Blue Moon Aurora

I figured it was time for another update on all things Blue Moon Aurora.

Duet Saga: Knight of Curidan is ambling along. We have about 50,000 words written and the basics of all the mechanics figured out, but I suspect we’ll need another 50,000 words to finish things up.  This means we probably won’t have a first draft done till August.  The art is almost entirely completed and we have some excellent pieces. My instinct is that Knight of Curidan won’t be released till probably early 2012, but I am confident it’s going to be quite the book when it’s done.  I hope it will enable those GMs who don’t have the time or maybe the ideas to be able to run a really compelling duet campaign.

We are learning a lot, which is the whole point of the Duet Saga series.  Foremost we have learned that a novel with 100,000 words is many times easier to write than a RPG book with 100,000 words. We suspected this would be the case, but underestimated the factor by which RPGs were more difficult to write.  Obviously, one would think that for your first RPG you would aim smaller than a 100,000 word opus, but these are the type of RPG books I like so these are the type of RPG books we’ll make.  That said I keep toying with the idea of slicing off a lot of the duet advice material from Knight of Curidan and bundling it up as a free PDF.  That way we wouldn’t need to keep putting that foundational information in every Duet Saga and we’d have a small product as a practice run for Knight of Curidan. 

Within two weeks, West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide will be released as an e-book. We’re not doing any significant advertising for it but will push it here and there.  We honestly have no idea whether it will catch on once it’s released, but we’re committed to the line regardless. We’ve  started writing West Pacific Supers: Victory at any Cost and as a wild guess I would peg maybe September when we’ll have the first draft done.  The turnaround on Victory at any Cost from first draft to e-book is probably going to be a lot quicker than with Rising Tide.  First, we’re more organized in the writing and thus will have less systemic problems to correct. Second, in writing the first book we established a voice and style for West Pacific Supers that is easy for us to continue.  So I would guess that spring 2012 is when Victory at any Cost will be released.  We might write the third book at the same time as the second book, in which case the third book, possibly called President’s Team, will be released in fall 2012.

After those books are out, we’re pretty flexible but it’s really a toss-up between another Duet Saga or West Pacific Supers: The Roleplaying Game.  The West Pacific Supers RPG is one of the big reasons we started Blue Moon Aurora, but we don’t want to tackle that until we’re completely ready to make it the awesome book we’re envisioning.  In either case, we may be hiring writers to help tackle some of the grunt work on these projects.  This could speed up the process or result in wasted money and a lot of rewriting, but it is one of those ideas we’re tossing around.

All in all things are moving along. As a reminder we do have a page on Facebook here and also are on Twitter.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

When I was in middle school, back in the mid ‘80s, I discovered the BECMI edition of D&D (Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, and Immortals Dungeons & Dragons).  In particular, the Companion Set, the C in BECMI, captured my imagination for it had rules for managing dominions, mass combat, and tournaments – who doesn’t want to rule kingdoms, command armies, and compete in tournaments? This to me has always been fantasy roleplaying, not the slaying of monsters and taking their stuff.

Thus when we decided to publish Duet Sagas, with each book containing all the material a GM would need to run a duet campaign, it was this style of campaign that I wanted to do first.  Michelle took some convincing, but in the end we decided that Duet Saga 1 would be The Barony of Calagard.

This is one of those RPG sourcebooks that defined my early roleplaying years, in fact all of my BECMI books are pretty worn.  Them and my WEG Star Wars books were unquestionably the most used of my RPG collection.

The concept is simple enough: the PC begins by inheriting a small dominion in the Barony of Calagard and is thrown into the world of lordship, politics, and grand adventure.  We are using the Pathfinder system for our rules and the book will include some mechanical crunch, some flavor, but is focused on tools for running this sort of duet campaign.  Every duet campaign is different as every GM and player is different, but one constant I have seen is that a lot of GMs struggle with these sorts of campaigns.  Our focus is not to give you a script to follow, but to give you the means to quickly and easily create scenarios and challenges for the PC to grapple with.  Our biggest assumptions are that anyone can be an effective GM with a little help and that an effective GM is superior to any book, computer game, or other interactive media in challenging and engaging a player.  That is why roleplaying is so damn fun.

