A Maxim 70 Moment
over 7 years ago – Wed, Oct 05, 2016 at 01:06:45 AM

If you've been following Schlock Mercenary online, you saw Maxim 70 on September 18th:

Maxim 70: Failure is not an option. It's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.

We've been wrestling with the Seventy Maxims book for over six months now, and the problem is that Howard's vision for the book—an in-world artifact featuring the maxims, plus in-character handwritten notes—simply isn't working. Our beta readers thought it was jumbled and confusing, and while we were able to make it a little less jumbled and slightly less confusing, we were never able to shake that. 

We tried pulling notes out, but then the story they told began to fall apart. We tried making them smaller, and moving them around, and only managed to create more readability problems.

We'd be understating the issue if we said "this impacted the schedule." It's been HUGE. 

Last night Howard decided to let go of a piece of his vision, and admit defeat. It was not an easy moment.

 

With the cookie dough and the failure out of the way, Sandra and our designer, Mike Brodu, are now able to create a beautiful book for you.  Here's the plan.

1) The hard copy of Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries will not have handwritten notes in it.

2) Everybody getting the Seventy Maxims book will also get a PDF copy of the Seventy Maxims book that does have the handwritten notes.

3) We'll do a note-free PDF, too.

We are aware that this is not what was originally promised. The handwriting was a really cool idea, and it worked fine in the digital realm, but our test prints all looked like they'd been vandalized. They were, in a word, ugly. Our beta readers made it clear to us that a great many people would open this book for the first time and be vigorously disappointed. 

The heart of the Seventy Maxims book is the maxims themselves, and the handwritten notes were detracting from that.  

Good News!

Good news! This means Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries is now a week away from being sent to the printer. Shortly after that we'll send out the PDFs. The printing schedule suggests that in January we'll be able to ship actual books to everyone who ordered just the Maxims book. 

We are looking into the budgetary impact of splitting our shipments up, so that backers who ordered both the Seventy Maxims book and the Planet Mercenary book won't have to wait for everything to be ready. If we can come up with the money for it, we'll make it happen. 

More Good News! 

After this week the Seventy Maxims book will no longer impact the Planet Mercenary schedule. Mike can return to the RPG layout. We're still behind, but Howard has almost completely recovered from his pneumonia¹, and we should be able to provide a pre-release, uncorrected PDF of the Planet Mercenary rules sections by the end of the month.

That means that you'll be able to start playing. You won't have the book yet, but games can begin.

Some Side-Project R&D Notes

The handbrain game-screen project is done. Note that this is not the "ships to scale" game screen that will be shipping with Planet Mercenary. That will be a conventional screen made of heavy, glossy machine-creased card stock. This is a side-project that we promised to spend R&D seed money on.

We didn't need to spend much time on it, which was nice. 

The designer and the manufacturer did all their back-and-forth stuff while we were hard at work on other things, and then suddenly we got thirty of the game screens in the mail². They're amazing. You can fill them with whatever information you need, for whatever game you're playing, provided you can get that information onto a half-sheet of US Letter or A4 paper (both will fit). 

The only thing that remains is to tell the folks at the factory how many of these things we want, but we don't know that number.

We're torn. Kickstarter is far and away the best tool for gauging demand on something like this, but it is terrible form to launch a Kickstarter before delivering on a previous Kickstarter. On general principles, we're inclined to just sit on that project³ until Planet Mercenary is done. 

Expect Another Update Soon

Yes, we said that in August and then went silent. We'll do better this time. At the very least, we'll drop an update the moment the Seventy Maxims book goes to the printer, and another one when we've got PDFs for you. 

Thank you for your support, and your patience. 

—The Planet Mercenary Team: Howard, Sandra, Alan, Patrick, and Mike

¹It was walking pneumonia, which is not very aptly named since it makes you want to not walk anywhere. 

²That back-and-forth stuff went on for about a year, which means our use of the word "suddenly" was as not-very-apt as the word "walking."

³Our cat is also inclined to sit on the project. Or at least in front of it.

August Update
over 7 years ago – Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 11:59:57 PM

GenCon always takes over most of the month of August. This is true for us, Alan, and Patrick. It takes at least a week actively preparing for it, a week to be at it, and then a week to recover our bearings afterward.

