The Off Pitch
The time is upon us once again: a new submission window has just started for Wizards of the Coast and DDI!
And... and... I'm drawing a blank here.
The Thrill of Victory
Now I know how some of you think because I'm in a similar boat: getting something published in Dragon or Dungeon magazine would be really, really cool. It's an acknowledgement, a nod by a major gaming company that shows you actually created something worthy of their attention, so much so that they actually PAID you to do it! Not only that, but whatever you write will be read by lots of people! Players worldwide could potentially be using your content in their own private games! Your name will become a synonym for "awesome"!!!
Maybe I'm exaggerating that last part a bit, but you get the point. And I'm not saying that everyone's like that, but since I'm kind of already a self-publisher it's starting to look that way. I mean, I can already publish any content I want and it'll be seen by... well... a few people... So the only thing that DDI brings is a higher level of exposure and acknowledgement.
And money, let's not forget that. You can't buy a boat with it, but it's something. I admit that, had I received a check from Wizards of the Coast I would have probably not cashed it, choosing to encase it in plastic and make it a really cool paperweight. But, in case you all aren't aware, WotC doesn't send checks; they use direct deposit to pay you.
The Agony of Defeat
There's a flip side to acceptance: the agony of rejection. I have to admit, compared to other publishing venues in the world the folks at Wizards of the Coast do a fantastic job of rejecting your idea. Where most publishers will send you a "No. Just... No" form letter, WotC actually goes in to vivid detail as to why they are not interested in what you're proposing. There's an actual human responding to each and every email - I've received rejections from at least four different people at WotC in the past - and unless your idea is completely bats%#@ insane they'll add a fantastic personal touch to the message explaining why they are not interested at this time. I've never seen a company say "no" in such a nice, professional and constructive way. Even if they really want to say "good god, man... what the hell were you thinking?", they'll be nice about it.
But, regardless of how nicely they put it, some people see the rejection as a soul crushing defeat. Even if they respond "we like it, but we're doing that already", it'll feel like you're idea has been thrown in to the Abyss. If they don't like it, nobody will! You just have to look at the numbers to realize it... Every submission cycle WotC receives tens of thousands of submissions and only accepts a hundred or so. Where are these submissions? We should be up to our eyeballs in independently published content for 4th Edition, but instead these ideas are thrown away and lost.
The Publisher's Dilemma
Now I have to admit something: I have an article in the pipeline. I don't know when it might get published, or even if, but it's out there... sitting in either the "to be published" or "shred with extreme prejudice" virtual bin on a WotC server. And, yes, I did get paid... but printing my online bank statement, cutting out the single line that recognizes the wire transfer from Hasbro/WotC and encasing that in plastic just doesn't have the same flair to it.
That article was accepted about eight or nine months ago. Quite frankly, I freely admit it wasn't my best work by far, but I still look forward to the day that it might get published. At midnight on the last day of every month I eagerly open the new Dragon and Dungeon table of contents to see if my name is there yet, only to fall away in despair when it's not.
I know what you might be thinking: "you got paid, right? What does it matter?" ... Well, if you're like me you're not thinking that but somebody out there is. It all goes back to acknowledgement; until I see my article in print, the payment means little to me. It almost feels like I got paid to be silenced, especially since I legally can't publish it on my own now. Heck, I'm pretty sure I can't even mention the article's contents at this point. Until the world sees the article, the payment almost feels like hush money. And, at $0.06/word, it turns out that it's pretty cost effective to shut me up.
Because of my first experience with publishing something in DDI, I'm now hesitant to do it again. If I submit an idea now, it might not see the light of day until 5th Edition is out... and what's the point then? At this point I'm not worried they'll say "no", but I'm concerned of how I will react if they say "yes". Can I take another nine months of waiting for the article to be seen, hoping that it'll be published while 4th Edition is arguably still relevant?
And then the business person in me chimes in: "you're already a publisher! What do you need DDI for?" Admittedly, self-publishing is a lot more work and doesn't get anywhere near the level of exposure that a DDI article gets. And, even though WotC doesn't pay much, it might not make as much (I've only had one product sell well enough to be worth it, and of course it's the product I can't sell anymore and can't talk about. You know, that one...). Some people might write for recognition or for profit, but I write because I enjoy it.