A few weeks ago, I bought the Kingmaker Adventure Path published by Paizo.  I was aware of it when we started writing Calagard and the more I wrote, the more I started worrying that it had already done what we were trying to do.  So all six installments arrive from Amazon.com and I begin reading. The first foreword describes how this series would be an open-ended campaign where the PCs can build nations, fight wars, and tame a wild land.  I flipped through the six issues and saw they had governance rules, mass combat, a tournament, and lots of NPCs, monsters, and flavor text on some religions and kingdoms.  For a moment, I was honestly dismayed as it did seem like a lot of overlap with what we were trying to do.  Then I read through it more closely.

Kingmaker is really a remake of the classic Keep on the Borderlands where the PCs claim a keep and then explore the surrounding region facing various challenges hidden at various locations around the area. This part of the adventure path is solid and the villains of the week should entertain a group of PCs as they advance up levels, but when you leave the traditional hack-and-slash realm and move into governance, politics, and the like – Kingmaker fails.  Let me rephrase that, Kingmaker works for a group of PCs tackling these issues at a very shallow level, which covers more gaming groups.  Like most RPGs, Kingmaker approaches governance abstractly, so it loses any semblance of drama or excitement.  Our approach is completely different – we create situations where PCs have to make real decisions with real consequences. Furthermore, we leap off the beaten path and tackle romance, duty, family, faith, and other issues that drive these sorts of decisions.  Any situation where a decision or crisis is simply resolved by a few rolls as opposed to a PC actually making a decision utterly fails in our opinion.

We’ve run these sorts of campaigns for over two decades.  I have run group and duet campaigns involving governance many, many times.  I know all the mistakes and I also know some tricks that really work.  The Barony of Calagard shares all of this valuable information with a GM so that the GM can run a campaign that is simply incredible.  Sure there will be monsters and combat, but that’s not what drives a duet campaign – what drives a duet campaign is the sense of empowerment a PC has that comes from making real decisions that shape the campaign.

No doubt about it, we have ambitious plans for these Duet Sagas. Our goal is quite simply to lift the bar on what a campaign sourcebook should be.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

It has been a few weeks without an update, though it was a good Spring Break so it all balances out in the end.  Things though have been moving forward and most exciting is we have our cover for our pending eBook - West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide.  The cover art was done by Eric J. Carter and he did an incredible job of creating West Pacific on the verge of crisis.  The title design was done by Andy Kerr who was also the mind behind the Blue Moon Aurora logo.  We'll have the second chapter of Rising Tide up in the preview section next week, but as we are ahead of schedule we are moving up the release to June instead of July. We still have a number of things to do, but are well ahead of our various target deadlines.  So unless some fiasco or crisis catches us, Rising Tide will be available as an eBook in June. 

Rising Tide is a fun book.  It's also a little odd, I guess.  Sure the fact it's about superheroes who are treated as celebrity super stars is a little different, but I think the real oddness to Rising Tide after rereading a few chapters is how it has a little bit of everything.  There's melodrama, there's comedy, there's action, and rotating around the story is a number of interesting characters.  We hope people like it, we certainly think it's a good story, but you never know till people read it.  That's why at the end of the day, we just wrote a book we would like.  

Duet Saga 1: The Barony of Calagard is progressing, though slower than I would like in regards to the writing.  The Barony of Calagard is basically a complete duet campaign for a knightly PC.  The ideas are easy as this is a sort of campaign I have been running for decades, but converting the ideas is proving challenging, well more slow than challenging.  The art is coming in great with a fantastic cover done by Lorraine Schleter who is also doing some interior art as well.  Actually, the artists Michelle has been working with have been great in all ways.  Christine Y. Chong (Mayshing) we've used for a number of pieces, like this one she has up on her DeviantArt page.  We're also using Kim Feigenbaum, Zak Hennessey, Christina Hess, and MuYoung Kim.  I have to say every artist we have worked with has been great, very responsive, and professional.

All in all, things are moving forward, we've even partially outlined West Pacific Supers: Victory at Any Cost our next eBook as well as Duet Saga 2: Ghosts of Arbastil, but first we need to get some books published and not get too ahead of ourselves. So back to writing for me!

