Hi! My first post here; forgive me if I make any kind of newbie mistake.
At least four different people, two on reddit's /r/rpg and two on 4chan's /tg/ recommended me to come here to look for help. You guys have an amazing reputation!
I am very close to finishing a rulebook for a game called "Enter The Shadowside". It's a modern setting where characters have paranormal powers as a result of hosting ghosts (referred to as Hierogamy). There are seven main organizations whose activities revolve around the Shadowside, and my (admittedly ambitious) dream is to have seven writers chipping in, each of them deciding what is canon for his/her organization, writing history, lore, etc.
The main post I would like you to see is this: http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/nzwqu/looking_for_seven_writers_i_would_like_each/
But if you're in the mood for reading A LOT, there was a lot of interesting discussion about my ruling mechanism here: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/17376824/
And some positive response from reddit about the character sheet is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/nv1sr/what_are_your_thoughts_about_this/
I think that's an information overload, apologies if it's too much! I'm just excited about getting this off the ground and I'm looking forward to collaborating with cool creative people.
Thank you all so much!
Marco
First of all, welcome to the CBG! :) It's great to see new members popping in.
I didn't get to read much of the information you linked, but the character sheet looks gorgeous; nicely done. I don't fully understand everything on it, and I may be inclined to think the World-Turtle a little cluttered, but otherwise great stuff.
Regarding your request for writers, most people are usually pretty busy with their own settings; we're more about posting what sort of cool concept or setting you've got and commenting on it. I think if you posted some more information here regarding what you might be looking for in a thematic sense, or just about the setting in general, we could provide you plenty of feedback for you to work with. I'm not sure if there are many who have the time to write it for you, however. I'd love to see what you could come up with as you seem like you've got something good going here.
Thank you for the welcome! The other thing those four people said was that this community is very friendly :)
Re: Character sheet: it's a work in progress, for sure. I'm on the fence as to whether leave or remove the runes.
Re: writers: most certainly I understand people are busy; I wouldn't expect anyone to do anything unless they enjoyed doing it. The link I posted has descriptions, character art and paranormal skills for all seven organizations -I would very much welcome any comments there too!
Thanks for the encouragement!
This looks really amazing! Some really beautiful artwork there, and an extremely intriguing setting!
I might be interested in contributing. A few questions:
1) Roughly how much material - word count/page count wise - are you envisioning? Are you thinking of each organization having a dedicated 100 page sourcebook, or are we talking more in the range of a 15 page write-up to go in the main rulebook?
2) What sort of deadline would you be aiming for?
3) Are you looking to publish this for-profit? If so, how will you be handling compensation?
Seriously, very cool setting. Not sure which organization appeals to me most - probably the Sisterhood or the Thelema Society.
EDIT: Yeah we're a friendly bunch, and some of us are pretty insanely prolific writing-wise (check out the extremely detailed Clockwork Jungle on the wiki if you haven't already, Polycarp!'s crazily detailed setting, or Lord Vreeg's Celtricia; my big one - the Cadaverous Earth - isn't on the wiki but it's pretty big too).
Wow, thank you! It's really exciting to hear people like this stuff!
The same questions are being asked in reddit; I'm thinking I should have made a text post. Let me copy paste this though, in regards to what I'm looking for in a writer:
"Well, I think the number one thing almost goes without saying: I'd expect you to really enjoy doing this. Like I said from the beginning, the goal is not to make money (although some have suggested a "pay what you want" deal and if this happened it would be nice to split all monies among all writers); but for the most part you'd be working for love of the art and because it's fun. It would be a hobby project.
The second thing I would look for is for you to be able to get along well with everyone else. Creative stuffs, in my experience, are prone to carry emotional involvement and the last thing we want is to hurt anyone's feelings. So, within reason, I'm looking for people who play well with others, and are cool about collaboration, etc.
The third thing would be the actual writing skill and creativity. It's number 3, because writing skill can be improved and work can be polished, while creativity will spark on it's own providing the first requirement is met (that this is something you enjoy and it excites you).
So yeah, I think those are the three things. Like it, be cool, and write well.
I don't have a "selection method". Maybe I won't need one -it depends on how much interest there is. Ideas welcome."
1) To answer your question about how much material: I have no idea. How much do you think it's reasonable? What would you suggest? Would you suggest having them all as separate elements, or all together within the same rulebook?
