April 28, 2003 - GURPS SWAT gets the callout.
After six months of pre-proposal alpha playtest and a few weeks of pestering Steve Jackson Games, GURPS SWAT is finally on the production schedule. After a bit of contract negotiation, I ended up with an extra 1/2% royalty, and they ended up with an insanely short deadline - June 15, 2003.
We're hoping to catch some of the buzz from the upcoming SWAT movie with Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrel, Michelle Rodriquez, and others. The book's slated to hit the stores by October, which should still be close enough to the movie's August release to be a hot product, and will be around for the video/DVD release. Let's hope anyway. :)
Special thanks to all the folks at Game Storm and Orycon that helped pre-test it, and to the Hellions for their impending help on turning it into a good book.
May 20, 2003: For whatever reason, Sony keeps changing the URL for the movie. The picture at the left will take you to their "SWAT Street Team" site. You can ignore the "sign up to win crap" promotion - though I must admit they've got some slick wallpaper available, and the SWAT Theme Remix is pretty cool. Anyway, there appears to be a stable link to the official movie site at the bottom of the Street Team page (just under the release date). Enjoy.
Pen and Paper announced the winners of the 2002 Fan Awards, and GURPS Cliffhangers took a runner-up slot in the Best RPG category. Steve Jackson Games managed several other runner-up awards as well. The full results of the voting can be found here.
The award means a lot, since it's all write-in ballots and voted on by the fans. Nice to feel appreciated by the folks that actually matter. Thanks to all who voted.
In addition, thanks to those that worked on the project with me, especially Jake Boone, Jeffery McGonagill, and Gene Moyers, all of whom came through at crunch time. A lot of work went into the book, and it wasn't all mine. So part of this award goes to you guys too, for your hard work, contributions, and just plain old being there when I needed the help. Thanks, guys.
Congrats also to the winners of the other awards. Some I know well, some only in passing, but all deserve a round of applause for their work on various projects as well. I was especially glad to see names like Steve Jackson, Steve Long, Andrew Hackard, and Robin Laws, and to see Godlike get a nod in the Best RPG category. Kudos all around.
Now I may have to go buy a copy of AEG's Shadowforce Archer -- winner in the Best RPG category -- just to see what the fuss is about. :)
Well, for the first time in about three years, I don't have any contracts pending. Three books are still in editorial/playtest stage (Godlike: Torch, GURPS WWII: All the King's Men, and GURPS WWWI: Blitzkrieg), but there's nothing new lined up and contracted, which is actually very nice. Okay, admittedly it's a little like being unemployed, but it is awfully nice to be able to catch up on everything else without stressing that I "should be writing."
Game Storm was a big success; it was nice to meet both Steve Long (Hero Games) and Peter Adkison (formerly WotC, now GenCon). They were both nice guys. Steve Long said the GURPS Cliffhangers was "the best pulp RPG supplement ever written." Nice. I should put that in a "celebrity endorsements" blurb on my Cliffhangers page. :) Admittedly, he did add, "until I write one," which apparently he's planning for 2005 (tentatively entitled Pulp Hero.) Looking forward to it! Long live the pulp genre. :)
Speaking of which, I've recently become fairly hooked on Adventure, Inc, a modern-day cliffhangers adventure series on Fox and/or UPN (check your local listings; it's on Saturdays, on Fox, for me). Click the nifty banner below to check out their site, and go pay 'em a visit. Nice show - a little cheesy at times, but fun. If you liked Tia Carerre's Relic Hunter you'll like this one. On an interesting sidenote, the show is based loosely on real-life treasure hunter Barry Clifford. His bio is on the Adventure, Inc website if you want more info, or check out Clifford's books at Amazon. Nice stuff.
NOTE:Not long after this entry, actor Jesse Nilsson (who portrays Gabriel Patterson - middle on the above banner) died at his home in North York, Ontario. The 25-year-old actor was a lifelong asthmatic who had also been suffering from pneumonia for the previous two weeks, and died on April 27. The series had shot 22 episodes, and had yet to be picked up for a second season. It's fate remains unknown at this time. Condolences to Nilsson's family and friends. - May 1, 2003.
Not a lot new going on to report. Both King's Men and Blitzkrieg are still at SJ Games - no word yet on playtest or second draft status. I suspect they're a bit behind schedule. The Godlike supplement, Operation Torch has been a thorn in my side lately, mostly from lack of familiarity with the game I think. Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller have both been great and very helpful. I'd love to work with them again some time, assuming I actually get through Torch. :)
I also finished up the GURPS SWAT proposal and sent it off to Sean Punch. He seemed positive about it, so now it makes the rounds of the marketing folks and SJ himself. Dunno what'll become of it, but I'd really like to do the book. The research was fun and I think the book would write easily and sell well. We'll see.
Convention appearances have been mostly finalized, but I still haven't heard from Norwescon. I may cancel that one. More later...
The fine folks at Crucifiction Games decided that a little free advertising from yours truly was in order. Check out their game, Horror Rules, at the Crucifiction Games' Website and take a gander at their shameless celebrity plugs. I knew I never should have put those teeth in...
