The Campaign Builder's Guild

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.

Sounds good man! Come on over to 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!

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...

Tangent_Jaerc, all I can say is welcome! We need people like you helping out! C'mon over!

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.

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), 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 :)

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

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.

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!

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!

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).

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 :)

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/

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.

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!