Today I got a slap in the face for not being more scrupulous about third-party services and Terms of Service Agreements. I don’t have any recourse, so all I can do at this point is share my experience and hope others learn from my lesson.
Shilling is a crappy part of being a writer. Or publisher even, since I technically qualify as that too. I really hate doing it, and when I do shill I try to do it in respectful, non-spammy ways.
I also make no money as a writer and even less as a publisher. So there are obviously some flaws to how I market.
Still, nothing turns me off more than strangers randomly trying to mass network with me. I wouldn’t even think I was worth shmoozing, but it does happen once in a blue moon. (A friend and I were approached after we were on a panel at a tiny convention by someone who wanted to press their business card on us. I had no idea what to do.) Even my tiny little zine, Mad Scientist Journal, gets a bit of spamming from people who don’t know me but want to team up or something.
I’d be lying if I said general ennui and frustration with roleplaying games is some new thing. I’ve been dissatisfied with a lot of roleplaying games for probably the last decade, but occasionally it spikes up and I want to rant and foam a bit. I almost had a new post written when I bought the newest edition of Fading Suns. It had changed a few things, but left in a lot of the bits I thought were ill conceived. Now Shadowrun 5th Edition is coming out and I feel similarly frustrated. I want to grab someone and yell, “You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!!”
On the flip side, a lot of Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts have made gaming a whole different level of fun. And it’s gotten me to dust off a lot of game ideas that I’d otherwise given up on.
We played our second session of our Apocalypse World game recently. This is probably the first time I’ve run a second session for any of the AW hacks. This session got me involved in the use of the Fronts and threats for the game. This is the mechanical tracking of plot threads that impact the characters. Normally I run generally off the cuff, with only a vague notion of where things are going and leaving myself open to letting the magic happen. But I figured I wanted to get the full AW experience, so I pulled out the little booklets that I’d printed out with all the other playsheets and started filling them in with guidance from the book.
One of the interesting things about our Monsterhearts game that I failed to mention were the ground rules that were set up for our gaming etiquette. I’ve never really managed to get anything like that established for my gaming groups. In the past I’ve tried to ask people for hard limits and gotten little to no response. And since it’s sometimes hard to just get players to read setting information (“I don’t do homework for fun”), I had just given up on the topic. In general, our rules tend to be an unspoken “Don’t be a dick.”
After Go Play Northwest this year, I found myself wanting to dive into Apocalypse World and its assorted hacks. In part because I have a couple hacks I want to make and don’t want to repeat my past mistakes of taking elements from a game I barely understand and then fumbling it up when I try to apply it elsewhere. In part because it’s just stupid fun. Bizarrely, I still don’t feel jazzed over “the post apocalypse” as a genre. But I’ve had stupid amounts of fun both times I’ve played it so I was willing to give it a whirl.
Once again I went out and played twee indie games with the fine folk of Go Play Northwest. This was their seventh year running it, my sixth year attending. Here’s my recap, and I’m sticking to it.
I’ve started and trashed a few different blog posts over the last few weeks. I have a lot of things gnawing away at me that I want to comment on but haven’t really found the right words for it. But I had some recent and unexpected news that I’m trying to process. So while it’s fresh, I thought I’d share.
A while back I got permission to self-publish my novella, Kensei, as well as a sequel once the rights reverted back to me. It’s a shared world and a good chunk of the characters are taken straight from other sources. Some are co-created with other authors who have played around in that world.
It’s not something I figure I can shop around, but I’ve had at least one sequel in mind for this book for a while. And the scant handful of serious Kensei fans (both of them!) have wanted one. I’m easily led around by a stroked ego under the right circumstances. So I have been working on trying to have a manuscript ready for when the rights revert back to me. I’m in the outlining stage right now.
This week I realized that I had misremembered my contract. I thought the rights reverted back to me in three years. It actually reverts back to me in two. Meaning that I am looking to have things that I need to decide on. And then the fear settles in.
Another Easter as come and gone, and with it another iteration of Norwescon. Norwescon is the largest convention of its type in the Pacific Northwest.
Once again, my lovely wife and I ventured east to the Great Lakes State to once again savor the roleplaying pleasures to be found at AmberCon!
