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multi volume omnibuses like my commando series this means that while amazon paid me 6 18 for every three commando titles sold amazon is now giving out only 35 for those same three books and that s before wolfpack takes their cut of course they target kindle unlimited readers and make most of their money from them and a page is still a page no matter who publishes it but i made a significant amount of my money from sales not ku reads so wolfpack needs to not only make up what they are taking as their cut of the ku royalties but all the money i made from sales as well this means that now in order for me to make the kind of money i was making on my own wolfpack is going to have to sell a lot more copies of my books especially the commando series and i do mean a lot like an order of magnitude more can my new publisher come through on those kinds of numbers we will have to see the us sales of the commando titles aren t very promising they re still in the six figure rankings which is well it s terrible in the uk the rankings are much better but the uk ebook market is different much smaller meaning you don t have to sell as much in order to get those better numbers so while the numbers in the uk are good that doesn t necessarily translate to sales being great on the other hand killer instincts and san francisco slaughter are now after all these years actually selling fairly well it was always highly frustrating to me that those two books were well liked by pretty much everyone who read them and yet these was so little cross popularity from commando readers so while i will probably not be rolling around in large piles of ki and sfs cash those books are finally going to be earning the kind of money i always hoped they d earn i think that s all for this post perhaps next week i ll do a post on 2020 projects but for now it s fingers crossed posted by jack badelaire at 4 02 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels books commando ebooks hangman killer instincts publishing writing writing in review wednesday october 2 2019 wargaming wednesday the beards and battleaxes rpg cover art from one of the gw army books hello everyone sorry for a lack of posts friday and monday things were a little troubled on the home front but here we are again talking about gaming after venting my frustration last week i began thinking of a gaming project i could undertake something simple specific and entertaining to me personally while at the same time viable as a product that can be shared to folks out there in the world at large so i settled on a game about dwarves i like dwarves i ve played them in various rpgs the dwarfs not dwarves but dwarfs were my first warhammer fantasy battle army they re short stout and bearded just like me and although beer isn t my go to form of alcohol these days i can certainly appreciate a well brewed pint of ale or stout dwarves are also usually portrayed as gruff curmudgeonly little assholes who don t like taking shit from anyone and hold grudges far longer than rationally reasonable and yes guilty as charged on all counts a single player race game might seem limiting but it is also focused it lessens the number of decisions during character creation and reduces the rules and word count keeping the game tighter also i would probably stick with tradition and limit any form of dwarven magic to a kind of rune crafting coupled with perhaps some kind of holy boons or blessings from dwarven gods again it limits player choice but also alleviates the need for a player side spell catalogue which in many games can be equivalent to all the other rules put together from a gw dwarf infantry minis box as for adventures i think a lot of the major bases can be covered dungeon and underground exploration is an obvious go to but you can also have dwarves patrolling the areas around their strongholds overland expeditions trips to human or non human lands and cities long distance explorations diplomatic trips monster hunts with a little thought almost any adventure type is possible as for the rules i think i have a good foundation i want to build upon originally i thought of going with the core rules i developed for my stalled out tankards broadswords rpg but i think for the moment i am going to set those aside and try something a little more basic and if that doesn t seem to fit my needs we ll reconsider i think the rules should be simple avoid a lot of math and most difficult of all not be just a generic system but an expression of the concept of the game how we get there we ll have to find out so i m going to leave this be for now next week i hope to have a few more details on this and as time goes on we ll build bit by bit in the end this is likely just going to be a downloadable pdf that anyone can enjoy so we re keeping it as simple and straightforward as possible posted by jack badelaire at 1 07 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels dwarves fantasy games workshop role playing games sword and sorcery wargames warhammer writing wednesday september 25 2019 wargaming wednesday nine novels zero rpgs old cover draft from wayyyy back when going to cut and paste in a series of posts from twitter that i wrote this weekend every year or so i get this notion of finally finishing a small role playing game product that i can let out into the wild i don t think i d sell it just create a pdf that s available for download perhaps put a print on demand version on amazon for as cheaply as they ll let me but year after year it doesn t happen and i got thinking about why recently i ve blogged about it in the past but it is very strange for me to face that i have written nine novels and many shorter works of fiction but the thought of putting out a short role playing game product is vastly more nerve wracking i ve been gaming since 93 and writing for profit since 2011 i ran campaigns with several homebrew rpg systems over the years and tinkered with probably a dozen more system ideas yet i have never had the nerve to finish a gaming product package it and put it out there at first i thought it was fear of criticism but being a novelist beats that out of you pretty quickly maybe it s knowing that most readers just consume your product and move on but s o many gamers i know are system tinkerers it s like running a restaurant where half your customers are also running their own restaurants every single person who buys it is going to be deciding whether they could have done this better than you and how because that s the nature of rpgs and that s fine except that means not just criticism but active in depth critique no 4 reviews on amazon fun read but the action was a little confusing you have to defend every rule and every wording against everyone who reads it and to have that level of exhausting engagement and so much of my time dedicated to a project that d probably earn me 1 of what a novel would if i even put it out at a price which i probably wouldn t just seems not worth it which kind if sucks because i love role playing games and i have been a tinkering game designer for 25 years but the meat grinder which is that middle aged person s algorithm of time money and energy vs reward is difficult to overcome i wrote a post about this back in 2015 on my tankards and broadswords blog click to go there and read it it s still relevant it s funny that in the last four years despite continued