Give The Gift Of Books (And Help Authors End The Year On A High Note)

Well, it's that time again. We're prepping turkeys, eyeing Christmas shopping lists, and plotting how we're going to survive the rest of the year with our combined sanity and waistlines intact. And that means it's also time for me to take a moment to gently remind folks that authors are trying to close out the year in the black rather than the red.

So if you've got folks on your list who like books (or that you just wish read a little more than they do), I have a couple of recommendations for you this year! So please take a moment to go down the list, and see if there's something for the special someones you're hoping to get memorable gifts for.

Or if you're making a list of books to get with your incoming gift cards. That is also acceptable!

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Shout Outs For Authors I'd Recommend This Holiday Season!

All right, first and foremost, I want folks to buy my books. So whether you want to get a copy of Old Soldiers for someone who's a fan of dystopian sci fi thrillers featuring alien/human hybrid shock troops, or you want to check out the Hardboiled Cat series where Leo sticks his whiskers into the darker doings of New York City in Marked Territory or Painted Cats, I would absolutely recommend you give those books to as many folks on your list as possible!

There's even a great audio preview for that first title, courtesy of Altered State Adventures, which you should check out over on YouTube!

With that said, though, I know there are regular readers here who have already read all of my work. You may even have gotten copies of my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic, and subscribed to the Azukail Games YouTube channel where I regularly share free audio drama fiction. But if you've already gone through my catalog (or it's just not quite right for the people on your list), I would recommend checking out the following authors for your gift-giving needs!

Author #1: Alice Liddell

Does this not tell you everything you need to know?

Alice Liddell, also known as Lauren Masterson, is a talented author who has made her mark in a number of different genres. If you have anyone on your list who loves period dramas and gothic romances with vampires, get a copy of Succumb To Darkness. If you have someone who loves Japanese history, handmade art, and a well-researched story, consider checking out Geisha Hands instead! Fantastical mermaid romance? Yep, you can find that in her book Love of The Sea.

It's actually easier to check out her author pages Lauren Masterson and Little Alice than it is to list all her titles here. And just as an additional plug, if you are interested in learning the ins and outs of being an author, or if you enjoy cozy gaming streams, check out her YouTube channels Alice The Author and KHR Arts respectively. She can absolutely use all the subscribers (and views) you can give, if you want to make her holiday season that much better!

Author #2: Clinton Boomer

If you haven't checked this out, I'd highly recommend it!

Most folks who are familiar with Clinton Boomer's work know him as a TTRPG writer. He's contributed to the Pathfinder setting of Golarion, and he's published a lot of World of Darkness supplements (including 100 of the NPCs in the 200 Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk supplement I wrote with him for Werewolf: The Apocalypse). However, in addition to all the gaming content he's put out, he also has a handful of other books I'd recommend folks check out!

The most popular are Team Murder Hobo: Assemble, and its sequel Team Murder Hobo: Flaming Love Icosohedron, which are essentially collections of hilarious moments between various members of an adventuring party. If you read between the lines you can find some kind of emerging plot, but mostly the books are just there for the lulz, and they make solid gifts for any fantasy or D&D lover in your life. For those who want something a little more serious, though, I'd recommend checking out his modern fantasy novel The Hole Behind Midnight. A tale of murder, detective work, and the things that happen in that nowhere-time just after the end of one day and the start of another, it's a compelling read! You can find these books, and more, on Clinton Boomer's author page.

Who Would You Recommend?

Full disclosure, I generally try to use this space to big up folks in my community whose work I think deserves a wider audience. But since Alice is my partner, and Clinton a friend of mine, I can see how this might seem a bit biased to readers out there. So let me ask you, who would you recommend for a holiday shout out? If you have an indie author whose work you think should be seen by folks, tell us about them in the comments below! What do they write, why are they good, and where can we find their books?

Let's get as many folks as we can into the hands of fresh readers!

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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The Pros and Cons of Using Tabletop RPGs as a Writing Tool

Tabletop roleplaying games have been around for decades now, and at this particular moment they're undergoing something of a resurgence in popularity. Between shows like Stranger Things, which heavily feature Dungeons and Dragons, and the popularity of online live play shows like Critical Role, it seems that more people than ever before are getting into this particular hobby.

