A month or more ago, a poster at RPGnet asked the inevitable and fateful question: “Can Smallville do Star Wars?” I had an almost religious revelation at the question, and immediately started thinking about how to implement it. Strategicon: Gateway was coming up, so I resolved to run a “Jediville” game there.

To prepare, I had to write a few new traits and do up a Pathways chart. I like what I came up with — it seemed serviceable — and liked even more the episode that I built with it, The Treasure of Hoth. You can check out all three documents by clicking the links below:

Jediville Pathways Chart • Jediville Traits (unfinished) • The Treasure of Hoth, a six-Lead episode ready for play

If you want to play in the game at the upcoming con, you probably don’t want to read the episode. There are spoilers in there!

I sat down with Mitch Morris and Mike Bonet, of the Ninjas Vs Pirates podcast. We talked about the Smallville RPG, primarily from a design standpoint. We got down to the nitty-gritty on how and why the game was designed the way it was, and chatted a bit about my other design work, as well. It’s a smartly-edited, action-packed forty minutes of RPG system wankery!

Over on the RPGnet threads about the Smallville RPG ([print] [PDF]), somebody asked for an example of Tag Scenes and the Growth Mechanic. Here’s an example using the characters from the book:

A few weeks ago, I sat down with the guys from RPG Haven — which is a completely different podcast than Gamer’s Haven last month — and lo, the interview has borne fruit!

RPG Haven episode 11 – Josh Roby on Smallville the RPG (57 minutes and 32 seconds)

The interview is reportedly “so long and informative that we didn’t do any intro discussion or preamble,” which I’m not sure is good or evidence that I ramble. However, if you’ve got an hour to spare, we go into detail on the Smallville RPG as well as some retrospective on Full Light, Full Steam and Sons of Liberty. We even chat a bit about my upcoming projects Coronets and Agora, not to mention Rooksbridge. Conan and Ryan were a blast to interview with, and it’s a fun hour.

Optional Drinking Game: Every time I say, “Absolutely,” take a drink.

I was recently interviewed on the Gamer’s Haven podcast! We talked about the upcoming Smallville RPG, specifically the “Fight On or Give In” theme and the Challenge rules. We also chatted a bit about my own background as a writer and gamer, which I’m sure you’re all dying to hear about!

When I mentioned I was looking into how to publish my Rooksbridge stories to iPad’s “iBookstore,” Jeff Tidball asked me to, once I figured it out, share the answers. Thus, this post.

First of all, unlike Kindle’s Digital Text Platform, it’s not as easy as going to a website and uploading an HTML file. Where Kindle is relatively open and “anybody” can publish there, Apple only allows a small number of “certified content aggregators” to publish to iBooks. Most of these are big publishing houses, but also in the list are Lulu and Smashwords, both of which are self-publishing outfits. So if you want to publish to the iBookstore and you don’t want to submit your manuscript, deal with house editors, get a book contract, and all that mess, you’ll be using one of these two options.

My first choice was Lulu, which I had worked with before and which accepts files in ePub, an open format useful for other applications. However, Lulu’s process does not, at this time, seem to work. Their ePub validation fails to validate files that clear other validators and does not return error messages. Their for-pay ‘ePub Conversion Service’ turns out files riddled with formatting errors. So they refuse your file, don’t tell you why, offer to charge you money to do it themselves, and do it poorly on top of that. So I’ll be investigating Smashwords tomorrow.

I’ll write “Part 2″ of this process soon; in the mean time, if you’d like to check out the ePub process or the first few layers of the Lulu process (before you hit the layer of utter failure), read on…

ePub

So the first step is turning your content into an .epub file. I’ve found this great tutorial at jedisaber.com which shows you how. All you need is a text editor and a .zip program*, because .epub is basically a set of XML and XHTML files inside a .zip archive that’s just been renamed to .epub. The tutorial has a ‘hollowed out’ .epub file ready to use as a template**. I don’t want to repeat every step that’s in the tutorial, but the basic strokes are: dump your content into the chapterX.xhtml files (which is stupid-easy if you store your content in XML, which you should because of this very thing), update the index file with where to find what, and then enter all your metadata (author, publisher, etc). Then zip it back up and rename the .zip file into an .epub file.