The fact that I'm drawing a complete and total blank this time around doesn't help either. I have some big campaign ideas, but they are all beyond the scope of anything that would ever get published in DDI. And I am terribly bad at writing lore (I struggled on the lore like you wouldn't believe in the aforementioned article of mine), so I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that sort of thing no matter how cool the idea might be. I just can't think of anything to submit right now.
But, sooner or later, I'll submit something. Because, god damn it, I want to see my name on that Dungeon table of contents!
-=O=-
In a completely unrelated and surprising note, "The Heart of Fire" was recently reviewed on ENWorld and got 4 out of 5 stars!
Two things I learned from that review:
- Interior art is important. I really got to do something about that.
- I'm not charging enough for my products. I've always been bad at gauging the worth of what I do; when one enjoys it so, it's hard to try and gouge people with the price. Many say I should raise the price, but I probably won't.
In the Works
I can't help it... I have more and more ideas popping in to my head, and part of me really wants to write them up in a module but there's another part of me that questions what edition to do it for. After all, some would argue that 4E is on its last breath, but 5E is still too far away to create anything concrete for it.
So, at least until I get around to writing some of these, here are the projects I have in the works:
DM2: The Fields of Bone and DM3: The Den of the Dark Mistress
These two modules are a continuation to my level 0 adventure DM1: Death's Edge, which was released as part of the May of the Dead blog carnival.
Part of the reason I haven't continued work on this, besides there not being enough hours in a day (man, if every day had 57 hours in it I'd be unbelievably productive!), is that the latter half of The Fields of Bone is virtually identical to the Reavers of the Harkenworld adventure that comes with the DM's Kit. I mean, the similarity was amazingly uncanny considering I hadn't even looked at Reavers until recently.
I've been considering doing a Kickstarter for this, but I've already expressed my concerns regarding that.
Unnamed Lair Assault style adventure
I got this idea from Twitter in a roundabout sort of way, and it was one of the ideas I had submitted to DDI last cycle only to be told "no".
Premise: The players are all kobolds. While they are away a group of level 1 adventures attacks their lair and kills everything inside, and the kobolds return before the party has left. They must reclaim their lair and get their revenge on the adventuring party that dared attack them!
Part of the design involves giving the kobolds the ability to "buy" traps, creatures, obstacles, etc... that they can place throughout their lair in order to thwart the intruding adventuring party. So basically the DM decides the path the adventures are going to take, the players then buy the traps using resource points (similar to Attack of the Tyrantclaw, I think), and the DM resolves whether those traps caused any damage to the adventuring party. Then the kobolds go in and try to kill the adventurers, which consist of the stereotypical five PCs (fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue, ranger), one animal companion, one familiar and at least two henchmen.
I thought it would be an interesting idea to have the participating players pretend that they themselves are Tucker's Kobolds, and it'll be an experiment to see whether the role reversal - players as monsters and the DM controlling PCs - will work without being too big a headache for the DM.
Module's about 70% written and still needs a map of the lair. I'm walking a thin line because kobold PCs are not exactly GSL compliant, but I think it will be OK.
Unnamed Epic Tier adventure
Preliminary synopsis:
Nobody knows where they came from; ten foot tall shards of reddish-blue crystal were appearing across the land, and these crystals defied all magical explanation, were impervious to all damage and could not be moved by even the most powerful forces. They remained motionless, seemingly inert, hovering a few inches above the ground, without any rhyme or reason...
...until the seventh day. Without any warning, the crystal and everything surrounding it vanished in the blink of an eye, leaving behind a massive crater over two miles wide and almost half a mile deep. All that remained was gaping hole in the earth; no destruction, no debris... Just emptiness.
