Hello!
The ashcan version of the players’ chapter is all but ready to be released. I accidentally gave unclear instructions to the cartographer about a map and he labelled it in Italian and English, so once he tidies that up I’ll have that ready to go out.
The temptation, of course, is to put it off for a few months so it is episode 500 of Games From Folktales.
Aside from a map of the islands of the lagoons and a map of Venice, I’ve also ordered a deck plan of a Venetian great galley and a map of the four levels of the Ducal Palace. In the previous rough drafts you’ll have seen that the palace switches between the C12 and C15th century layouts? Well, it turns out we have really great documentation for an even later layout, including floor plans, so I’ll be using those instead. I have an artist redrawing them and annotating them in English. The originals are here, but the people who look after the Ducal Palace now say some of the rooms are in the wrong places on this map, so I’ve switched them to their real world locations.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Floorplans_and_facades_of_the_Doge%27s_Palace_by_Francesco_Zanotto
I hope you like surreal art by Turner, because he and Canaletto are going to be holding up the rest of my art budget.
That I’ve used outside art has, alas, made this a commercial venture. Up until I needed an art budget my whole production was on a shoestring. Now I’m out of pocket about 250USD. That’s cheap for 7 pieces but it does mean that it would be sensible of me to try and reuse the material for a journaling game and a D&D Domain of Dread. At $10 a copy with Drivethru taking 30% and tax at 30% I’d need to sell about 50 copies to break even, and that’s possible, but it does make it harder for me to make any money for my time on the whole thing. Still, this is all a useful learning experience.
So, the plan is to do up the player character ashcan and record it as a podcast episode. That will let you get your players to listen to it if they won’t read their chapter and it gives an easy way for potential buyers to sample the product. I’ll likely use that document to test out how to put the document on platforms like Drivethru. I’ll continue to work up the full book, and then see what happens with the open license, before making whatever changes are needed and launching it, At this point I feel that the text is essentially locked. I need to make a few changes because of the newer floorplan of the Ducal Palace, and there’s one more False God who needs stats…but that seem like it for now.
Games From Folktales 