We ran multiple Planet Mercenary games at GenCon. Many of the players had never heard of Planet Mercenary or Schlock Mercenary before. This does not appear to be an obstacle. All our players had a grand time running through our pre-built adventure. Our layout designer, Mikael Brodu, took a couple of days off from doing the core book in order to design some character sheets, which we got printed just one day before we needed them. 

We picked the right guy for the job.

These sheets are tuned for the specific game that we ran at GenCon. The finalized character sheet will be different and far more flexible, but this lets you get a look at some of the layout elements. 

We don't yet have a complete page that shows off all of the page elements that will show up in the book, so Mikael threw a "Lorem Ipsum" page together to show how the headers, sidebar, images, and tables might look on a page that has all of them.

Staging the Layout

With Mikael's design in hand we're ready to begin building final pages. The process is quite involved, and will be done in sections. Each chapter goes through the following stages, and the crunchiest parts of the book have already been through the first two of these: 

• 1st editing pass where mechanics and stats are all double checked (Sandra & Alan)
• 2nd editing pass (Patrick)
• Voice pass, for that "in universe" flavor (Howard), 
• 3rd editing pass (Patrick)
• Preliminary layout (Mike)
• Editing and tweaking in layout (Patrick, Sandra, Howard, Mike) 
• Final editing pass which creates cross references, index, and a full copy edit (Patrick)

A few of the "location" sections bounced off of the 1st editing pass, and are getting more words from Howard. The equipment sections are out for 2nd editing, and the game mechanics sections are in voice pass. Those game mechanics bits are very close to becoming actual pages that you can look at.

Maximally Effective Layout

While he waits for the voice pass, Mikael has begun laying out The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, which is running a bit ahead of the core Planet Mercenary book. We'll have some pages and a cover to show off within a couple of weeks.

Digital Delivery

As a thank you to you, our patient backers, we will make some digital goodies—playable stuff, not wallpapers— available by the first week of October. We'll announce details on that in the next week or two.

June Progress Report
almost 8 years ago – Sat, Jun 25, 2016 at 03:08:41 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Cover Art Wallpaper!
about 8 years ago – Wed, May 18, 2016 at 09:33:18 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

BackerKit Lockdown Date: June 3
about 8 years ago – Tue, May 03, 2016 at 12:28:04 AM

On June 3rd we will be locking down orders in BackerKit 

This means your credit card will be charged for any additional items you purchased through BackerKit. Now is a good time to make sure that BackerKit has the right card info for you so that payment will go smoothly.

If you've already filled out your survey (the word "survey" is confusing—in this context it means "shopping cart and shipping address") then you should be good to go. Thank you! 

If you have not yet completed your survey, need to change your address, or if you want to change things up (add or remove extra items,) use this link: https://planet-mercenary-rpg.backerkit.com/

After June 3rd you will not be able to change quantities on your order, but you'll still be able to update your mailing address.

If you have friends who missed out on the Kickstarter and who would still like to join the fun, they can pre-order here: https://planet-mercenary-rpg.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders. Note that once we're locked down pre-orders will be charged immediately, and we may need to restrict quantities on things.

Production Begins

If it's not already clear, the reason for the lock down is that we've moved into the first production phases of the project. The cards and tuckbox are going to print this week (later than we wanted, but we caught several mistakes, and have now fixed them) and the dice, RiPP tokens, and bag are all done. They're just waiting to be joined by the cards before the entire shipment is sent to us.

More sections of the book have been moved into 2nd phase editing and preliminary layout. This includes most of the rules and character creation text. Alan and Sandra have been pounding away at the Game Chief section. Patrick is about to dive into the gear sections to make sure everything matches up. Howard has been amping up the humorousness of text in many of the sections and also working on the 70 Maxims book.

That R&D Thingy

We are waiting on a production sample of the Handbrain-style Game Chief screen, which was part of the Risky R&D stretch goal. That product is not included in the Kickstarter because at the time we dreamed it up we didn't know if it was a thing we could actually make. 

It is, in fact, a thing we can actually make. We may be opening orders for that item within the month, and all of those orders will be handled from the Schlock Mercenary store. We'll post an update as soon as we have pictures of the screen and are ready to commit commerce.

We're keeping busy and working hard to make sure that everything we deliver is up to the highest standards. Thank you for backing the project.

—Howard, Sandra, Alan, and Patrick