Sourcebooks: Comments Appreciated

[incandescens]

I'm trying to clarify my thoughts on something, and would be grateful for people's opinions/comments.

There exist a fair number of roleplaying game sourcebooks, for the pen-and-paper type of rpg, which are based on a fictional property (Firefly, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Star Trek, Song of Ice & Fire, etc), and which contain a fair to extensive amount of background detail on the series, but which are mainly marketed to roleplaying gamers, and at that, the sort of rpger who is likely to see them in a specialised gaming shop or in specific online selling areas (such as http://www.rpgnow.com).

I'm curious about whether fans of the series/background on which such sourcebooks are based, or even people who play them in lj-rpgs or fiction communities, would be interested in such books if they knew of them or knew where to find them, and what sort of factors they'd be looking for in them.

So go on, tell me about it. Which, if any, of the following points would make such a book interesting to you? And is there anything else that'd get your attention?

- Heavy character-level detail (personal history, abilities, relationships, etc)
- Heavy universe/background-level detail (geography, history, metaphysics, spaceships, etc)
- Mechanical rules for handling any of the above in play (complex? simple? in between?)
- Lots of pretty art taken from the original series
- Art supplied by other artists
- Speculation about the series/background
- Ideas for further play/exploration/stories
- Comments on the themes
- Availability in PDF format
- Price (What would you consider a good price? And for how thick/detailed a book?)
- Anything else that'd influence your interest in it.

Thanks to all.

Comments

[pureyaoi.livejournal.com]

I had no idea there was a Utena RPG system. I can't think of anything that would spark my interest more -- I've been wanting to work out a Utena-only RPG for years.

I am not very well-versed in game rules, but the simplicity, adaptability and flexibility of a system is my #2 factor in how well I like it (theme and setting is #1). Personally, I would probably only buy a system for a property that I was absolutely fascinated with, like Utena, so I wouldn't need a lot of the character and setting details, but speculation and comments on the themes as well as nudges and ideas for plots/campaigns would be well appreciated.

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

There was. GoO commissioned 3 books from me on Revolutionary Girl Utena for BESM2. They paid me for 1/2 of one.

The first one came out pretty well, and Adam Jury edited it and laid it out. It looks nice and reads nice although Utena purists didn't like it much. The second was obviously a rush job and even I don't have a copy. The third did not even see light of day.

I might still have my manuscripts somewhere. I wrote 120,000 words of Revolutionary Girl Utena and that is 4 months of my life I will never get back.

[incandescens]

The Utena books were brought out by Guardians of Order to go with their Big Eyes, Small Mouth anime-centric system. http://paizo.com/store/games/roleplayingGames/b/bigEyesSmallMouth has some of their products off it, including two of their Utena books.

Thank you for your comments.

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

Interesting question. Having written a few of these, I actually have some thoughts.

First and foremost, it depends on who you want to target. The overlap of the two sets of FANS OF A SERIES and ROLEPLAYERS is a thin intersection set. If you want to sell books to FANS of a SERIES who might use your books for RP later, definitely a larger pool of people of the two sets, you definitely want to focus on universe and character-level detail and lay off as much mechanic rules as humanly possible. Preferably, if you can get away with it, you want to build on an already established system and have the back of the book/appendix be full of rules and the bulk of your book be character information and setting.

For example, I have several highly nerdy Star Trek books with technical information from way back in college playing Star Trek. They have no gaming information in them, but they were infinitely more useful than the old FASA books loaded down with rules. Those books were used -- they had diagrams and pictures of ships, rankings, and fleet information (it as a very military game) and this was very useful to play. Rules were pretty useless, considering that the system was bolted on.

I find this to be the most useful to least useful, in order:

1. Universe setting. Ideally people are purchasing your book both for copious universe information. They want detail about, say, races and ships and worlds and weapons and history. If they are going to play the game, they will want as much universe information as possible because they are going to play their own characters in the universe. Think long and hard about great settings like Star Wars and Star Trek, where the canonical characters are a slice in time but the cool stuff in the world they live in.

2. Licensed Art. Licensed properties need art. Preferably lots of it. In color. Glossy. I have several Robotech books -- I have them for the ships first and characters later. I want ships. Your text is meh next to the beautiful art.

3. The canonical characters. Here you want fleshed out histories and genealogies and stuff that makes the characters widgets in games or interesting for casual readers. Keep in mind your book will be picked up by casual readers, so you want to keep the gaming stuff away from your theoretically awesome text.

4. Price. I will buy a very expensive beautifully laid out book full of universe goodness in book form that is universally applicable to general fandom. Not so much a gaming book.

