Corporia: Printing and Publishing

I’ve gotten a lot of material knocked out in the last week, so the book is nearly finished, barring a couple of pages of writing, plus editing and polishing based on playtester comments and my own changes. 

Now, some bigger news: I’d planned on a Kickstarter ‘beta playtest-to-print’ in June, but as of yesterday I’m in discussions with one of my favorite publishing companies about taking on the game in print. Thus, I’m putting the brakes on the Kickstarter release until those plans are either firmed up or cancelled. Writing and editing and polishing and blogging will continue in the meantime, of course.

I’d love to actually get Corporia released with a strong publishing company so the book can remain in print beyond the initial Kickstarter release, and get into gaming stores. I could have a print-on-demand option online, of course, but with a full-color, design-heavy book like mine, the cheapest printing option is to print a decent quantity with a local publishing company and ship them out myself. Otherwise the potential price point could be $50+, and I’d like to keep it $20 to $25 lower than that. And neither of those options will get it into stores (though if you know of something that might help, please tell me).

One problem with do-it-myself is, if I print the books locally, I still have to deal with the shipping and any extra printing overage. Setting up my own online website and store could work, but that’s a lot of tech work that I don’t think will be easy for me. There’s a lot to consider when you’re thinking about long-term goals beyond PDF-only. I plan to talk more about this on an upcoming guest spot on the Jennisodes podcast, a fun gaming podcast that I listen to every week, so keep your ears open for that.

As I said above, regardless of what happens, I’ll continue to work on the book, and blog about it here. I still have to write up the one-page adventure, finish the character sheet, finish the NPC/cryptid stats, and various art placement and design.

And speaking of which, I’m really pleased with the art I’ve been able to acquire so far. I think it really establishes the look and feel of the setting. For instance, check out the rough version of page 1 (pardon the watermarks and such; not all of the art is final yet). Cool, hunh?

Corporia, page 1 draft

Corporia Sub Rosa

Yesterday I took a few minutes in between editing, making salsa for today’s contest at work, washing clothes, doing dishes, and cleaning house, and planted some rose bushes! You can see the results on my house blog: Associated Fugues.

I hope to finish the Gary Gygax/Advanced Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Adventures Dark and Deep editing project for its author, this week, and then get back to the Corporia RPG so I can knock it out by June 1st. It’s a slightly ambitious goal, now that I haven’t touched it for three weeks, and moreso because I’ve thought up at least two or three new concepts for it that I’m fairly impressed with. They should increase the fun for the players, while making things even easier for the GameMaster, and you can’t ask for much more than that. I’ll delve more into that later, so stay tuned.

Impossible Ghost Protocol

This post has nothing to do with Tom Cruise’s latest Mission Impossible movie. Well, not very much; today’s title was mostly inspired by the way the title currently appears on my local video store’s marquee. (Incidentally, that reminds me of some humorous photo that was making its way around the internet a few years ago: a theater marquee with “My Dog Skip,” “Screwed,” and “Erin Brockovich” – in that order, of course. But I digress…)

I’m still working my way through the editing process for “Adventures Dark and Deep: A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore,” Joe Bloch’s very cool ‘what if?’ re-imagining of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as it might have been written by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax had he remained with the company (based on Gary’s public writings on the subject over decades).  Naturally, that’s taking up a great deal of my free time, but I’m making good progress, and should be finished within another week or two. Then I can get back to Corporia (my dystopian utopia with a Cyberpunk-y/Shadowrun 0.5 feel), and hopefully wrap it up as Kickstarter beta by the first of June.

Otherwise, the only slightly unusual event to occur lately revolves around the new carpet that’s being installed at the Academy. No, really… Amazingly, the installers actually lift the pods (cubicles), install the carpet, and set the pods back down. The row where I sit is a four-deep/two-wide row of connected pods, but except for my water bottle lying on its side on my desktop, the fact that I had to turn my computer back on, and of course the new carpet, you’d never know anyone had been there.

I keep waiting for Tom Cruise to come out of a closet in full MI gear and yell “Surprise!” … but that’s another conversation altogether.

ADD & subtract

Not a lot to post about lately. Most of my time for the next two weeks or so is going to be full of editing a certain project with A, D, and D in the title – and probably not the one you’re thinking of… It’s actually the first book in Joe Bloch’s “Adventures Dark and Deep” line.

Of course, this is going to cut into my Corporia time, but I’m still hoping to knock out a page or so each day so I can keep my current writing completion  deadline of June 1.

Some Stuff

I spent this last weekend entertaining company and working on some home renovations, as you can see on my other blog. There’s still more remodeling to do, but hopefully I’ll have the chance to knock out a few more pages of Corporia.

