Okay! The response back from FFG was much more inspiring than I was expecting!
Basically, my friend and Ross Watson had a long discussion about what I could do and they relayed it back to me. The state of the rpg market right now is that it is too risky to buy an untested idea and "FFG is not in the business of speculating on an IP." What they did suggest was getting the book up to first edition quality, publish it on drivethrurpg and market it aggressively and build a community around it, which is what they're looking for. Once there's an established market, a publisher will approach. Well, it's an exciting idea.
The other two pieces of advice were to make the game untorrentable, ie including game tokens, cards, things like that, which is also appealing to publishers and to establish a brand. That means getting rid of the generic setting Koipond wanted and giving it a flavour. Basically, Dark Heresy was the highest grossing rpg of 2009 and that's because it has a brand. You know what it is before you buy it. A name like "Space Rock Future" seems a good way to go as far as establishing a brand, but I am going to toss up the setting a bit more before I decide to go with it. The main other concept I had contending with it is the 60,000,000 AD setting Lee-Ham came up with, which I described as "a future where tribes of sexy dinosaur babes a la frazetta girls fight for survival." I'm not about to reduce such an important decision to a MERE POLL, but when I am this tired I am bad at decision making, so I will probably work it out tomorrow when I'm less exhausted. Input desired!
Thank Christ I saved all my old notes in a separate folder and never got rid of them, that's all I can say about that!
Once it takes off and people think of it as a "thing", some guy will go, "Oh, I liked Space Rock Future, but I want blanky blank blank" and then it gets licensed.
As for "counters, miniatures, dials, some kind of card-tradin system, custom dice", I really have no idea about that sort of stuff. Suggestions are EXTREMELY welcome, since I am not terribly sure if my system lends itself to stuff like that, but I'll listen. It reminds me of course that Deadlands introduced something as simple as poker chips for AP, so a simple, elegant solution is obviously the way to go.
So, yes, self-publishing is a go. I'm going to finish up writing the errata soon and then get to work restructuring the book. I WILL BE GIVING OUT CHAPTERS TO EDITORS AS SOON AS TOMORROW and would also like to get in touch with the people who offered to do art. Of any money I make from this, half will go to me and the other half will get divided up evenly between everyone who helped. This is more about getting some outcome of my hard work than getting
, so I don't really care about giving half of it away.
So, yes, let's play publishing a book.
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Topic: Awesome System (Read 2761 times)