One of the unforeseen advantages of my approach, though, was that it left me with a lot of steampunk “pamphlets” full of colorful descriptions of a fictional solar system and short-short stories of the people who call it home. Content I might be able to use in other ways. For instance, I’ve had a “Spirit of the Full Light Full Steam Century” project on my hard drive for years that I never quite complete. Recently, though, as I’ve been putting Stories from Rooksbridge onto Kindle, it occurred to me that this stuff might be of interest to folks all on their own: pamphlets of the digital age, as kindle minibooks.

There are three, and I fired them off into the intarwebs at 99 cents a piece:

• For Queen and Country
• A Daring Tourist’s Solagraphy
• The Layman’s Reports from the Royal Society

And of course, I’ve got Rooksbridge available on Kindle, too, for the usual two-buck price:

• Dirty Work
• Getting By
• The Divide
• Ravens, Rooks, and Crows

Publishing to Kindle, it turns out, is dead-easy… as long as you have your content in an easily-accessible format, like XML or HTML. The above titles were approved for the Kindle store a couple days ago; when I went to check if they were live, they already had a couple sales on them. This with absolutely zero promotion, which is pretty neat. For maybe an hour’s effort on my part, it’s a nice little revenue stream that I don’t really have to do much to manage. The percentage of revenues that gets back to me is less than awesome (35%), but in the grand scheme of things, that’s 35% of revenue that I doubt I’d be tapping any other way.

So those of you who are Kindle-enabled: here’s another way to get some tasty, tasty content from my corner of the world. Hope you enjoy!

Download Situation Report!

This little project was a long time coming. Waaaay back when I first published Full Light, Full Steam, I put together demo materials: six “half-gen” characters and a handful of situations engineered for those characters. As a theme, I set each situation on a different planet: one on Mercury, one on Venus, one on Mars, and one in the Asteroid Belt. I also tried to diversify the situations as much as possible, so while one is all politics and social maneuvering, another one is all action-adventure, and another one is all scifi spaceships shooting ether cannons at each other. It was a nice little package and I was proud of it. It was, however, all in long hand and filled out cog cards. I always meant to fire up Illustrator and transfer all those characters, sets, props, and situations over into a pdf and publish it. Life intervened, of course.

As of a month ago, I actually thought I had lost the longhand originals, one or two drifting off at a time into the untold mess that is a Monday unpacking after a gaming convention. A couple weeks ago, though, I was pleasantly surprised to find three of the four situations in an old folder, and the fourth one filed away for safekeeping. The cog cards for all four situations were scattered all the hell over, but I managed to find them all and put all the pieces back together. In other words, I lucked out — it was all still there. Sensing that having all the pieces all in one place was not something I was lucky enough to have happen twice, I resolved to sit down and finally get the situations in a nice, safe, digital format.

Thus I present you Situation Report!, a free supplement for my three-year-old game Full Light, Full Steam. It includes six characters and four situations engineered for those characters, ideally suited to one-shot, short-form, or convention play. Hope you enjoy!

So this is my very small contribution to the thing (which cannot even be said to be a debate at this point). This white guy would like to see some more diversity in sf/f, and when I write and publish, there will be (and has been) characters who are not white guys who are more than token color in the background. I’m not going to wade into the crazy that is the blood-orgy internet dogpile that is RaceFail ‘09, because I’m not equipped to do much good there, so I will, outside of this post, confine my efforts to what I produce. That is, I wager, the most effective thing that I can do.

You can read the full article here.

Check it out at IPR.

With copies in stock in a couple weeks, I’ve set up preorders and all that jazz:

Preorder Full Light, Full Steam!

We’ve blown through the last of my stock after the Have Games, Will Travel podcast. I figured the stock would hold out for another week or so, but I didn’t count on folks buying multiple copies! I am rather happy, despite having zero on hand.

This weekend I’ll be doing up a new pdf for Lulu (with a few typos fixed and errors repaired) and getting a proof ordered. With any luck, we’ll have new Lulu hardbacks within a couple weeks!