Maledoric, Victorious!

+Mike Davison is kind enough to host the FLAILSNAILS Jousting Tourneys every few months on G+  Set in his realm of Normandie, the tournament draws knights and ladies and entities-shaped-as-knights to the lists to hurtle toward each other at speed and smack each other with pointy sticks.  They come from long-standing existing campaigns, and characters that know each other and adventure together often - to some knights and ladies who exist solely for the tourney.

An interesting thing has happened with Maledoric - who was made whole cloth via Mike's character generation rules.  I found immediately that he took the rough shape of Elric with a powdered wig, and my vision of him is sort of an anti-chivalric necromancer/holy man.  I conceived of him in a DCC mode, and thought it might be cool to use a cleric for the tourney rather than a fighter.  He got a train, a squire, and decent armor, suggesting to me a knight of some station.  And he came hot on the heels of a post about Atari 2600 Adventure -  and I imagined up the kingdom of Alfgrim, based on some perverted version of Adventure if it had gone afoul and lost its way (a la some Alice re-imaginings).

Tiberthe loses his cool when a mysterious visitor arrives at Palanche's lower gate

 Maledoric is not just a philosopher/cleric of an evil and almost forgotten dark god, he's also a worldly agent of the Yellow King - in DCC I imagined that Maledoric does the dirty work of the dark side of the King of Elfland, who shows up in Alfgrim as a tattered reflection of Oberon or something, obsessed with finding and recovering the Golden Goblet, sending out dragons and kleptobats to do his dirty work.  Or maybe it's the other way around, maybe he's working against them.  I don't know.  It's not clear but in my head cannon, it's okay if its ambiguous (I think it may be better).

Anyway, Maledoric won the tourney!  I chose A1 (AD&D) and B2 (Moldvay) as my prize, and look forward to hunkering down with those again, lost to me all these long, long years.

So, you can read who was in Maledoric's current train in the arrival for the Fall Tourney post, and I got to thinking it might be fun since I am on a little bit of a blocked period to describe the entities that came up in that post, and Gurailtz, and the deep gnome cook, and the Snake Men of Golaire.  Maybe describe Palanche, Maledoric's grim and picturesque cantilevered keep-office that stands guard over a deep and foul place wherein all manner of wretched things skulk; maybe it's Maledoric's hobby to investigate the catacombs below when he's not spying in tourneys or doing missions for the Yellow King.

A fearsome non-horse heavy mount.  Gurailtz?  Close enough?

We'll see.  Powder My Wig, but maybe this is the feeling of creativity coming back to me.  The insomnia makes me want to paint little plastic warriors I can't afford but this enterprise is free and makes me sleepy (obversely).

To bed - to drive on the morrow, and visit with family.  If I am away it's for the same reason most Americans are. Also, as an aside/footnote/postscript - Gutenberg is an easy way to go down the rabbit hole on interesting images.

Digital to Print-on-Demand is working

It's like this.  HHSOLO1 passed the officially, mathematically profitable mark already, while I wasn't even paying attention.  So, uh, WOOT, I guess.  Well, better to say that it's no longer a loss in terms of overhead, unless you factor in work time.  Note: I don't think this is a good measure of success - the way I heard these high school kids took off with my working copy, and some good reports I've gotten from FB and G+ community - that's success.  Funnily, I see now why I probably could never ever ever do publishing for a living, but it's a fun and interesting hobby and once you get some steam going, I mean, hey.  Could be worse.  My wife said something like: "I know you're not in it for the money...  But if you could be in it for the money a little, that would be great."

Where is the POD, the guys all say?  Lulu?  The way I set that thing up, it was easy to make some changes to text and content, and have the InDesign spit out a new digital thing pretty easily when changes were made.  This is in 8.5 x 11, nostalgia-nerd boner for TSR's treatment circa BSOLO (what I was aiming at/for)

It's tedious to suck all that text out and convert it to 6x9 print.  Conversely, it makes it easier to place interior art (except the Russ Nicholson piece), and it happens to break the cover into smithereens.  NOW, it feels like maybe what you get when you picked up a copy of SORCERY!, if you get my drift.

Dreary cut 'n' pasting, but the upshot is, maybe you could get an actual DCC solo gamebook in your actual hand by Christmas-time or whatever your Yule-like equivalent is, but I think it'd be white-knuckle layout for yours truly.  Gotta figure out how to work the Table of Contents, also...

Work so dreary, it could make one Irascible but OOO a tasty gemstone!

Almost done but so much professional stuff to attend to by January's end, I can't even tell you (also, probably a law suit over this borrowed dwarfsney)