Starting to sell World of Near

Today I updated our English website a bit. You can now order the new book there, for instance. I probably should do some more updating as well this weekend, before leaving for Gencon – for instance, I still don’t have a proper resources section in the Solar System / TSoY pages.

Finally finished!

I haven’t been blogging this summer, as I’ve been writing my new TSoY book. It’s the largest book I’ve ever written (though not the largest I’ve designed), although I did have some help in the form of prior art by Clinton and Josh and other TSoY enthusiasts who allowed me to use their work. Very, very much work, I haven’t pushed this hard since -05.

I deliberated on the name of the book for quite a while, and ultimately ended up calling it The World of Near. The issue here was that I didn’t want to use the same name Clinton had used for his own book, but I wanted to make it clear that this was a TSoY sourcebook. “TSoY” is still on the cover as a sort of brand logo, but the actual name of the book is different. I never cared much about the rpg (and textbook) industry practice of publishing new editions of the same book even where the creators, intent and structure of the work were completely reworked.

Writing of War

I’ve managed to get some work done on the new TSoY book I’m supposed to be creating. Difficult to make time for uninterrupted writing, but perhaps I’ll manage now that the holidays went away. Aside from planning the book and writing some chapters, I’ve been planning more campaign frames for playtest. Specifically, I’m figuring out how to run the War in Khale, which is something that is featured pretty prominently in the original TSoY text. Despite being laid out, however, I don’t think the text much concerns itself with the specifics of how to run a campaign around the war – especially resolving mass combats is something people seem to have problems with, if forum threads wondering about it are any indication.

Solar System in PDF

It’s amazing how long it can take to fiddle and tiddle a simple pdf file together and put it up for sale. I must have spent something like 2-3 whole workdays doing it, but now Solar System is available in PDF. It’ll be interesting seeing whether it was worth my while to do this – not that it wasn’t interesting to try to create a screen-optimized layout again after quite a while, but I do have other things I should be doing, too.

Solar System in print

I’ve been told that a human being shrivels up and starts hallucinating after 100 hours of no sleep, after which death soon follows. Last night I got to 40 hours before getting finally going to sleep. That’s how #!%?”! busy I was getting the Solar System finished.

Project Update

As the smarties probably guessed, I’m busy with my insane convention schedule. The two games I’m preparing for Gencon just might kill me, unless I kill them first. Now’s a convenient moment to write about progress, though, considering that I just managed to finally send a complete draft of the Solar System to my stable of critics.