Proposals for at Least Three Years

I'm readying myself — not enthusiastically — for the troublesome bureaucracy of Kickstarter, to initiate support for the menu I promoted earlier.  Woah, it's been a month.  I've looked into advice about Kickstarter and I believe we've satisfied two main points that virtually everyone agrees is the right approach:

1.  Don't go into it broke.

2.  Have the product already completed (as far as possible).

Done and done.  This last month we have sought means to raise nearly the equal of money I'm going to ask for, $3,000.   We want to be sure that (a) we have enough product, whether or not we raise money on kickstarter, to begin selling, and (b) that we can overcome unforseen costs in shipping, packaging, extra costs with ordering more of what we need to bring this together and so on.  We want to get started with our pants up, belted and with suspenders.  Therefore, we expect that if Kickstarter fails — that being a real possibility — we can still somehow go forward and make this work.  And if Kickstarter succeeds, we can feel more sure of ourselves, increase the viability and creative content of the product, and potentially bring out a second and even a third version in similar vein, with distinct aesthetic differences.  At the moment I haven't imagined a fourth version yet, but I have perfect clarity for what no.2 and no.3 would look like.  That brings us to ...

The Poster

In part, we talked about and began putting our energy towards the menu because issues were arising with the poster.  The poster's perceived appeal is far less certain; it is a much larger project with definite visual issues (which I think we've solved), and as it happens, with it's size.  I cannot see any practical means to make the poster smaller than 36x48 inches, but as it happens the universe seems to have moved into much smaller sizes, presumedly because of the internet.  Seven years ago, when I wanted a poster for my book cover, for the game con we joined in Toronto (2014), I had a poster made that was 36x60 inches, without any trouble whatsoever.  I had my pick of some dozen agencies to go to; today, possibly because of covid, we're still trying to track down any manufacturer who will both make the poster in that size AND send out copies direct to customers on order.  This is easy for a poster that's 24x36 — virtually every company has a print-on-demand service for a poster that size.  I haven't found anyone on the internet able to produce a poster of twice that size under these circumstances.

This has led us to wonder if we shouldn't put out two posters, somehow dividing up the content into "soft goods" and "hard goods" ... and even possibly adding even more content to the mix and putting out three, four or even five different poster "themes," including more universal equipment lists with the minor stuff removed, posters that have more visual art and far less items (a dumbed-down version, if you will) or even posters specifically for things like jewellery, treasure and military gear.  It was this thinking that led us to the idea of producing a "menu" of items ... which then led to the thinking that by launching a menu, we could establish ourselves towards the making of other things.

That brings us to ...

A Splatbook

This is an idea I proposed on my Higher Path in March, but nowhere else.  The notion was embedded in my thoughts while I worked on the poster, but has been shelved for several months while digging into the menu's research.  Discussing it here for the first time, my perspective is this: part of my designing products has been to increase the amount of equipment detail available to the player.  For example, not merely to say that the character can buy a "woollen robe" or a "linen robe," but to specifically describe the feel and appearance of one versus the other, right there in the equipment list, to enable the player to make a visceral, informed choice about which they'd like to buy, regardless of the cost.  And since I believe in an all-inclusive equipment list, where virtually anything imagined can be realized, I have upwards of 20 kinds of cloth ... and along with that, multiple forms of cloaks and other dresswear ... and along with that, different kinds of wood, metals, cheeses, breads, horses and cows, marbles, leathers, grains, fruits and vegetables, varieties of inn accommodations, furniture pieces, house-building materials, you name it ... literally thousands of products and hundreds and hundreds of materials used to make those products.  This has been steadily built up over the last decade and has seen a tremendous boost this last year, as I've invested myself more deeply than ever in the description of these things.