In the past the crystals appeared in seemingly random locations - in the middle of a barren field, hovering above the ocean surface miles offshore, atop distant mountains and deep within swamps - so the locals had no reason to be concerned. But now one of these crystals has appeared in the town square of the most populated city on the continent, causing widespread panic and jeopardizing the residents, their homes and their way of life. Something must be done before time runs out and the city is consumed, leaving nothing more than a lifeless crater where it once stood.
I have never done an epic tier adventure. Actually, the only epic tier stuff I've done has been bits and pieces of my Items of Legend supplement. The reason: I am very bad with D&D lore. Epic tier usually involves interaction with gods and primordials, other planes of existence and a lot of things that require detailed knowledge of the world that is D&D. I'm just not comfortable with that as a designer and as a DM.
This adventure is meant to be for the early epic tier - around level 21-23, I'm guessing - which means I can get away with not dealing with a lot of the lore that comes with epic adventures. Yes, a majority of the adventure will take place in the Elemental Chaos, but it won't be bound to much lore there beyond the plane of existence itself.
I'm still debating whether to make this a straight up adventure or something that leans towards the Fourthcore style of play (which is something I've been wanting to do for some time). And, since I have the story in my head but haven't done any actual design work for it, it seems like a good candidate for "DnD Next". Still don't know... Need to think about it...
Untitled RPG or Campaign Setting
For quite some time I've had an idea to create a somewhat post-apocalyptic RPG, or at least an extensive campaign setting. This idea of mine has been somewhat motivated by the fact that I can't legally create Gamma World (*writes check!*) content, so rather than complain about not being able to use the system I thought I'd create my own system and do with it as I please. I haven't decided what engine to use - I've considered d20, AGE, FATE and others - or whether I'll roll my own system, so my plans are still quite up in the air.
The setting is not quite Gamma World (*writes check!*), but it's close. It's a post-apocalyptic world, and although there is a certain extra-terrestrial influence it is "down to Earth", if you will. I have ideas for space travel and other adventures along those lines, which might take it beyond the d20 style of play to something more tactical or more resource-driven (my life has been heavily influenced by Star Control, Starflight, Master of Orion and similar game mechanics), but I don't know if I want to take the core that far "out there".
Writing your own RPG or campaign setting is, needless to say, a helluva lot of work. I'm not sure if I have the time or resources to take on such a thing, and I'm fearful that anything I create might be lost in the sea of RPGs currently out there. And, like I've said before, I'm horrible when it comes to writing "fluff"... and that's kind of important in a project such as this.
So maybe, some day, I might actually make some progress on this. Don't be surprised if I throw up a real Kickstarter to develop this some day.
So stay tuned for my next creation... whenever that may be. 🙂
Kickstarter… Or Not
I have a lot of thoughts and ideas that are constantly rolling around in my head, and if the average day contained more than 24 hours I would most probably put them down on paper and publish them for the world to enjoy. But there's always one thing about my publications that makes me somewhat self-conscious and question the quality of my own work: they aren't "artsy".
Like I've mentioned on this blog before, I am not an artist. Sure I can make tactical maps, but that's not what I'm talking about when it comes to being an artist; I'm talking about actual hand-drawn images to give my product a little more of an artistic flair. Every time I finish a product and am about to publish it, I spend weeks trying to figure out what I'm going to do about cover art because I don't consider it a true product without one. My last product, Death's Edge, was published without cover art (the image you see on the listing is a very low resolution stock image; I do not have license to an image of sufficient resolution to publish), and that actually bothers me a great deal. It just feels... wrong... ya know?
I got lucky with The Heart of Fire: I was able to find the perfect image on DeviantArt and I contacted the artist to see about licensing it. The artist allowed me to license it, gave me a very reasonable price for it, and most importantly I was able to afford it at the time. Nowadays the return on investment for 4th Edition products is nowhere near what it once was - I haven't made a profit on any product in ages - so it's hard to justify spending money to commission art or to pay for existing art when you know you're not going to make the money back in sales.
So I've considered Kickstarter as a means to fund the creative aspects of the project and pay for commissioned artists to create the covers and interstitial art in my publications. I have actually written up at least three separate projects in order to fund some ideas of mine... but I've never had the courage to hit the "post" button for a variety of reasons.
