So You Want to Write RPGs

One version of the joke is, what's the best way to get $1,000,000 and a Porche by writing game books?

Start with $2,000,000 and a Ferrari.

It's not exactly a high-profit business. But it can pay, mostly as a hobby.

ZakS makes a great case for just doing it yourself.

My usual employer, SJG, pays pretty well even for new authors, especially if you write for Pyramid (currently $0.04/word) or e23 (currently 25% royalties).

But what is the trick? Like with most things, the general feeling is you only need a kick-ass idea and a creative writing style and some total gaming awesomeness.

The truth is you need an idea. But execution is what gets that idea published by you or by anyone else.

Here are the three keys to being a successful freelancer, in my experience.

Most important thing: Meet your deadlines. Seriously, if you want to know why I keep getting paid writing gigs, it's because I meet my deadlines. If there is even a possibility of missing one by a single minute, as soon as I know I will contact my editor(s) and explain the situation and see what we can do. To date I've always made my original deadline or a revised deadline based on shifting company production schedules. Don't be late to work. It's your hobby but it's your publisher's livelihood.

My advice is to ask for a deadline you know you can meet, and then add 1-2 weeks to that just in case. Hand it in early if you want (I just handed something in a few days early myself). But don't be late.

Second: Write what you agreed to write. It's a contract and it's work. Treat it like that - if you agreed to do A, B, and C it's going to mess folks up when you say B didn't turn out to be so fun to write so you wrote A, C, and X instead. Not to say you can't change the approach during writing, but you can't do it without getting agreement from your publisher.

This is where your clever idea comes in. You'll need an idea with some meat on its bones to reach a reasonable pagecount. You'd be surprised how often a great idea that seems like a 32-page book turns out to be a 4-page pamphlet. So aim high. Better to reach for a big-but-doable project and have to cut chunks off to save for later than to come up short. I wrote 15 monsters for DFM1, and I have a file with 5 more that didn't make the cut. That's a lot better than 10 monsters and, uhm, about those other 5, Mr. Editor . . .

Third: Know the Rules. The game rules and the publishing rules. Know the formats. Learn the writing style of your publisher. If you're doing it yourself, have a writing style of your own and know the formats of your publishing software. If you write for GURPS and they have a standard set of formats (they do), know GURPS and know the formats. If you write for a white-box D&D clone you better know the white-box D&D rules and how you want the product to look. Know the SRD if you're writing stuff using bits of it. Understand copyright and crediting people, and know that "I didn't charge for it" doesn't mean it's not a copyright violation.

My ability to do those is probably the most important reason I get to write what I write. People at SJG know that I'll fulfill the contract, the material will fit the rules, I'm fairly well conversant with the formats, and it'll be in on time. I'm not a risk. Don't be a risk, be a known asset!

Finally, accept that this isn't going to get you glamor, fame, and fortune. You can be a big fish in the small pond of RPGs, sure, but if it's not fun, don't do it. It's not a sure-fire path to riches. You get to know that your house rules are now an influence on other people's play styles. But you also get to know that gee, not that many people buy RPGs. And you get that "friend" who shows up with a pirated copy of your book to game with and says "I got this off a torrent site!" without a trace of shame. And people who tell you that your book sucks and they'd have done it a different way. But I won't lie to you, it's fun and if you like to write, converting your game stuff into published stuff is enjoyable. It's just real work, and not very well paying work. Know that and be realistic in your expectations.

I hope that helps somebody.

Return to original owner

Today, just before Thanksgiving dinner, I gave my uncle his original copy of the AD&D Player's Handbook back.

I ended up with it in a roundabout way, from a cousin who'd gotten it from my uncle. But my uncle's name was in it. When I moved and consolidated down to one copy of everything, I found that in my PHB stack. So I brought it to him and gave it back to him. He was pretty surprised and happy.

I doubt he'll use it, but it's nice to get to put it back in the hands of the person whose copies of "The Lord of the Rings" and D&D got me interested in gaming in the first place.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Give back to the ones who got you into gaming.

Dread Empire

When we last left Bragi Ragnarson, he was under a big pile of corpses on a battlefield. Finally we'll get to find out what happens next (no thanks to the person who swiped the original manuscript years back).

A Path to Coldness of Heart (Dread Empire 3) is up for pre-order on Amazon.com.

