I am torn between whether Zorcerer of Zo Actual Play reports are more entertaining than Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies APs.

On the other hand, it's ALSO a tough call between Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies and Truth & Justice artwork.

What do you all think, on either question?

In the wake of the multi-year "mostly dead" status of Pen & Paper, and the looming demise of Geocities (where my other publications credits are listed), I have begun to try and assemble a decent CV of my work in the gaming industry over the past few days.

It's harder than I thought it would be (especially for an egotist like me!)... apparently I did not keep adequate track of ALL of the work or award nominations I received.

Still, I can say, with some assurance that, since 1998, I have worked on...

20 RPG books

and wrote

50 articles or columns.

. . .

Whoa.

Still assembling data; will let you all know when the credits page on the ASMP site goes live.

With the completion of my initial work on the Small Favor matrix and some freelance editing, I am taking a short break.

Of course, for me, "break" means I only work on one project, because I iz insaneymans.

But which. One. Spock? Which. One?



Lemme know, f-list. Taking you advice until tomorrow evening.

But for tonight: comicable books and wine, oh yes.

Latah!

Work Journal: 4 pages of longhand, legal pad notes on Small Favor. This brings us up to 90% of the text.

ALSO...

From this post, I have closed out the following TO DO items:

4. Zorcerer of Zo-based fairy tales: EXCEPTION: Must write one as present for somebody's birthday. RESEARCH DONE.

6. Script Collaboration: Final draft done; patricks is submitting to contests and whatnot.

Now, I print sumfing out and start dinner.

Just a quick update... all of my current projects are still live, I've tried to service them all a bit this past week... and it's sucking the juice out of me.

Here's what I'm gonna do with them, so as not to go insane.


1. Local gamma playtests of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies: One down, at least three or four more to go, switching in different players and characters. Try to set next session up for late April. Rewrite handout.

2. Gamma draft revision of the S7S manuscript: Can't be done until local gammas are done. Stop thinking about it until after playtests to free up headspace.

3. Research and analysis on Small Favor: Finished re-read of book. Starting the actual note-taking tonight.

4. Zorcerer of Zo-based fairy tales: Stalled in mid-tale, most due to fatigue. Stop thinking about it until after I can get back to novel; free up headspace. (EXCEPTION: Must write one as present for somebody's birthday.)

5. Incipient novel: One chapter written. (Stop thinking about it until after Small Favor work is done to free up headspace.)

6. Script Collaboration: First draft done. Awaiting comments from trusted readers. Revise/Edit/Trim/Tighten for upcoming contests.

7. Providing feedback to authors/game designers: Reducing this, unless one or more of three things is involved -- friendship, a PDQ licensee, or cold hard cash.

8. Freelance editing work: Do one more night's worth of work on prep docs beginning of next week, then ignore until the document to be edited hits my inbox.

9. Other low-impact projects I can't remember: If I can't remember them, they're unimportant, so I'm erasing the vague bookmarks point into mystery that are squatting in my skullmeats.

Thus, the actual To Do List becomes, in rough order:
A. SmF notes: Start tonight.
B. Get feedback on script; revise: As it happens.
C. Get info for a Zo Tale for present: This weekend.
D. Finish editing prep docs: Monday or Tuesday.
E. S7S Gamma Playtests: Revise handout late next week, start nosing around for interest in an end-of-month session.



Well, that almost cut it in half.

Also: Find time to sleep, somewhere in there.

To aid my own sanity and time-management, here's the list of freelance projects I'm currently juggling (note, please, I am not including day-job stuff or social stuff):

1. Gearing up to run several local gamma playtest sessions of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, to test out rules changes made through the beta playtests. After I get feedback and testing on that...

2. ...moving onto the gamma draft revision of the S7S manuscript with lessons learned and general text-tightening/awesomifying. This will be sent out to peer reviewers for comment and gamma playtesters for testing.

3. I am still contributing to The Dresden Files RPG; the most important element of this will be my research and analysis on Small Favor, once I actually buy the book later this month.

4. I am writing Zorcerer of Zo-based fairy tales, with the aim of putting out a small fiction collection. Right now, I've written five -- "The Blue Tailor," "The Wooden Pirate," "The Witch Girl," "The Horse Prince," and "The Gingerbread Knight." I probably need at least five more (and art) to make a slim digest book.

5. I (apparently) have begun a novel, trading on two of my big interests: swashbuckling and mysticism. One chapter down.

6. I am collaborating on at least one (possibly three) movie scripts with a colleague.

7. I am providing feedback to other authors and game designers regarding their works on an ad hoc basis.

8. I will be picking up some freelance editing work for another Standards Developing Organization (SDO), in the interests of making money.

9. I am positive I have one or two other low-impact projects I cannot summon to mind right now.

That's the State of the Chad at the moment. I will be pondering how best to service all of these endeavors with regard to the limitations of time and attention.

If you are involved with any of the above listed projects, please take this as an explanation of why I may be a bit terse in responses.

Daniel Perez says nice things about me:

http://highmoonmedia.livejournal.com/125166.html

Also, last night, I wrote a new Zorcerer of Zo-related fairytale, as a birthday present for one of my girlfriends.

Given her response, I may do this for everybody's birthday this year.

Two benefits to this:
1. People get a personalized piece of prose art for their natal day.
2. I get another story for my eventual Tales of Zo collection (which I really want to finish before Xmas 2008 for pub in 2009).


EDITED TO ADD:

This is awesome on stilts:

Battle Scene! From SPIRIT OF THE SEASON

Quick links where I or S7S are mentioned:
http://rob-donoghue.livejournal.com/281736.html
http://macklinr.livejournal.com/579012.html

---

I spent most of Sabaday morning hanging out and prepping for my pick-up game of S7S, scheduled for 2:30, to catch people who missed other game slots.

