My daughter said I posted the mobile URL so see if this works better on your computer:  

Judges Guild's Bob & Bill: A Cautionary Tale - Kindle edition by Bill Owen. Humor & Entertainment Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Thanks David! It's good to know that it works way over there where you are staring down the polar bears.

While it seems as if I have held back on the D&D campaign, I really don't have any more specific memories to pass on. It seemed like a rollicking group and perhaps the "adrenalin" just erased a lot of those memories. On the other hand, maybe they are deeply stored and might take more TNT to blast them loose. To accomplish that breakthrough, I have had the idea of getting 5 of the original party together for a Skype conference call and see what the kibbitzing might turn up.

My money is on Marc Summerlott. Being a machinist he's always been a precise sort of guy AND he has judged or played D&D for nearly the entire time since 1974! The problem is that he just doesn't seem to get into forums, email and so while I have asked him to help with explanations of "how we did it then", he hasn't put anything in, so far.

This is not to denigrate Craig, Carl & Mark's input as they probably will have much good stuff to add also. Perhaps the chemistry will harken back to that time.

Some of you may have come into D&D 'cold' without any wargaming background but I came from being a judge of dozens of miniature games and hosting a variety of boardgame extravaganzas also. To me it was very natural to try lots of different magic and combat systems. It's what we did already routinely. Frequently the changes were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. And we did not document much.

Bob may have and perhaps Bob Jr. will find something in the papers. I have been surprised at what he had literally from our first days in business. Things I had never seen because we operated in such a compartmentalized way: Bob with product creation, assembly and accounting and I will layout and orders. So I inserted some of this in the edition.

Indeed very few people saw the extra material from the second edition because the hard-bound coffee table edition was so expensive via Print On Demand. So the Kindle allows me to get the material out there this way.

I am very pleased that the photographs look a LOT better than some of the Kindle books I have read. But I researched best practices on how to present them to maximize the quality while keeping the file size small enough to make the book inexpensive. I figured that I already made the ideal edition from the standpoint of gorgeous, large photographs and scans on the premium quality paper of the 2nd edition and that the Kindle was never designed for ideal picture reproduction. So my focus was on making it very inexpensive this time. Yet the photos really are better than I expected.

Now I have 2 more books that I could Kindlize ...a war memoir of a guy from WWII and a history from the early days of WWII. So I'm having fun with this! And of course there are other TOP SECRET projects that I can hardly contain myself and not mention. Never hire a marketing guy to be a spy.

Bill Owen wrote in Bill Owen Q&A:My daughter said I posted the mobile URL so see if this works better on your computer:

Judges Guild's Bob & Bill: A Cautionary Tale - Kindle edition by Bill Owen. Humor & Entertainment Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Purchased. Thanks for making this version available, Bill.

Just a little note about the kindle book: if you look at the web preview or cloud reader, some of the acronyms like ifw or icd appear in lower case letters (as I just rendered them). But in the actual Kindle book they appear as "small caps" IFW or ICD instead. I thought I goofed up something but apparently the preview version does not take into account character formatting.

If those acronyms were really all lower case letters, it would give the book a 1960s ee cummings sort of vibe. Which is no longer cute in my mind. I was going to fix that this morning but first downloaded a preview onto my "Kindle" (it's actually an iPhone version since only my wife has a real Kindle), and the small caps are correctly displayed.

To those who have bought the Kindle edition, there are bound to be other grotesque errors (besides inelegant writing) that if you find'em, would you let me know? Thanks!

PS I think that if an author makes a corrected edition, those who have bought it already can download it free of charge and I think there's a way I can contact all indirectly to let them know. I am just learning this e-publishing thing! To-date the limit of my e-publishing knowledge has been pdf's.

Thanks THG! I appreciate hearing from gamer/readers.