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

As those who frequent this website have noticed it has a new look, a new logo, and is slightly reorganized to better serve Blue Moon Aurora, LLC. But the even cooler news is that the first chapter of West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide is up as a PDF on the Previews page. We will follow this up with the second and third chapters in May and June to build up to our release of the e-book in July.  We are planning on releasing the book through Amazon and Barnes & Nobles and you will not need a Kindle or Nook to read it,which is a common misconception about e-books, Amazon, for example, has a free reader for its e-books you can use on your PC.

Now the first three chapters are pretty indicative of the book.  So if you like the first chapters you’ll like the rest of the book, but if you don’t like the first three chapters…spend your money elsewhere, but do check in from time to time, because we have other books planned including a Pathfinder-compatible roleplaying game campaign we’ll release near the end of the year.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

One of the most exciting parts of our new business operation has been commissioning art for our books. We've always been lovers of high quality illustrations in roleplaying books (and in books in general - I've been collecting beautifully illustrated children's books since long before we had children), and when we started Blue Moon Aurora, we assured ourselves that we would get the best art we could afford for our books. Worst case scenario, we don't sell many books but we end up with a collection of beautiful art to go with our writing!

Finding artists was the first challenge, not because there are so few artists,but because there are so many. Several people referred us to deviantart, but the scope of the site makes it almost unusable for our purposes. There are artists of every imaginable style and quality and no easily discernible way to find out which ones are based in the United States and interested in commissions.

After a bit of online searching, I discovered ArtOrder,which describes itself as "a community of Fantasy and Science Fiction illustrators committed to mentoring, artistic improvement, and career enhancement". Most importantly for our purposes, the site has a members database with locations clearly listed. It was a laborious process to go through 54 pages of names (1,143 members last I checked), pulling out every one in the United States, and then narrowing further to those who had websites displaying their art. Each online art gallery had to be checked to see if it was a style of art that we liked (either traditional high fantasy or realistic-looking superhero art; anything too horror, too erotica, or too manga was out). I made a master list of artist names, website links, and contact information, along with notes about which of our books a particular person might be best suited to illustrate.

The final list consisted of 62 artists whose work I considered to have real possibilities. Of those, I selected 20 who most fit the projects we would be commissioning illustrations for first and sent query emails to check rates and availability; I received 15 responses. Almost everyone I've dealt with has been friendly, helpful, and enthusiastic.

Blue Moon Aurora, LLC, has currently entered into independent contractor agreements with six artists to provide freelance illustrations and one to produce the Blue Moon Aurora logo. Two of the artists are working on cover art pieces and four others are doing interior illustrations, all in accordance with written art specifications. We've received the preliminary sketches from several artists and the finished work from one; it's incredibly exciting to see our written descriptions come to life on the page.

As with everything else with Blue Moon Aurora, the art side of things is a learning process. I'm fortunate to have a childhood friend who does book layout professionally and who has been advising us on matters involving dpi, fileformats, trim sizes, and other mysteries. As art is delivered and contracts are fulfilled, we will be asking each artist to answer some "outtake"questions about how we can do things better. We're eager to learn and improve,although I can already see that the biggest problem that we're going to have with art is sticking to our art budget.

Thanks for reading,

Michelle

Blue Moon Aurora, LLC is three weeks old, things are moving forward, and we’re learning lessons as we go along. Honestly, a lot of what we have done has been tedious but rather easy like setting the company up as an LLC and registering for an EIN.  Reworking the website, setting up email addresses for the company, organizing our computers, and setting up a box for files are all disgustingly easy but time consuming. Unquestionably, the biggest challenge we have faced thus far is developing the contract we are using for our various art needs.

I attended law school and like all future lawyers muddled through classes on contracts and legal drafting, but that was six years ago, and the lawyerliest thing I have done since then was a summons for jury duty, which resulted in nothing more than sitting in a lobby reading a book as I was never called for jury selection.  However, when faced with the prospect of writing a contract, I did what all lawyers do when drafting documents – they begin by copying the work someone else has done.  So a search of the Internet turned up lots of appropriate contracts and I muddled through a number to work up a rough draft, which I turned over to Michelle who is in all things a writing goddess. We finished our draft and sent it off to our lawyer to review.

