On Submission and Prices and Other Weighty Matters

Ahh, the banal details of business for which I believe I am relatively unprepared to handle any ramifications whatsoever except the most rudimentary ones like maybe this will be an outbreak of financial Ebola that will finally sink me in a mire of unremitting money problems (O WAIT ALREADY HAVE THAT!)

So, the solo funnel module HHSOLO1: The Hounds of Halthrag Keep is submitted to Goodman Games, in what is likely to be (barring any OGL weirdness - man that thing is a wasp nest of legalese) the for-salable iteration

(note to self: there happens to be one or two widows NOT PEOPLE that I just noticed that grate upon me but I will address them later so as not to throw the whole thing out of whack)

When this puppy allows me to retire in leisure and just attend RPG cons across the country humbly turning down high-paying new positions in game companies all over the world, having paid off my student loans to you admirable debt collectors who may read this post LOOK AT YOU AND HOW INDUSTRIOUS YOU ARE!, I will look back on those lost hours of sleep fretting about text/style GREPs (still haven't exactly sorted them out, yet) and leading and points and Character vs Paragraph Styles etc. etc. etc. and LAUGH ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK

Some minor details:  business license and pricing of the actual thing.  At 86 pages and a million heartbeats and a cupful of salty tears to make, I honestly don't know what a digital book goes for on the streets.  I printed it out at Kinko's for something like 9 bucks total.  I know I sunk about 130 bucks into some art and 60 bucks for the software to write it and at my going hourly rate for the day gig, I guess the thing has cost something like $20,195.00 give or take a few hundred man-hours and like WHY DID I GO TO GRADUATE SCHOOL AND INCUR THIS IMMENSE DEBT if not to have the leisure to write this thing and draw it and lay it out and fuss about fonts and draw maps and cross-check entries and throw playtesting to the wind all willy-nilly?  Thank the Dark Gods That Abide Behind My Water Heater when they cast a sleeping dweomer on my wife and daughter so that I can finagle the free time and lost sleep to do this thing I love so well!

I PROMISE, O DEBT COLLECTORS, TO ONLY SPEND THIS FAT WAD OF $$$$MONEY$$$$ ON BOOZE AND A BUS or possibly cargo freight TICKET TO GENCON AND/OR NTRPGCON

Also, Hey! New Logo:  maybe I will figure out a way to stick it in the banner when I have recovered from sleep debt (non-monetary, although I am sure that one day the Feds will figure out a way to charge me for that, also).  Man, work life and money are starting to impinge upon my fantasy life in a very unacceptable way.  Off to look for consolidation that won't cost me a testicle and the souls of my child's children's children's children!  I'm not a welcher, I swear!

Eh?  Wink wink, nudge nudge?  KnowwhatImean?

Sky Bandits of The Glassine Wastes

I don't know what kind of water we all drink, but I am into it, and hip-deep and over my head.

This is a thing that I lament I will never finish, but I wanted to offer it as an example of what things flit about in the psychosphere around these parts.  I just got my copy of Perils of the Purple Planet, which if you haven't the forethought to be into DCC and also into Kickstarter and also into Swords and Lasers/Planets-type stuff, weep and gnash your teeth and cover yourself in sackcloth and ashes, O mendicant!

I began it before my daughter was born, and I guess maybe when I gave it up I was high on Carcosa and sleep deprivation and newfound body horror and really seething with something else in my brain and I felt that wrangling Carcosa and DCC together and doing it a half-justice at that point was beyond me.  Turns out +Harley Stroh and the admirable GG folks are well up to the task, and then some, and then around the corner and up your bum, if you get my drift.  I began this project in July or so, is what Word 2003 says to me, and not modified again until August 2013 when was when maybe I added the NPC listings from a playtest with +Evan Lindsey and +James Bennett and +Don Corcoran where we used many a Dungeon World resolution to add pep to the normal flow of things...  Jesus that seems like a long time ago, now.  I guess I was fueled partly by the arrival of the movie John Carter in my household, which I am proud to say was the first Disney movie my daughter Lily was exposed to, to the best of my meagre knowledge...  I am not sure if I heard whispers of what Harley and the gang were up to at this point; but if I developed this spontaneously and independently (unlikely, I admit) then it is suggestive of the kinds of shared influences that drive us.  In this case, I was was enraptured at the textual features of the Carcosa PDF and hankering to publish something, and I had about a million ideas cranking up.  I still hear the whawhawhawha of the nuclear daemon turbines on the hover skiffs when I think of this thing, and I almost shit my pants when I saw the Poag illustration of the raiders in the PPP

I haven't made it in all the way to PPP but I am happy to say it is indeed right up my alley, and the Spellburn podcast in which I sent a letter to the crew laments the lack of SnL/Weird influences in the things I was reading for OSR but I admit I have been schooled and sated for a bit and there is no more need to fret.  I haven't been this excited to receive something in the mail since I had a subscription to the X-Men in like the 10th grade.  Like a goddam secret decoder ring, Little Orphan Annie

when I read the news these days, I'm not sure tomorrow will come...

Also, I have serious remorse and regret about not getting onboard the Chained Coffin thing (damn you, +Bryan Mullins !)

Here is my basic sketch for The Sky Bandits of the Glassine Wastes, and if I can find it I'll do the Hex Map (unlabelled version) just so:

Looking back, I dig the Rumor Table and some of the monsters (still extant in my Imagination Zone)  - must have been thinking hard about my game of Keep on the Borderlands with a couple of the Camp Nerdly people.  I had plans to do a new race, a bunch of spells, and a couple of Patrons from the CAS/Lovecraft days...

Maybe I will still do this; maybe like a PP freebie or something.  Anyways, it awaits and if there is anything you particularly like in there, let me know and I'll dink it out a little farther down the line...  Jesus, I gotta finish one or two of these projects one day.