My games are now available at DriveThruRPG!

So one of the things I like to do to amuse myself is present my games in the medium of the day. For Full Light, Full Steam, this meant as excerpts from pamphlets, which were booming in the victorian era. For Sons of Liberty, this meant a newspaper-like format, although I decided not to cram everything down to 8pt like the colonial papers of the time. It’s something that I doubt anybody notices, but it keeps me entertained.

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!

Mister Chris Perrin interviewed me a little while ago, and the result is now posted up in his new weekly article on RPG.net, “Small Press, Big Game.” The interview is actually about all my games, which was a bit of a departure from other interviews I’ve done before. It was interesting talking about how my games relate to one another — and interesting forming those thoughts as they spilled out of my mouth. In any case, I am Mr. Perrin’s second designer (somehow I’m supposed to follow Luke Crane and Mouseguard — no pressure there!), and I’m looking forward to seeing what other designers Chris lines up in the future.

So there’s been a big thing over the internets recently, and a lot of people have become very angry over some really stupid things that some other people have said. Specifically, those things have been about race and the depictions thereof in science fiction and fantasy. At this point, so many stupid things have been said that it’s far beyond my ability to itemize them. Suffice to say: there’s a lot of white guys in sf/f — both in the fiction and in the publishing industry that produces the fiction — and there’s a lot of other folks who’d like to see themselves in sf/f — both in and out of the fiction. Which you’d think would be a pretty straightforward proposition with some immediate support, even from white guys. Apparently not so much.

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.

Serendipity, surely, but somebody’s made some kickin’ steampunky Beekeeper Goggles. I can just imagine Royal Astronomical Navy officers wearing these to the apiary…

You can read the full article here.

Full Light, Full Steam is now available as a PDF download through Indie Press Revolution. The Digital Edition includes the complete setting and rules, and also comes packaged with the character sheet, situation sheet, and cog cards in the same convenient download. If you’ve had a passing interest in FLFS but haven’t got around to picking it up, it’s now available in this format for just ten bucks. Hard to beat!

Check it out at IPR.

Paul Tevis is using Full Light, Full Steam to run Spelljammer. And they look like they’re having fun.

Alrighty. After surprisingly little headache, I have proofs coming from Lulu for Full Light, Full Steam in hardcover and in softcover. Hardcovers will be going for $30 and come with the Full PDF Preview. Softcovers will be going for $20 — a steal, I tell you!

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

Preorder Full Light, Full Steam!

As of today, I am sold out of Full Light, Full Steam hardbacks.

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!