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.

Editors, Please

Okay, the principle work on the new project is completed, as of last night.  I'm ready to print a mock-up, but before I can demonstrate it on line, I'm waiting for a key component that's coming to me from Fall River, Massachusetts.  It's set to arrive between the 2nd and 6th of July.  Then I will have the mock-up ready.  I can't publish this item through Lulu, so I will have to ship it myself; just now, I don't have the capital to launch this right away, though we're working to raise that.  It's not out of the question that I could be doing a $2,200 kickstarter campaign. That's how much we figure gets us started.

For the present, I'll please ask no one to contribute anything special at this time.  Continuing to support my Patreon is more than enough.  However, I'm in need of four editors; covid has obliterated my former resources in this regard.  I need my spelling and continuity checked, is all.  The work is about 20 minutes, I'd say.  Any takers?

Write a comment here, so I can confirm (this has to be people who are Patreon supporters and regulars); I have your emails already so I'll send one quarter to you.  I need this turned around by tomorrow, so I can get this printed on Wednesday.

I recognize that some will want the opportunity for a preview (once seen, what the project is will be blatantly obvious), but I will ask you PLEASE do not offer to edit if you cannot edit.  I cannot express the importance of my getting this just right.

Poster Teaser

 

This is a terrible teaser, especially if I don't come through and make it ... and on some level I'm writing about it today to keep myself motivated.  I'll have to be to get this project off the ground.

What the reader is seeing is a small portion of a 36" by 48" poster that will include as much of my equipment list format as I'm able to fit in.  At present, I'm using 11-point font; I'm not settled on the font-type, I'm looking into that.  This is Garamond, which is bound to be too thin a font for this.  I am sending out some persons to find me an artist to fit in small pictures here and there throughout; I have some leads on that.  I don't know how much the poster will cost, but as it is huge, and I intend it to be glossy, it's going to cost a lot.  So it goes.

Just now, I don't even know who I can obtain to print the poster; I'd like to make an arrangement with a company like Lulu, that sells my books, so that posters were printed as they were purchased, alleviating my needing to keep a bunch in stock.  I haven't looked into that yet.  I've only been on this project about a week now.

Obviously, I've had to create prices that discard my usual trade/pricing system; that should make the poster more accessible to ordinary game worlds.  As can be seen, I'm upgrading my descriptions, so that the poster will be interesting reading.  It should be the sort of thing a guest could stare at while waiting for the microwave or in a hallway next to the bathroom door.

Adding 25-30 items a day; some 1600 items to be added altogether.  Negotiations with artist, negotiations with printer during covid will be troublesome.  Hopefully, I can make this available by the end of April.  Some creative work, but nothing that will especially trouble me.  Shouldn't be a problem.

Incidentally, notice how most of these things would be included in a "craving" list.

The Bullshit Delivery Company

This post is not part of the series I've been writing, but does reflect on it.  Regarding categorising players, which has made the last seven posts something of a trial, I understand why the 4th edition writers tried it.  I did it myself in my book, How to Run, published seven years after the text I've been deconstructing.  At that time, I had read the 4th edition version of player categories, but I can't specifically remember thinking about it when I wrote my own book.

"The Players" is the 3rd chapter of How to Run, which begins,

"Any attempt to classify a player ‘type’ based upon their personality is an awful strategy. It doesn’t work. Players do not fit into artificial categories. However clever I might be in organizing patterns of behaviour, I promise the player sitting across the table right now will fit into none of them. 

"On the other hand, trying to explain how a DM should tailor the presentation of the campaign for every unique, individual person who might ever play is an impossible task. First of all, I haven’t met everyone. The interview process alone would probably require the rest of my life. So we are stuck with classifications. The reader should remember while reading through the list that our goal is to examine the players we know for expectations, which we can then fulfill. By looking at a set of mythical players – stereotypes – I hope to create a model from which readers should deviate in assessing their own players."

This may or may not have been the thinking behind these 4th edition categories, but it is the thinking behind psychological profiling, which never thinks that any individual fits a "type."

The thing I did not do was to present every possible character type as a positive one.  I included "predisposed," "disenchanted," "badly behaved" and "the guest"—this last being a person who knows nothing about the game but has come along to watch or merely because their significant other is playing.  I based my categories on psychological behaviour, not gaming ideals; and the psychological principles being used were not "positivist."