Now there is a divide among lawyers over legal drafting and that is the divide between plain language and legalese. We are fanatical believers that legal writing should be plain language, as understandable as possible. This is also the standard they teach you in law school.  However, in practice most lawyers embrace legalese. The plain language versus legalese is the conflict between ideal and reality.

In law school, there are a few things you learn quickly enough.  First, that whenever you answer a question from a professor you must begin with: “It all depends, (insert your argument).” Second, the law of the land is mostly forged from judges grappling with those cases involving the most outrageous, moronic, or nuanced fact patterns you could imagine.  Yes, we are a litigious society, but easily 90% of all civil suits are settled long before they go to trial as the parties find some equitable resolution.  The remaining cases are the wacko ones, people trying to change the law, people out for ‘justice’ (i.e. make the bastards pay), or perhaps both parties are just too stubborn for their own good.  Thus it is these cases that end up making the law of the land, yes, this is one reason why judges try to decide cases on as narrow of grounds as possible, but generally bad cases make bad law.

So imagine a case where two parties are arguing about the meaning of a contract, let’s say a section detailing which jurisdiction covers the contract, and that section is drafted about as well as writing on the wall of a bathroom stall.  However, the court finds that section actually does what it’s supposed to and upholds the contract.

Now stop for a second.  You’re a lawyer.  Your job is to protect your client from all manner of legal problems and to draft contracts that will hold up in court.  So our previous case is the law of the land in your jurisdiction. You could write a clear, simple section on jurisdiction, or you could use the crappy version the courts have upheld as valid.  It’s not an easy choice.  Do you go with the sure win that is horrifically written or the elegant version that you think is clear, but what if you’re wrong?  Your answer should begin with, “it all depends.”

This right here is the conflict between ideal and reality.  If a contract, no matter how poorly written, is held up to do what it was intended to do then if you use that contract language you’re good to go in the eyes of the courts. Let’s go the other way.  Imagine a case with a crisp, short contract that “assigns all rights” for a work of art to the person commissioning the work of art.  Reading that you might take “all” to mean “all”, well, what if there is a case out there were “all” wasn’t held to mean “all” but instead was held to mean “really just a couple”. Ridiculous? Maybe, but what words mean in a contract depends upon the contract and the industry covered by the contract.

Now we sent off a 2 ½ page contract to our lawyer and got a lot of comments and concerns, which we incorporated into the current 5 page contract we are using.  It’s now legally sufficient but not nearly as plain language as we would like and we’ll have to deal with that at some point.  The point of a contract is not to screw the other guy.  The point of a contract is to set up rules for what is hoped to be a mutually beneficial arrangement.  If things go poorly in the arrangement then the contract is there to help protect you.  But you have to know what you want more: a clear contract to promote a positive working relationship or a contract that ensures you can safely get through troubled times.  Ideally, you try to do both, but this is a fundamental business philosophy you have to decide.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds summed up the basics of contracts: “I do the job…and then I get paid.” At the end of the day, that’s all there is to it.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

We finished our last revisions of West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide this past Sunday and registered the copyright on it Monday.  It was unquestionably the smallest revision we have done as it was targeted to fix a few issues. Besides some minor aesthetic changes the main focus was on sidestepping any trademark issues.

Trademarks are a tricky issue and when you use something like a can of Dr Pepper in a work of fiction you need to be careful.  It’s generally okay if you use something as a backdrop, like having people eat at a McDonald’s, but if you are derogatory to a trademark, or a trademark becomes important to the story, then you are treading in dangerous waters.  And by dangerous waters, I mean getting angry letters from lawyers who have just enough grounds to cause you headaches even though you are probably well in the clear of the law. However, that sort of is the standard for trademarks.  Take a look at this article.  It’s interesting when you think about how something like selling a trademarked weapon (i.e. TASER) in Second Life might be an infringement on that trademark.  It kind of makes sense and kind of doesn’t.  Imagine you have a real world restaurant chain in a MMORPG and every time you ate there your avatar became overweight.  It’s funny, but it does negatively impact the trademark.  On the other hand it’s a make belief world and some companies need to get a grip.  Anyway, what we did was just create a few fictional trademarks to replace the real world ones we were using significantly and the real world ones we kept are in the background or portrayed in as positive of light as possible. Actually, it worked a little better with the changes, a little more humorous.  Still at this point after four significant revisions and half dozen minor revisions Rising Tide is locked down.

