I am very pleased to announce (having just recieved the final, beautiful copies from the UPS man) that Push vol 1 is now available.  Copies can be purchase from the fine folks at Lulu for $17.  You can find a link to our Lulu site on the menu bar of the new Push webpage.

Contributors and commentators!  You folks get free copies.  Let me know how and when you want them.  If you send me an address, I'll mail one to you.  Otherwise, you can either pick them up at GenCon (where I will be bringing a stack of at least 50).  Or in some other fashion of your choosing.

We did it, folks.  Booyeah.

For those of you have forgotten about this project in the almost 2 years it's taken to organize and get into print...

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Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying

An annual journal of progressive roleplaying thought and short-form games to blow your mind, modelled after predecessors such as Kazu Kabuishi's comics journal Flight, Dave Egger's literary journal McSweeney's, the Nordic convention book put out every year, and our own Matt Snyder's webzine Daedalus!

In addition to a fabulous cover by Clio Chiang, Push Volume One contains the following:

Emily Care Boss, in Collaborative Roleplaying: Reframing the Game, provides an overview of games which seek to distribute control of the play experience more evenly among the players involved and speculates on the future of this type of play.

John H. Kim, in Immersive Story Methods for Tabletop Roleplaying, describes his own experiences planning an on-going game in which each player’s character was the protagonist of their own story and offers advice on how others can do the same.

Shreyas Sampat’s game, Mridangam, draws on the vocabulary of classical Indian dance, handling all out-of-character negotiations and narrative structuring through the silent exchange of gestures between players.

Eero Tuovinen, in Against the Geek, Choice, expresses his concerns about the rampant Americanization of Finnish tabletop roleplaying and explains how his small publishing operation is working against the current trend.

Finally, there’s me, Jonathan Walton, and my game, Waiting for the Queen/Tea at Midnight, which is inspired by early computer games of the “get lamp” variety and strictly limits character choices while not limiting a character’s ability to express themselves.

If that isn't enough to get your engine going, it also contain's ongoing commentary (in the margins) by the talents of Victor Gjisbers, Jessica Hammer, Brand Robins, Annie Rush, Paul Tevis, and Mo Turkington.

If you're still not convinced, there's a 25-page PDF containing my introduction and the first two pages of each article that you can download from our website (linked above).

Give us a month or two before sending in proposals for Volume 2.  I think we all need to rest on these laurels a bit.

Congratulations, Jonathan.  It's on my Gen Con must-buy list.

Okay, so I've got a new post up on the Push website that explains what's going on with PDF distribution. The short version: I'm hoping to distribute PDFs through IPR at some point in the near future, but it could be after GenCon before we get that together. In the meantime, there's a PayPal button where you can send me $10 and I'll email you a copy of the PDF and add you to a list to recieve future updates.