I shamelessly stole from the Dread Empire series for my last fantasy game, and I'm really looking forward to these. I'll add the DE books to my re-read pile. It's been too long . . .

Response to "one monster per dungeon."

Paul over at blogofholding.com posted this about a one-monster dungeon, like Theseus vs. the Minotaur or most pulp stories. You know, how Conan isn't hacking down hordes of orcs, he's fighting the one big lizard or ancient god or whatever in the place.

I posted a response on his blog but I realized I didn't want to lose that comment in the ether of "Where did I write that?" So here it is again, slightly annotated and hyperlinked.

Said I, considering a dungeon with one big bad monster:

"If it's possible to explore the dungeon, find the Big Treasure, and sneak back out with getting whacked by the big monster, sure, tension. It adds a whole new dimension. As long as the monster is scary enough that avoiding it would be better, and there is a non-monster-slaying goal involved (escape the dungeon, find the treasure, get through the maze into the secret lair of whomever, etc.) So the monster is the worst thing that could happen, and it's not something that helps you with your goal.

Theseus is a bad example of that, though. The minotaur is the quest item (find him, kill him) and escaping the maze is the tough bit. The maze is the monster there, if you follow me. A better example might be the sea maze in front of Imrryr, where sea raiders hope to hell they get through the dungeon to the prize (sack the dreaming city!) without encountering the monster – the golden battle barges. Smaug's lair, too – Bilbo wants to find the treasure, not really find the dragon. Getting rid of the dragon is fine but everyone would rather not be the one to fight it.

But it's just a big maze I have to explore and hope I find the monster I want to kill . . . eh, that doesn't sound too fun."

That's pretty much it - if the monster is the goal, an empty maze to navigate to find it doesn't sound fun. Not that it wouldn't be a cool story (I like the Theseus story myself) but it's not as interesting to spend 3-5 gaming hours at the table hoping you finally find the bloody minotaur. It's way more interesting to spend 3-5 hours thinking please-please-please-please-don't-let-this-room-have-the-minotaur-I-just-want-to-find-magic-amulet-and-go-home.

Random thoughts

Just some random stuff:

- I'm jealous of the folks in Jeff Rients's Caves of Myrddin game. I'd love to throw my hat in but he runs game during my work hours (yeah I'm at work at 5 am until mid-morning, as well as most nights and on weekends - welcome to working in the 2000s). It's a bit sillier than how I prefer to run my own games, but it's pickup D&D early in the morning, so silly+coffee seems ideal. One of these day a Constantcon game I can regularly make will show up and I'm totally going for it.

- Captcha is a great source of fantasy game names. It's a creative whack, really - next captcha code you need to plug in, jot it down and try to make it into something in your fantasy game.

- I miss painting minis, but I'm busy and I can't remember where I packed my pin drills and files for minis prep. So I dropped by my FLGS (actually not so L, but very F), Timewarp Comics & Games, grabbed some of Reaper's pre-painted plastics. Nice, I wish they had more. Other pre-painted non-random fantasy plastic would be cool, too if anyone has recommendations.
I've got enough lead and pewter, unpainted, to last a lifetime . . .

- When writing adventures, a punchy, one-sentence description of a room, item, or monster is better than a long, dripping description. A few sentences is fine if there is a lot to say. And in any description, it's unacceptable to say "You see blah, blah, blah, blah. And three orcs are running at you." Yeah, I'm going to notice blah, blah, blah, and blah, and then the orcs? Keep situational blindness in mind, but don't get silly - fighters do notice obstacles and surroundings. But the first thing we notice is the other guy.

- If you're going system agnostic, "This should be hard to do" is better than "roll X at -Y." Don't make me learn a system to use your non-system-based tool. If you've got a system, keep it descriptive. "Eric is the best swordsman in the city" is better than "Eric is a level 7 swordsman" and make me look up your 7-level descriptive rankings.

Just some random stuff that's been on my mind over the past few days as I read, shopping, stared at my boxes and boxes and boxes of unpainted minis, and did some writing.

Review: Challenge of the Frog Idol

Since this is a free product, I'm not doing an extensive review on it. You can just go pick it up and read it. I'm going to tell you why you might want to, and why you might not.

