|
3 people marked this as a favorite.
|
Hello, Paizo boards.
Eric Morton here. Some of you may know me from my freelance work, my two appearances as an RPG Superstar finalist, or my many pages of free online content.
Today, I would like you to know that I have also started work on a short-term publishing venture. My plan is to release a small selection of high-quality, fully-illustrated PDF products on par with those available from other small publishers.
It will be a few months before I am ready to contact online stores and arrange the release my first PDF, but I would like to take this opportunity to let you know what I'm working on. As usual for a product in development, the exact content of this PDF is subject to change.
The working title of my first release is The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Wealth and Power. Designed for gamers who lack the time or patience needed for tedious bookkeeping, this product presents new, streamlined options for downtime, kingdom building, and warfare. Use this content as a simplified, stand-alone system, or use the new options it presents in conjunction with previously-published mechanics, as desired.
The rules being developed for this upcoming product include:
- Simplified rules for buildings and vehicles, including expanded options for custom rooms and furnishings. Attract a haunt; install a deafening pipe organ; maximize your ki with feng shui; and more, all while earning an easy-to-track monthly income from your buildings and vehicles.
- Simplified rules for kingdoms and other governments. Use previously-published leadership roles and edicts, or replace them with alternative leadership roles and edicts for a simpler, more flexible style of government. Leave the management of routine affairs to your minions; you have a kingdom to build.
- Streamlined rules for warfare, combining previously-published mass combat rules with the new rules for the troop subtype. Raise an army and resolve battles using creatures with the troop subtype and the normal core rules for combat, with no need to use unrelated army statistics or tactics.
- An expanded list of kingdom events, including both random and planned events. Send goblins to burn down your neighbor's forest; survive a deadly meteor shower; use ritual magic to cloak your kingdom in eternal winter; and more. Plus...
- An appendix of bestiary stats for numerous creatures with the troop subtype. Everything you need to recruit soldiers for your nation, employ mercenaries in your own private army, or challenge a party of individual characters to a battle against impossible odds.
All this and more is being designed for The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Wealth and Power. Coming soon.
Sounds cool, Eric. I'm interested in what you will be providing. Best of luck on your endeavors!
Am interested to see what you'll be doing with the Downtime system.
As a longtime fan, its really nice to see you stepping out and promoting your own vision. Nice one Eric.
When I first clicked on this I was saying to myself "Don't be some no name Joe Blow asking us to support his kickstarter without any credentials." I then preceded to skip even bothering to look at the name and just look for the first link which I just new would be either to a list of items they had worked on or would be a link to kickstarter. I was pleased to see it was items the author had worked on. And then I saw that the items belonged to Epic Meepo and I was all about ready to come back here and rip some *** for trying to steal his work.
And then I saw the name on the opening post and thought that was worth sharing.
/sidenote
On topic, I'm thrilled and wish you all the best. :)
|
2 people marked this as a favorite.
|
If you need help you know who to ask!
I haven't set up a project website yet, so I'll post my latest progress report in this thread:
Three weeks in, and things are going well.
Most of the artwork for this project has now been acquired. I've opted to use high-quality black-and-white illustrations, with full-color graphics and trim to keep the product from existing entirely in shades of grey. I did have an opportunity to grab one or two okay color illustrations without breaking my budget, but I decided to pass on those. The black-and-white alternatives looked way cooler.
After inspecting the illustrations at my disposal, I spent some time exploring page layout and graphics options. As a first-time publisher, this was relatively new to me, so I designed several sample PDFs for practice. After comparing my latest effort to the offerings of several other third-party publishers, I feel confident that my final product, while not particularly fancy, will at least be visually respectable.
Which, ironically, makes the actual writing part of this project the one that requires the most attention moving forward. With several rounds of editing and playtesting ahead of me, I can't really predict the final word count for this project. But I can say with some certainty that this PDF is going to be fairly large.
Before adding any illustrations and tables, my partially-written draft is somewhere between thirty and forty pages long. Based on this, my current goal (which may shift a bit over time) is a finished product with 64 pages and 32 illustrations, available at the end of August.
Very detailed production notes Eric! Nice to see - 32 illos in a 64 page product is awesome!!!
Dotting for great interest.
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Another three weeks, another progress report:
Slowly but surely, I'm approaching my goal of 64 pages of content. As of this post, I have roughly 52 pages of content in various stages of completion. The sections I have yet to write should easily be able to round out the remaining 12 pages.
