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The History Book: Week #48
Feb. 16th, 2011 12:27 amJust finished the work I intended on the RPG History Book for this weekend late tonight. But, it was a busy weekend.
My main goal was to update and edit the history of Palladium Books, my penultimate article. I'd found a new early source for the company, but other than that, the editing was pretty easy, as Palladium has mainly been puttering along since their so-called "Crisis of Treachery". Between 2006 and 2011, they've put out the books originally scheduled for 2006 (plus some new stuff).
As with every edit of the Palladium article, this one made it less biased and more reflective of what fans enjoy about the company. It was hard to do because Kevin Siembieda has more than once been somewhat unfriendly to the rest of the industry and then while originally working on the article I found a really self-agrandizing article that Siembieda had written that falsely claimed that Palladium was the first company to do all kinds of stuff. He claimed to publish the first modern horror RPG (four years after Chill and one year after Cthulhu Now), the first cyberpunk RPG (using an extremely spurious definition), the first universal RPG (using a spurious definition that still would have left him behind Chaosium--but really, it was just a house system until Rifts unified it), the first company to publish trade paperbacks (which I'm pretty sure was FGU), etc. I remember being flabbergasted when I originally read the article about how ignorant he was of the rest of the industry.
In any case, I'm pretty happy with the final draft because it feels fair and it captures the sense of wonder about the company. Which was the goal.
In the process I ended up writing a whole new article on Phage Press. I'd intended it to be a mini-history, but it ended up at 2000 words, so I pulled it out as its own history, much as I did with Bard Games last year.
And on Saturday I scanned 200(!) book covers at Endgame for use in the history book. I'm still(!) processing those. I've got about 120 done to date, most of which add breadth the various chapters, but some of which include crucial products.
My main goal was to update and edit the history of Palladium Books, my penultimate article. I'd found a new early source for the company, but other than that, the editing was pretty easy, as Palladium has mainly been puttering along since their so-called "Crisis of Treachery". Between 2006 and 2011, they've put out the books originally scheduled for 2006 (plus some new stuff).
As with every edit of the Palladium article, this one made it less biased and more reflective of what fans enjoy about the company. It was hard to do because Kevin Siembieda has more than once been somewhat unfriendly to the rest of the industry and then while originally working on the article I found a really self-agrandizing article that Siembieda had written that falsely claimed that Palladium was the first company to do all kinds of stuff. He claimed to publish the first modern horror RPG (four years after Chill and one year after Cthulhu Now), the first cyberpunk RPG (using an extremely spurious definition), the first universal RPG (using a spurious definition that still would have left him behind Chaosium--but really, it was just a house system until Rifts unified it), the first company to publish trade paperbacks (which I'm pretty sure was FGU), etc. I remember being flabbergasted when I originally read the article about how ignorant he was of the rest of the industry.
In any case, I'm pretty happy with the final draft because it feels fair and it captures the sense of wonder about the company. Which was the goal.
In the process I ended up writing a whole new article on Phage Press. I'd intended it to be a mini-history, but it ended up at 2000 words, so I pulled it out as its own history, much as I did with Bard Games last year.
And on Saturday I scanned 200(!) book covers at Endgame for use in the history book. I'm still(!) processing those. I've got about 120 done to date, most of which add breadth the various chapters, but some of which include crucial products.