I am looking for people who are willing to read the first draft of Ember which will be finished in the next day or so.  There will of course be a contract involved and those who choose to read will also have the opportunity to playtest the game once the first reads are all finished.  This is not an editing or layout or proofreading job, this is just people volunteering to check out a new game and let me know what they think about the system, setting, etc.  Contact me here or at headtripgames@hotmail.com, thank you all in advance.

This might not be the thread for this, StrongBadMun, but I'd be interested on why there will "of course" be a contract involved. Can you talk more about that decision?

My experience has been that people are much more likely to check out your work if you provide a direct link, as opposed to asking for them to email you, receive a contract, sign the contract, scan it, send it back, then receive in their email a playtest document.

Are you worried about damage to your intellectual property? The Forge has a lot of members who advocate things like designing in public, putting playtest materials "out there", etc. It's my experience that intellectual property theft doesn't happen... a symbiosis where people engage each others work, base things in their own games off of stuff that rocked in yours, put you in their Inspirations list, and in turn allow you to do the same does happen, though.

I'm curious about this decision. For example, I would have gladly clicked a link for Ember right now, and read it or part of it right now. These barriers to me getting interested in your game are, however, barriers.

For two reasons,

1: I am less concerned with disputes over my intellectual property than I am with burned bridges, I have been on the Forge long enough to know no one wants to have the reputation for stealing someone else's IP.  Without a contract though a simple misunderstanding could result in a ruined relationship that was just beginning and I would like to keep all possible avenues open.

2: Presently I do not have the book in a linkable format and do not have a place to store the file if I did.  While I am presently remedying this and will certainly have a link for people to read the book with a little disclaimer that says "I understand this belongs to blah blah blah." so that people can just click the link and read and give their opinion as you stated, I unfortunately do not have that capacity at present.  If you would like to wait until I put this link up I would still be happy to have you read Ember and give your thoughts, however it's a lot of text and this ad is for people who want to have an actual copy on their computer to read at their leisure or a printed copy sent by me.

I don't mean for them to be barriers and as I said I'll be bringing them down as soon as possible, unfortunately my lack of web savvy slows me down.  Thank you for your input.

and I just used the word "present" far too many times in that post lol

Cool! If you're looking for a place to put up stuff for free, that you can directly link to from, say, a forum post... check out fileave.com
You can direct link a single file, or link people to your account page so that they can download anything of yours.

Joe,

Thanks a lot, until my site proper is ready I'll take a look into that.  Rough draft needs a few more final things and then I'll see about uploading.

John