com/html/index.php" target="_blank">93 Games Studio</a> and <a href="http://www.bakabanashi.com/ARP/index.php" target="_blank">ARP</a>.  Which brings us to today when I recently found out why most people charge a few extra dollars more than I do on their books.My next project -- it is safe to say -- will be much smaller.</blockquote>

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