5. PDF Format. I am enh on PDFs. In general, I can't read them. They're big blurs. But they are a must-have these days and lots and lots of people are buying PDFs as previews or to show off coolness to their friends before buying your very expensive coffee table world/setting book.

6. Art by other artists. Not preferable to licensed art, and a far second tier. But if that is what you can afford, then that is what you will use.

7. Game mechanics. In an appendix or in its own chapter near the back. This was always a failing of GoO books in my mind: people wanted STUFF about, say, Tenchi, and were always likely to make up their own stories. The rules vs. information wasn't a clean separation and if you want to appeal to general fans, you're going to want to front load with images and world stuff.

8. Ideas for further play/exploration/stories. A small section in #7.

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

(Part 2)

Things I would prefer you not have at all:

- Speculation about the series/background
- Comments on the themes

This reminds me of Dan Savage on Savage Love Podcast a few weeks ago. He had a caller who was a new sex columnist at Columbia. Her problem is that she was writing a column about her sex life instead of other people's sex lives. She was writing about herself, and not doing journalism. Thus, her column was boring and failing. Who cares! Find cool people doing bizarre stuff! We don't CARE what YOU are doing!

These fall into that category. As a reader, I don't want the author's commentary. I want my own commentary. That is why I bought the book in the first place. I want enough encyclopedic information so that I can go obsess with my friends. I want you to do the work for me and then I am going to pay you and get cool stuff and read it.

So no speculation, no pontification, no commentary. Leave that for your readers to do themselves.

[incandescens]

Many thanks! And glad to have entertained you on a Friday afternoon.

(And I already own your books, but you know that.)

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

You should light them on fire. I am not a great writer. :)

I wrote 4? 5? of these things so I had plenty of time to think about what works and what does not work. Generally, gaming people make the mistake of writing for gaming (or worse, themselves). If you pitch it toward fans and less toward gamers, you'll get much better traction -- and write a better book.

This is pretty easy to think about. Say you are doing LAST EXILE. I love the planes and airships of LAST EXILE. I want to see big close up shots of giant war zeppelins. The world has a cool mythology. It may have an excellent past. I am not so interested in the mechanics of flying a plane. A chapter in the back with FATE add-on rules is not a bad idea, but I want 80% of that book to the lovely lovely airshippy goodness.

If I want an airship swashbuckling game, I'll buy chadu's new game! Which I will anyway, but that's an example.

[incandescens]

While I see your point and I agree with you about what appeals to you or me, I suspect we have not yet found exactly what would appeal to the fan mass out there -- or, well, they'd hopefully be buying more of them. :)

I think you're right about writing for fans rather than for gamers, though.

[copperbird.livejournal.com]

This isn't of huge interest to me, I'd rather find an online community where I could just chat about the setting with other fans.

BUT it is the sort of thing I'd buy as a present for friends who like the series but maybe aren't gamers. For that, you need big glossy pictures to go with the text, and quirky facts about the characters/creators that a casual fan might not know. Availability in pdf is nice but if I'm buying presents, I'd rather buy a book.

[incandescens]

Thank you! Your thoughts are appreciated.

I don't have any definite purpose in mind. I'm just trying to collate a cross-section of views. It seems to me that there must be some sort of middle ground that could be pitched to here, and that quite often books which could have intrigued the fan market simply never get heard of by them.

[copperbird.livejournal.com]

Oh one other thing. This occurred to me when I was flicking through the Dr Who magazine in Smiths.

I would happily pay for material that included good, insightful interviews with the writers and creators. I'm not so bothered as to what the fan-author thinks of the theme but I would LOVE to know what the creator intended, that sort of thing.

[incandescens]

That is something you actually get quite a lot of in manga. In the original magazines, and later compiled into the collections, you often get short interviews with the author, discussions of points he/she liked, questions answered from fans, etc.

[rvdammit.livejournal.com]

Just some further ovservations to what's already been said.

I'd want such a book to define the plot arcs/series history it covers, and if there are several umm... arc breaks? then some speculation of how to break off at those points.

Have as cleaner break between rules and background as possible. Where rules and background need to be in the same chapter think either sidebars or splitting the chapter into two sections.

If it's going to be made available as a PDF and print version, supply the PDF with the print version.

[incandescens]

That all makes sense. Thank you for your comments!

[rvdammit.livejournal.com]

Something else I realised is that if chracters evolve over plot arcs, learning new skills, letting old skills lapse for example, then provide multiple versions.

[incandescens]

Good point. Thanks.

[splendidshadows.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I've never done a pen-and-paper RPG before, and I probably never will. Forums and LJ-comm RPGs are my poison of choice. However that doesn't mean I wouldn't be tempted to buy such a book.