I'm currently working on the text and the page layout in parallel. It would probably be more efficient to finish the text in full before doing any layout work, but I like being able to adjust my word count goals in response to page layout issues as they become apparent. In most cases, that means adjusting the word count to accommodate stat blocks and tables.
I've decided to organize things into two-page spreads as if this were a print product. Independent one-page spreads seem to be the industry standard for third-party PDF publishers, but I want my pages to appear as part of a cohesive whole even if the reader zooms out to look at pairs of pages side-by-side. Laying things out on that scale is probably unnecessary. (After all, who actually zooms out to view PDFs two pages at a time?) But I'm doing it anyway, just for kicks.
While I still have lots of work to do before I'm ready for launch, I've reached the point in development where I can start announcing specific content with a fair degree of confidence. So, without further ado, here are some troops whose stats I plan to include in this product:
Included with these troop stats are reprinted and updated rules for the troop subtype; rules for mounted troops and troops of steeds; commentary on the interaction between troops and teamwork feats; and army recruitment rules that allow powerful individual monsters to fight against or alongside troops in mass combat encounters.
Use these rules to build armies for mass combat campaigns, to assemble competitive PvP warbands, or to challenge adventuring parties with fights against overwhelming odds.
All of that and more is scheduled to appear in one of the chapters of The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Wealth and Power. Because lazy gamers shouldn't be required to design their own rules for these sorts of things.
Oh, that information for troops sounds good, especially the bit about worg packs (go wolves!), ghoul packs and zombie hordes, and 'normal' army troops.
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Also, stats for militias and mobs.
Four more weeks of design work finished; time for another update:
I've reached the original deadline I set for myself on this project, and I've arrived at a sort of good news/bad news point for those of you who have expressed an interest in The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Wealth and Power.
First, the bad news: This project is going to take a few months longer than originally planned. I've decided to work on several projects simultaneously so as not to burn out on any given one of them. While this approach is slowing down my self-publishing schedule, I think it will produce better end results than a series of mad dashes to finish a given project before starting the next one.
Now, the good news: I'm running behind because I hit my 64-page end goal this week and realized that I still had stuff to say. Lots of stuff. So I've extended my word-count goals, acquired additional artwork, and made plans for even more content. Though I have plenty of design work yet to do, it now appears that The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Wealth and Power is going to be 96 pages long.
The 96-page PDF will have even more troop stats than the several dozen already announced in this thread; even more new events that can effect your kingdom; even more additional content of other types, such as ritual magic spells and edicts for characters and kingdoms. (Have I mentioned that yet? Kingdoms can now cast spells.)
If this was a long-term publishing venture, I would be splitting all of that content into half a dozen narrowly-focused PDFs and selling them separately. But I'm not going to do that. I'll have plenty of time to write narrowly-focused products in the future. The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Wealth and Power is my first real self-published PDF, so I'm making it big. 96 pages big.
Sounds good, Eric. Looking forward to seeing the end result.
I had an epiphany the other day:
Much of the content I'm trying to cram into an over-the-word-count 96-page PDF would work better as free online content.
I could, for example, post my thirty-plus troop stat blocks to d20pfsrd.org (an outlet I've used extensively in the past). That would reduce my page layout workload by a third, keep the price low on the Wealth and Power PDF, deliver content to consumers faster, and generate web traffic on pages where I can advertise products I make available through the d20pfsrd.org store.
This may have to happen in the near future.
Well, as long as you finish it and it is good, I'll probably buy it:)
This past month, I've been busy laying the groundwork for a full product line of short PDF products, but I haven't forgotten The Lazy Gamer's Guide to Wealth and Power. In fact, I've regularly refined my font selection and page layout over the past few weeks.
I have decided that it definitely makes sense to release a fair percentage of the 96 pages in Wealth and Power as free web content. In particular, I'm planning on releasing all of the troop stats announced in this thread as free content on d20pfsrd.
For those of you familiar with the two-hundred or so monsters I've posted on d20pfsrd, the roll-out of my troop stats will look familiar. I plan on releasing a handful a week for several months while continuing to work on other projects. With any luck, that will help create a bit of visibility for my efforts as the release of my various PDFs grows nigh.
At the moment, all of the announced troop stats are written (though not yet in HTML), but I want to do an additional editing pass before releasing them.
I may also need to set up a d20pfsrd storefront before I release any troop stats, as I want to post them as "official" content from a third-party publisher instead of fan creations. I'll be contacting the good folks at various websites to discuss storefronts and related matters in the near future.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber
Any news on this project?
Recent threads in Product Discussion
|