Top TV #5: And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place

Well, this was an interesting week, blog-wise. It’s the first time I’ve ever tried to write a series of five related posts, with one each day. I’m still impressed with how other people blog so often, though of course it depends how much time per day you’re willing to spend. Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get to today’s episode.

Since it’s the last of the five episodes, I wavered a bit when choosing the one that I felt deserved to be here. Since most of these week’s episodes have been pretty dramatic, I thought about choosing something lighter, like the “Modern Warfare” episode of Community or the musical “Once More With Feeling” episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On a more serious note, I considered the final episode of Life on Mars (the original UK series) and several others, but in the end I went with one that I’ve loved since the first time I saw it.

“And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place” is the 20th episode from season 3 of Babylon 5. Like all series, B5 has its ups and downs, but this episode is definitely one of the “ups.”

This episode features two main threads: a joint meeting of religious leaders (on board the space station Babylon 5), as well as part of an ongoing story in the current state of affairs between the Centauri and the Narns (two alien races whose conflicts are somewhat analogous to the Nazis and the Jews in World War II, respectively).

I won’t try to explain all the characters and the details of the plot, and who’s counter-bluffing and getting revenge on who, since it won’t mean anything to you if you’ve never seen the show. You can get it from the Wikipedia link above, if you want it.

The standout moment of “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place” utilizes one of my favorite storytelling techniques, which I’m afraid I don’t recall the name for, but it’s one that anyone who’s read Alan Moore’s Watchmen will recognize. In brief, it’s what you get when you are watching one scene play out while hearing another scene that’s taking place somewhere else and is only occurring at the same exact moment by pure coincidence. In the case of Watchmen, that ‘hearing’ was in the form of word boxes with, for example, ‘hearing’ a sports announcer on tv talk about “He’ll feel that in the morning,” “He’s on the ropes,” and so on, while you’re watching a brutal fight in an alleyway.

In this instance, [spoiler alert] it’s the camera intercutting between a church service on board the station, and a Centauri aristocrat suffering a brutal death at the hands of the Narn whose families he executed, as he attempts to flee through underground tunnels. [end spoiler] 

The song being sung at the service is a traditional Negro spiritual, “There’s No Hiding Place Down Here”, and you continue to hear the song even while watching the revenge of the Narns. It’s a beautiful, brutal, spellbinding piece of television that I’ve never forgotten.

Top TV #4: Dragonchasers

After yesterday’s ‘controversial’ post, today’s (the fourth in this week’s series of my favorite television episodes) should be a welcome change. 

Even my normal caveat barely applies, but let’s throw it in here anyway: these aren’t necessarily my permanent Top 5, and I certainly won’t claim that these are the best tv episodes ever; they just have a special appeal to me, for one reason or another. They’re also in no particular order, and mostly spoiler-free. Episode/series title links go to the Wikipedia or similar page for the show. 

Today’s selection is “Dragonchasers,” season one, episode ten of “The Shield“.

Picking this episode was almost as difficult as yesterday’s, though in this instance it’s because there are simply too many incredible episodes throughout all seven seasons of this critically-acclaimed drama. When I watched this series during its original run, and even now on dvd, I don’t realize how gripping an episode can be until the end, when I feel my body relax and my breath exhaling, as if I’d been holding my breath for the last hour.

The Fully Reconditioned blog described this episode in much greater detail than I’ll go into here, so if you want the full details I’d suggest giving it a read.

In brief, though, Dragonchasers features: the intelligent but awkward ’sad sack’ detective “Dutch” Wagenbach in an emotional roller coaster of trying to break a man he believes is a serial killer; Michael Chiklis’ incredibly nuanced star character Vic Mackey (“Al Capone with a badge”) trying to get a drug-addicted mother through her ‘cold turkey’ period; Shane and ‘Lem’, struggling to shut down a string of muggings happening in a local strip club; and black, secretly gay Julian dealing with his emotions and acts of revenge when a possibly AIDS-infected black transvestite tries to infect his partner (cop partner, not life partner) with a bite.

Despite the number of plots, the episode never feels like it gives short shrift to any of them. There’s a bit of humor, with a great deal of darkness, sorrow, and pain, even in the midst of triumph. It’s a great sampler of what this amazing series has to offer.

Runners-Up: I was tempted to choose “Cupid & Psycho” (season one, episode eight), which utilizes The Magnetic Fields song “All My Little Words” to great effect – and as you know from yesterday, I’m a sucker for that. The final episode of the series, “Family Meeting“, was a temptation as well, but I thought it might be too difficult to describe to any of you who haven’t gladly suffered through the up and down journey of Vic’s life. Furthermore, the montage during the closing credits of the last episode, overlayed with Concrete Blonde‘s “Long Time Ago“ was a great post-ending for the series that brings it all back to me every time I watch it.