Nick LS Whelan Project Roundup 2

I mentioned in my revision of the Bear in Disguise that I ought to fill you in on all the bookmaking I’m doing. What’s so great that I’m neglecting my poor old blog which has served me well for so many years? In this post all will be revealed! I did something like this once before back in January of 2017, so let’s call it part 2 of a series. Heads up: there is NO interesting game content in this post. If you’re not interested in what I’m spending my time on, this is a very good post to skip. I’ll have another class revision out hopefully before the end of the month, so you can look forward to that.

The most relevant place to start is Deadly Dungeons, and the fact that it didn’t sell very well at all. It’s kinda crushing to spend literal years working on something, only to then discover nobody wants it. Putting a book together is a grueling, miserable process. I do it for love of developing and refining cool ideas, but a big part of what gets me through the rough times is the hope that when I’m done it’ll be just a little easier to pay rent. Instead, the first month of sales for Deadly Dungeons made it a little easier to pay for pizza.

Then, Deadly Dungeons got a bit of unexpected advertising, and the second month’s sales shot through the roof. Not rent money, but definitely “rent will be easier this month” money.

Before now I operated on the naive that if I just made sure to write great books and maintain a kickass blog, that’d be all the advertising I needed. Turns out actual advertising is all the advertising I needed. Most folks who read my work seem to like it. The trick is getting my work in front of them in the first place. It’s something I shoulda known. It’s not like people didn’t tell me. Sometimes I gotta learn lessons the hard way.

The result is that I’m shifting more of my attention towards pushing my extant work in front of people, trying to learn how to hustle. I’ve set up stores on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and Lulu. I’m working to drive as much traffic there as I can, so if you know anyone who’s interested in THE BEST GAME BOOKS ANYBODY IS WRITING THESE DAYS, they’d probably appreciated it if you shared those links with them. 😉

Writing-Wise my current project is Miscreated Creatures: Volume I. Long time readers will remember this big ol’ monster book, which I’ve been working at off-and-on since 2013. I’ve finally accepted that my original vision just isn’t feasible at my scale. WotC or Paizo might be able to publish a book of 325 monsters, but they’ve got a bajillion people working on those books. So instead I’ve pulled out 20 of my monsters, recruited a team of artists and layout people, and am as of this writing 80% of the way done with a working draft. My aim is to have this available by the first quarter of 2020, and hopefully make enough to fund a Volume II.

Of course the writing will be done much earlier. Within the next 2 weeks I think, at which time I’ll leave the artists to do their work and turn my attention to something short and sweet in the vein of Mice with Legitimate Grievances or The Dachshund Dungeon. The tentatively titled Dungeon of Five Anomalies already has a killer map, and most of the rooms are keyed. It’s something tinkered with whenever I had dead time at my dayjob. I anticipate being able to get that into your hands by early Fall, though Fall is going to be unpredictable for me due to various life circumstances. I can’t make promises about anything during that time.

If you didn’t notice, my ancient release The Bloodsoaked Boudoir of Velkis the Vile recently got some attention. Greyscale art just doesn’t work on covers for me, so I recently commissioned Moreven B. to produce something a little more colorful. While amending the document I took the opportunity to give it an entirely new and improved layout. The book is free, so you should definitely check it out. If you feel like dropping a dollar in my tip jar for it, I’ve got it set up as Pay What you Want.

The On a Red World Alone setting book is in a…weird place. Essentially what happened is that about a week after I started working on it I got approached with two amazing job offers. One of those became Faux Pas, and the other is as yet forthcoming from a certain Finnish publisher. Great projects and I’m glad I worked on them, but taking months off to write them derailed the ORWA project, and I never quite got back on that horse again. It’s still in the pipeline. In fact I’ve been putting a lot of work into a new player-facing document these past weeks, which I’ll eventually share here on P&P. It’s not a full setting book, but it will likely be the basis for one when I eventually get around to it. Given that it will be a large project, I probably won’t give it another serious attempt until my smaller projects start turning a more consistent profit.

Writing and art for The Duchy of the Damned Dancing Duke are done. At over 150 pages of text alone, this is a whole different beast from anything else I’ve ever done, or am even planning to do in the near future. This is not something I can handle fully in-house. I’ve hired an editor who is currently at work on the text, after which I’m going to hire a layout person. Depending on how the text lays out on the page there may need to be a round of supplemental art before the end. Once we’ve got the text assembled the plan is to do a kickstarter to fund an actual for-real print run of the book. The nice thing is that the pdf would already be done, so it could be sent to backers immediately after the campaigns ends.

My card game, As Seen on TV is similarly out of my hands at the moment. I’ve got a fully realized prototype in the hands of a publisher who is interested. Progress is a little sluggish, but that’s just how these things tend to go.

Bubblegum Berzerk is in a slightly more unfortunate limbo right now. The game was completed to my satisfaction about 2 years ago, but has been stuck on production snags which are fully out of my hands. To be honest I’m a little out of the loop myself, but I hope to be able to share it with you all someday.

