So...you're a publisher now?

 

Ruckus! What news?

I have been writing Ruckus, my medieval skirmish wargame, for about four and a half years, and I have been very fortunate to have had Wargames Illustrated adopt my game and publish a précised version in 2023. It did well and now my game is played in countries all over the world. The plan was that Wi would publish my much bigger more complete version of the game. Well after giving it a lot of thought I have decided to publish my game independently

Working with Wi was fun, they made it all look so easy and indeed for them it is! It is what they Do after all and they do have a whole team to do it, and they are very practiced at it, and they do have all the resources, a big studio, expensive cameras, tons of great looking terrain and backdrops, thousands of well painted figures and the expertise to use all these resources to produce an excellent product.

They also have a publisher, a distributer and lots of connections…

I have gained some insight to the process from working with them however I never realised how big an operation it really was. Well who would have thought that getting a game published could be so much work?

On the plus side the text of the book is already written and has been for about two and half years so there is that…

Yes… but it turns out that the writing is only one part of the business of writing a book and only a small part of designing a game. There is the editing, the overall design, the layout (so important), the artwork, the printing, the pricing, the costing, the distribution, creating a website. All of which has to be affordable on a retired nurse’s pension! Where to even begin?

The writing was easy, the game practically writes itself on the table and you just put it into words…editing is a whole different story. Editing is what shapes the game and gives it form. The thing about editing is you should never edit your own work, it should always be done by another pair or pairs of eyes, something with which I heartily concur however there is only me…

The works that make up the whole book of Ruckus have been edited separately by James Griffiths sub editor at Wi and Dan Faulkenbridge, the bossman and Editor in Chief at the mag. Each is very experienced and each has a different style. James is excellent at proofreading and always has ideas about how to embellish the text. Dan is very forthright and likes concise, compact and simple writing.

Between the two of them they have edited everything I have written and now when it comes to compiling all the separate parts and rewriting them into one whole cohesive tome I find myself using the ideas that I learnt from them and, adopting a middle way between their very different styles, which means I have pretty well rewritten the whole thing! The content hasn’t changed, just the style and the presentation.

And that it seems was the easy part.

Making it work

Where do you begin? How much does it cost? What do we need? How do you do it? Do I have the skills?

To be honest I nearly gave up, after all my friends and I have a game we all enjoy, why put myself through it? However, my wife, the fantastic Brum, had no doubt that I would publish and prompted me to go for it.

The project

No that I am no longer with Wi I can have free reign and print the book that I want to create, no longer tied to page count or a number of editions or the whims of the editor. With Wi, I knew that I would get one shot of a limited production run and so I threw everything into it, crammed all my ideas into one magnificent huge volume. However that is no longer the case, I can republish and print to order, and I do not need to have all my ideas in one volume because if  the first one is successful I can do a second and even a third…

So the project then is to create a book of the game in 200pp or thereabouts of the highest production values we can achieve.

Costing

How much will it all cost ? How much do we need up front? How do I keep track of the money?

I opened another current account, this one would be just for the project. My daughter , Lucy got involved she created a spreadsheet, ah I said more of your newfangled magic ways. She showed me how to use it, and I think it will prove to be an invaluable tool. You can use it to do projections…

I need a plan, an achievable affordable plan. I have assets, my family and my friends. Between us we have quite a few resources and not a few skills. So break it down , what do we actually need?  

The cover One thing I knew for sure… I knew I needed a cover and that I needed an artist to create it. I had one name in mind Marco Capparoni! Marco is a household name for wargamers, his art graces the covers of many wargames rules and magazines and his is the box art on many manufacturers’ kits. He has great talent, there is nothing he can’t paint or draw. His pictures are always accurate and lifelike. They are bright almost cheerful depictions, but I had examined Marcos profile and I found other pics there of dwarves and demons and darker things. I wondered if I could persuade Marco to give me something from the darker side.

I messaged him, he said he would be pleased to help, and we discussed what a Ruckus cover should look like. Marco is a true professional and great to work with, he makes that part of the process easy and fun.

Marco's rough sketches based on the ideas I gave him

I wanted a deep and doomy dramatic picture but my daughter, Katie, persuaded me otherwise. “Your game is fun Dad, the cover should reflect that!”

And of course she was right…

So the cover will have a deep and doomy theme but also be fun.

Marco sent me a selection of sketches based on my initial brief, I considered and then chose one, but which one? You will have to wait and see.

Ok, the cover is on its way what next?

 

Pics

I need lots of top quality, high resolution photos, that’s something I can do! I use my 1 phone 8 pro, which is a bit old now but has an excellent camera. I have a few tripods, a remote blue tooth button (avoids camera shake) and half a dozen cheap LED lights that I have bought on offer.