As a side note, if you publish to Kindle as well, your .epub can use the same XHTML files that you upload to Amazon… and if you don’t publish to Kindle, well, now you’ve got a suitable file, so go set up a new revenue stream.

*What this tutorial will not tell you is you cannot use the Mac OS X built-in compression feature, because that function re-orders your files within the archive and adds invisible files that mux things up. After much frustration, I used Springy, a little utility that makes proper archives. And while we’re on the topic of ‘proper’ archives, when you use Springy, make sure you add the mimetype file to the archive first and use the “Store (no compression)” option. Then dump in the rest using the “Deflate (standard)” option.

**The other thing is that the sample file available at the tutorial isn’t quite up to spec. It may have been obsolesced by a new epub standard or something — I’m not researching why it fails, you can do that for extra credit, if you like — but the thing of it is that sample.epub fails validation for a handful of reasons. Its xhtml files must be resaved as UTF-16 text encoding, and content.opf’s line 14 needs its media-type changed to “application/x-dtbncx+xml”. Or you could just use my file as a template.

You will want to validate your ePub, and there is a handy web app from Threepress Consulting that will check it for you. Apple will have its own validation process that checks this and a few other things, so make sure your file is clean here before proceeding.

Lulu

Publishing to iBooks through Lulu is relatively straightforward, with two caveats (besides it not, you know, working). The first is that Lulu will slap its own ISBN onto your iBooks ebook (that seems redundant…). This means that the publisher of record, at least as far as ISBN is concerned, will be Lulu. On the up side, this ISBN is only for the ebook version, and Lulu will “give” you the ISBN for free (whereas Bowker will charge you a chunk of change). The second caveat is that Lulu only accepts .epub files for publishing to iBooks (could be worse: Smashwords only accepts .doc), which are notoriously difficult to produce well (and very easy to produce poorly).

Lulu has been doing the self-publishing for years, so it’s got its ducks in a row. You start a new eBook project, you upload your ePub, you set some metadata (for some reason all iBook prices need to end in .99), and then it wants a cover image. I already have cover images set up for rooksbridge.com and for print production, but of course these weren’t the right size. One quick crop later, and I uploaded the cover file (and turned off their text-overlay of the title and author). Lastly, you click the prominently displayed check box labeled “iBooks Distribution Service.”

…except there is no such check box.

While their “we do iBooks” page is flashy and slick and looks like they’ve got their shit together, well… the truth of the matter is that it’s still a new service and there’s a guy at Lulu that’s got to flip some bits for you. You’ll find this out if you dig through the Lulu Knowledge Base to find the How to get your book in Apple’s iBookstore (Authors) article. Yes, it’s another tutorial.

Luckily, this one is short. The skinny is: set up an ebook with the handy-dandy ebook wizard (which is relatively straightforward) and then “buy” this free product. Putting this product (which is “free for a limited time”) into your cart adds you to a queue, and one of Lulu’s people will contact you by email in “two business days.”

I got my response the day after I “bought” the submission service. The email reminded me that the ebook needed to pass ePub validation and asked for the Lulu ID number of the project I wanted submitted to the iBookstore. Presumably I might have other eBooks published through Lulu, and since the submission service is presently bound to my account and not a specific project, they need to know which to send. The email then advised me that the submission process might take 4 to 6 weeks to complete. The kicker of course being that, if Apple refuses the file (which it reserves the right to do), Lulu won’t actually tell me; I have to keep tabs on the iBookstore (which, without an iPad, is difficult…) and if my book doesn’t appear, then I contact Lulu again.

Of course, this process ended with emails from Lulu claiming my files did not validate, not giving me any reason why they did not validate, and the “resolving the case” so I couldn’t reply for more details. I did a little research on their own support forums and found this same story repeated over and over again. Perhaps someday Lulu will get their act together and become a conduit for self-published content making its way to the iBookstore; that day is not today.