I'm wrapping up the first draft of Blitzkrieg this week; it's due Friday the 10th. I like this book a lot better than King's Men - probably because it's more interesting writing 5,000 words on Eben Emael than on the British military. :)
I spent some dough last week to make life a little better, and bought a Dell Inspiron 1.5 ghz notebook, so I've been doing a fair amount of my writing out of the house this week. It's been nice. I'm a bit disgruntled with the "3-hour" battery, though. Even the meter on the computer estimates 2 hours and 51 minutes remaining when I boot up fresh, but I can't get more than about 2 hours out of it. I bought a second battery, so it's not a huge issue, but I guess it's the principal of the thing. (Still, I do an awful lot of CTRL-S saving during my writing; maybe the HDD access is sucking battery juice).
Anyway, King's Men still hasn't hit playtest, nor will it until after Jan 10 at least (thanks to the kindness of my editor, Gene Seabolt - you rock, Gene!) I'm not looking forward to it (typical for me), but I am pretty excited to show off my work in Blitz. Wonder if it'll turn out to be as well-recieved; I sure like it better.
Well, it's official. At 9:07 pm, PDT, the first draft of All the King's Men was zipped up and emailed to SJ Games. All I have to say about that is.. "Whew."
Just got back from Orycon this evening. Good con, got some good gaming in. Ran GURPS SWAT and AtKM, played Cliffhnagers, and even managed about 10 hours sleep. A post-con report will be up probably next week, once AtKM is out the door. In the meantime, let me just say: Kudos to the Game Storm folks that sponsored Orycon gaming. A great selection of pickup games available to play, no bottlenecks in the game areas. "A good time was had by all." (If "all" means me, anyway).
If you ran into me at Orycon, feel free to drop me an email. I can't guarantee a rapid reply, but I'm pretty sure I'll reply.
Anyway, I'll be finishing up AtKM this week; deadline is a week from today. See you all in a week or so.
During the course of writing Cliffhangers, the subject came up of VE stats for vehicles; something I was averse to, since Cliffhangers is, by nature, a high-drama, low-rules style. In the end, drama won out, and I ended up using a simple Driving modifier system.
With WWII books, I didn't get off so easily. AtKM requires over 20 vehicles, in fully-fleshed out MVDS (Modular Vehicle Design System) stats for the game. Now, I'm SO not keen on vehicle stats; I don't use 'em, and I sure don't write 'em. So I've been doling out the vehicles to folks that are number-crunching grognards. :) Anyway, I've had this list of vehicles, all in red (my color for "needs to be done" in a manuscript outline). Finally, today, I was able to mark off several in blue ("finished") and the rest of the list has been turned green ("in progress")!
I know it's a seemingly insignificant point, considering I have 90,000 words to write en toto. But the rest of the book I can take responsibility for, since I can *do* the work. The vehicles... not so much. So I feel like I'm at everyone else's mercy to get them done in time. :)
Anyway, it's a good day for that reason, thanks to guys like Hans Christian-Vortisch, Brandon Cope, Kenneth Peters, and Wayne Roberts. Kudos, guys!
I had to stop writing yesterday from pain in the fingers of my left hand. That can't be good. You don't have any muscles in your fingers, so it wasn't muscular strain. Dunno if it's arthritic or repetitive motion strain or what, but it hurt a lot. Soaking in hot water helped. So I knocked off yesterday, hoping it would go away. It was better this morning, but by about 300 words it was painful again. I managed to hack out about 500 before stopping, but that's pretty sub-par for me, considering.
I've been using my fingers for years - playing guitar five nights a week, writing, working in computer networking. The last year or so I've hammered out 250,000 publishable words, 2300 emails, 30,000 words in a journal, and way too many hours on MSN IM. I guess it's no wonder my fingers are sore.
Now the question is, What do I do about it? An ergonomic keyboard? Voice recognition software? An extended break? A reduced writing schedule?
I'll keep ya posted...
It's been a hectic couple of weeks, with everything from a horrible eye exam (the dilation kills me) to what seems to be the beginnings of a wretched cold.
I got a nearly-finished draft of the Brit weapons from Hans-Christian Vortisch this week, and they look great. He's such a top-notch GURPS number cruncher; it takes a lot of heat off me for trying to turn muzzle velocity and bullet weights into GURPS damage figures. Likewise the great help I'm getting from guys like Brandon Cope and Kenneth Peters on vehicles. I guess I'm just not a number-cruncher. *shrug*
At the moment, I'm trying to finish up all the bios for various personalities (from Montgomery to the lesser-known Blarney, et al). It's hard to capsulize an entire person's life, career, personality, skills, etc, into 100-300 words. Plus, try calculating GURPS stats for guys like Montgomery, when some would say he was a brilliant tactician (Strategy-18) and others would simply list his failures (Falaise, Arnhem) and put him at Strategy-10. I finally settled on "skill levels in the 11-13 range." I'll probably get chewed out in playtest for it, but what's a guy to do?
Need to get to work on the desert war section soon enough. I'm torn between making it an overview-ish thing, like in the other WWII books, or try and make it more game-ish, like Blitzkrieg is going to be. Still, seems like the war in the desert deserves its own book like Blitzkrieg.
And finally, I'm going to be running a pre-proposal look at GURPS SWAT (which, of course, doesn't exist yet) at Orycon later this month. Means I need to make up a handful of characters for the con, plus some maps and a good plotline. I might have to post it all here later. Until then...
Entire Contents Copyright 2002-2003 Brian J. Underhill. All Rights Reserved.