The Vanity Project (part 1)

As regular followers will know I write a set of wargames rules most years. Sometimes I go back and revisit earlier efforts and make changes. There's nothing like a 5 year break to realise what rubbish you wrote previously. I learnt that from Stephen King.

Many of my sets are available as free downloads, over top right. People who end up playing my games at COW will usually be handed a printed set, together with a playsheet in the desperate hope they might then write up the game for The Nugget magazine or otherwise provide me with feedback. Occasionally (very occasionally) I get asked if I intend to publish.

Generally my feeling has been not to bother, and just post the files here. But then, I did that book earlier in the year, and it seemed that it wasn't that much of a faff to self publish. So why not?

The main "Why not" is that it takes time to get things right, and I don't really want the thing to cost me money. Well, not a lot of money. And suffering the humiliation of no one at all buying a set of rules from a generally unknown wargames writer.

Still, vanity is a terrible thing.

And then I was asked to run a session at the Society of Ancients conference. So I dragged out "To Ur is Human" and decided that it might be suitable. Of course, as previously covered on this blog, I felt I needed to make some changes to the combat system. And tighten up some of the wording. Oh, what the hell. Why not just work them up for publication? After all I'm going to end up printing out a half dozen copies or so and collate them at home. Why not get Amazon to do that. And then I can charge people £5 for a souvenir.

So that's what I'm doing.

Wish me luck.

Or go to Amazon and buy a copy, when it's released.