I do know what'd I like to see for each organization though:
* A richer description
* History
* Main figures
* Some more more Paranormal Skills
* A short story even?
2) I have no deadline. The rulebook will be ready as a draft next week. Maybe all writers could convene and agree on a deadline that seems reasonable to everyone and we can all commit to.
3) I'm not looking to make money. Some very charitable commenters in reddit have said they would love to pay money for this, and so I thought of setting up something online with a "pay whatever you want" scheme. If this happened, I think all of us should get equal shares.
Very excited to hear you're liking this stuff!
I'll take a quick shower and come back.
Cool. I'm not going to commit right away but I'll have a more thorough read of the material and get back to you. Have you got any writers from different sites fully on board, or is it still very early days?
EDIT: Sorry I missed that posted text in the main link, I was distracted by the pretty pictures in the other link...
Interested. I may have to give this a better read from a computer in the next couple of days. SCAV3NG3R appeals to me the most, followed by the Catholic church one and the corporation.
Thanks guys!
To answer Steerpike's question, no one has been chosen yet; it's all very new.
But I finally figured out how to choose people, please come over here and take a look:
http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/comments/o02b9/welcome_to_the_shadowside/
I hate to be the one who has to say it, but it's probably not going to work.
Seven people each doing their own thing is probably going to result in seven vastly different approaches. That's fine if they're working on seven different projects, but if they're expected to be coming together on one project, then there has to be some consistency. The need for consistency is especially important when this is going to be your core book. Now, I'm not saying that multi-author books are not possible, but one written by eight people, especially when the instructions given to seven of them are "hey, take this concept that sounds cool and run with it." Which, in itself, seems nice, you're giving people a lot of leeway and letting them really run with their ideas. Except, well, then you'll have seven different people running seven different directions. Odds are there are going to be inconsistencies, and major ones at that. There will be plot holes. There will be points where, while your contributors are all well-meaning, mature people who are happy to work with others, they simply cannot compromise without totally destroying their vision of what their chosen faction should be-- and if you're really lucky, there won't be two of those sorts of points that are in absolute contradiction with each other.
Worse yet, you're asking the creators of the seven factions to come up with more paranormal skills. That means you're not just asking for fluff, but crunch, too. That is, you're asking people who probably never even played the system to write crunch for it. Granted, if it's just an issue of a few numbers being off, you could rebalance those, but there are plenty of problems with crunch that can't be fixed by mere number-tweaking, such as a power simply doing something unintended, interacting with another power in a strange way (and since you've got six other people writing powers as well, expect this to happen more than a few times!) or just plain breaking the game in some strange way that nobody could have anticipated-- including me, which is why I can't go into much detail as to what might happen.
If you want some evidence of the validity of what I'm saying, just flip through some oWoD or recent Exalted material. One of the problems that plagued White Wolf's various product lines is that they'd farm out the production of their splatbooks to freelancers. The writing was often creative and all-- but sometimes too creative for its own good. Authors had their own vision and approaches, and trying to put those together into a coherent whole often resulted in simply a mess. Various backgrounds did not mesh, powers were not well-balanced relative to each other, and so on.
Hey Forge, welcome to the CBG.
Right off the bat; I haven't read -any- of your material yet. Though I have read this post entirely and thought I could pitch in.
You admitted it yourself, this is an ambitious project. Personally I like seeing team efforts and cooperation attempts like this one. I fervently believe in involving third parties in the creation process. I'll speak for myself, but it helps spur further creativity, funkiness and above all; learn. Though, Sparkle made a good point when pointing out the possibilities of inconsistency. If you give said third parties too few restrictions and allow them to have control over too much, you risk loosing the original essence of your project; your idea.
Though, it's not -impossible-. What I would suggest, if I may, is to act as a manager. You can have all seven individuals working on different factions, no problem, but I think you need to work in close collaboration with each of them throughout the entire process. I'd probably even do a few ''groups'', with like-minded factions sharing ideas, maybe even history, to make things more realistic.
That being said, with what I read from the post, not the material, this is something I might like contributing to. I'll get back to you when I read some of the material.
Cheers
Quote from: sparkletwist
I hate to be the one who has to say it, but it's probably not going to work.