tinkering i still don t have any kind of rpg product to share i m fully aware that the skill set of game designer and novelist only partially overlap but i think that is only a small portion of the problem so we shall see i ve got a few ideas and i feel like if i can start small enough i can build on a little idea incrementally only time will tell posted by jack badelaire at 12 39 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels publishing role playing games writing monday september 23 2019 media monday rambo v last blood there s no good way to approach a review of this without sinking neck deep into the current socio political quagmire there just isn t i m going to do my best to talk about it without engaging this but i will fail i m just putting it out there that this review isn t meant to be a discussion of racism and politics in film but rather how to handle such issues in a way that doesn t make you look like a pack of morons rambo last blood is a garbage movie there i said it bring on the hate i grew up watching the rambo movies on vhs and edited television channels so if someone wants to accuse me of not loving mindless action movies come at me bro i saw rambo 4 in the theater and left absolutely thrumming with adrenaline because i thought it was if not a masterpiece certainly leagues better than rambo 3 and felt like they at least put some effort into addressing the complexities of the issues at hand with how outsiders view violent civil conflicts and the futility of helping in regions where such help is marginal at best and bloodily counter productive at worst last blood on the other hand appears to have been conceived for the sole purpose of getting to the last 20 minutes of the film and no one gave any real thought or care as to how the film got there in order to talk about this i m going to have to deal with some extensive plot spoilers so now is your chance to bail now if you don t want this keep scrolling almost there a little more last chance okay then don t blame me if you re reading this and don t want spoilers the long and the short of it is that rambo is now living on a horse ranch in arizona with maria a woman who is at least approximate to his age and gabriela a young girl who is graduating from high school and going off to college the first big problem here is that rambo s relationship to these two women is never actually explained at the end of rambo 4 you see rambo going to a place that you assume is his family farm but in this movie you don t really know who is related to whom rambo isn t gabriela s father or even her grandfather there s mention of her mother and a deadbeat dad whom rambo stopped apparently at one point from beating up the mother i m not even sure of the relationship between maria and the younger girl i think she might be an aunt but i can t say for sure seeing as the film spends at least its first 20 25 minutes establishing the family dynamic the fact that i couldn t figure out the relationships makes this just sloppy writing this is especially annoying because the entire reason rambo goes so batshit later on is that the girl is so emotionally important to him the one good thing in his life ok according to wikipedia rambo has no relationship to any of these people the horse ranch belonged to his dead father and maria is the grandmother to gabriela and maria just runs the household that at least makes sense but this relationship isn t really ever laid out clearly which shouldn t be that hard you at least know that gabriela s mother died of cancer when she was little and after that her father who was apparently always an asshole leaves her with maria and goes off to mexico fast forward to now when maria is 18 a childhood friend of hers gizelle who is referred to as a bad girl by maria is now living in mexico and she has found gabriela s father who apparently lives in the same mexican town despite rambo and maria repeatedly telling her that her dad miguel was a violent asshole and she shouldn t have anything to do with him and rambo even telling her that she should maybe let her urge to visit her father simmer a little before she makes the decision to visit him gabriela almost immediately ducks out and drives down to mexico to go find gizelle and her father i ve already spent two long paragraphs here so i ll keep this short dad is an asshole surprise and tells gabriela to beat it gabriela is sad gizelle takes her to a club where she sells gabriela to some sex traffickers who then drug and kidnap gabriela gizelle then calls back to maria tells her she lost gabriela and rambo goes full batshit mode and drives down to mexico where he finds gizelle realizes she sold out gabriela and gets her to point out one of the bad guys stuff happens rambo fails and gets beat up by the rest of the bad guys who decide not to kill rambo a guy who just tortured one of their own and showed up with a pistol and a knife gabriela gets doped up gets her face slashed and is put to work as a forced prostitute eventually rambo learns from an independent journalist who just happens to watch him torture one of the bad guys and saves him after his beating where to find gabriela but alas after he saves her she dies in his car as they re just i don t know driving around in the dark yes it makes no sense he finally drives over the border and brings her body home then buries her on the farm maria just packs up and leaves rambo tells her he s going to leave too but that s a lie he goes back to mexico and kills one of the two lead bad guys in a way so that they know it was him he then comes back home preps his murder maze and in the last 20 minutes of the film kills everyone the end you might be thinking hey this actually sounds awesome what s the problem but honestly everything is just so stupid it s not that the characters make stupid decisions although there is some of that but that every time the story reaches a point where something could be done in an interesting intelligent nuanced fashion the car screeches off the road and goes into the ditch by the time you get to the climactic battle at the end it is boorishly obvious that the entire reason the film was made was to show rambo running around an underground death maze murdering bad guys with knives punji sticks old timey guns booby traps and other assorted ordnance claymore mines and hand grenades there isn t even any strategy or cleverness to any of it bad guys just die over and over running flat out into death and screaming in blood and pain i m sure many of you are still shaking your heads and saying hey what s the problem the problem is it is stupid sloppy work this movie could have been a really good reflection on the plight of old soldiers who never really left the war behind on ptsd and re integration on wanting to be left alone only to find violence at one s doorstep again and while you might think there s some of this the movie only ever skims the surface like a stone skipping across the water but never sinking just bouncing back out on the other side of the river what was the point of the movie what themes does it dig into what message does it send you could get the same thrill just firing up your xbox and killing dudes in some fps game for a couple of hours and yes i am skirting the whole mexico issue the only thing i ll say about that is you could have told the exact same kind of story even with most of the major plot elements relatively intact and not ...