Here is what she had to say:

“I’ve chosen Chronica Feudalis not just because it is a delightful conceit — a group of mediaeval monks playing a game of imagination in the monastery cellars — but because that conceit is sustained beautifully throughout the text. From the foreword to the end, here is a ‘translation’ of the original document written by one of the monks, laying out the concepts and the rules for their imaginings, even the illustrations (or should that be illuminations?) and cover serve to maintain the illusion. I can just imagine finding this tucked behind a cupboard somewhere in a monastic library, misplaced once the monks who wrote it had no more time for such things — for surely such imaginative young men rose rapidly through the ranks of Holy Mother Church — not to be seen again until today.”

Suffice it to say, this is a great honor. I was there to accept the award at the ceremony and it was a little overwhelming. The other four Spotlight Award winners were: Trailblazer, Fiasco, Ancient Odysseys: Treasure Awaits, and Mindjammer. A fine selection of games to be included among.

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who made this happen. To my editor, Trent Urness, and to my artist, Miguel Santos. To my play-testers, my proof-readers, and everyone who gave me advice on layout, presentation, and marketing. And I want to thank all of the individuals out there who, like Megan, have recognized something in my little game that encouraged them to buy it, read it, and play it. You have made my endeavor of game-design, writing, and publishing so worth it.

Thanks!

Click here for the official press release.

The Blue Knight edition of Chronica Feudalis is now available! The PDF versions of the game have been updated with the new edition files at RPGNow and DriveThruRPG as well as Indie Press Revolution. If you have already own the PDF of Chronica Feudalis, just go to the site where you purchased it, log-in, view you past purchases, and re-download the PDF. If you don’t own Chronica Feudalis, what are you waiting for? Buy the PDF today!

New in the Blue Knight edition:

• Simplified defense rolls to make conflicts run smoother and quicker
• A streamlined skill list
• Enhanced conditions that improve the effectiveness of maneuvers
• More robust purse rules

Print copies of the Blue Knight edition will be available at the Indie Press Revolution booth (#2339) at Gen Con 2010. Look for them at the IPR website and your favorite local retailers soon after. Just look for the blue knight on the cover.

Announcing the Blue Knight edition of the medieval RPG, Chronica Feudalis. This new version incorporates all the changes from the revision document (found in the downloads section) into the complete text of the game. These updates to the rules, made over the past year since the game’s original publication, make this game of imagined adventure more streamlined and accessible at your game table.

Every effort has been made to maintain the pagination and layout of the original book. This means that, except for where rules have specifically changed, any rule you look up will be found on the same page as in the original edition. There’s nothing preventing you from playing with both versions at your game table.

Print copies of the Blue Knight edition will be available, barring any significant printer issues, at GenCon 2010. PDF sources will be updated with the new version soon. So if you already own the PDF of Chronica Feudalis, you will be able to update to the Blue Knight edition for free!

Just look for the blue knight on the cover.

Check out the full list of registered games here.

Here’s the deal, from my interpretation of the reports I get from RPGNow, there were something like 7400 purchases of the bundle. That is the kind of penetration into the gamer community that few independently published RPGs ever see. Over 7400 people now own Chronica Feudalis who didn’t before. Over 7400 people own 3:16 and Apocalypse Prevention, Inc. Thousands of new owners of Full Light, Full Steam and Beast Hunters.

You probably personally know several other people in your local gaming community who donated their $20 and picked up this bundle. This has been touted on every major gaming forum and a myriad of blogs, podcasts, Twitter tweets, and Facebook posts. Gamers came together in large numbers and in agreement for a cause like I have never seen before. It has been tremendously inspiring. The effort raised over $180,000. That’s significant.

Just because the bundle deal is over and the iPad was announced and Amazon and Macmillan got in a little tiff, doesn’t mean the problems of Haiti have gone away. So, when I say this, don’t take it like I’m saying the crisis is over. It’s not. We still have lots of work to do.

But here’s my point: take a little time to play. You and 7400 of your closest friends have new game material. There has never been a better time to find players to play these games. Take advantage of that. Games are meant to be played. They long to be played. They desperately want to be played. Call up your friends and say, “Did you download Diana: Warrior Princess? I did and it’s awesome. How about we get together this weekend and roll some dice.” Don’t just get your $20 out of these games, get the full $1000+ bundle value out of them. Crack them open, take them out, use them, abuse them. After all, they’re PDFs. They can take a beating.

Here is what the revisions do:

• Combines the reaction and passive defense into one defense roll
• Streamlines the skill list down to 20 skills (5 in each category)
• Revises mentors in regards to the new skill list
• Enhances the effectiveness of conditions, therefor making maneuvers more advantageous
• Removes the Vigor Rush rule
• Clarifies disarming an opponent through the use of a maneuver
• Better defines the rules for buying and selling using one’s purse
• Includes a conversion guide for updating existing characters to the revised rules

Be sure to check back often as further revisions may be added to this document.

Imagine you have a little more than one week until Gen Con Indy, your self-imposed and somewhat public deadline for having your book done and printed and ready to sell to the eager masses. And imagine that the latest proof of your book comes in the mail and something is wrong with it. In this case, the cover art looks fuzzy, a little out of focus. Well, this is what happened to me, just as I was getting ready to debut my first ever RPG to Gen Con Indy 09.

