Slow (Armoured) Train Coming

After what seems like forever I have finally got "It Rolls For Ivan" off to the printers so I can get a proof copy.

The rules haven't exactly been bedevilled with problems per se. It's just that from the moment I switched over to working on them from my previous abortive project, stuff has just kept happening that I needed to deal with. And then I got COVID, of course.

However, over the last month or so bits and pieces of the action plan we developed as a committee have started to come together, so I was able to take a break from Northamptonshire Battlefields Society affairs for a week or so and really get my head down on IRFI. 

The rules have been pretty much set for a month or so, and it was just the tidying up, really. Things like making sure what we've been playing to on the QRS is reflective of what the rule book says. That's really easy to get out of sync. Part of my technique when writing rules is to...er... "write them". What that means is if I'm not sure how something is supposed to work I sit down and write a paragraph explaining it. That tends to flush out things I've missed or raise questions that I hadn't thought of. Putting key info in tables does help, as I can copy them directly onto the QRS, but if I then change the QRS I've got problems.

The last three or four days have been intensive. I've been proof reading pdfs of the rules on the tablet, then updating the publishing files, making sure amendments don't make a nonsense of the layout - for example adding or removing a sentence can shunt a whole paragraph up or down a page. Then I have been sourcing the graphics and trying to get the layout look that I want. And then sorting out the contents list and index and page references.

I will have missed loads of stuff in the proofing and layout, so when the hardcopy gets here next week I'll be at it with a red pen

I think it will be worth it. It'll be the longest single rule book I've done, coming in at 110 pages. Having said that the mechanisms are still quite simple, I think, it is just that I have decided to put in detailed sections on the really quirky stuff like Armoured Trains, Interventionists and Cheka, so that I get the feel of it all right.

I still need to work on the Resources Pack, like I did for the SCW rules, but most of that is lying around in  bits in  various files on the PC, so I only need to bolt them together.

So it has been a long time coming, but I think that it will do the period justice.

And provide a good game, of course.