Seven people each doing their own thing is probably going to result in seven vastly different approaches. That's fine if they're working on seven different projects, but if they're expected to be coming together on one project, then there has to be some consistency. The need for consistency is especially important when this is going to be your core book. Now, I'm not saying that multi-author books are not possible, but one written by eight people, especially when the instructions given to seven of them are "hey, take this concept that sounds cool and run with it." Which, in itself, seems nice, you're giving people a lot of leeway and letting them really run with their ideas. Except, well, then you'll have seven different people running seven different directions. Odds are there are going to be inconsistencies, and major ones at that. There will be plot holes. There will be points where, while your contributors are all well-meaning, mature people who are happy to work with others, they simply cannot compromise without totally destroying their vision of what their chosen faction should be-- and if you're really lucky, there won't be two of those sorts of points that are in absolute contradiction with each other.
Worse yet, you're asking the creators of the seven factions to come up with more paranormal skills. That means you're not just asking for fluff, but crunch, too. That is, you're asking people who probably never even played the system to write crunch for it. Granted, if it's just an issue of a few numbers being off, you could rebalance those, but there are plenty of problems with crunch that can't be fixed by mere number-tweaking, such as a power simply doing something unintended, interacting with another power in a strange way (and since you've got six other people writing powers as well, expect this to happen more than a few times!) or just plain breaking the game in some strange way that nobody could have anticipated-- including me, which is why I can't go into much detail as to what might happen.
If you want some evidence of the validity of what I'm saying, just flip through some oWoD or recent Exalted material. One of the problems that plagued White Wolf's various product lines is that they'd farm out the production of their splatbooks to freelancers. The writing was often creative and all-- but sometimes too creative for its own good. Authors had their own vision and approaches, and trying to put those together into a coherent whole often resulted in simply a mess. Various backgrounds did not mesh, powers were not well-balanced relative to each other, and so on.
Sparkle has a point here. You can make it work but it's going to require working together. The problems that plague collaboration projects like this center on everyone running off to do their own thing. What you're going to want to do is to have meetings on certain things and get a consensus on what to do next and how to do it. Only once you have solid outlines on the next part of the project will you have people start working on parts of it (while keeping in constant contact to make sure there aren't contradictions). It can work but it requires a full time commitment from all seven people. For this reason such projects do better if you know the people in real life. Regardless I wish you the best of luck. I'm not sure if you can collect enough people with the free time for something like that from here, but you certainly will be able to collect a ton of advice from us once you start posting on your setting (you're welcome to start posting collaboration information here on the forums or on our wiki whenever you want).
Hi! Sorry I didn't get the chance to reply earlier!
Thanks everyone for all the advice; I am taking it very seriously.
Sparkletwist, my main takeaway from what you said is that I must pay special attention to keeping things in good synch and consistent, and I completely agree. I agree that it will be challenging, but I'm sure you're not saying it's impossible. Most of all, I really think it's worth a shot.
My ace-in-the-sleeve so far is http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/ . As you can see, we already got a couple stories posted there in the last few hours (everyone's just writing for the heck of it right now, just to get a feel) and we're going to play it very loose this week, while we identify who will be in charge of what.
But I think in about a week from today, we'll have firm names and maybe even dates, and then we can start doing what Open Source Software does. All very transparent, very welcoming of feedback and constant fine tuning, etc. Reddit is good for that. And I should be able to generalize at least a bit of my skills as Project Manager, which is how I earn a living after all. We'll see, I guess! I'm optimistic.
Now, I do want the organizations to feel very different, storywise. I do want the writers to run with the ball wherever the muse tells them to, and to put their own particular twist in the thing. It sounds corny, but I believe every time we create something we put a little bit of life in it; our life, and it shows. That's why it hurts when someone else tears it down. I want to keep that from happening. All I can promise is, not that there won't be trouble, but that we will try our best to handle trouble as mature adults who share a common goal. That common goal, the way I visualize it at least, is the satisfaction of knowing a bunch of people somewhere out there will spend awesome afternoons throwing dice about a world we saw first, and found compelling. And back on the topic of consistency: no one has played this particular version of the system, but the mechanics themselves were what I used to play when I was living in Mexico 10 years ago, and are also similar to an online rpg I made called vaxia. So I'm not going in 100% blind, but I do want to be open to feedback and I do want to be very flexible and very ready to change whatever needs changed as things go along.
In summary: I'm sure some writers will come up with crunch that is fundamentally incompatible, or with fluff that simply doesn't belong in the shared vision (note the choice of words there; it's not my vision) but what I promise to do is to try to catch these things in the bud as soon as they are posted in the subreddit, and then, with the help of everybody and assuming everyone is willing to cede a little bit to everyone else, we can hopefully focus and land on something common enough. We'll see! (man that was a long sentence!... brain is tired...)
