We May Be On Tour Yet

 

I have been spending a lot of my time writing a manual of losers, crooks, monsters, and super villains for Weird Detective Mystery Adventures.  Coming up with statistics and power sets is tedious, but there is a formula to it.  The real imagination work is compiling a unique context for these disparate fictional desperados and mad men.  You have to give them a plan, a motivation, a reason for operating which makes some semblance of sense.  I am about 75% done with the text at this point. Nowhere in my fantastic blatherings on this subject did I contrive an arch foe whose aim it is to steal the Ukraine. We need to look to reality for insanity like that.

Vlad the Failure would like to remind everyone that he has nuclear weapons.  From what I can glean, this gives him the right to take over all states adjacent to Russia. This is a new fiat power he has granted members of the nuclear club. Even the pumpkin head in North Korea isn’t that presumptive.

Previously Vlad has limited his hijinks to attempting to get into the G7 and propping up his client dictators. It seems his battle-hardened troops are most adept at shooting unarmed civilians. (Similar to their fellow Chinese autocrats.) When confronted with something as onerous in opposition as Armed Civilians, Vlad’s battle-hardened Cossacks get slogged down. So Vlad is going nuclear, or threatening to. Or he’s going to blow the Ukraine up, bit by bit, and threaten anyone who sanctions him, aids his victims, or speaks harsh words in his direction with TOTAL WAR as only he can wage it. Because he has nuclear weapons.

This really puts writing role-playing game stuff in perspective. I was going to use this post to announce the convention that Weird Detective Mystery Adventures would be premiering at. Unfortunately, it got cancelled. Not the convention, just my participation in it. (I may still get in, but as of this moment I am frozen out.) I have, just this morning, applied to four other conventions. Provided Vlad doesn’t start a nuclear war, I may get to vend at one of them. 

I bought this nifty convention banner.

Hopefully I can use it as intended.  And not as a protection from fallout for my horde of canned goods.

I recently decided to abandon the paperback edition of Weird Detective Mystery Adventures. All of the other role-playing games are hardbound. Mine should be hardbound, too. Not that there is anything wrong with the dozen or so paperback editions I have printed up so far. They look great! But hardbound is the way to go and thus I have ordered me up some hardbound editions. And… there’s an issue with the case-binding system that my short-run printers have been palming off to me as hard-binding. It’s not hardbound, as in folios sewn into a coated board jacket, but rather just a one up on perfect binding, laser spewed paper wedged into a pre-gummed bit of coated cardboard. At 530 pages I am at the staple limit for such a system.

While I am not wedded to a single printer, each of my four printers is using the exact same system. Hardbound Prototype from Printer A seemed fine, but the paper stock was flimsy. He did a wonderful job otherwise and if he wasn’t the absolutely most expensive printer I can find I would probably go with him. Hardbound Protypes from Printer B, who also did a wonderful job on my paperbacks, was so futzy that one out of three books is bowed and ready to pop. They’ve either farmed out the case-bound system or they have not mastered it. Paperback prototypes from Printers C and D have been all over the board but are generally acceptable. (It should be noted that Printer C was just pimping for Printer D.) The Hardbound Prototype from Printer C is now in and… it’s acceptable for what it is but no great jump in durability or overall book experience from the paperback. In fact, the paperback perfect binding system is far more flexible and robust than the case-binding system and thus the paperbacks will probably wear better. And wear is an issue with games of this sort.

 I have ISBN for both a paperback and a hardbound. I will go ahead and produce both. I just can’t upcharge for the hardbounds. At a higher print run I can address the hardcover’s quality issues without jamming the price out of whack. I could solve it now if I wanted to farm it out to China, where slaves would be sewing my masterpiece together as their god-less overlords pound drums and snap whips. For various reasons I have decided not to do this. There are some perfectly good American printers who do real hard binding. I need to coax demand to get to that print run point.

I am now going to go flush my entire head down the toilet. Hopefully I will be allowed to ponder these things as opposed to hunkering in bunker with my unsold games, waiting out the radiation