Just a quick note: Atlas Games has always relied primarily on freelancers
for our product lines, and this is true of Penumbra as well. Anyone
interested in writing for the Penumbra line should drop a note to
[EMAIL PROTECTED], to ask for guidelines.
The first few products have been written by people who we already work with.
Even so, it has varied from John Tynes (who is a freelance line editor for
the Unknown Armies Game) to Mike Mearls (who had just done a couple of small
contributions to multi-author works, and early last year expressed interest
in writing a D20 adventure), in terms of how much experience we had working
with the writer. I expect that as time goes on we'll be giving ink to a lot
of talented first-time authors as well as established professionals who
haven't worked with us before.
Something that is really fascinating about the D20/OGL thing is the way that
writers now have a larger marketplace to sell in as freelancers. If a range
of healthy D20 publishers is out there and interested in buying material
from the "slush pile," as unsolicited manuscripts/proposals are called, then
a writer has good reason to put together a complete, polished manuscript on
spec -- if one publisher doesn't find it suits their needs, it will be easy
to offer it to others.
The proprietary nature of RPGs has largely discouraged this in the past: If
you wrote an adventure for one game, and the game's owner didn't have a
place for it on the publication schedule, you typically were either out of
luck or had to do major surgery to make it work for any other RPG.
Consequently, most writers for RPGs are working under a contract to some
kind of outline provided by a publisher, and the publisher is often
committing to a project before knowing how good it's really going to be (and
may incur a lot of expense and missed deadlines to get a disappointing draft
up to snuff; or may publish something that really isn't top notch).
Open gaming not only brings new free market dynamics at the level of
publishers the people they sell to, but between authors and publishers as
buyers of material. I think this is a good thing all around. As a
publisher, I like the idea of competition among writers to produce the best
material, and being able to pick the best of what's available to us; as a
writer (if I were still doing the freelancing thing) I'd be attracted to the
idea of multiple markets for the very same work (just like the glory days of
short story periodicals) and the idea that I could focus on writing and
leave the publishing work to someone else.
(If you have the ambition to be a publisher, go for it; but if you're in
this because you like to write, it's lousy if you have to start your own
company and do a lot of things you don't particularly love doing in order to
do that. Certainly the existence of Wizard's Attic and Tundra Sales
Organization make it easier to be a small publisher, but there's no way to
escape a lot of the headaches that you just don't have if you're contracting
with someone else to publish your work.)
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John Nephew voice (651) 638-0077 fax (651) 638-0084
President, Atlas Games www.atlas-games.com
