Dracula’s Revenge Comic Script Done

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Yesterday, I finally managed to finish off the script for the second of the two-part comic book miniseries for Dracula’s Revenge. It’s now in the hands of my editor and old friend Jeff Mariotte over at IDW Publishing. I’ve seen a few of the pages from the artist, Szymon Kudranski, and they’re great.

Although it was great fun to work on it, it’s a relief to be done with it. My Eberron novels are calling. It’s funny how 100,000 words doesn’t seem like all that much when you have seven months to go, but their size grows by the day as the deadline gets nearer. My first draft isn’t due until early May, but I need to revise my outline right now to bring it into line with the way the game world has developed since Wizards first sent me the early material.

Writing a comic book isn’t like anything else. With a novel, a short story, a screenplay, and so on, you have a rough structure you work within, but you can roam around a little bit. A comic book has a tight framework that you can’t deviate from too much. Each issue has 22 pages of story, and each page can only have so many panels on it. If you want the story to flow properly, you have to map it out page by page before you script your first panel. It’s like working a puzzle as you write.

For someone like me who had two years of engineering courses in college, using both sides of your brain like this is a lot of fun. Your creative side works the story while your scientific side wrestles with the structure. With any luck, it comes out as a seamless whole.

You’ll find out in March, when the first issue goes on sale.

Dracula’s Revenge Website Up

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At my day job at Human Head Studios, we just launched a new website for Dracula’s Revenge, a boardgame of tactical combat that pits Dracula and his minions against Van Helsing and his friends in the catacombs beneath the streets of Victorian London. I designed this game for Grenadier Models back in the early ’90s, but they folded before they could publish it. When I hired on with Human Head, I dusted it off and presented it as a possible game, and the team loved it. With luck, it should be out in May or June.

My friends at IDW Publishing have licensed the setting for a two-issue comic-book miniseries I’m writing. I should have more about that on the official Dracula’s Revenge site soon.

The Circle Is Complete

Cover of The Authority RPG

Once upon a time, I got a call from John Nee at WildStorm Productions. They wanted to produce a collectible card game, but they knew nothing about how to pull it off. Jim Lee and Drew Bittner had gotten together and designed a first draft, but they wanted a professional’s opinion about it.

John got my name from Martin Stever, an old college buddy of mine. John asked me if I’d be willing to fly out to La Jolla, California, for a week to hammer at the game. We worked out the details, and I was gone.

The game was rough, pretty much what you’d expect from people who’d never designed a game before, but it showed promise. Drew and I smacked the thing into shape over the course of that week and lots of later e-mails and phone calls. Eventually it became the WildStorms CCG
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Testing Your Wings

I went back to freelancing right after I left Pinnacle at the end of 1999. I worked for a lot of different companies, including the fine people at Atlas Games. I wrote a section of En Route for them, as well as the whole of Seven Cities. Michelle Nephew did a bang-up job editing both books, pushing me to make my work better and better.

While I was working on Seven Cities, Michelle contacted me about a freelancer she was working with on another project. He was a game designer at VR1, a computer game company in Boulder, Colorado. He’d been there a long while without ever seeing anything get published, a frustrating situation for any creative soul. He was thinking about making the jump to full-time freelancing in the adventure game industry. Would I be willing to answer some questions, give him some pointers?

Sure. Why not? Michelle says this guy has talent, I believe her.

His name was Keith Baker.
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Eberron Coming Along

I just turned in the cover order for the first in my trilogy of novels for the Eberron setting due out for Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the Coast this August. The first book in my series won’t hit stores until early 2005, a month after the first novel in Keith Baker’s trilogy, but it was a kick describing in detail how each of the characters looks and acts. I don’t know who the cover artist will be yet, but I have high hopes.

Knocked Down, Back Up

If you stopped by this morning, you might have seen that Forbeck.com wasn’t here. My domain registrar failed to renew my domain name on time, despite the fact I paid the fee weeks ago. Still, they made things right and got it ironed out within hours of me noticing it, so we’re back up and running again. Whew!

(Don’t) Quit Your Day Job

Last week, T.S. Luikart (I assume—he’s the only T.S. I know outside of the long-dead poet Eliot) rightfully pointed out that you should examine your potential output before you decide to make the leap to full-time freelancing, if that’s what you’re after. I dug around in my files a bit and found the old article I’d written on just that for my “Gameslinger” column at (the now-dead) www.GamesUnplugged.com. Rather than put it up as another PDF, I’m posting it here.
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On the Mortality Radio

The fine folks at Mortality Radio asked me to appear on an upcoming show, and I was too stunned to try to weasel out of it. I’m scheduled to be on the January 23 show, which starts at 8 PM EST. More details as I have them.

Hardy Har Har

One of the perks of working in a creative field is having friends that do the same. Every now and then, one of them does something fun for you because of it.
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Talking ‘Bout a Resolution

The New Year is a time for looking both back and forward, for seeing how you’ve done and making plans for doing better.

One of my resolutions this year (as I mentioned before) is to make regular updates to this site. So far, so good, although the year’s just starting now, so we’ll have to see how it all plays out.

This week, I have something to help some of you out there with a possible resolution: to become a published writer. Earlier this year, Anna M. Dobritt asked me to write an essay about being a freelancer in the adventure games industry. She published it in the apparently short-lived RPG Freelancers Guide, but I’m making it available to you now for free.

I often get asked how to break into the adventure games industry as a freelancer and what you need to do once you’re there. (I wrote a feature article on this once in the early days of InQuest (Gamer) Magazine.) “The Freelancing Life” is a short and sweet answer. Enjoy!