Royce's Random Thoughts

Recently managed to find a couple of public links to a few of my old Pyramid Online articles that I managed to get published before it transformed into a PDF only publication.

Update: Fixed a bad link and added two more, plus some stubs.

Scrapyard Battles. : The old BBC/TLC program Scrapyard Challenge/Junkyard Wars translated into GURPS Discworld terms.

Supporting Cast: Deacon Paul, Bioroid Rights Activist: An artificial person rights activist for Transhuman Space.

Characters and Campaigns on Colony Worlds for GURPS Space: My very first published article.

Mog the Half-Orc's Fighting Pit: A pit fighting ring in the GURPS Banestorm setting.

The Dustmaster, Road Trains for Transhuman Space: Article stub for Martian road trains.

Weird Prisons as Campaign Settings: Article stub, exactly what it says on the tin.

As I've been working my way through the 365 Days of Prompts, which has proven an interesting way to come up with short world building bits for the FYS universe, I've had an idea niggling at the back of my brain to create a FYS roleplaying supplement. This is a bad idea for all the reasons listed in the title, not to mention it would distract me from writing fiction. Never mind the fact that the bottom has pretty much dropped out of the pen and paper RPG industry and is never going to rise again, thanks to video gaming.

Nevertheless, it's horribly tempting. I've got a little experience in writing for games, thanks to several articles I had published in Pyramid's previous online incarnation. And if I could pay for production expenses through Kickstarter, that would go a long way towards making it possible. Several problems would need to conquered first.

1. Getting a Powered by GURPS license.

This would likely be my biggest up front expense. GURPS is my go-to default for RPG's, and has the detail and flexibility needed to create a FYS campaign book. But it's also Steve Jackson Games' intellectual property, and they're going to expect to be paid for letting my have the privilege of using it for my needs. I need to talk to their licensing department to see what legal hoops I'd have to go through to secure


2. Editing and Layout

My next likely biggest expense. I don't dare try to catch all the inevitable typos on my own, and my abilities at laying out text are... basic, to put it politely. So I need a pro, or at least semi-pro, to help me make sure my product looks professional.


3. Artwork

Another expense, but finding artists would likely be relatively easy. I've already got both a friendship and business relationship with Meg Sveryud, Naziha Zahed and Peta Hewitt, their artwork is similar enough that I could use all three of them and maintain a consistent visual style, and they would likely be interested. The problem though is making sure they've got time for such a project. They've each got day jobs, and their own comics to write and draw.

With a Kickstater campaign, one of the goals I'd have would be to make the artwork full color. Depending on how much money is donated that might even result in a full color print version.


4. Marketing

Cue manic laughter. I have absolutely no experience in this area. My best bet would be to buy M.C.A. Hogarth's book on marketing and start there. God only knows I'll be providing a niche product. If I go for a dead tree edition I'd rather not have a crate of unsold books sitting in my (non-existent) garage.


5. Profit!

Because if you call them Space Marines, Games Workshop will sue you.

Short Version: M.C.A. Hogarth, aka haikujaguar, writes sci-fi and fantasy novels. One of which is titled Spots the space Marine. Originally appearing as a crowdfunded serial on LiveJournal, it followed the adventures of Magda "Spots" Guitart, a middle-aged housewife and USMC reservist, who gets called up as a replacement to reinforce a Marine detachment guarding a critical anti-matter production facility that's under threat by the "Crabs".

It's been available as an ebook on Amazon since 2009. At least until a couple of months ago, when Amazon yanked it on the request of Games Workshop's lawyers, based on the notion that her book infringes on their copyright of the phrase "Space Marine", despite the phrase being in use since the days of E.E. "Doc" Smith.

Hogarth would like to fight this. Plainly the phrase has been in use in science fiction novels since the 1930's, and in roleplaying games since the 70's. But GW's lawyers are bigger than any she can afford, and she's going to lose this fight unless the Internet community can shame them into giving up, with perhaps a bit of help from traditional publishers who don't care for this overreach either.

Otherwise, future authors won't be able to use these two words on their covers, and possibly in the book itself, until basically the end of time.

So the other Steve Jackson is releasing his old Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books as Kindle aps. I suspect I'm going to be giving him a lot of my money in the future. Hopefully I can give some to Steve Jackson Games too if they could do the same for the Car Wars adventures they published through TSR.

I was flipping through The Traveller Adventure recently, after pulling it off my bookshelf in a fit of nostalgia. Published around 1980, it was perhaps one of the first actual grand campaign settings for an RPG, not merely a one off adventure that a GM would have to connect together with his PC's somehow.

The plot revolves around a MacGuffin that the PC's get a hold of, a brooch that contains a microfilm(!) message with evidence that a major subsector arms manufacturer is selling a pair of naval meson guns to a local pirate group. Once getting it, the PC's fly off on their subsidized merchant, the March Harrier and spend potentially game years trying to figure out what's going on prevent the sale and stop the pirate from taking over the sector.

Here's the thing. The plot starts with them coming to the aid of a Vargr (an anthropomorphic wolf) who is being chucked out a museum, while they're on leave on the planet as their ship is being repaired. Once he (partially) explains the situation, the default assumption in the adventure (there are no other options considered) is that they're going to drop everything to aid this guy breaking into the museum and help him recover "his" property.

This makes no sense. Especially on a world which from the description in the campaign book is a perfectly law abiding place, not a "Wretched hive of scum and villany".

[Poll #1459167]

It's very easy to laugh at Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition these days. Clunky, munchkin inducing rules, a world view that reduced everything to targets for players to destroy, monsters that ranged from the all powerful to the wince inducing. A whole host of problems that required 2 1/2 more editions to finally bend into something easy to use and relatively balanced. It was an awful RPG.

And the Wright Flyer, judging by all the reports of contemporary pilots trying to fly reproductions, was a lousy airplane.

But they were both the first, and they both worked.

If it weren't for Gary Gygax, there would be no RPG's. Likely there would be no MMORPGS. No Steve Jackson Games. No GURPS.

Because of Gary Gygax I tried to write stories based on events from the long running campaign I played in at college. I'm still writing today.

Because of Gary Gygax I made my first professional writing sale to SJG's Pyramid Online.

Because of Gary Gygax and AD&D, I met the friends that would stay with me through college and whom I still keep in touch with.

Because of Gary Gygax I met my wife, moonshadowed.

Thanks, Gary, for everything.