So, we've had this blog site for 15 months now, so I thought I might reflect on how things have worked out.

When we started up the blog we were quite disenheartened with the whole business of being a "professional" writers. It was probably all of our own making, but a number of different events had conspired to mean that we had fallen out of love with writing RPGs. Whilst things might appear to be a bit off-and-on over the past few months, I think "the Orifice" has certainly served its purpose. Nigel and I are writing again. The decision that we made, which has enabled us to get back our enthusiasm for writing, has been to give stuff away for free.

When we started the Orifice up the idea was to strip things back to what we loved doing. To stop worrying about unit sales, reviews and award nominations. The idea was that we would just put stuff out when we'd got it done - not to bother with things like editing and marketing that were driving us mad. The theory being if we put stuff out for free people might download it and read it and, if they liked the material, run it or integrate some ideas into their own games. How much of what we have done is actually being used we can never, I suppose, be sure, but I think we are getting a fair few downloads.

After our intial zeal for producing free material, a bit of realism and commercial thinking has crept back in. I guess it kind of started with the POD of Midgard. There's just something more satisfying about having a quality hard copy of your book in your hands than even something printed on my home colour laser printer can achieve. At that point we started to think about what is the best way to get our products seen by as many people of possible. The answer, so Dave at Fanboy3 tells us, is to get into distribution. And so we have started to think about a few products we might produce that we could make commercially viable enough to interest distributors. The money isn't our main concern here, but getting a product into distribution will mean it will have costs that need to be covered. And whilst the retailers, distributors and printers are all taking some money out of our efforts, it seems like we would be cutting off our nose to spite ourselves not to make a bit of money for ourselves too. Having looked into the process before now the sort of money we'd be talking about wouldn't massively affect the price of the product anyway - the casual gamer might be surprised to know how little of the cover price actually ends up in the writers', or game company's, pockets.

This, then, brings me to Savage Worlds, and the Freebie Settings. Savage Worlds suits us in so many ways. As mentioned in a previous blog post, a generic system allows us to put out a setting very quickly. With Savage Worlds this is especially the case - the system is so versatile it takes very little to embody your setting with a few rules tweaks, edges and hindrances. Also, it's a system that seems to have a good following, making it a good starting point for any commercial venture, as the D20 System was when we started up ten years ago. The freebie settings allow us to kill two birds with one stone. Whilst I would hope putting them out is bringing us new interest from the Savage Worlds fanbase, it also provides an avenue for our wacky and weird (and some of our fairly traditional) setting ideas, enabling us to put out the setting with as little effort as possible.

I'm probably not doing myself any favours, commercially speaking, putting these settings out so quickly one after the other. I'll end up getting through my backlog of half written dead projects and then end up with a big wait for the wacky idea, or get tied up with a bigger project like savage etherscope, and end not putting anything out for months and everyone forgetting we exist.

I'm just a slave to my own exciteable personality - as soon as i get an idea I just want to work on it all day long, and as soon as i get the job done, even to the poor standard of editing in these freebies, i want to get it out there. But then thats why we started up the Black Orifice, so that we can work quick and fast, put things out for free and not worry about endless dull proofreads, editing and rewrites. I tell you if we could find someone who enjoyed editing as much as i like page dressing and we both like writing, and who would do it for free, we'd conquer the world (or maybe just do what we're doing now without the typos and internal contradictions!)

I think Savage World's slogan: Fast, Furious, Fun sums up my attitude to writing as well as it does to gaming, showing why Savage Worlds is a perfect vehicle for my style of writing.

Cheerio,

Ben