What would probably attract me the most is heavy character and universe details. I wouldn't care too much about specific stats, but better background stories or explanation of the universe's physics/magic/what-have-you would be great.

Pretty art would also be an added bonus. So would the speculations or creator insight on how/why they made something like the did.

Price ... hmm, the most I would probably be willing to spend on it would be $25 CDN, and that's before tax, mind you.

[incandescens]

I see. That all makes sense. Thank you for your comments!

[masonk.livejournal.com]

I love game supplement sourcebooks for existing series. If it's a series like Star Trek that I have a lot of familiarity with, then it's fun to see interpretations of the familiar broken down into game terms, even though, realistically speaking, the people in the series have stats set at the level of Plot.

More fun, to me, is the sourcebooks for series that I'm not terribly familiar with. I was not very much into Sailor Moon until I looked through the SMRPG and saw just how deep and complex the series really was.

To me, the most important parts are the character-level detail, the universe and background level detail, looks at the themes in the series, and summaries of episodes, which can lead to springboards for new adventures.

[incandescens]

Thank you! Your comments are appreciated.

[charlesatan.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this applies to me since I'm a gamer first and fanboy, uh, not quite second.

The thing is, not all RPG sourcebooks are created equal. The Black Company RPG book for example has something the books never had: maps. A Game of Thrones on the other hand has a history of the world and additional background info. I own the Wheel of Time sourcebook and I'm not really getting "more info" by buying it but it does give me Wheel of Time Art and for me as a gamer, interesting mechanics for the theme of Wheel of Time.

I'd also like to point out that there are conversions for existing systems. I mean even before the "official" Wheel of Time d20 sourcebook, there were rules for playing Wheel of Time for us in the Tri-Stat system. And right now there are two popular systems for playing Firefly/Serenity: the official one released by Margaret Weis Productions and the one using the Savage World system. (Uh, if I'm confusing you with all these gamer jargon, just ask so I can clarify.)

And then some books are generic enough. I mean when you purchase Big Eyes Small Mouth, it's not because it's focused on any particular fandom, but because you want to play anime-type games.

I'd just like to add that in my experience, some fandoms don't really care for these type of stuff. They don't roleplay using game systems, but roleplay using freeform rules in a community, such as via chatroom or message boards of communities like LJ (one of your commenters pointed this out).

Personally, I'm a gamer so I'll go for game system first and setting second. There are a couple of game systems wherein you can "fit" the particular fandom you like. And Record of the Lodoss War IS D&D for example, and GURPS is generic enough to accomodate nearly any setting.

On a side note, I have some related essays on the subject (but they don't necessarily answer your questions):

http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2007/09/bastards-of-sf.html

http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2007/09/rpg-bookshelf-syndrome.html

[archangelbeth]

(*grin* I don't think you're confusing her with gamer jargon. Well, unless you delve deeply into GURPS details...)

[incandescens]

(coughs) Let's leave the GURPS statistics out of it . . .

[incandescens]

Dude, I have been doing freelance rpg writing for a few years now, and playing since I was 9 or 10. You are not confusing me. :) (The name is Genevieve Cogman, if you need to check my stuff out.)

I appreciate your comments, though. Thanks!

[charlesatan.livejournal.com]

Alas, I only got the link from dreamlessness, so prior fandoms/hobbies/interests are beyond me. =)

What RPGs do you play/like/write for?

[incandescens]

So far, I've done writing for Exalted, Orpheus, and Dark Ages Vampire from White Wolf; Hearts, Swords, and Flowers from Guardians of Order; and multiple In Nomine stuff and the forthcoming GURPS Vorkosigan for Steve Jackson Games. And way too much fanfiction off my own bat. ;)

[charlesatan.livejournal.com]

Cool. =) You sure you don't want to discuss GURPS pointage and stuff? =P

[incandescens]

You're very kind, but I'm more of a background person than a systems one. ;)

[libekory.livejournal.com]

Very literally a month late, but I have my reasons for the stalking, I swear. ♥ Here's hoping you have comment notification turned on and will notice.

(For all those who have been saying that they prefer freeform RP, I've actually been wishing recently that I could somehow make a dice system simple and accessible for everyone on my own upcoming LJ RP. XD There's going to be combat, and a lot of interaction that would benefit from taking success rolls and being able to do -- I don't know -- podcast DM stuff, or something! I dislike the total lack of direction in most RPs, my experience is that your typical player usually doesn't know what to do with his or her character, and would like to given direction every now and then...)

I agree on universe/background detail, simple rules kept separate from the bulk of the information, art, and so on. (I also found the theme commentary to be a little silly and overreaching. Maybe it's just me, but I think I could do a Buffy-style campaign without needing to actually sit down and think, "Okay, the theme of this campaign is friendship versus dependence." It's very artistic and everything, but is it necessary for the experience of the players, really? I feel like at that point you're forgetting that you aren't really making a new TV series for other viewers.)

