You do a thing, people want more of the thing

It seems that if you write a lot of RPG and scifi stuff, people will want more of it.

At least enough of it that they'll put up with you and your pet alpaca herd.*

It's official.

I'm now part of the Alligator Alley Entertainment! That said, you probably wonder what my job title is.

As you know,  you get to wear all sorts of hats in a small company. Sometimes you wear all the hats and other times you share one hat with the other guys and hope everyone shampooed in the morning.

Right now that giant shared hat is Esper Genesis, until we can get the Core Rules PDF out to our backers and then get the print version on the shelves.

So the closest title I can probably nail down right now is game writer, though that's pretty vague and it's not all of the skill sets I'm bringing to the table.

The Cool Stuff I do:
I'll be tweaking a rule here and there and making quite a few monsters soon, but I'll also be adding my  world building to the mix, along with some of my signature fiction.

The "Boring" Stuff I do:
Decades of marketing, layout, and editing expertise.

The Fascinating Stuff I do:
Reflecting on a lifetime of analyzing genre fiction and running RPGs has become more handy than I expected.

i.e. Answers to questions like: What do scifi gamers expect out of a game vs fantasy gamers? What are the underlying expectations to those experiences?  How do you design a new setting to work with a rule set already in place.

Even more fascinating is the stuff I'm learning from my teammates. We are pretty much your textbook little company of part-timers, as are a lot of business in this industry.

So when you find yourself wearing a job hat that you haven't had before, you find yourself back in padawan mode.

Which if there is one tidbit I can pass along to others, no matter the challenge, it is enjoy and embrace the opportunities to learn. I suspect that most of the jedi you know or revere have end up becoming students many times over in their lives and be better for it.

*No alpaca were harmed in the making of this post. I don't even own an alpaca. I'm just trying to get a bigger place so I can have dog. Though a cat in a bigger place may not be that bad either. Goats are right out. Have you seen their eyes, those are like creepy Exorcist eyes.

Yep. No goats.

Wow. Feeling the love and maybe punch drunk.

This is a bad ass cover.

And lot of you guys evidently agree.

I did manage to get a five-star review for the content, which is also super nice. Mortal Fantasy was officially my best seller right out of the gates. The market was hungry either for a more generic GotF book or more in-depth Fantasy supplement.

After feeling like a lot of effort goes into making very little progress, this is amazeballs. If I had started out with sort of support, I would have been super spoiled.

I found a few mistakes and learned some new layout tricks so I updated the file. Feel free to go get your update today!

Thanks again my fellow Cypher phans! I am now going to eat a lot of chocolate and watch some Marvel Netflix  and chill with myself.

Someone just told me what that means.

Gnawing off my arm -- growing pains

Dude, learning is hard.

I have been trying to bring up my layout skills for my next project, Mortal Fantasy, since I am hoping it will reflect a new level of skill and design on all fronts.

The thing is that it feel like it's taking forever to learn from my mistakes, tear things down, and then build them back up. It's not quite like rebuilding your house every time you find out that you just put a exterior door in your shower stall, but it feels like it.

Mortal Fantasy is going to be a blended book, part Gods of the Fall, part D&D style fantasy. Serving two audiences, and two masters, at once. If this gamble pays off, then hopefully we can get the ball rolling on other ideas and projects.

Crossing fingers.