As a full disclosure, the 3rd edition does not add anything extra about how Bob's campaign was run. That was the only caveat that reviewers of the first edition made. I know a lot of you guys that is of prime interest and I just have not dredged up any more written materials or memories to pass on. So I don't want anyone to buy this and be disappointed.

I wrote the book with two other goals (than describing the campaign) and that was dealing with the wonder of Bob's friendship and the business aspect of DIY gamer publishing. I know that the latter is very tempting for people to get into as they have a fun time with their unique approaches and the light bulb turns on "why don't we sell this?" That can work out fine and that's great but I think that the wise counsel is to consider what sort of changes your hobby may go though. Like extinction. And how if failure doesn't get you success an too. But there are some unique aspects to small scale publishing that I try to go into in the book and "exit strategies". You get into the "dungeon" and have a bag of loot; how do you get out? I deal with that at length in the new edition. If only I had that to read at age 23!

While my role in the RPG hobby was modest, I wanted to produce a mini-autobiography from the gaming standpoint because I think that there is a tendency to put some of the big guys on pedestals and I am not aware of their ever writing a homely version of their game playing times like I have done. I wanted to show it as accessibly ordinary. The key difference between Bob and I was the incredible breadth of his reading versus my preference for miniatures games and the graphic design.

Everyone has unique interests and you can't really force them. I remember Bob pushing me to do original writing of dungeon/wilderlands settings. He saw my bookshelf and said that I should just use that but at that age I had not read all of those having bought some of them with good intention to read eventually, cherry-picking bits out of some, or, as "what the book would say about me"--superficial, yes, but all so common a reason to buy a number of products. I was a game fan and Bob was a Swords & Sorcery fan.

Now back to the primary interest for many. In November I will make it a point to get as many of the original campaign on a Skype conference call to go over the old days with special attention paid to how we did it back then and the evolution of that. Maybe the familiar voices (and faces if we can get everyone to have a camera on) will help me remember more. So stay tuned!

They say that it will be "up" at Amazon in 3-5 days and might be at like one book store in Ulan Bator in 6-600 weeks. So if you are within an ox cart's ride of Ulan, pop in and advise the store's carrier sneetch to fly off with the ISBN/EAN13 are: 1503071332 / 9781503071339

Thanks Tom! Perhaps it could have been fluffed up to make it longer but at the 3 stages* I wrote it, I just ran out of memories. And I think I hoped that the hundreds of pictures were each "worth a 1000 words" but perhaps with Kindle particularly seem so small that they don't have the impact that they did in the larger editions. All the same, even if the book was a tiny morsel, I'm glad it was thoroughly enjoyable.

Unrelated progress report (but might address the "too short" issue): I have now made overtures to 4 other guys in Bob's campaign (& waiting on 2 replies) to have a Skype video group chat and see if we can stir up specific memories about how we did things back then with specific words on combat/magic systems and their evolution. I think one of the things that would be worth trying to grapple with is Bob's approach. My never having played in another person's campaign, I don't think about style or approach of the Judge any more than the fish is aware of the water he swims in and "breathes". So stayed tuned to this spot because I will try to provide more details asap.

*Underlying the writing was something of the stages of grief and perhaps that held me back initially but memory not getting sharper.

TollHouseGolem wrote in Bill Owen Q&A:Thoroughly enjoyed the book, Bill! Thanks for sharing this with everyone. It was, in my opinion, too short. Or maybe I just read fast, hard to tell. The "what if" scenario about potential buyers of your share was very intriguing - hard to tell how that scenario could have played out, but fun to think about nonetheless.

Tom

Thanks but my budget for naval art acquisition is limited to non-rare South American postage stamps!

Speaking of naval battles in South American waters, we have had a couple of refights of the River Plate battle of 75 years ago. One being with older guys never played wargames before (a success and shown below) and the other younger ones who had diverse gaming backgrounds including FRP.


Next week I hope to have another such game as there are several who want to try it out. Good to do in the afternoon when the summer sun is strong enough to drive us indoors.