2017 ENnie Awards and Layout Influence on a Line

7th Sea was nominated for seven ENnies. Products I worked on have been nominated for (and won) ENnies in the past, but not all of the awards are things I feel I should get an award for. Like last year Urban Shadows was up for Best Rules and Product of the Year. If Urban Shadows had won Product of the Year, I would have gone out and gotten a copy of the medal because layout has to do with creating the whole product. It won Best Rules, which had nothing to do with me, so I am okay with no award for Thomas.

7th Sea‘s Mark Richardson, our staff cartographer, was nominated for Best Cartography this year. Discussing the nominations, we realized this is the only award with nominations for 7th Sea products that was as close to 100% a single person’s award. Mark may have had guidance and feedback from others on the John Wick Presents team, but it’s as close to 100% his sole work as anything else JWP put out there.

This stood out to me because we’re pretty much working as a team on the products. On Pirate Nations, there are dozens of people who made that book into a thing that could be nominated for Best Supplement.

If we look at Best Writing, if a 7th Sea book was nominated for that, we’d have a lead developer, about six writers, two “additional” writers, two to four editors and proofreaders, and even me involved, sharing the credit. (Although my contribution to the writing is more in line edits, where I have collaborated with the lead developer to rewrite short passages to make copy fit into the space the design allows. Minor stuff, really.) But if we look at Unknown Armies (which is nominated), I would say that at least 97% of that is all Greg Stolze with some edits from proofreaders and maybe some developmental editing. On Unknown Armies, that was a creator’s vision going through the product; on 7th Sea, we have a developer for the book guiding a stable of writers through an entire work.

So I’m going to look through the nominations for product I’ve worked on, and show you how much input your layout artist has on each of these.

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#RPGaDAY2015, Day 2: Kickstarter Game You’re Most Pleased You Backed

The second #RPGaDAY2015 topic is Kickstarter Game You’re Most Pleased You Backed. I would reword that topic to “Crowdfunded Game…” because there’s some fantastic stuff coming out on Patreon and IndieGoGo. Every three weeks at Purple Pawn, I write a Crowdfunding Highlights article (4-6 things that have caught my attention) in rotation with two other staff members, and there’s more to crowdfunding than just Kickstarter.

But Kickstarter has the best interface for finding things to throw money at, which is part of the reason why I’ve backed many more things on that funding platform than all others combined.

I’m going to go with a game that I worked on: Chill, 3rd Edition. I backed this at a dollar, which is something I do when I’m brought on board a project before the campaign ends. I really I want to see the backer-only updates and the backers’ comments. (And, if need be, respond to the comments if it’s cool with the campaign creator.) There are about seven of them in my backing history, and Chill is one of those one dollar backings.

chill-openI’ve played Mayfair’s edition of Chill and loved it. When I heard of a potential 3rd Edition, I contacted Growling Door Games, and after a little bit of discussion, there I was, creating the graphics for the KS, laying out the quickstart, and designing the rulebook. And by designing the book, I mean actually designing the book — I had just come off of Firefly, where I was working from Daniel Solis’ design. While Firefly was a fun gig, I wasn’t as free to lay down some design work for a full product. The physical book arrived just three days ago, and it came out looking even better than I thought it would. I’m still amazed — here’s this thing that I did and it’s right here. It’s so…awesome. It makes me smile. Chill, 3rd Edition, is the most pleasing game I’ve backed.

Honorable Mentions: Posthuman Pathways for the ENnie, Primetime Adventures because it’s my favorite RPG, and Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier because John Wick is John Wick.

Aside: I also backed a book at a level that would have gotten me the PDF of the it. After the campaign, I came on board during production to finish laying out the book. After it was done — meaning, I had all the book files from here — I received a download code to get my free copy of the book. Crazy!