"Positivist psychology" is a philosophical approach to human behaviour that argues we should only discuss elements of knowledge that describes only positive approaches and experiences.  For example, if you try to search "health" online, you will find endless articles encouraging you to be healthy and methods of how to achieve health—but you will find very little or nothing at all towards a definition of how "healthy" or "unhealthy" is defined, or where the line exists between the two.  You will find very little on being unhealthy, except mostly to argue that you shouldn't be.

If you look up "rape" you will find endless articles, both political and psychological, explaining its wrongness and how to get over its effects.  You will only find a little about what those effects are, as no one wants to wallow in the negative description of the aftermath.  You will find even less online as to what motivates a rapist; and you will find nothing at all about what the after effects of rape are on the perpetrator.  That is because online is almost wholly positivist in its view; rape is wrong, therefore any discussion of actual rape is wrong, as is any discussion about rapists.  Psychologically, the rapist ceases to exist once the crime occurs.

This is fine for building a better society and encouraging us all to be empathic and responsible, but if we're arguing that psychology is a science, then it's ridiculous.  Of course, there are experts in psychology who investigate these things; they spend every day of their lives detailing at length how the body breaks down and in what ways, and there are endless statistics that describe your chances of survival depending on what collection of unhealthy characteristics you possess: but it isn't published on the internet, because it would be viewed very negatively by readers who haven't been educated and who would misunderstand the point.  For the lay person, what they understand about psychology, medicine, war, perversity—in short, anything bad—is only half the equation.  As far as the experts are concerned, the general public cannot handle the truth; and they're right.  There are reasons why the last many months of locating a vaccine have not gone into detail about the price that had to be paid getting it; there are reasons why we have death statistics from Covid, but specifics regarding those morbidity statistics are deliberately kept vague.  The less you know, the better is it for you.

Certain elements in society think that's wrong; they want transparency with everything.  That comes from trusting no one, and thinking that if we can see it, we can prove its credibility.  I am not one of these people.  Truth is inconceivably terrible; it needs to be parcelled out in small pieces to a large number of people.  Those people must spend years of dedication to open the series of doors, guarded by gatekeepers who know what's there, before they can enter.  They have to be made ready to enter.  The average, uneducated, unprepared person is a liability with regards to such knowledge.  In many fields, I am that uneducated person; and in other fields, I'm very much on the inside.  In other fields still, medical fields, my partner Tamara was once on the inside.  Some of my readers are military and they understand perfectly what I'm saying.  It is better that these things be kept from the general public.

All this aside, the greatest proponents for positivism in presentation are marketing companies.  For a games company anxious to make profits, we don't care how much the players enjoy the game, so long as they buy it.  We don't care if they learn how to play.  We don't care if the game sits on a shelf in their room, or goes in the trash.  Did they buy it?  Goal.

The 4th Edition DMG is the sort of positivism that tries to keep on selling you after you bought the game, even as you're reading the game, because it's known that a good experience for the purchaser translates to the purchaser's willingness to buy a game.  It contributes to a feeling on the purchaser's part, "If I don't get it, this must be my fault; the makers of the game seem very concerned about me; they seem like really nice people."  This strategy works.  You might be surprised.  Did you know you can get more donations for a political candidate if you ask people, "Do you want to get involved with my party?" than you will if you ask, "Do you want to help support my party?"  It's not even a little bit of difference.  You can go from getting two signees an hour to eighteen, boom.

Gygax didn't present the AD&D version with marketing language in mind.  For one thing, much of what we know today hadn't been tested and advanced in 1978; for another, Gygax wasn't concerned with sales.  Gygax, for all his flaws, saw the game as a message he wanted to relay.  Very often, in my opinion, his message was idiotic and wrong, but on the whole the message was "Here's how to play, if you don't do it this way it's all your fault if it goes wrong, in reality you're by yourself, dig in and work hard."  That message didn't resonate well with a lot of people, and didn't hold up once the message got muddied and fucked over by twenty other messages that frankly contradicted themselves.  Present day D&D has learned from that; the message is mostly bullshit, but everything published now stays on that message.

This is why, I grudgingly admit, Gygax was a man with vision, whereas Mearls and others who represent the present-day ideal are sausage-grinders.  Gygax gave advice which was intended to make DMs better at running the game.  Modern D&D says "You're fine, don't worry about it."  One says to play the game, you have to "give."  The other says you only have to be "involved."

So, it is the manner in which the players are being organised here, not that they are being organized.  The purpose is for you, the reader, to find the category you feel most appeals to you and then feel the positive language flow over you.  Of course, if you're fundamentally cynical, you've grown to recognize this writing when you see it and immediately begin to gnash your teeth.  Me too.

I know a bullshit delivery company when I smell one.