State of the Blog – 2/5/2013

I don’t like writing these kind of behind-the-scenes posts, but sometimes they demand to be done.  The Accursed fan-five project was a bit draining; I’ve figured out I have a cycle of four weeks on and one week off for my creativity, and I pushed through that last month to my detriment.  I need to take a breath and figure out what to do next.

I want to start publishing for profit this year.  I’m just plain not good enough at my job that I’m going to get promoted or get a serious raise anytime soon, and I’m way too cautious to quit and go looking for something else in this economy (plus my job has great benefits and I really wouldn’t mind retiring from that place), so it would be nice to very slightly improve my income stream by other means.  I don’t really feel comfortable having a “contribute” button on this blog (though successful professional writer Mark Evanier has one), so I’d rather publish work for sale on DriveThruRPG.  I’m not going to be an ass and just republish blog posts and expect to get paid for them, though; anything I publish will be at least half new and expanded content.  Frankly, I’m good enough at this that I think making some money off of it isn’t unreasonable.

Tommy Brownell’s incredibly generous recent post seems to have generated some interest in The King is Dead.  I’d always considered turning that into a fully-developed commercial setting, but I think I need to start smaller.  To do justice to The King is Dead, I’d want to do a proper, fully-illustrated book (preferably with a plot-point campaign).  I’m just not ready to jump into that yet.

Honestly, The King is Dead has gotten a little away from me right now.   The vampire bloodlines are too complicated for Savage Worlds, and the logistics of the whole thing just seem too big.  Does that make sense?  It just seems like too many vampires.  I don’t know what is, but something’s just off; that’s why I have to let it gestate a bit more.

A nice subject for a mini-setting/sourcebook might be the Heian Period.  I could easily illustrate it with public domain art and I think I could adequately cover the necessary details in about 50 pages or so.  Heian Japan is admittedly a bit obscure, but there seemed to be some interest in it when I did the Mappō Monogatari post a few months back.   

I could just yank a bunch of Kikuchi Yōsai art from Wikimedia Commons.  He was awesome even by modern standards.

Another nice mini-sourcebook would be a “Bandits of Old California” setting inspired by the public domain story The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley.  I’d be worried about finding any art, though.  I wonder if I could do that as a “requires the Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion” book?  Hmm…

Of course, if Mystical Throne Entertainment, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Savage Mojo, or somebody else with a budget would like to pay me to do a robots vs. giant monsters setting for Savage Worlds, I’d be happy to do that as work-for-hire.  I could probably knock the whole thing out just in time for the release of Godzilla in May. 

I am not kidding.

Seriously.  Call me.

On an unrelated note, I thought of the perfect, goofy-ass character names for a pair of swashbuckling adventurer lovers: Calico Kat and Ginger Tom.  The brain immediately started pondering creating an open-ended swashbuckling fantasy setting (like an 18th century Forgotten Realms), and then I realized that my list of setting features almost exactly duplicated 7th Sea.  Damn, I wish I hadn't been on hiatus from RPGs when 7th Sea was active.