[S/Lay w/Me] Wham Bam

Sometimes something comes along, mentally, which makes me willing to take risks. It's happened again this year.

Late in 2008, Sean (username Calithena here and elsewhere) contacted me to write an article for the magazine Fight On! I like the mag and could feel a vague idea percolating regarding monsters. Monsters are a big part of my imaginative life and I've disliked most RPG monsters since about 1980 or so. I wanted to investigate my notions about "something" being lost from fantasy and gaming about then.

Well, life hit in the form of another child being born, as well as some brutal work demands outside of gaming. I didn't get my thoughts together and didn't see how I might ... until some internet scuffle regarding the retro supplement Carcosa arose, and some ideas snapped together. It wasn't just monsters, it was nudity. And it wasn't just illustration, it was content which the illustrations reflected and reinforced. Another avenue of inspiration then hit in the form of John Harper's Ghost Echo.

I wrote the article and a short new game simultaneously. The former is called "Naked Went the Gamer" and will be available for free at GenCon, as well as appearing in Fight On! #6. The latter, S/Lay w/Me, is printing more-or-less as we speak and fingers-crossed will be at GenCon too.

Too fast? Not playtested or baked enough? I dunno. My thinking is "not." It seems ready to me. This thread is intended to describe how the publishing process went. Whether it turns out to be instructive or a cautionary tale, I dunno that either.

The physical vision

It's short-short, not as handout-y as Ghost Echo, but clearly the physical artifact would be a pamphlet rather than a book. I began with the image of a digest-dimensions booklet, maybe 16 or 20 pages, white, stapled. My thinking was to have it professionally printed and bound, so the staples wouldn't be all cockeyed and the inner fold wouldn't be bunchy. To some extent, this recalled game supplements from the late 1970s. But I wasn't shooting for absolutely retro, so much as simple and "what it is, no more and no less."

Whom to get: layout and art<Game, essay, game + essay?

I'd had some good results in the past from combining the Sorcerer core book with the essay "System Does Matter." Should I do that again? The essay and the game are twins by birth; why not publish them together? I went back and forth and back and forth about this. Ultimately, and only partly because I still associated the essay's publication with Fight On!, I decided upon keeping them separate.

Of course, my equivocating didn't help Paul much. It's hard to lay out a book when you don't know whether half of the potential text will be in it or not.

Playtesting

All of these decisions were concurrent with furious playtesting. You can see some of it discussed in [S/lay W/Me] The Lion, the Wretch, and the Woman, [S/Lay w/Me] the Lover and the liquids, and [S/Lay w/Me] The back-story and earliest playtesting <Printing<Designers with printed books: who do you print with and how's their service?<Crunches and hassles<Team 2 at the 11th Hour<not<And where I am now