Of course, everybody loves Blogs on Tape, so it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t get updated more regularly. I’ve learned that the best approach for me is to let BoT cycle naturally. It’s more a hobby of mine than a serious pursuit, which usually means that I’ll get super invested in BoT for a month or so, then get interested in one of my other hobbies and the podcast will go dormant for awhile. It’s a healthy cycle, and will probably continue in that fashion unless the Ko-Fi donations start actually paying for the server costs, and guilt me into putting it on a firm schedule.

That’s about it for projects that are presently ongoing. There’s a lot of other stuff that I’d like to do, or have even said I’m going to do, but which I haven’t yet put in enough work to make them worth talking about. I will say that I’d like to move into doing some fiction in the coming years. It’s always been an ambition of mine, and it would seem wise not to keep all my writing eggs in the RPG basket. I do actually have a lot of work done on a couple stories I think will do well, but both are erotica and not appropriate to share here. Diversity is strength. If I can get some short stories, and novels, and maybe video game writing on my resume I’ll feel much more well rounded and secure.

Since I called this “Project Roundup 2,” I suppose it’s only fitting that I at least touch on everything from the first Project Roundup that didn’t get a mention above:

Dumb Stuff Taken Seriously is long defunct. Tzvi and I hadn’t recorded an episode in about 2 years. When my web server got hacked the DSTS website was actually the hardest hit. I wasn’t able to save anything from there, and we decided not to put in the work involved to restore it. By now the domain has lapsed. It’s doubtful this project will ever be revived. It was never all that good, though we might someday figure out how to make the old episodes available again somewhere.

Dungeon Moon is eternally on my back burner. I met up with Gus of Dungeon of Signs a few weeks ago. We walked around Seattle and he pestered me to publish more Dungeon Moon stuff, which I want to do, but time is a bitch. My hope is that shifting some of my focus towards smaller projects with a higher turnover will give me the opportunity to explore Dungeon Moon again by publishing smaller dungeon bits.

In fact, several projects from that old post will likely be getting a more speedy turnover if I can figure out how. Things like The Boulder Dungeon and The Luncheon are already 80% done, and will likely be on the docket shortly after the 5 Anomalies Dungeon. The Clitoris is the Devil’s Doorbell isn’t anywhere near done at all, but will also probably wind up as one of those quick turnover dungeons if I can get it to work. The Sideways Tower of Slaggoth the Necromancer is also largely done, but it’s also…large. More on the scale of Miscreated Creatures Volume I. Something that will take a few months to get done. The same goes for 1000 Dragons, which will lamentably be re-titled something weird like 284 Dragons or something. I dunno, we will see.

They Came From the Silver Wheel wound up being a blog post, which is probably for the best. The SciFi game wound up becoming Fuck the King of Space, which was pretty deeply flawed. I’d like to revisit it and make a good version at some point in the future.

I think the last time I touched the Serial Killer Board Game was about a year before I wrote that last post. It was still bouncing around in my head at that point, but by now it’s so far on the back burner that it’s not even worth mentioning. Nothing is ever truly abandoned, but the odds of this getting finished are low.

That blog post is probably the last time I even thought about Fallin. That project really is dead, but only because ORWA incorporates so much of its ideas, and is vastly superior. If you take everything in ORWA out of Fallin, all you’re left with is the idea of the Internet being full of AI wizards who control the world’s Nukes and vie with one another for digital territory while mostly ignoring the primitive human survivors. Even that might wind up in the ORWA book if I decide to do a “What Destroyed The Earth” table.

And that is what I’m up to. Thanks for sticking around and reading my dumb little D&D whining. I appreciate you.

5 thoughts on “Nick LS Whelan Project Roundup 2

  1. This is the first I’m hearing about a published thing for ORWA, but I’m excited! Same goes for a possible return to Fuck The King Of Space. I enjoy all the stuff you publish, but I think your style fits gonzo science fantasy particularly well. ORWA, Fuck The King, and Dungeon Moon are all amazing settings (and easy to fit together into the one larger setting, too).

    1. That’s awesome to hear, thank you. 🙂

      Yeah, in January 2018 I was getting all fired up to write a full ~200 page treatment for ORWA. The plan was to fill it up with various tables and whatnot to create a sort of “build your own ORWA”

      That’s still something I’d like to do, but I’ve lately become convinced that I need to focus on smaller projects with a higher rate of turnover.

  2. I think the miscreated creatures questions post is what led to me following your blog, so I’m excited to see your book! I’ve actually been meaning to do a blog post of my own about it, mainly turning the questions into something with discretized answers and then creating a javascript random generator, and then building a set of monsters based on randomized sets of responses to the questions. It’s been on the back-burner because I’ve struggled to discretize the answers in a reasonable way.

  3. You sure have a lot of awesome stuff in the pipeline. Not to mention the stuff that’s already out, which I REALLY need to catch up on when I have the chance. I just wanted to pipe in with a hearty “Great Job!”

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