If I've counted right, there are 13 "Dead and Back" story pages on this site, not counting what is posted in the draft PDFs. Talking with a friend the other day, they said this was a rather large collection of free work, and perhaps I should go ahead and try to publish this as its own collection of stories - with or without the actual game.
On one hand, I do tend to get lazy and not work on things if I don't have a dead line. Thus I see this site as a great tool for keeping me honest. I rather see this as a competition, and do my best to keep myself ahead in posts/ replies. (Is that healthy?) But on the other, he does seem right.
I have a number of items in the works, though now I'm questioning if I should post them.
* 2 or 3 stories describing New Birmingham
* Journal of a Russian SSNBM captain
* Very long description/rant on Africa,
* A thief comparing an AK to gauss weapons
* Stranglove faction member justifying nukes
* 2nd person story involving a type III
* Discussing life in an alien commune
* An alien's view from within a Demon PA
So, let me ask the group:
- What else do you people want to see?
- Any further issues within the AZ setting that must be addressed?
- Where would be a reasonable cut off point?
- Does anyone else want to contribute ideas, NPCS, Creatures, and so forth?
- Should "Anarchy Zones" be the sole setting for D&B, or just one of the possibilities -like "deadworlds" for AFMBE?
- After this amount of effort, should I stop posting, and start trying to actually sell this? If so how?
Keep going
You should keep posting here.
The thing is, that developing a detailed setting is long hard work and not very rewarding in many cases because you can put a lot of time into it and then just show it to 6 of your friends, or you can try to get it published and show it to 15 different publishers without getting an approval.
But if you know you have a group of regulars who look forward to your stories, who, indeed, get bored when the lab is quiet and they know they only have a 15 minute break and they owe their wife a website for a client, so they can't really work on their own stuff and they say, "I wish there was some cool story from Anarchy Zones, I mean I still don't know what's the deal with Birmingham, and are there any other places on the planet that have zombie armies, and wouldn't it be cool if one of them had a zombie army and they used it against other human communities", then you would have some incentive to post, because you don't want us to be bored do you?
(Take that William Faulkner! That's actually not the longest or best sentence I've ever written.)
And just because you've put something out there for free it doesn't mean that you can't later publish it for money. Remember how long the Atomic plug-ins were free Fuzion suplements before they became professional system neutral RPG supplements?
In fact, if we're worried about developing stuff here that we can't later publish for money all we have to do is ask Keeton to add a function so we can delete book pages, just like we can delete our blog entries, then you can collect all the stories, work on the layout and presentation, find some or develop some artwork or images, and go to the printer. Or barring publisher interest or access to money for the printer you could check out on-demand printing, or pay per download or the ransom model. And then delete everything you shared with us here.
Even if Keeton would rather keep it up here for posterity, Jared Sorensen sells PDFs that he made available free elsewhere earlier and you can still find if diligent.
So keep going, build support. Remember, the cooler you make Anarchy Zones, the less poor people skills will hinder you when seducing others to your cause. Everyone loved Andy Warhol.