The Non-Euclidian Staircase

I've had two professional publications and a rather long semi-pro period. Semi-pro was several years as editor for CompuServe RPGames forum's monthly gaming 'zine, for which I mostly produced game reviews. This "paid" in the form of a free account for use of the forum and a handful of review copies of games, and it was overall a positive experience, albeit one that took considerable time and didn't exactly endear me to a few game designers whose work I failed to praise. Still, I learned a good bit more about the industry, gained a larger appreciation of the value of smaller publishers (a font of creativity that the OGL/d20 movement has interesting effects on, both positive and negative), and became familiar with even more games than I would have just on my own. Net that one to a positive experience.

(I don't consider running AmberCon North as being "in the industry"... that's been a pure act of a fan.)

One pro was an article in Amberzine 7 (the only actual rules article ever to get past the Amberzine editorial process, as the usual focus is character diaries/stories), entitled "When Good Stuff Happens to Bad People". Its purpose was the object to the Good/Bad Stuff rules in ADRP, and the title was an all but offhand quip I made to Amberzine 7's editor (Joe Saul) at AmberCon 5 while bouncing a character idea off him. He said he pretty much agreed with my opinion and if I could write the article in three weeks, he'd put it into print. I still get occasional comments from people about this piece, mostly positive. And, unexpectedly, I received a reasonable pay rate (I had actually never asked about that before agreeing to write the article). Definitely a positive experience.

The other pro experience has more influenced my attitudes. "Teenagers From Outer Space Yearbook" was a less than positive experience. My co-author and I poured a fair amount of time to merge our two TFOS campaigns (and a few additional ideas needed to fill the page count) into one book. It was a list of NPCs, students and teachers, plus numerous adventure seeds. We arranged art (a friend of the co-author, who did an amazing job), put together the text, assembled a rough layout, and sent it off. The final project looked about like what we'd hoped (excepting a couple of annoying typos, one on my own favorite PC, whose stats in the printed book make no sense at all), but distribution was all but nonexistent. I don't think I ever saw it for sale except at GenCon... even at my own home comics/game store, who ordered it several times, failed to acquire even one copy. And getting paid... Well, we eventually settled up with the publisher, but I don't think any of the four of us (authors, artist, or publisher) were exactly happy with the experience. This was a lot of work for something too few people got to enjoy, and tussling over money issues drained even more fun out of things.

Not really my cup of tea. If I want to pour work into a game (and I have, on several), I'd rather it go toward making the game more fun for me and the players. Trying to also make it profitable for me... well, that just shifts my focus off and introduces strain that helps no one. I have a few ideas that might be worth publishing, but I don't expect I'll be going that route again anytime soon. Oh, I may finish and submit one of the half-dozen articles I have written or outlined, but I'm not focused in that direction at all. It's just not what I game for.