WHAT HAPPENED:
I’ve been grinding hard on this Bestiary. I don’t always get as many done as I wanted, but it’s getting smoother and production is picking up. I’m not going to work myself to pieces on this project, even if [REDACTED] really gets under my skin about it. I’m good with fans. I really am! But this [REDACTED] has the gall to tell me that “I’m not playing until you have a Monster Manual® and Dungeon Master’s Guide® out!” Yeah? Go [REDACTED] yourself. And you know what’s worse? I’m genuinely conflicted about releasing them at all purely because of this asshole. I can hear it now: “Yeah, I told him I wuddn’t gonna play until he put out these books here. This game sucks.”
You, [REDACTED], are a special kind of stupid, and have contributed nothing to the creative process. This isn’t being done for you. It’s being done for the nice people who make me want to play my own game. If you do ever figure out how to read and your mommy says you can play, it won’t be at my table. You’re a smelly [REDACTED].
That felt good.
Now it may surprise you to learn that I can NEVER have a Dungeon Master’s Guide® OR a Monster Manual® for the Chronicles of Ember. Those are more than copyrighted material. Those are registered trademarks of WotC. I can’t use those names even if I wanted to, because it would imply that I was affiliated with WotC, and if they wanted to protect those trademarks (AND THEY DO), they’d be forced to sue me into the ground. And I would lose. Open-and-shut.
SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO CALL THEM?
The new books will be (spoiler alert) The Bestiary and The Loremaster’s Guidebook. I like to think that one doesn’t need a LMG to run this game if they know how to run basically any other game. All the adventures I release tell you step-by-step what to do, and they provide monsters as you need them in the story. Making a book like that involves more than just shitting out some words on a page and calling it good – there is a ton of work involved, and it’s all Technical Writing. It’s not prose. It requires you to be consistent, accurate-yet-concise, and informative. And if you can manage it, make it fun to read, too. I’ve long said such a book would be either an encyclopedia or a pamphlet, and I stand by that. I’ll design the LMG after I finish these monsters. I’ve got a long way to go.
CONCLUSION:
Some people are [REDACTED].
I love my job.
-Alan