Two new products up at rooksbridge.com that I’d like to tell you about:

I just published Rooksbridge #7, Requiem for the Wicked, at rooksbridge.com. One of Camwright’s old cronies is in town, but this time he’s the honored guest of the Baroness. Which is a little awkward, and then, well… things kind of go downhill from there. This chapbook was actually sponsored by Mister Paul Tevis, that apotheosis of humanity and generosity (which is not to mention his superlative taste in fantastic fiction) and author of Penny for My Thoughts. He asked for Norchester, so I gave him some Norchester!

Requiem was a long time coming (and it’s a long chapbook: 72 pages), and in retrospect maybe it would have been better as a two-part deal across two chapbooks. As it is, it’s sort of a “double issue” with a whole lot of plot, reversals, and character development. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and that’s powering me directly into the next chapbook, Haunting, which I hope to have out in the next two weeks. Hope being the operative word, there.

Additionally, I’ve got the Autumn on the River Collection, a super-bundle of the first four chapbooks in all three formats. That’s four chapbooks, four audiobooks, and four digital editions (twelve PDFs) all together for twenty bucks. The collection is ideal for catching up or getting started if you haven’t yet dipped your toe in the water. It’s also good for plugging holes in your own collection: I will be sending out coupons to folks who’ve bought pieces of the collection so they don’t end up paying for the same stuff twice.

And if you’re still hemming and hawing over taking a plunge, take a look at the first chapbook, Dirty Work, available in its entirety for free. Rooksbridge is really shaping up into a project I’m proud of, and I’m just itching to share it with as many folks as I can!

My friend Tony, who is playtesting the Smallville RPG that I helped design for Margaret Weis Productions, recently wrote:

The Smallville RPG continues to be awesome and lots of fun. It’s really well made for episodic drama involving people with super or supernatural powers. Since that describes a lot of the TV shows I watch, I think it’s fantastic. As a result of this, as I watch some of my regular TV shows, I keep flashing on the Smallville RPG structure as underlying the structure of the episodes.

I shudder to think of what will happen if I rewatch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Tony’s generously complementary post reminded me that I hadn’t actually mentioned Smallville here, although I doubt it’s really news to anybody who reads this blog. Round about in November, Cam Banks approached me about writing for a RPG project which, while it was based on a major network television show, he could not actually tell me what it was until I signed an NDA. I signed on without any hesitation, and thus began a months-long stint of intense game design collaboration behind the scenes and public silence. However, the veil of secrecy was torn asunder a couple weeks ago, and so now I’m free to talk about what has become a very exciting project.

For those of you who don’t watch Smallville (as I did not when I signed on), you probably know the basics: it’s the story of Clark Kent before he donned the red-and-blue tights of his superhero identity whose name has not been spoken aloud once in the nine years that the show has been running on CW and WB. Nine years, and it’s greenlit for season TEN. This show is huge, with a devoted following — and one of our red-letter goals has been to make sure that following is well served with the game we publish.

The Smallville RPG will use a variant of MWP’s house system, Cortex. We call it Cortex K. Cortex K is a “variant” of Cortex Prime much like a german shepherd is a variant of a grey wolf (one of the really neat things about Cortex is that it keeps developing with every product). Whereas Cortex Prime is a robust, sim-oriented workhorse that can be used to emulate just about any content, Cortex K is optimized and streamlined for Smallville: in other words, drama and superpowers. The collaboration process to get us to where we are now has been long and hard-fought, and the almost-finished product is looking great — and playing even better. I have high hopes that the game will make it easy for players of widely different experiences and backgrounds to get the sort of gameplay that makes Smallville such a fun show.

We are in the home stretch of playtesting and writing the game right now. Once the press of that has passed, I will probably be blogging little snippets of the game to give you all an idea of what I’m talking about, and hopefully whet your appetite for a game that I am becoming very proud of.

10 Words You Need to Stop Mispelling Misspeling Misspelling

Blood & Tears: Live Action Rules for Houses of the Blooded will be available March 21st at the B&T Live Event. PDF copies will be available through www.indiepressrevolution.com and www.drivethrurpg.com on April 1st.

I did the layout on this book, shamelessly copying Daniel Solis’ design for HotB and flowing the B&T text into it. Sort of a new wine, old wineskin thing — and the game is gonna burst with awesome, let me tell you. I’ve played in a handful of B&T events, and this is the slickest LARP I have ever seen. You should buy it.