My biggest problem is that I don't really consider this a self-sustaining business. That's always been my problem: I do this for fun, so I'm not actively looking at this as a means to put food on the table. As a result, any aggressive efforts to try to make a strong revenue stream from these products feels kind of inappropriate, and it feels kind of awkward to ask complete strangers to spend their hard earned money to have me do what I consider a hobby, a pastime. Sure, you can pay me all you want to buy an existing product, but are people seriously going to pay me to create something that doesn't exist yet and I was going to do anyway simply because I want to?
Secondly, because of the mathematician that I am I've done the numbers a lot, and in the back of my mind I question whether it'll be worth it. If everyone provides just enough funding to get a digital version it's all great because that's considered 100% profit, but once you start getting in to the higher reward levels the profit dwindles. Let's assume that everyone (or at least a majority of backers) decides to get the hard-copy version of the product; if I have to spend $20 to get a $25 backer his reward, I could risk not getting enough margin to pay for the commissioned art in the first place. The two solutions to this - either put the project goal higher or make the cost of the hard-copy rewards higher - put the project at risk of not getting funded.
Finally, and this might sound silly... there's the issue of the video. You see, I am not a salesman, and I am very self-conscious about things like that, so much so that my online persona has no trace of what I look like or even what I sound like. Heck, if it weren't for me putting my Twitter handle on my GenCon badge nobody would have known who the hell I was. So sitting in front of a camera and trying to sell my product to you feels rather awkward, especially when I'm doing what I'm doing for fun and not for profit. I would much rather stay behind the scenes, maintain the notion that I am the "digital rabbit", and have people buy my product because they want it and not because I told them to buy it.
So now I've got this planned product, the next two parts to the campaign path following Death's Edge, that I question whether to do it on Kickstarter or not. I have the project typed up and pretty much ready to hit "post", but it feels both risky and inappropriate for all the above reasons. There are other reasons for my hesitation, such as my plans for The Fields of Bone being almost identical to the Reavers of the Harkenworld module (which is part of the 4E DM's Kit), but that's a small issue compared to all the other issues with Kickstarter mentioned above.
Maybe one of these days I'll come up with something that I feel worthy to be funded in such a way, and maybe that'll be enough for me to come out from behind my rabbit face and try to sell people on it. Time will tell, I guess.
May of the Dead: Death’s Edge
As part of the May of the Dead blog carnival, I decided to do something similar to what I did with the Winter is Coming carnival: create yet another adventure module!
This adventure is significantly smaller in scope than my earlier publications, but it's just getting started. It's a very short (5 scenes) level 0 adventure for Dungeon and Dragons 4th Edition, using the rules for creating level 0 characters published n Dragon #403, and is intended to be the first part in a three part series I am calling The Dark Mistress Saga.
The summary of the adventure:
DM1: The Dark Mistress Saga, Part One: Death's Edge
The village of Nerasi has been at war for as long as you can remember. Hordes of undead, led by a powerful necromancer named Draya (also known as "The Dark Mistress"), have descended in to the valley countless times over the last century. But this time something is different: they seem more organized, more coordinated, more bloodthirsty... and the village is in jeopardy more than ever. With the safety of the village on the line, every man and woman that was capable of swinging a blade was sent to battle. Even though the village was nowhere near the front line it was left undefended, presumed safe due to its distance from the conflict.
Now, while the battle continues in an area known as The Fields of Bone, a small group of undead creatures have found their way in to the village. With no heroes to defend the common folk, it is now up to you - the above average commoner - to drop the shovel or take off the apron, pick up the nearest weapon and defend yourself and your loved ones from the approaching invaders.
Death's Edge is an short module for a group of level 0 characters, using the character creation guidelines provided in Dragon magazine, issue #403.
The adventure, the first chapter of the saga, is available right here absolutely free! And I also provided a PDF of all the tactical maps in printable, 1" x 1" grid format.
Enjoy! And do let me know if there are any major problems with it.