On other fronts, we have contracted the cover art for both West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide and Duet Saga I: Barony of Calagard.  We’ll talk more on that later, but art is exciting as it is really the process of giving visual life to an imagined world.  Besides that, lots of little paperwork and other nonsense with the company have kept me busy but I have dived into the writing for Barony of Calagard.  When I start making more progress I’ll talk more about that, but the writing is going well.  Furthermore, Bluemoonaurora is now on Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t expect to really use those lines of communication in earnest for a month or two.  The focus right now is setting things up and writing, because otherwise we’ll have nothing to publish.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

In March 2011, Blue Moon Aurora, LLC, was formed in the State of Maryland to publish fiction and roleplaying games.  The basic BMA business plan is to try to break even producing high-quality books.  That’s about it; really, that should be the business plan for all small press publishers. Blue Moon Aurora's focus is on roleplaying games, which is pretty much a niche market where if you sell 1000 copies of your book you’re doing pretty well.  So this is a modest little enterprise, but we have committed to put a minimum of three years into this to learn how it all works (we’ll admit it, we’re pretty ignorant at this point).  We aren’t in this to become rich (there are easier ways to make money), but we love to write and we love nice books.

Fiction

Our first fiction book will be released this July.  West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide is the story of a superhero team in a world much like our own where securing endorsements, climbing the rankings, and handling the media is about as important as saving the city from destruction.  We are in the process of preparing it for publication as an e-book and via print-on-demand.  To give you an idea what this book is all about, we will be sharing the first three chapters online in April, May, and June.  If you like the first three chapters; you’ll love the book, if you don’t like them, well, buy someone else’s book.

So our first three books will be:

West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide (July, 2011)

West Pacific Supers: Victory at Any Cost (TBD, 2012)

West Pacific Supers: Apotheosis (TBD, 2013)

After West Pacific Supers we will be writing other books,almost definitely in the fantasy and science fiction genres. We certainly aren’t one-trick ponies; we’re at least three-trick ponies.  Once we finish writing West Pacific Supers: Apotheosis we’ll bicker for a few weeks about what to do next and one of us will finally yield.  At that point, probably some time next year, we’ll announce in this blog what we’re writing next.  

Roleplaying Games

Our first RPG will be Duet Saga: Barony of Calagard which is an entire duet campaign to allow a narrator to run a single PC as the ruler of a dominion, managing an unruly noble family, foiling evil machinations, courting one’s true love, and trying to be a just, or at least effective, ruler.  Released simultaneously will be the Duet Saga Handbook, which will be a free PDF giving you all the information you need to run effective duet campaigns. These first books will be Pathfinder compatible, but will have lots of great materials for any fantasy RPG.

So our first roleplayinig books will be:

Duet Saga: Barony of Calagard (TBD, 2011)

Duet Saga Handbook (TBD, 2011)

We are also in the process of developing West Pacific Supers: Roleplaying Game but between our big ambitions for this RPG and our limited resources means this won’t be released any earlier than August, 2013.There are also a number of other ideas percolating, including a number of additional Duet Saga sequels, but thus far nothing is set in stone. 

Children’s Books

Michelle has a manuscript done for a collection of Buddhist children’s stories that we will be publishing, but we can only do so much at a time so we don’t expect this to be released till probably 2013. 

Other Stuff

I will continue to rework the website and forums and make a better effort to keep putting new stuff on the site.  There might be a few other things to announce down the road, but this is the place where I'll make all our major announcements first. Check back as there’ll be more use of the members function for this website with emails and even a section with stuff just for members.  So join up to not miss anything! Otherwise this is more than enough for today's blog.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk