4,981

Sometimes we get so caught up in our future projects we forget where we began. 

I've been working frantically as of late.  My poor proofreader/copy editor has been struggling with three sick sons who insist on sharing their germs with her.  We're working on a host of new projects for this year and finalizing a publishing schedule for next year.  The writing contest is in full swing.  In the middle of all of this I was talking with an old friend about our upcoming Ubercon demos.  He seemed surprised that I wasn't running anything for our Neiyar campaign setting, which is what we normally run at Ubercon.  "Figured you'd do something special this year," he had said.  At first I thought he was referring to the whole upcoming 4e release.  The he said it was like the 5 year anniversary of the game.  I told him no, we didn't actually publish it until 2005 (though we had run demos of it as a homebrew before that).  But then I'm thinking, "wow, has it been three years already?"   And then I realized that it would be three years this week since we did the mass release of the game.

WOW.

I went through my old reports and discovered that Neiyar has sold 4,981 copies since it was released in March 2005.  Not bad for a game sold completely through word of mouth without normal distribution.   It's an exciting and strange feeling to realize that there are people all over the world playing a game you wrote.  Probably one of the oddest moments was getting a tear sheet for a review that ran in the German game magazine Spiel Press.  The review sure did look nice.  They used some of the illustrations from the book and all.  But I don't read German, so I have no idea if it is as good as the editor told me it was, and they couldn't provide me with a translation.

But still, how cool is it to get a review of your work in a language you don't even know?

 Neiyar was my first RPG product.  The original layout was ugly.  The copy editing sucked.  I can admit these things now, because I think it's important to acknowledge when something you created sucked.  Because once you can acknowledge that, you can fix it.  And we did.  We revised the book a year later with better design and layout.  Fixed some embarassing typos.  And we learned a lot about publication production.  Neiyar was important to me, not because of pride, but because it was my sandbox.  It's where I learned what would work and what wouldn't.  It's where I put my work out there under a harsh spotlight and let others play with it.  It made me aware that my own assumptions about game design didn't neccessarily mesh with the assumptions of others.  It made me learn to adjust.

And now three years later I can say it is still important, not because my name is on it, but because almost 5,000 strangers have copies of it sitting on their bookshelves or on their hard drives.  Some people bought one of those early copies and hated it, and probably never forgave me for it.  Some people bought it and have send me e-mails telling me how amazing the world is.  But the truth is somehow almost 5,000 people looked at the book and thought it sounded interesting enough to buy it.  Not because of some polished marketing program.  Not because of glossy ads in trade magazines or oversized booths at conventions.  But on the strength of the idea.  And now there are folks around the world playing in a world I created.

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