Believe me, we are happy to have every one of you!

If you're a fan of genre fiction, though, you've likely noticed the impact tabletop RPGs have had for some time. Writers like R.A. Salvatore, Ed Greenwood, as well as Chris A. Jackson, are known for their novels that explore the settings these games take place in, for example. Additionally, many of these games will adopt popular fictional settings, from Tolkien's Middle Earth to the Known World of A Song of Ice and Fire, and give players the chance to forge their own tales in realms they've only read about before.

A lot of folks use these games as ways to test out story ideas, character concepts, and to help them build worlds. However, there are good sides and bad sides to using RPGs when it comes to your writing.

The Pros

Just take a drink... what can it hurt?

Before we get started, I'd like to establish some bona fides. First, I've been playing RPGs on the regular for about fifteen years or so. I'm also a content creator for these games, with modules like The Curse of Sapphire Lake for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, and supplements like 100 NPCs You Might Meet at The Tavern on the market right now. Lastly, I've used several games to explore characters and ideas for stories, such as in "Jungle Moon" and "Dead Man's Bluff," both found in my latest release The Rejects. I also run the gaming blog Improved Initiative.

This is a topic I know a little something about, is what I'm trying to say.

So, from the pro side of things there are a lot of benefits for writers who take up tabletop roleplaying games. First and foremost is that these games exercise your creativity (often in ways you don't expect). They let you experiment with personalities, archetypes, character arcs, and histories, getting all the reps you need to pump up your imagination. These games also give you a sandbox to play around in, testing out different ideas and structures to see what most appeals to you. Perhaps most importantly, though, these games are group affairs, so you can play off all the other folks involved, get feedback from them, and build off of the collective activity.

And that's just what you get from being a player.

If you take the extra step to become the dungeon master (the person who runs the bad guys, voices all the other characters, and generally breathes life into the setting) you can learn a whole new set of skills. Everything from constructing narratives, to filling plot holes, to making the world feel real and lived-in are things you learn how to do when you sit behind the screen. And while the extra character creation and world building are good practice, you also learn how to cover all the details when it comes to the world. Because when your players ask you what the history of a particular symbol is, or what kind of sewer system the city of Karoka has, you learn there's always more going on in the world than what you think to put on the page.

The Cons

Oh god... not again!

Before you get too enthused at the idea that a DND boot camp will turn you into a brilliant novelist, I'd like to let a little air out of your balloons. Not all of it, of course, but there are some genuine traps I've seen a lot of writers fall into you need to be aware of, and that you need to watch for in your own work if you use tabletop games as your training ground for writing.

Keep all of these things in mind, because they'll save you a lot of time, trouble, and frustration along the way.

First and foremost, you need to know where the lines are in a game so that you don't end up using someone else's intellectual property. I've talked with dozens of different RPG players who were going to write novels about their favorite characters or adventures who didn't realize until someone pointed it out that everything from the names on the map to the gods of the realm are the intellectual property of the company who created the game. So unless you're writing the book for that publisher (great work, if you can get it), you're going to have to go through and scrub everything in order to make sure nothing you can be sued over makes its way into the final product. And depending on how intimately your story is connected to this specific setting, that might torpedo your whole project.

Another problem I see a lot of writers deal with is that when they base their books off of RPGs they often end up with a distinct RPG feel to them, which can introduce a flavor to their stories they may not even realize is there at first. For example, roleplaying games generally have tiered threats and achievements, with the player characters growing in power over the course of the story. So they start off protecting towns from goblin raids, and end the story fighting god-like wizards for the fate of the world. Now, there's nothing wrong with that kind of escalation, but if your story has definite periods where the party "levels up" in threats and powers, just happening to discover new abilities when they most need them, that can impose a structure you weren't intending on your narrative.

Where the hell did all this come from?

