Yes, I’m finally holding a real book in my hands. That’s my very own stack of books, at EndGame, freshly arrived from Evil Hat Productions’ printer: War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus. Dang, it’s real! I’m real!
Luscious matte-finish hardcover, full-colour printing on thick glossy paper, glorious end sheets. It’s so wonderful to be on a project where the whole team excels. I’m awed by:
- Karen Twelves‘ editing and way, way more: she identified the correct “voices” for various portions of the book, tied this into a coherent text, reorganized it several times as we answered the playtest feedback, hunted for typos and cross-references, selected appropriate images from the pre-existing pictures from ZombieSmith, and wrote extensive art notes for new pieces. In all this, we worked on multiple sections in parallel and the only time we had a version control problem was my fault.
- Dale Horstman‘s beautiful layout that brought out the art while conveying mood, his choice of images where we had not provided instructions, his skill at visually distinguishing the different types of text (instruction, narration, examples, fiction, etc.), his extensive work to showcase art pieces in the best way possible, his patience with our edits and changes, and his attention to detail. He also did “invisible” work, such as making sure all those hyperlinks worked properly in the PDF version, and preparing the layout for a smooth transition to ePub.
- Edmund Metheny‘s micro-fiction, coming to my rescue when I was too exhausted, mentally and physically, to write it. His little bits of dialogue are funny and zippy, they are short enough that they don’t interrupt the “gamer” reading, they convey a whole lot of flavour and background info in small bites, and they make the characters come alive.
- Mike Olson‘s help with the conflict rules, and particularly his ideas on using zones more intensively. I think the playtesters generally loved this rule sub-set, and it’s completely portable to other Fate games.
- Sean Nittner and Stephen Bajza‘s excellent project management, unexpected in the world of gaming.
- Sean also acted as creative director, and he was always there with a good idea when I was stomped. To his particular credit: the cycle of approaches in the Froth rules, and reminding me of the usefulness of invoking aspects for effect. There were tons of other things, but these two bits right there had important ripples in the book.
- Plus we had an all-star team with all the specialized tasks: Jessica Banks (proofreading), Krista White (indexing), Carrie Harris (marketing and tie-in fiction), Rob Donohue, Leonard Balsera, and Brian Endgard (internal reviewers), Twyla Campbell (playtest survey consultant), Josh Qualtieri, Anthony Brown and the artists at ZombieSmith (art and concept), and of course the business savvy and long-term vision of Chris Hanrahan and Fred Hicks. (Also, Fred decided to switch from a softcover to hardcover book, which I think the art and graphic design totally deserved. Thanks, Fred!)
And it smells good!
P.S.: Of course, as soon as I opened the book I started thinking “Oh, I could have done better here!” etc. But when I play it, this is a miniatures-based role-playing game I enjoy. I’m also pretty pleased with the game-master tools I provided in there. I hope you’ll like the book.
The Reef 