The Dark Mistress Saga, Part One: Death's Edge
Adventure Module (PDF, 4.5Mb)
The Dark Mistress Saga, Part One: Death's Edge
Tactical Maps (PDF, 21.2Mb)
In the meantime, I'm actually considering starting a real Kickstarter to fund the other two parts of the campaign, starting with DM2: The Fields of Bone. Still haven't officially decided on that... Let's see what the response is on this one.
Status Update
It's been almost three weeks since my last post, so I figured it was time to give everyone a status update.
If you're not aware, on April 27th my mother passed away. I can't say it was unexpected - she had been dealing with a fair share of health issues and she hadn't been the same in the last few months - but even so it's been somewhat of a shock and a trying time as I deal with her loss. For a while there I lost my creative spark and desire to do anything from a design and development standpoint, but I've been slowly working my way to getting back to "business as usual" in that regard. Even so, we've still been dealing with issues as it relates to her passing, so it's still occupying a large part of my daily life. But I'm OK... pressing on day by day.
I'm now back in the creative swing, if you will. The Heart of Fire is doing as well as can be expected (the 4E market has dwindled, it seems), and I have several other projects currently in the works:
- On May 28th (I think), I will be releasing my contribution to the May of the Dead blog carnival: another level 0 adventure called Death's Edge, which involves the players defending their homes against an invading horde of undead. It's part one of a three part series I am calling The Dark Mistress Saga (I have my doubts of that name, but still), and will be available for free on this site. It's already completed, so I'm struggling with the fact that I want to get it published and am normally too impatient to wait the week and a half before its intended release date.
- I have already started work on part two of the three part series, a level 1 module that doesn't actually have a name yet. The second part is more warfare oriented, where the players are now "heroes" and are now on the front line of a war against a powerful necromancer and her vast undead army. For this second part I'm taking a lot of inspiration from the Heroes of Battle supplement for D&D 3.5E, and am debating to what extent to include some of the mechanics presented there (such as victory points, reputation points, morale, etc...).
- I was working on a Fouthcore adventure, but now I'm not sure if it's worth completing at this point. To be honest, there are many other people out there that can do Fourthcore much better than I can, and with DnD Next looming over the horizon it doesn't quite seem worth the effort at this point. So what I will probably do is release some of the areas of the campaign I've already done on this blog for anyone to use, similar in what I've done so far with the Gamma World Remnants.
- The Coming Dark is still the 700lb gorilla hiding in my closet. Once the DnD Next playtest materials hit (exactly one week from today), I am going to start planning the conversion. Granted, there might not be a whole lot I can do or would even want to do (I don't want to spent too much time creating mechanics that might change), but I can at least make some basic progress. My goal is to have one or more first level adventures available as soon as DnD Next launches (licensing limitations not withstanding), so we'll see how that goes.
- I have one adventure idea I pitched to Wizards of the Coast as part of the DDI submission window, and I have yet to hear a response regarding that. It's a really fun and somewhat wacky idea, and quite honestly I'm not expecting a positive response because of the nature of it, but whether they accept it or not it's going to get written sooner or later. It's actually about half done as it is, so once I hear "yay" or "nay" I'll complete the rest of it and publish through them or on my own.
- I have one DDI article that is slated to be published (in Dungeon, I assume)... eventually. I have no idea when, and for obvious reasons I can't say much more about it until it appears in the calendar. It is my first and, all things considered, it's pretty simple compared to my other stuff, but I'm really excited waiting for the day it's actually in print.
- As I said above, in one week the first wave of the DnD Next playtest will commence. I don't know how much I'll be able to actually play it, but I'll definitely be picking it apart with tweezers to figure out what it's all about.
Finally, there was a time I was considering a Kickstarter to fund the physical printing of The Heart of Fire, but after crunching the numbers it didn't seem all that practical to do. But now I'm seriously considering a Kickstarter to fund the development of parts two and three of The Dark Mistress Saga to help fund the creative needs of the project (cover art, maps, etc.) and to see if there's actually a demand for it. I have to run the numbers and give that some more thought.
Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know what I've been up to.
About the Author
Software developer and game designer in Miami, Florida. Currently working on content for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Pathfinder, 13th Age and other systems.
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