Long Overdue Update on Mini Six in Print

I just handed over the text for Mini Six to Phil for layout. This means that one stumbling block has been dealt with but there are still several obstacles to overcome.

Firstly, I was so late in handing over the text that Phil and I haven't really discussed Mini Six much lately. I don't know what his schedule looks like right now. Just because I belatedly turned this in doesn't mean that it's at or even near the top of his priority list right now.

It's been handed off to layout. That's not the same thing as saying that it's in layout. I set my schedule, Phil sets his. Also, Phil will review the text I gave him and considering the edits I made, he might choose to kick it back to me or he might want to add to it.

Secondly, it's our intention but not our promise to add a little bit onto the end in the form of an additional mini setting or two, and those aren't done yet. We have to see what layout looks like before we're able to settle on a final page count which will determine if and to what extent material will be added. There's no plan for anything breathtaking. Just a few pages at most. Honestly, the mini settings won't hold up the project.

Phil will let me know when he gets far enough along how many pages we will have available for additional material and how much we must extend in blocks after that. For example, suppose that Mini Six came in as 41 pages in the new layout. Phil would suggest that we need 7 pages to bring it to 48, and that if we went past 48 that 56 and 64 pages would be the next logical break-points.

Then Phil and I will have a pitch meeting and we will decide on exactly what to do in those last few pages. We will divide the writing assignments by interest and decide on a deadline. Then we'll adjust for reality.

When we tackled Mini Six before, what eventually evolved into a Farnsley's Phantasms was originally my assignment, which I had conceived as modern day ghost hunters who bought their equipment from the surplus of a failed franchise from the 1980s. My version fell flat, Phil reworked it and turned it into something better than I had. Even all this give and take only took a week or two.

In summation, a minor milestone was crossed. It's temporarily out of my hands and Phil hasn't even had a look at the state of the text as of yet, so it may fall back in my hands or he might tackle a revision of the text. And I can't promise when the layout will land on his priority list. (Phil's a pretty busy guy.)

Phil or I will update again when we have something to say.

Thanks for hanging in there everyone.

Ray

Stormglass (updated links

Ron Fricke has released Stormglass, a setting which uses the Mini Six rules:

"Stormglass is a setting combining three things I love, Steampunk, Cowboys, and the Stargate TV shows and movies.
The first document, Stormglass, is a summary of the setting with rules addons specific for the setting.
The second doc is JN001 The Jungle World, a guide to one of the many worlds you can visit by stepping through the Stormglass."

Heaven's Shadow

Over at Indigogo, John Berry has created a project for Heaven's Shadow:

Heaven's Shadow is a game about assassins of faith, hunting down and eliminating the ancient Nephilim, half-demon beings who hide in the guise of human beings and sow sin and discord and evil within our society.  

Players take on the role of Shadows, skilled operatives recruited from many walks of life, recruited by an Agency for their faith in the Supreme Director and commitment to protecting the innocent from the machinations of the Adversary's servants on Earth.  

The system is based on Mini Six, the excellent OpenD6 variant developed by AntiPaladin Games, modified to suit the trappings of modern-day supernatural espionage.  Included add-on systems extend combat options, cover planning assassinations, shadowing and following enemies, and other such tasks common in the day to day operation of an intelligence and wetworks operator.  

The book is designed to be short and sweet, easy to pick up and learn, and easy to browse and search from mobile devices like e-Readers and tablets, and will be available in both PDF and EPUB forms, as well as small format print.  Layout is simple and, presently, sparsely illustrated, to make mobile format reading much more comfortable and to allow maximum content within the space provided, and minimize cost.

That looks great, and I'm going to support this right away!

Disclaimer: AntiPaladin Games is not affiliated with this project, we just think it's awesome.

Update on Mini Six in print

Not the news a few of you are hoping to read, but we haven't made any significant progress on the Lulu version.

I expected to have more time available immediately for this project, but that hasn't worked out.

I will update as soon as we get a firm timetable set. If nothing happens within the next few weeks I will at least let you guys know that there's no news.

Sorry about that.

Edit: November 5: Nothing to report. We're lazy.

The State of Mini Six

We sold out of the full print run of Mini Six. I know that it's not an amazing number of books, at about 1000 over the last two years, but we really only expected to sell about 100. We had the booklets printed locally, and by far the largest expense was shipping, especially when we factor in that the USPS apparently lost or mangled about one in four of the shipped packages. So those 1000 books didn't represent 1000 sales, it was closer to about 800 units sold. (We gave some to our friends as well.)

We started out with a planned run of 100 books, then at Phil's insistence we upped our order to 300, then to 1000. I read before that small press things like this are lucky to sell a hundred copies in a year, so I think we did well. Nothing we've done is actually aimed at making a profit, and we've hit that mark exactly.

We never planned to sit on it and do nothing for so long, but that's how it turned out. I could list all the mundane details that got in the way of our good intentions. We've started about six or seven projects that have dead-ended over the last two years.

In the larger industry deadlines slip all the time, and the same could be said for us except that we try hard to not announce anything until it's done. If you've followed Mini Six for awhile, you will surely have noticed that we haven't had much to say about it. Sorry about that. I will try to update things here once in awhile, even if it's just to say that there's no news.

On to future plans, and this one is pretty minor so I don't mind announcing it in advance. We're laying out Mini Six (and trying to catch some more of those typos that are everywhere) to make it available in print over at Lulu.com. I don't know what the price will be, but we're going to place our cut at zero or very close to it, so it will be as cheap as we can get it. I expect this to be finished and live within a week, plus or minus a few days.

After that we will be done with the upkeep of Mini Six, and we'll be ready for new challenges.

We're coming out of stasis at the moment. We don't have any special plans to announce because we're lazy, and things will be announced only when they're done.

But boy oh boy, do we know that Mini Six sure needs to be fixed up!

Update: Oops! All the links are broken. I'm fixing it now.

2nd update: I think I got them all fixed.