Writing the Battle Gaming Book Update

Here are were things are at with the new book.

Currently the title is "Battle Gaming: The New American Sport." I am not sure if this is the title that will exist for the release. Margaret had suggested "Battle Gaming Made Fun." The problem I had with this title is that it implied that Battle Gaming was not fun to begin with (on the contrary it is quite fun).

Overall the book is coming together well. I still wish to have a draft out by the end of the year. I have now been printing each section I work on so as to have a binder that represents the entire book. Still do not know how many pages I have. I am trying to keep it under 300 pages in an effort to keep the price of the book down.

Last week activities included:

I was working on the Open Battle Gaming System Dagorhir Variance Document. This is a document that allows players who read the book to convert the books Open Battle Gaming System rules into a set that matches the Dagorhir rule set. As always this force me to loop through yet another revision of the Open Battle Gaming System.

I also spent a good bit of time working on developing a chart categorizing various real weapons to Open Battle Gaming System weapons. This was a nightmare because historical weapon taxonomy is an art more than a science. I ended up writing a few paragraphs about the whole tangled mess of categorizing historic weapons and then went on to just start a table that made sense for most people who are familiar with the common names of weapons used in role playing games. The table is not finished and likely will continue to get updates until the time of publishing.

This weekend was spent attacking the games in Chapter 3. I created my game information rendering template and ran my first mail merge against the Excel spreadsheet I have been loading with games. It was gratifying to see pages and pages of battle game descriptions come out in a good readable form. Of course the spread sheet is still incomplete. I have also taken a hard look at consolidating and reducing the number of games. I am working on how to describe the unique qualities of each game and then reference combining them with other games. I am working on removing redundancy (after all how many versions of zombie can one read about). I think the result will be more concise, with an objective of reduced volume (to keep the price down) along with maximum useful information content.

My objective is to by the end of the year have a draft that I can send out to reviewers. Things are coming together so well I think I may make this deadline.