#RPGaDAY 2017, Days 8 and 9: A Game That Takes About Ten Short Sessions to Play

Our topics for days 8 and 9 of #RPGaDAY are “What is a good RPG to play for sessions of two hours or less?” and “What is a good RPG to play for about ten sessions?” Easy-peasy.

Primetime Adventures.

When I run Primetime Adventures, each episode takes about two hours to run through. A long season of PTA is nine game sessions. Add on one session to bust out the pitch session — where we all make protagonists and decide on the series we are going to create — and we’re at ten sessions.

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Spine Treatments

When obtaining art assets for books in the roleplaying industry, I have noticed there is a lot of input into getting the interior artwork and cover artwork. With selling pdfs (and other electronic editions) through places like DriveThruRPG, you’ll find that those files have the front cover, the back cover, and the interior. They are usually in that order so you can view the pdf as a two-up document with a separate page for the front cover, preserving the page spreads in the printed work. What seems to be forgotten — or at least not considered fully — is the treatment for the spine of the book. I find this odd, because at a store, your book is more likely to be shelved spine-out.

I hadn’t really noticed this until I developed the cover for Magpie Games’ Urban Shadows. For that book’s cover, we only had the front artwork which was to be placed on a black background. The back artwork was a composite of four of the character types, combined specifically for that space. We used an interesting typeface for the logo (and some chapter headings) with a white fill at about 85% opacity, re-purposing it for the spine. I wanted to make it big, bleeding over the edge of the printed spine. As a happy accident, this wound up looking amazing on bookshelves.

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#RPGaDAY 2016, Day 4: Future Convention Plans

In the past #RPGaDAY events, the four days of Gen Con had questions that revolved around game conventions. This year, there aren’t any. So for the next four days, I’ll be covering topics about gaming conventions. The one “official” prompt I’m interested in pursuing from this time frame will show up on the 8th.

Today, in question form: What are your plans for conventions in the future?

While I enjoy Gen Con, I don’t see me attending again unless I’m there as part of a company. It’s grown too large for me to handle. Last year on Day 14, where the topic was “Should I attend Gen Con?”, I wrote a bit about an episode of Ken Hite and Robin Laws’ podcast discussing that convention. The takeaway line from that was Ken saying, “I hate to say it, because Gen Con used to be great one-stop shopping for freelancers… I would find it amazing if a freelancer was able to get two words of quality time, edgewise, with a busy booth owner.”

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