Speaking of unintentional structure, another issue folks who try to write stories and novels based off their gaming experiences run into is adopting the framework of the game for how things work in their books. As an example, in fantasy RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder your spellcasters have a certain number of spell slots per day they can use for their magic. This is meant to keep things fair in the context of a game's challenge, but it isn't necessarily something a story will benefit from. If your protagonist is a wizard, though, and that limitation has been part of their character since their inception, you might simply adopt this Vancian magic system out of reflex. The same is true with iconic magic items, the special abilities of the monk, or the rage of the barbarian; if you get too steeped in how things work in the game, you often end up copying and pasting those elements into your story without asking whether they're helping or hurting.

To be clear, that's not inherently a bad thing. There is, after all, an entire genre of Lit RPG books which are supposed to feel like you're reading an RPG campaign. But if you aren't doing it on purpose, it likely won't make your book better.

Lastly, something I would recommend to those looking to use RPGs to enhance their writing is to test out concepts and ideas, rather than simply recording the events of a campaign and then writing them in a more engaging prose format. Part of the reason for this is because (with very few exceptions) you are not the only one at the table, and the other players may not take kindly to having their characters wind up in your work. This goes double if you're the dungeon master, because then it feels like you ran the game so your friends could write your book for you. Learn how to test specific elements and ideas, and to take those things out of the game, polish them, refine them, and spin a book about them.

You get a lot more mileage out of this approach.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my short story collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Community Content Programs For RPGs Are Another Avenue For Authors To Get Paid

If you're an author, you know there are basically two roads to make money when it comes to writing stories. The first is to submit your work to a publisher, have them do the brunt of the heavy lifting (formatting, art, editing, distribution, etc.), and share the profits with them. The second is to go it alone, and to self-publish your work. You don't have to share the profits that way, and with the variety of tools available today there are all kinds of roads you can take to getting your books out there.

Pick your path, and start storytelling.

However, this hasn't been the case in the past for roleplaying games. For creators who've wanted to work in this field, you've either had to design your own game from the ground up, or work with a publisher who was willing to let you use their intellectual property. Sometimes they would have an open game license (or OGL) that lets you use parts of their game to make your own, but even those licenses don't let you use everything in an existing game.

If you've ever wanted to try your hand at writing stories for games like Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Pugmire, and others, though, there are some community content programs you should be aware of, though.

Who With A What Now?

A community content program is, essentially, a way for anyone willing to put in the time, energy, and sweat to create supplements for a roleplaying game, and sell them. These programs allow you to use the rules, setting, and other intellectual property as part of your supplements, giving you the creative freedom to add your own touches, flair, and stories to the setting.

Within the rules of the agreement, of course.

And then money?

Yep. As long as the content you create falls within the program's guidelines (every program has its own specific rules about what you can and can't do within their specific games), you are allowed to publish it through the community content program, and to sell it to the gaming community the same way you would other self-published work.

There are a few caveats, though.

The first is that if you create something through these programs, you don't get the rights to that material. It's made as part of that game's setting, and with their intellectual property, and all the rights to that content stay with the company. You'll still get paid for your sales, but the company might decide to make reference to your work in other editions, or outright re-publish it in later releases. And the parent company is more than allowed to do that without consulting you. Secondly, you can't just throw up anything your heart desires. Each community has specific rules about what kind of content you're allowed to make, and what sources you're allowed to draw on. In some cases you may be allowed to write additional rules, for example, but you may not be allowed to create new races, or to make new locations that have not been detailed in the game's canon. You may also not be allowed to put up fiction.

If you can work within those guidelines, though, and you're willing to sweat the details in order to create attractive, fun, playable content for some of your favorite games, then you should check out the Drive-Thru RPG Community Content Program rules. Remember, each one is unique, so make sure you read the fine print before you get started on your next project.

Also, if you'd like more information on tabletop RPGs (playing, running, and working in the field), tune-in to my sister blog Improved Initiative. And if you'd like to open up your options for making money writing whatever you want to, I'd also recommend taking a look at my previous posts Make Money Writing (By Joining InfoBarrel.com), and Want To Make Money Writing? Check Out Vocal!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing. If you've got advice on how to work within these programs, or if there's something else writers should know, feel free to leave it in the comments below. For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and to keep up with my latest releases follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Lastly, if you want to support my work, head over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page, or Buy Me A Ko-Fi.