Magnus Pym and Nomadic: what you said makes perfect sense. I may not be the best manager out there, but I'm committed to do my best and with a team of good people my job gets a lot easier. Crossing my fingers. Also, I would love to hear your opinion once you've read the stuff I wrote for each organization and seen the logos, etc. Thanks for the welcome!
EDIT: I had misspelled and omitted people's names :)
Not terribly helpful feedback I'm afraid, but I was curious where you got all your art? I understand the character sheet and logos can easily be created in photoshop with a modicum of expertise, but you seem to have some professional quality concept art in your preliminary pages.
That's a reasonable way to choose people. Not sure I can bring myself to give in to the trend that is reddit, however. I sort of hate the place, though it seems to grow more useful by the day.
Numinous, I paid for the character art; it was made by this fine gentleman: http://www.jesusgarcialopez.com/indice_galerias.html Money well spent, if you ask me :)
Nerevarine, thanks! The good thing about reddit is that you can unsubscribe from all the major subreddits and only subscribe to the few niche ones that really appeal to you. As in life, the bigger a community gets the higher your chances to run into trolls, but places like /r/rpg are very good. I also recommend you /r/nosleep (disclaimer: I write a lot of stories for nosleep).
Is there any more setting info other than the descriptions of the various organizations?
There's a bit more: there's a description of the shadowside here:http://imgur.com/a/dTRjH#OFMe6, then there are two comic books I wrote. One is the spiritual origins of Sisterhood of Salem and Diabolus Malleos, here: http://imgur.com/a/Phy67 and the other is about the organization called SCaV3NG3R, here: http://imgur.com/a/1EP3q
Btw, I announced the seven writers today, here: http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/comments/o9inf/meta_and_the_seven_writers_are/
We had around 30 stories/applications, all of them pretty good! :)
I'm excited about what comes next!
Wow, that was quick! Best of luck!
Thank you sir! I'm crossing my fingers we all meet our deadlines, and if we do, we should have something to show by February. So far it's looking good; the writers are delivering the goodies, a couple test game sessions have happened and we got our first batch of deliverables.
Thanks for the well wishes!
Congratulations. That was very fast moving.
Thanks! Btw, we're probably going to be in a permanent state of looking-for-new-writers. This is because we're planning to release a supplemental book with an anthology of Shadowside stories, meant to inspire players, and to give hints to StoryHosts as to what the "endgame" could be (Endgame not as in "end of the game" but as in "ultimate goal" of polar opposite forces in this universe). It gets a little heavy, so I'd rather just link to it (here: http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/comments/oaxn1/meta_the_supplemental_book_will_be_a_collection/) but anyone is welcome, if the muse calls, to submit some stories for the supplemental book, or any ideas for the corebook.
Thanks so much everyone for taking a look.
Sounds interesting. I might look into that once I can give the first release a look over.
Forgive me for necroposting; please feel free to delete this if it's against the rules. I just wanted to tell you that the book this thread was about is done, and released! There is a press release thing at http://www.entertheshadowside.com/stories/press-release-04-20-12
Thanks to everyone for your encouraging comments! We still plan to add a lot more supplements, and there is room for a lot of collaboration at the subreddit; everyone is welcome.
Cheers!
Marco
Dude, it's totally fine to post some good news like that. Congratulations on your book.
Quote from: FableForge
Forgive me for necroposting; please feel free to delete this if it's against the rules. I just wanted to tell you that the book this thread was about is done, and released! There is a press release thing at http://www.entertheshadowside.com/stories/press-release-04-20-12
Thanks to everyone for your encouraging comments! We still plan to add a lot more supplements, and there is room for a lot of collaboration at the subreddit; everyone is welcome.
Cheers!
Marco
Congratulations :)
Perhaps if you feel that our advice and feedback was helpful you might spread the word of our existence to your fellow roleplayers. We're always open to helping anyone make their settings better.
Quote from: Nomadic
We're always open to helping anyone make their settings better.
We're especially open to it when that person then sticks around and, in turn, posts about others' settings. :grin:
Congratulations- you exceeded sparkletwist's expectations of the ultimate success of your work (see page 1 for the citation) :D. Which is difficult to do.