This pursuit has led me into many a rabbit hole; and it's impossible not to see vast caverns full of particulars and features that are far too much content to fit into a mere equipment list ... the creation of the components, for example: how they're grown, shipped, collected, altered and ultimately sold.  All of this content makes the ingredients for a much larger volume.  This work could be collected in a massive tome, far more sophisticated than the juvenile works of the WOTC, which are more concerned with flavour text for the reader's ego than with providing scads of fascinating, adventure-building and role-play useful details, thus monumentally expanding the DM and Player's perception of the game world in a deep-rooted sense.  This has led me to think of a traditionally designed "splatbook" that would be 8x11 in., with a hard cover, two columns, reams of equipment lists with elaborations of the options contained therein without the constraint of space that a poster or a simple equipment list demands.  Users could enjoy the existing, condensed lists produced by the poster and even the menus, while ALSO having the option to dig into a dense, intentionally delightful tome (I'm told I'm occasionally witty and even make people laugh out loud) whenever they had the time to really dig.

Such a tome would have the title, A Streetvendor's Guide to Worldbuilding, as the emphasis would be upon encouraging the DM to understand the elements and specifications of the game world ... enabling a visionary approach to how the world could work and what happened there.

In making notes for this project, based on the equipment table I've used for decades, I found myself wanting to write descriptions not only for the equipment pieces themselves, but for the places they're actually sold.  We can imagine what it must be like to enter a medieval bakery, but how is a wet market or a mason's workshop organized, not to mention dozens of other vendors.  How do these things smell?  How many people work there?  How are commissions or contracts arranged with such entities?  What is involved with becoming a part of that world; what happens in the day vs. the night time?   What sort of people frequent these establishments?  These questions, I think, are the true substance for enhancing the ordinary players' strengths where it comes to world-building.  Once these matters are made manifest and tactile, it becomes increasingly easier to picture ourselves "there," and thus explain to the players what they're seeing, what's happening and most important of all, why it matters.

I believe others may have conceived of a splatbook on these lines, and perhaps of these proportions — but I also believe there's a characteristic that might have held them back, which is no doubt on the minds of many readers just now as I describe the proposal.

The task is gargantuan.

But I have a secret weapon, one that makes the research for this doable.  I'm not writing an academic historical textbook.  I'm not interested in proving any sort of accuracy by footnoting my sources.  I'm writing a game support aid, not an investigation into real-world human events or sociology.  I intend to say, right up front, NONE OF THIS IS NECESSARILY TRUE.  And why should it be?  Collectively, the RPG community spends billions of hours mis-describing walls, chests, the weight of things, biological responses, survivability rates, you name it.  A game is not founded on its accuracy, but upon the principles of that game: that it be an enjoyable, engrossing pasttime, that the participants agree upon the general consensus of the environment and that the material used for supporting the game be useful.

Therefore, I believe that much of the information included in such a book can simply be "made up" from my imagination ... just as most everything is from my actual game world, the one I've been running for almost 42 years.  In that time, I have been steeped in real-world historical texts and sociological descriptions of real life in real history, and with regards to these things, I intend to write a splatbook that more-or-less parallels the common perception of what the world was like in the "fantasy-based" past.  Said tome wouldn't be of much use if it wasn't.  But as I'm not being peer-reviewed, and as I don't care about the respect I receive from the academic community, or the other Pickwicks of the internet (I'm one myself), it does not matter to me how many rooms a "real" 14th century inn has, based on one famous surviving example from Liebesrattenschaumbaum, Germany, or what actual coinage was used, etcetera, etcetera.

This greatly reduces the need for exactness, which in turn greatly reduces the need to nitpick every unnecessary detail.  What's wanted is a clever, elaborate, imaginative and complex ruse, giving "a personal view of the D&D world," without any pretense of doing otherwise.  A comprehensible Voynich Manuscript, therefore ... which the reader can steal from exhuberantly while feeling free to inject their own personal view (or accuracy) into the content contained therein.

When such a book would be completed, I can't say.  Wagner spent 27 years writing his Der Ring des Nibelungen.  I dare say that this conceived project would be to D&D as the Nibelungen is to mythology or music.  Not the only great work in the field, but perhaps in the contention as the greatest work nonetheless.

Really, it depends on how hard I want to work on it.