Challenge of the Frog Idol
Price: Free.
23 pages (21 counting the cover but not the OGL license pages)

What is it? It's a basic hex-crawl, sandbox adventure for just about any old-school D&D clone. What does that mean? You have a base of operations and a mapped-out area to explore. The adventure is non-linear, so you pretty much can explore the swamp as you will. It's a location with lots of sub locations instead of an "adventure" or "dungeon" per se.

How does it work? Pretty well.

The town is sparsely detailed but it's enough to use it as a base of operations. It's got enough issues and conflicts to affect adventures and provide springboards to more conflict (aka adventures).

The swamp is much more detailed, with encounter areas well set up to push or pull adventurers in the direction of still-more encounters. The random encounters are interesting, the monsters appropriate, and the set-piece locations are pretty cool. They have enough detail to run them off the top of your head, but not so much that'll you need to flip around finding out the "right" way to run them.

Why might I not like this? If you hate swamps, you love railroad or linear adventures, or you want very detailed (instead of sparsely detailed but evocative) locations, you might not like this so much. You could stick the adventure on rails, but it's not designed to be so.

How does this work for GURPS? You'll need to convert stuff, if you want to run it straight-up. But with some lizard men, giant frogs, and plain-old swarms, you'll be fine running it just porting over critters as needed. You could easily change any given D&Dish Monster X into GURPS Monster Y without a problem.


Rating:
Content: 5 out of 5. Excellent quality and it includes everything you need to run it.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Attractive and easy to use.

Overall: If you need to fill in that as-yet-undetailed-swamp in your game, grab this and drop it in. Recommended.

I for one miss Nostalgia

I'm not trying to speak for anyone here but myself. But part of why I play the games I do, and the way I do, is out of nostalgia. I'm nostalgic.

Nostalgia, 2: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia

I'm running The Keep on the Borderlands partly out of nostalgia. I chose to run GURPS Dungeon Fantasy partly out of nostalgia - a return to a simple dungeon-bashing game instead of the bigger, wide-area and (largely player-driven) plot-and-problem-centric games we used to play. I have all my old gaming stuff (well, almost all) partly out of nostalgia. I can look back on this stuff, even stuff I won't use, and remember why I got it, how exciting it all was, etc. It inspires some nostalgia; it's natsukashii (懐かしい), even, for you fellow Japanese speakers.

I say "partly" because while nostalgia helps drive my choices, it's not driving my games. I could have chosen B1 In Search of the Unknown (which was my second dungeon ever) or B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (either the first or second module I ran). I considered B3 but decided it was more work and less fun than B2, but I considered it. I'm playing the 4th edition of a 2nd or 3rd generation RPG, depending on how you count generations, not going back to the systems that were my introduction to gaming. I'm using old modules but not ones my players have been through before, and I'm using a new-to-me megadungeon, something I never tried to do before.

If we weren't generating new fun with this old stuff, we wouldn't keep doing it. My games are a mix of old stuff I miss, new stuff I wanted to try out, and old stuff I never did get to try out. I would keep playing if it wasn't adding new value to my life, but it's not like I went back to my old D&D stuff from when I was 9 because of a purely forward-looking outlook. I went back because I miss that sense of wonder and that simplicity of play, amongst other things. My gamers show up and play partly out of that too, I expect, but again, if it wasn't new fun who would keep showing up? I'm creating new entertainment out of a mix of old and new.

I think it's fair to say that nostalgia can be a positive, if it's what brings you back to something old that you used to enjoy and can enjoy again. Pure nostalgia - nothing new at all, enjoyed purely as remembering previous fun - doesn't seem so useful. Doing bad stuff or boring stuff or sucky stuff because that's the way you used to do it - eh, I can't do that. I don't miss a lot about my old D&D days. I like a lot of the changes in RPGs, and what drew me to GURPS from AD&D and Rolemaster. But the bits I miss, well, they helped keep me in fantasy gaming all this time and helped me decide to go back to an even more simple campaign than I'd been running. I got a little tired of a big sandbox with an over-arching plot (a plot jointly generated by my actions and those of the PCs) and realistic consequences for violence. I wanted a little sandbox of a dungeon with PCs returning to a tavern and selling off the armor and weapons of their fallen foes.

Like I said, this is just me. Other folks may play old systems and old style games for other reasons. I'm playing new systems with old style dungeons for a lot of reasons. These aren't even all of mine. It's just the occasional negative tossed at nostalgia that made me think about my own relationship with that feeling.

I think I play partly out of it, and I don't think that's a problem.