But I disagree a little on the importance of adding ideas for further expansion of the series -- for creating original campaigns in the same flavor, etc. As I was looking around the 'net for Buffy RPG-related information, in lieu of having the money to drop on books (and as many of them were out of print anyway), what I kept hoping for was more original campaign setups. I found them fun to read, and interesting for thinking about the structure of my own RP. (Which is going to be Bleach-set, so in my case I wasn't even looking for the sourcebook-substitutes in order to play Buffy -- just because they seemed entertainingly-written, and because I knew enough about the property to try and adapt a little.)

(Meanwhile, I went through a billion and a half [Name Here] the Vampire Slayer sites, all excitedly giving play-by-play of their "episodes" and their character details, with a vague feeling of boredom and even disgust -- so there's definitely no need to go quite that far with your examples. There's a definite line between giving a theoretical sample campaign, for other players to adapt, and just telling me what you do every Friday with your five friends in excruciating detail.)

Anyway -- I think I'm getting a little off-track. What I'm trying to say is that one or two sample campaigns (Buffy divided them into "episodes" and "seasons", and in this case I'd have liked a few standalone episodes, and two full seasons, where they were doing more like including an episode of their sample season in each book -- cute marketing and all, unless you do three books and then vanish. ;) ) Some worlds are easier to envision and extrapolate on your own than others, but from what I could tell the ideas offered for setting up your own original stories in these books were very brief, unimaginative, and unhelpful. And personally, I'd want more out of this than just a full range of stats on the canon characters. (For my money, the stats on the canon characters are best used to help you figure out what's reasonable for your own character by giving you something to compare them to.)

And, yeah. Two cents and then some. /babble

[incandescens]

Your comments are definitely appreciated! Thank you.

[libekory.livejournal.com]

♥ You're welcome. (Is there any easy LJ-type location to actually comment on your fic, by the way? Found the website storage the other day, but it was looking like I'd have to send an email! ;) )

[incandescens]

I have a lot of it on fanfiction.net as well, under the name "incandescens", if you feel like commenting/criticising . . . well, all but some of the most recent stuff. I do have _Dominion_ up there, if you liked that?

[libekory.livejournal.com]

"If you liked that," she says. Yes, ma'am. I may have been linking it at people somewhat incessantly. I liked.

I can attempt to offer criticism, if you'd like, but I think there was just going to be gushing. You write nice things, and you write them a lot, and I'm hoping the unfinished chaptered Bleach fics still have more coming. I believe the word is "purr".

[incandescens]

Thank you very much! You're very kind. ;)

Currently working on the next chapter of _Requiem_, if that helps . . .

[libekory.livejournal.com]

You've been kind to me for ages with comments; if I'd known you wrote, and wrote like this, I would have tackled you long ago.

It helps. ♥♥ Awesome cliffhanger there. (I'm a dork, though, I want "Mixed Spirits", too. You should know it's your fault I'm currently trying to find some feasible way of getting reasonably involved in Dr. Who. I don't really WANT to just start with the modern incarnation and pretend nothing else existed, but 26 seasons, with many early episodes missing? Gah.)

[incandescens]

Aww. Most kind.

I apologise re Doctor Who, but as a longterm fan I can't really object. :) And I will write more Mixed Spirits, as soon as I'm more certain about what happens next . . .

[libekory.livejournal.com]

Don't apologize, just a.) pardon the American and b.) direct me at some sort of guide to indoctrination (and wouldn't that be a great title for it, perhaps with hyphens to play on words) in the series. It's so daunting I'll never be able to get my roommate to join me, as much we both enjoyed the Torchwood spinoff and are waiting for its next season. Ideally this would give a list of must-see serials, like the introduction of key villains or concepts, to get a firm foothold in the world and start enjoying it without spending the next few years of my life doing nothing but watching episodes with short breaks for sleep! Sigh. ;)

And see, now I'm all pleased and feel warm inside. It's like all's right with the world at large somehow.

[incandescens]

Yikes. Alas, I'm not sure that there is such a guide. Online discussions of it are either very neutral, or totally informed by the author's personal preferences, alas.

But if you do want to try some Five (who is the one in Mixed Spirits), the first story with him (and a very good one) is _Castrovalva_. Other excellent stories with him include _Four to Doomsday_, _Kinda_, _The Visitation_, _Black Orchid_, and _Caves of Androzani_.

BTW, if you want to contact me elsewhere, I have an AIM and yahoo! identity under the name incandescens. :)