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.

The rules are light and easy, as is character generation, with a setting that has room enough for both GM and players to make Medieval Europe what they want.

Read the full review here.

Listen here.

But in reading over Diaspora over the last couple of weeks, I find myself reminiscing over one of the key concepts of FATE that didn’t carry over into Chronica’s design: phased character creation. For those of you who are not familiar with this process, introduced in Spirit of the Century*, each player writes a paragraph of background material for each of several periods (phases) in their character’s life. These paragraphs then serve as inspiration for the character’s aspects.

So, I’d like to present an alternative protagonist creation method for use with Chronica Feudalis. This method utilizes three phases. In each phase you will write a paragraph about your character’s background, pick one mentor (and apply those benefits), and write one aspect (and, optionally, one background).

Phase One: Childhood

In one paragraph, describe your character’s early childhood – from birth until the age of ten years old. What class was she born into? Who were her parents and what did they do? Was she provided with any education (perhaps via a hired tutor) or was she brought up to learn the trade of her parents? Some children are betrothed when they are very young. Did this happen to your protagonist?

Pick a Mentor

Choose one mentor from the mentor list to represent your protagonist’s most influential teacher from this period in her life. For the three skills that mentor teaches, increase those on your character sheet by one step. Copy each of the mentor’s gifted tools to your tool list.

Write an Aspect

Using what we’ve discussed about aspects in the core rules, write one aspect that encapsulates your protagonist’s childhood. If your character was born with a particularly unique feature or inherits a particular status or title by blood, this aspect should be used to indicate such things.

Write a Background

You may optionally write one background that describes something about your protagonist’s childhood.

Phase Two: Apprenticeship

In one paragraph, describe your character’s introduction to their life’s trade and their subsequent education. A noble’s son might be made a page in another noble’s household. Many sons and daughters are sent to be novices in monasteries and convents. In a city you might become apprentice to an artisan, and in a village you might remain with your parents taking responsibilities on the farm. What happened to your protagonist? What kind of person is he shaping up to be? What do his parents want him to be? Is he willing to go along with that? Some young people are getting married at this phase in their life. Is that the case for your protagonist?

Pick a Mentor

Choose one mentor that stands out as your protagonist’s most influential teacher from this period in his life. For the three skills that mentor teaches, increase those on your character sheet by one step. Add each of the mentor’s gifted tools to your tool list.

Write an Aspect

Write one aspect that encapsulates your protagonist’s apprenticeship. If your character has professional skills that reach beyond adventuring, it might be a good idea to establish those with this aspect.

Write a Background

You may optionally write one background that describes something about your protagonist’s apprenticeship.

Phase Three: The Path to Adventure

You’re not likely to play a protagonist that stays on the farm or in the shop forever. Write one paragraph that describes how your protagonist transitioned from the mundane life that was planned out for her to the hero of the tales you will tell in your sessions. Did she run away to escape an arranged marriage? Does she display some unique skill that influenced her convent to use her as an emissary? Was there some crisis that interrupted her life and forced her to find her a new path? And in all this, what kind of adult is your protagonist turning out to be?

Pick a Mentor

Choose one mentor that proved to be your protagonist’s most influential teacher from this period in her life. For the three skills that mentor teaches, increase those on your character sheet by one step. Add each of the mentor’s gifted tools to your tool list.

Write an Aspect

Write one aspect that encapsulates your protagonist’s path to adventure. If your character has a major motivation that will drive her throughout the campaign, you may wish to establish it with this aspect.

Write a Background

You may optionally write one background that describes something about your protagonist’s path to adventure.

A Name

Likely you have already named your character in order to write about him. Fill this out on your character sheet and the process is complete.

You will note that is incredibly simple to make child or adolescent characters simply by limiting the number of phases you go through. 6 to 10 year old characters should only complete the first phase. 11 to 15 year olds should complete the first two phases. 16 years old and up protagonists should complete the full three phases of the procedure.

* True, there were phases in FATE 2.0 but they do not appear to be as fleshed out.

To register or to learn more about the convention, please visit http://www.conofthenorth.org.