In no place that I have ever been able to find does CreateSpace list a phone number or an email address that you can use to get in touch with a customer service representative. There is a “Contact Support” button on the website the brings you to a form you can fill out if you have some issue. So this is what I did.

A little background: when I first set up the book with CreateSpace, I did not yet have any ISBN numbers. It was just at this point that my numbers arrived and so I needed to set up a new title to include the ISBN. I had made a few changes to the interior document, so that was a new file. But the key here is that I uploaded the exact same cover file to the new title. That is the very same cover file that I had uploaded and had received a completely satisfactory proof on from the last title, that is the one I uploaded now to the new title.

When I ordered the proof on the new title, the CreateSpace system warned that my cover file was only 150dpi. Weird, I thought, because the exact same cover file worked fine with no warning before. I ordered the proof anyway. When I received it, just about a week before Gen Con, the cover art looked fuzzy like you would expect 150dpi printed artwork to look.

So I used the “Contact Support” form to bring up my issue with CreateSpace, desperately hoping to get a response soon in order to resolve the issue. The following day I got the “Thank you for contacting CreateSpace” message sent by their automated robot. But there was no sign of a response from an actual human being.

At this point I got desperate and talked to a bunch of friends. Until I pointed it out, none of them really noticed that there was an issue with the cover. They said it was fine. I decided to place an order for the book as is. If I waited any longer, there was no way I could get them in time. The 75 copies I brought to Gen Con have fuzzy cover art. No one ever really seemed to notice or care but, well, I did.*

Three days after I sent my initial message, a customer service rep finally responds. They respond with a no-reply email address and with instructions that if you want to follow up, you’ll need to use the Contact Support feature again. Now, I’m paraphrasing, but the dialog between the representative and myself continues from this point much like this:

REP: We looked at your file, it is only 150dpi.

ME: But how can that be? It’s the same file I used for title id 3388354. That one printed fine!

REP: We looked at your file, it is only 150dpi.

ME: That’s the same thing you said last time, why don’t you respond to the title id 3388354 issue?

REP: We looked at your file, it is only 150dpi.

ME: Fuck this, I’m going to Lightning Source!

You can see how frustrating the above conversation is. But that’s not it. Between every time I say something and the rep responds, tack on three days of waiting for the rep to get back to me. That conversation took two weeks!

And that last line, with the profanity, I didn’t actually say. And I didn’t go to Lightning Source. Now, I made an account with Lightning Source, but they have a $75 setup fee and after my Gen Con expenses, I didn’t really have another $75 to spend.

What I ended up doing was deactivating the title and submitting the EXACT SAME COVER FILE again. Ordered a proof and it came back fine. (I have since had to submit the cover file one more time to fix a typo I found on the back cover).

CreateSpace has a lot of good things going for it. Their pricing competes with Lightning Source (at least for small quantities) and their turnaround time for printing is amazing (just the other day they printed and shipped 60 copies of CF in 24 hours). As far as I’m concerned, they blow Lulu out of the water. But CreateSpace (maybe even more so than Lulu) is a completely automated service. If you want to go with them, be prepared to deal with the following:

1. They have poor customer service.
2. They have very slow response time to service requests.
3. They will not hold themselves responsible for their own mistakes.

If you have a problem with them, you may need to be prepared to fix it by brute force: continuously sending them new files and ordering new proofs. In fact you can probably order a proof and have it printed and shipped to you in less time than a service rep will respond to you.

Wow, feels good to get that out of my system. Learn from this what you will. For my next book, I’m going to Lightning Source.

*If you are one of the people who purchased Chronica Feudalis at Gen Con (or in the first week it was on sale at IPR’s website) and you are not satisfied with the quality of the cover, please email me at jeremy /at/ cellar-games /dot/ com and we can work out an exchange for a corrected copy. To know if you have one of these first batch printings, look at the back cover. If you see that the website address is misspelled as “chronicafeudais.com” (missing the letter L), then you have one of the original 75.

In addition to Chronica Feudalis, you will receive over $1400 of gaming material. You’ll receive 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, Greg Stolze’s eCollapse, Spirit of the Season, Kerberos Club, Serenity Role Playing Game, Trail of Cthulhu Player’s Guide and tons more. Admit it, you’ve had your eye on more than one of these games for a while now.

Donate today, help Haiti, and expand your gaming library like you never have before.

Here is the link again: The Gamers Helping Haiti Bundle.

So here is another point of reference. Cellar Games’ sales for Q4 of 2009:

When we last talked about this, I was around $300 shy of Chronica Feudalis being a profitable endeavor. I am happy to say that it has now certainly made more money than I have put into it.

Along those lines I wanted to comment on something I said in that post. I said something off-the-cuff like “But if you ever expect this hobby industry to pay for your time, you’ll be sorely disappointed.” While I think it’s completely necessary to manage your expectations when getting into something like this, what I said was false. There’s some truth in there but it’s one of those things that people say without really thinking about it. There are plenty of independent game designers and self-publishers that do in fact pay themselves for their time. Vincent Baker said over at Story-Games that he gets “about $20/hour.”

Now I might be more accurate in saying that we can’t all be Vincent Baker, but there are examples of people making money doing this. Whatever, you know all of this. Point is, I said something wrong and, fuck, I’m going to own up to it.

The good news is that Chronica Feudalis continues to sell. From the reports I’ve heard, people are enjoying the game. As a new publisher and a hobbyist game designer, this has been a project I have been tremendously proud of. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible.