NoD #127 — Printer Proofs

I’ve been doing something mildly useful as well, let’s talk about that for a change.

I’m printing Muster in POD

Muster, the book I published recently about how to induce psychosis over little army men fighting for their lives in a dungeon, is currently out only as a digital PDF. The nature of the project as a CC-licensed free book without any particular distribution plans makes a print version something of an afterthought, but I did promise to set the crowdfunding patrons up with some, so while the project is otherwise done with, I still need to finesse this last detail. (I’m sure that for some backers who don’t like reading PDFs this is actually important. Patience, I’ll get it done!)

After reviewing my options for how to get ~50 copies of the book printed and mailed reasonably cheaply, I opted for the apparently common choice of printing the thing with DrivethruRPG’s POD printing service. I haven’t been following the developments in the field in real time over the last decade, so I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how straightforward and automated everything is on this. It could stand to be faster, though.

(“Print-on-demand” or POD is jargon for a book-seller that prints the books one by one as they’re ordered by retailers or, more commonly, customers. So instead of storing a bunch of books and selling those, you’re only producing the books as needed. Ends up costing more to produce per copy than a larger print run, but if your sales are small and protracted, POD is great for maintaining print availability.)

The basic procedure in getting a thing printed in POD is that you create the book as a digital object, upload it to the printer, print one copy out to see that everything’s good, and if the book seems all right, then open up the webstore to take orders from the customer base. In this case I’m putting the book up at cost (i.e. you only pay the printer for the physical act of printing and mailing the book, there’s no publisher profit), so it’ll end up costing something in the neighbourhood of $5.5 plus shipping. I’ll also order the ~50 backer copies through this same process.

What eats up time when working with Drivethru here is that a proof copy of the book takes like 2–3 weeks to arrive from the moment I order one. I got the book ready and the proof order in earlier, and got the proof delivered to me late last month. If that was the end of it, I’d have the book up for order at Drivethru already, but, well…

First proof experiences

Overall the Lightning Source (the actual printer used by Drivethru for this POD stuff) BW softcover is great, along the lines of what I’d expect of any small press perfect bind softcover. It used to be in the ’00s that POD books like this were noticeably shoddier, but this isn’t any worse than a normal digital printer book.

Almost all of the unsatisfying details in the proof copy are my own fault, and individually not really deal-breakers, the book is basically good enough as it is. I still fixed everything I found, that’s what the process is for; mainly it just means that getting the book out is delayed by a month as I order a second proof and check that to make sure the book’s good to go.

Let’s see… here’s what I found, in case you’re interested in the technical nitty-gritty of book creation:

Insufficient gutter margin: By far the most annoying and embarrassing error. It’s been a while since I’ve done a perfect bound layout of any sort, so I did the page design for the book with stitching in mind. Glue binding “eats” some of the gutter margin (the spine-facing part of the individual page) due to the technical way the binding works, and while it’s not much in modern perfect binding (several millimeters), it’s still enough that I’m bothered by the resulting tight inner margins; the book’ll look nicer once I fix that.

Lazy color conversion: There’s a diagram on page whatsit, 221 I think, that I’d converted to greyscale too lazily. I’ve created the book in full color, so this print version is getting color converted, and while that can mostly be performed by automation, in some places it’s better to manage it by hand. Again not crippling for the book, but big enough to fix.

Spine art misalignment: This is the only one of these errors that is not, I think, my fault. I’m not absolutely sure, but best I can tell, the cover art has been stretched by about 1% and consequently cut a little bit wrong. It’s not really human-visible anywhere except in the spine, where the tight positioning of the spine art makes the about 1.5 millimeter deviation noticeable.

I’m asking the printer about that last one, because while it seems to me like it’s a technical error on their end, it might also just be incidental inaccuracy of the process (their cover gluing process just deviates a couple of millimeters on each copy), or something I did wrong in prepping the file. Can’t fix it without knowing which of those it is.

So anyway, basically business as usual. It’s not uncommon to have something to fix in a book from proofs, even if ideally you’d manage to make it right the first time around.

A hardcover color version

I’ve been asked about getting the book as a color hardcover, which is something that the Drivethru POD printer also supports. I personally think that it’s essentially foolish for a consumer to desire a premium hardcover of a new and untested book like this, but then I pretty much think that physical books are a thing of the past, too, so what do I know. I can see how some kind of classical work makes sense to bind into a luxurious hardcover, but Muster is more of a quick writing exercise, and definitely only on its first edition, so eh.

Back in the early modern period it wasn’t unusual for rich people to have personal libraries with tailored book-binding; you’d purchase the book as a signature block (basically a book without covers attached) and give the bookseller/maker your personal specs for what kinds of leather and colors and whatnot you use in your personal library, and they’d bind the book together to match your house style. That’s such an amazingly cool idea for anybody who likes books (hey, I can like books even as I think that they’re a thing of the past), as you can make the books display very nicely in the bookshelf. So maybe this desire to have Muster in hardcover is something like that? You have a great rpg collection, except you only collect hardcover, so you can’t have Muster unless it’s in hardcover.

(For that one non-gamer reading this, the joke here is the idea of a rpg collector who specializes in hardcovers. So much core rpg history has been published as boxed saddle-stitch and perfect-bound softcover, only, that you could kickstart an entire publishing house on the notion of simply republishing rpg heritage in hardcover. A very stupid and unneeded publishing house, but that’s kickstarting for you.)

In the wonderful world of POD printing I can make this dream of a color hardcover Muster a reality, though, without too much trouble for myself. I just need to finesse the original color layout into print-shape and push it through the proofing process. Might as well.

Coup de Main in Greyhawk

We’re playing again over the coming weekend, and I dare say the game’s going strong. Come see: the game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.

And then the best part of the newsletter, more play reports from last summer. Seems like I’m about what, 26 sessions behind the game with these reports. Assuming I catch up by one each week (two reports and one new game each week), I’ll catch up to the present sometime before midsummer, maybe in May if there’s no delays whatsoever.

Coup de Main #86

Continuing the adventure of the Griffon Mountain, where the Knights Temp are… well, I’ll just let Tuomas tell it:

I like how Tuomas clearly got into the spirit of event logging with this one, and how his monotonous listing of events paints a picture of a damn paranoid adventuring party. It worked out fine, so no complaints here! It’s also notable how relatively painless this entire starmetal thing ended up being; just a couple of sessions of dungeoneering, with Heikki’s mid-tier Thief scouting out all the nefariousness. The 10-session side affair we had with the Fearmother of Illmire was much worse.

Coup in Sunndi #60

I guess I’m not 100% on the exact order of these Sunndi sessions from last spring (yes, it would have been smarter to write some notes as we went), but you get what you get, and in this case you get a special session.

Back in session #56, the Easter Special, a true miracle of resurrection had taken place as a horde of restless dead thousands strong rose from the cursed mountain that various adventurers had been poking just a little bit too eagerly. The unfortunate event resulted in the next adventure arc as the Temple Guardians (paladins) of Rao strove mightily to salvage the city of Naerie from the undead threat.

A stray detail in the unfurling devastation was that when the last survivors of that Easter adventure party scrambled their way down the mountain, they were being followed by a couple thousand “ghouls” (1 HD restless dead; quick runners, but no paralyzing touch) kept just barely away by a Protection from Undead effect. A nicely ghoulish touch here was that the Protection was carved on the body of a dead player character the others were carrying with them while the thousands-strong ghoul horde circled around waiting for their chance.

So what this meant in practice was that the adventurers were attracting a significantly sized horde of undead with them. As they were about as smart and responsible as the average murderhobo, the survivors beelined through the otherwise uninhabited wilderness to the closest succour of human habitation they knew of, namely the clan fortress of the Hakadaro hill men. The Hakadaros are otherwise an unremarkable hill clan, akin to a dozen others, but they do have the distinction of being politically Good (as opposed to Neutral) due to Pelorian missionary activity among them. Their clan territory is also the closest of the clans to the cursed mountain, bully for them.

And that brings us to the present session: I’d suggested after the Easter session that technically speaking nothing would stop us from gaming out the forthcoming confrontation between the Hakadaros and the undead horde, if we wanted to do a mass combat session for a change of pace. We didn’t jump on that immediately, as can be seen with the paladin stuff that got in front, but after a few weeks the players were still keen enough on the situation that it came under consideration again. There weren’t any serious player characters involved with the matter at all, and it would have been generally unproblematic to have the GM resolve the affair summarily behind the scenes, but I guess the notion of a relatively large battle like that sparked some imaginations.

Also, I think that the players were considering the angles on the wider scenario: the paladin investigation squad back in Naerie (about a week’s walk towards the low-lands from the Hakadaro lands) was in part hampered by the lack of news from the hills; the way the calendar was working out, the paladins would surely soon be getting direct news of what happened to the Hakadaros. So playing through those events would satisfy that curiousity and perhaps garner valuable information about the nature of the prophesied Doom of Naerie.

So yeah, a special session with the premise of pitting the Hakadaro Clan against the walking dead in a mass combat scenario. The players would take over the Hakadaro leadership, with option to create/bring specific player characters to join the scenario, or otherwise simply contribute to the wargame without a personal character. The GM meanwhile would play the opforce, as one often does in D&D. I think… yes, I did actually offer the players the option of having one of them take up the gauntlet and lead the undead forces to victory, but for whatever reasons nobody wanted to play on that side, so GM-vs-players it would be.

Sipi’s an old minis geek, and we were playing at his place, so the technical execution of the mass battle ended up combining a pile of his miniatures with my recent wooden sticks based terrain definition stylings. So in practice the thing was played with lots of sticks, miniatures and buckets of dice. As one does.

Here’s some high point remarks on the battle as we conducted it:

Operative initiative determines a lot: The scenario began by establishing how far away from the Hakadaro clan seat the outriders of the clan (men who ride around managing wolves and foreigners, and generally keeping the herds and shepherds safe) would spot the undead horde. It being a bit hard to miss a 2-thousand head horde of shambling dead in the hills, the clan ended up with I think two days of advance warning of the coming storm.

The force correlation was very lop-sided: The Hakadaro clan isn’t huge by any means, and although they did manage to bring most of their civilians and fighting them to the clan fort, for protection, we are still talking about ~150 trained combatants and whatever support the rest of the clan was worth, receiving an assault ten times their number. At least the Hakadaro veterans are battle-tested, having fought in both clan skirmishes and as mercenaries in the Sunndi liberation war and beyond.

The Hakadaro clan fort is fantasy-formidable: I hadn’t prepped the scenario in detail in advance, so the way we set this up basically involved me inventing the terrain and architecture for the environs then and there. I was imagining the Hollow Hills barbarians as basically medieval Afghans (with superficial Scottish color, because gamers get antsy if your Indian fantasy setting isn’t familiar at all), and what came out of that was this formidable ancient stone castle built on and within the stone of a steep cliff. A bit like Helm’s Deep in some ways, I guess. Fairly clear that the fort is a remnant of some past age, the current Hakadaros surely wouldn’t be capable of building it.

The Pelorian priesthood: The clan is a bit weird in that they have had Pelorian missionaries living with them for like a decade, and the clan has started, unusually for the hill clans, paying their respects to Pelor, the sun god of healing and fighting undead. What this meant in practice is that the clan had a bit of anti-undead magic on hand, allowing them to shake off the worst of the horde terror and whatnot.

Slings, slings from the walls: The hill tribes are famous for their slingers, that’s the ethnic identity weapon for them. So the way this battle was shaping out after the successful evacuation of the farmsteads suited the clan very well. Sitting up on the walls of their fortress, bombarding the undead horde with slingshot from high above, while the undead tried to struggle their way up the earth berm to reach the fort.

Undead are stupid: Against the above, the ghoul horde had inexhaustible running speed, immunity to morale and fatigue, and the true stupidity of the unthinking killing machine. The herd instincts (hey, nobody wanted to be a general here!) kept the horde moving in the generally right direction, but there was no true consideration of operative maneuver among these attackers; it was just one prolonged charge over all possible venues the terrain allowed, continuing despite losses beyond all human reason.

So what all of that amounted to was, after all the smoke and dice rolling had subsided, a fair bit of experience on the practical procedures of D&D-based free kriegsspiel mass combat, plenty of epic fight imagery, and a truly disgustingly one-sided slaughter, as the Hakadaro slingers and the entire clan’s worth of angry men and women kept throwing rocks and shooting the clan scorpions (a type of siege gun, think a big crossbow) at the sordidly stoic ranks of the furious ghouls. The undead did make some game attempts at claiming the flanking slope next to the fortress (probably not feasible for human troops; the slope was far too long and steep to climb at any speed without exhaustion), but the clan had specifically manned the secondary fortifications up there as well, so that came to naught.

The numbers discrepancy was so high that the biggest threats for the Hakadaros, protected by their walls, ended up being exhaustion among the men on the walls, and a mysterious aura of fear that the undead started emanating when the assault was at its apex. The stamina of the hardy hill barbarians met the challenge, though, and the Pelorian faithful among the clan succeeded in countering the fell magics supporting the undead. Afterwards the clerics attested to having seen a great pair of red glowing eyes in the sky, in the direction of the cursed mountain; a truly trope-riffic demonstration of a mysterious dark lord whose will was surely behind this entire assault.

(This stuff reads better if I say this now: a mysterious dark lord was indeed involved, but this entire cliched “the will of a dark lord rides with the undead horde!” thing was them stringing the witnesses along. Arguably the entire point of this failed assault was in that vision of a great evil “directing” the undead from up the mountain. I’ll discuss this more later, but this scenario has more to it than just some dark lord sending undead hordes out to kill everything that moves.)

The undead finally broke when their “herd intelligence”, the cohesion of the horde, ran out, and the individual undead started forgetting that they were in the business of charging against a mountain fort far beyond their beastly means. the majority of the undead kept faithfully approaching and getting obligingly destroyed by missile fire from the fortress, but many hundred also ended up scattering in the hills. The Hakadaros did send their meager cavalry of outriders to hunt the dangerous abominations down, but it’s pretty obvious that the memory of this horrible event will remain lurking in the dark recesses of the hills for the next generation to come.

Calculations indicated that each participant in the battle got 470 XP for their troubles; an unusually high value for mass combat, surely, caused by the overwhelming numbers advantage of the undead. Unusually for the game’s procedures, about half of the players never appointed personal characters here, so I left them with a sort of “character option” on this: if they later wanted to bring a veteran of the battle in as a new PC, they could start with that 470 XP to their name.

Overall the mass combat scenario was an interesting change of pace. In hindsight I think that I probably ruled the slings and thrown rocks of the Hakadaro to be slightly too effective against the undead (they usually are in D&D; realistically slings vs zombies should be like 1 point of damage per hit, surely), but that probably didn’t determine the result here. The generously epic clan fortress surely did, but that doesn’t bother me; it’s the way I’d imagined the place ever since establishing it weeks earlier, and there’s no rule of the game saying that nice fortresses can’t be had. (The way I’d been thinking of it in developing the Hollow Hills milieu was basically that the intense inter-clan rivalries in the hills have long ago forced all the real clans to set up some fairly formidable fortifications to prevent neighbours from destroying them; the Hakadaros are here because the fort is here, simple as that.)

The fact that the fortress made the battle somewhat one-sided doesn’t bother me; there is no inherent virtue in having a scenario be “balanced”, we can still experience and learn plenty even in one-sided engagements. Like here, I suspect that everybody participating gained a newfound appreciation of the massive force multiplier that high walls represent in siege warfare. Real human armies do not just bumrush at a defended castle for the exact reasons we saw here, the role of the undead was largely to provide the “what if” for what it looks like when the enemy fortifications are hopeless to scale.

State of the Productive Facilities

I guess I’m struggling along. Besides keeping the newsletter going and not stopping on the Muster print job, I should get some year-end paperwork done this month. Shouldn’t be too much as long as I can keep the newsletter length down so I don’t waste literally all of my time on this.

Speaking of, 4.5k words again. Damn. Next one I’ll publishing nothing but the play report stuff.