Also- that was an amazingly fast development time; congratulations to you for managing the project!
Quote from: Light Dragon
Congratulations- you exceeded sparkletwist's expectations of the ultimate success of your work (see page 1 for the citation) :D. Which is difficult to do.
Also- that was an amazingly fast development time; congratulations to you for managing the project!
Haha, thanks so much!! To be fair, sparkletwist was right when she said it wouldn't work having seven writers all together in one book. Logistics was not the problem though, neither was keeping our seven visions focused nor the crunch in synch (all of that we handled, and we mostly did what we planned to do right on sched (http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/comments/ouenn/meta_big_haul_checkpoint/)), but in the end it made more sense to publish each author in a different book purely because splitting the money seven ways would have been an accounting nightmare. This is much cleaner and self-sufficient, and opens the way for there to be a lot more than just seven writers. We're calling it "Open Canon"; anyone who cares may write Shadowside material, work with us in the subreddit until it's ready to be called canon, then publish it and sell it and keep all the money. We'll see what happens! The book has been out just a few days, so it's too early to tell, but well, I was hopeful three months ago about today, and I feel hopeful today about three months from now :)
Honestly my original thoughts had been concerns similar to sparkletwists, in the interest of full disclosure :D. She is the site's voice of harsh reason.
"it made more sense to publish each author in a different book purely because splitting the money seven ways would have been an accounting nightmare. "
Indeed. I had been wondering how you'd work out the accounting. I'm more familiar with music royalties- but in that field you need to keep logs and either do quarterly distributions or yearly distributions and you may need to keep the money in a segregated account to ensure you are upholding your fiduciary duty.
Light Dragon, you're 100% correct. That's exactly the conversation I had with my lawyer, and I slowly noped back into the bushes.
But I'm happier with the new setup anyway; we only get together for the fun stuff, such as discussing canon, and none of the accounting gets in the way.
Wha you are doing is awesome and appeals to the DIY gamer in me. My primary professional experiences with live and tabletop games have involved designing plots and mechanics as part of groups often containing+ people, and I'm glad to see it worked for you, as well as it has for me.
As a vivacious redditor, I 've seen a few of your links, but have never truly delved into r/gaming clicking; thinking to save myself some free-time. Now i shall simply have to brush up on your setting and perhaps try my hand and expanding the Open Canon.
Tangent_Jaerc, all I can say is welcome! We need people like you helping out! C'mon over!
Dude, I'm only on the Sisterhood so far and I already love your stuff. Seriously awesome.
I usually just lurk on these boards and rarely comment, but great stuff like this is why I
still stop by. Welcome to the community, it's the friendliest most encouraging community
I have ever found on the internet.
Keep it up man!
Way to brighten my morning! Thank you so much!
Indeed, these are the only forums where I've posted anything about the release, everything else has been reddit or /tg/. Thank you!! I'm really glad you're liking this! If you could pass the word to your friends, that would be awesome-I don't know any other way of doing publicity...
Hey FableForge, I think you'll be excited to hear this. So i've been thinking about your setting alot lately (particularly Scavenger, because
they're pretty damn cool) and I was feeling inspired, so I whipped up a short story about Scavenger. I'm not the greatest writer, but I feel like its quite good, and of course you can change anything you like, or not use it at all. It's three and a half pages, and showcases what kind of people Scavenger is made up of and how dangerous their recklessness can be. If you want I can email it to you, unless you want me to send you a PM, I don't know if you can attach documents to them though? It's a word document, 2007 I believe. There's some funky fonts at one point during an online chatroom, don't know if that makes a difference with compatability.
And again, no pressure to actually use it, I will completely understand if you don't want to.
Sounds good man! Come on over to http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/) and post it! That place is where everyone is posting stories, ideas, questions, everything. I've been thinking about an anthology of stories -maybe that would be the right place for your work. Can't wait to see it!
Where exactly do you want me to post it? Sorry i've never been on reddit I don't know anything about it.
Alright, here it is, up on Reddit.
http://www.reddit.com/r/shadowside/comments/te3lk/scavenger_short_story_fryfrofella/
I just want to say here what I said to FryFroFella over email: this story is VERY VERY good. One of the best Scavenger stories I've read. It has a nice buildup arc, and the ending comes with perfect timing -it's the kind of ending that makes you smile because you only saw it coming 4 seconds ago, and now it's here.
Awesome work.