It filled up in like 5 minutes.

The players were nikotesla, drcpunk, Mark Causey, and Remi Treuer.

Chargen went a helluva lot quicker, using the suggestions given to me by my peeps on Fliday. After getting them squared away, I went for a quick smoke and to buy another bottle of water. I had their write-ups in hand, and used the "Campaign Cartography" rules in S7S to come up with a cool scenario for them, based on their characters.

Of course we did not play it. Instead, these folks broke my game. Again.

In a decade of on-and-off development and several playtest sessions, no one has gone for player-vs.-player. Not once. The Sabady demo group did.

And it was pretty cool.

The system played fairly well, and having different folks game it spotlighted a bunch of hole to fix for the gamma draft. There was also some egeregious abuse of the Style Point economy (...Remi!).

However, the roleplay kicked ass over and above the awesome of finding flaws in the system. A fencing duel and a duel of wits. (If you check out Lisa's post that I linked to the other day, you'll catch a whiff of the awesome.)

Afterwards, we had about a 15 minute "What was Good?/Bad?/Ugly?" discussion, which gave even better feedback. And Remi did something that my DC area friends would label "extremely punk rock" -- he gave me his recently-purchased copy of Vincent Baker's In A Wicked Age..., because the Sabaday playtesters believed I needed to read it. (Cock-blocking Mark a bit, though -- Mark offered me his PDF since he'd bought a print version.)

I only accepted if Remi would take an ASMP PDF in return; he agreed, and all was well. (I believe he chose ZoZ, eventually.)

The Indie Games Pizza Party was okay, and I talked to a bunch of tres cool people. Indeed, there are two folks that I perceive a weird connection to: Joshua A.C. Newman / nikotesla and Mindy Kerr. The were familiar, as if we'd hung out together in the past. While granted that nikotesla has a mild physical resemblance to cjpetherick (especially when I first met Chris), it's more than that. It's odd and familiar all at once, that "don't I know you?" vibe. Mindy claimed that perhaps we knew each other in a past life. Whatevs, but I know I wasn't the only one to feel the vibe.

I had to kill a couple of hours between the pizza party and a demo I hoped to play in. So I hit the bar.

Big. Mistake.

QUESTION: What sort of people hang out at a hotel bar, when that hotel is the middle of an industrial park in NJ?

ANSWER: A freaking deeply weird and disturbing sector of the population. Mostly single, middle-aged Sopranos rejects, looking for massive meat-/meet-market action with other middle-aged Sopranos rejects.

I was sincerely freaked out. Seriously. Listening to the discussions between folks, I could inerrantly tell what the next words out of their mouths would be. The 50 yr old, relatively hot trophy wife hitting on the closeted gay Marine on leave: I knew exactly what each of them would say before they said it. Almost verbatim. It was almost like I was reading the subtitles of the movie ahead of the dialogue, and was deeply disturbing.

Add to that political discussions with some extremely stupid people (even those who were on "my side" and even allowing for the cognition-clouding properties of alcohol), and I got nervous and freaked.

I am dead serious. I was creeped out immensely, more than I would have expected.

So I drank. A lot. Way more than I should've.

Sleep-dep plus massive quantities of booze = Chad insanely drunk off his ass.

While I made it to the table for drivingblind's demo, something in me recognized I wouldn't make it through the game. So, before they started, I got up and left. Alas, I only made it to the elevator bank and the "comfy" chair sitting there.

I eventually made it back to the room without mishap, and slept like the dead.

Thank God I am not a mopey or loud drunk.

The Zorcerer of Zo is one year old (released 11/17/2006)!

It looks like ZoZ picked up a few more customers since my last post on numbers; this makes the (approximate) one year sales numbers for it...

526 copies.

(Numbers are approximate because I won't have IPR's sales numbers for the book for 4Q2007 until January 2008; I'll update again then.)

---

Also, in that last post, I said something like:

Interestingly, 2007 will be the first year I haven't put out a new product since forming ASMP.

Which isn't exactly true -- as folks following this LJ know, drivingblind and I have been working on a promo/freebie product for the upcoming holiday season. I think that SoTC and T&J fans will like it. More news as it becomes available.

Once again, thanks to all past, present, and future Atomic Sock Monkey Press customers!

Check out the post Fred Hicks / drivingblind made here:

http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/294198.html

The upshot is that I'm outsourcing a bunch of production/marketing/business responsibilities for Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies and some future PDQ and other gaming products to Evil Hat Productions.

There are many reasons for this arrangement. After all, Fred kicked ass on the Zorcerer of Zo layout. And I was extremely impressed with the production values of recent Evil Hat games like Don't Rest Your Head and Spirit of the Century. Additonally, working with the Evil Hat folks on The Dresden Files RPG has been a remarkable experience. And lastly, they have the tools and the talent with con-presence, marketing, and networking issues.

Despite this new arrangement, Atomic Sock Monkey Press will continue to exist. This isn't a merger. All current products -- Dead Inside, Truth & Justice, The Zorcerer of Zo, and Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot -- will continue to be sold and supported right here. But starting with S7S, some of new game concepts (and, maybe, some revisions of older products), will be produced under the EHP label. This frees me up from some of the business-end issues, and lets me get back to doing purely creative stuff. And every so often, I'm sure there will be "boutique" products that I want to get my hands completely dirty on, in all phases of production.

In any case, I retain full and complete ownership of my material published via Evil Hat. This was a key element of my arrangement with Evil Hat, and I am glad of their dedication to the "indie" aesthetic.

This is a great opportunity for ASMP-slash-me and Evil Hat Productions to leverage our individual strengths together, and I'm glad it's come to pass. And, as we all continue to work together, who knows what strange and delightful synergies may come of the arrangement?