I have an attic where I can lay out a scene and my figures and some various bits of terrain. I was spoiled by Wi, my collection of scenery and backdrops is very limited in comparison. Ah well, I shall just have to use it in imaginative ways!

Nice pic but is it good enough? Nope, not quite, it doesn’t go in!

Wi achieve excellent results when taking pictures, they use the very best technology, cameras of course, but also excellent lighting. Lighting is very important. So I have bought every reasonably priced, middle of the road quality LED light that I can find, most of them on offer. None of them are particularly powerful so I use them all, there is barely room for me to squeeze in and get the pic!

They ensure that every pic looks bright and each figure and piece of terrain stands out and is in focus. This is actually an impossible standard to attain as even with the best of cameras there is no way you can get everything in focus, no camera, no lens can produce a sufficient depth of field. So how do you achieve it?

They cheat that’s how! They use photo stacking. This is where you take several images and photoshop them together to create a final picture with all the bits you want, the focused bits, and lose the bits that you don’t want, the fuzzy bits.

So I use another resource, my son, who is a photoshop wizard, I take the pics then it’s over to you Frankie. I have sent him dozens of them and so far he has  not complained…

The Art

Another aspect of this production was that there was to be no AI generated art, and I wanted to avoid using big corporations and established names so I enlisted family and friends wherever I could. I asked my oldest daughter, Katie, if she would like to do some illustrations for the pages, she is a very talented illustrator and to my delight she agreed.

I wanted her to use medieval marginalia and creatures from Ye Bestiary. Once she had done some research and realised what these were she was well up for it! She loves anything fantastical, magical, strange. I downloaded a few images I liked from the net and asked her to do them “Why would I just copy them? You don’t need an illustrator to do that!”

And so the inside of the book shall be festooned with original marginalia! Fantastic!

The Layout I also need to have a book lay out. I had a mad idea about getting the necessary software and doing the layout myself, but I soon realised that is actually a process that requires certain skills and a working knowledge of Adobe InDesign. I might well be able to achieve this myself after a six week course and a lot of mental sweating, but I would still be slow and spending most of my time correcting mistakes!

I had no idea but then it occurred to me that I have friends who do have an idea. Geoff Solomon-Sims had been publishing his own books for a decade. His game the Woods, is well loved by  gamers and is played all over the world.

We met, we had a chat Geoff agreed to do the layout “I love doing layouts!” he said. “Hooray” said I.

Geoff also has the insider knowledge about printing, what paper to use, how to go about it , and a number of good publishers that he has used himself.

How do you publish a book?

Don’t ask me, I am clueless! How much does it cost? Again no idea, so I investigated. You can get anything published by Amazon. They use Print on Demand. Every order they get- they print a book. You set the price and they take a commission. Simple right? Well yes, anybody can order a copy anywhere and it will be printed and sent to you but there is no quality control. The publisher will be a local one to the customer and from what I hear the quality is variable and can be very poor. And I want a product with high production values.

After some investigations, mostly googling and asking friends in the know (Geoff) I discovered there are several ways that you might self-publish a book. One way is to create a pdf and sell it through Wargames Vault, this is actually quite hassle free. Its PoD again but the quality is assured as they only use one publisher that is available in all the countries that they cover. This is great news for me as quite a few Ruckus players live in the US, Australia and Europe, this will do away with expensive Postage charges.  

For the Uk tho, I want a printed book of the best possible, affordable quality.

I asked for quotes from several companies. I wanted affordable of course, but not at any cost. That ruled out China which is shame as you can get excellent quality books published ever so cheaply, so cheaply in fact that even after adding in shipping they are still a reasonable buy.

I finally settled on Biddles, a small, publisher in Kings Lynn. I wanted the book to have the highest possible production values that I could afford-top quality paper of a reasonable thickness, strong soft covers, pictures that POP and well bound so it’s tough enough to stand frequent handling.

The Extras

Ruckus is a tabletop wargame that uses cards. The cards are expensive to print and as the game has been out for some time a lot of players already own the cards, therefore I decided that we would not print the cards to begin with. They will be available for free as a download form the game website. If there is enough demand and we sell enough copies of the book then I will consider printing the cards, it will be an opportunity to update them and use real human created art to replace the AI that is currently on them.

We will also create a QRS which will be a free download.

How many is too many?

How many do we print? I have not a clue! I struggled for while considering how much money I would need to order 500 copies and wondering how I would afford it and what would happen if we didn’t sell them all and what would happen if we sold all of them and people wanted more…

 This seemingly insoluble conundrum really foxed me, and I really did not know what to do for the best. Some friends had mentioned Kick Starters, but this is another whole world of unknowns for me and something I thought I did not want to get into.

And so I did some investigating and then James Griffiths of Wi called for a chat, and he knows all about Kick Starters and eventually the penny dropped, you put no money up front with a Kick Starter. He gave me some good advice, and I constructed a plan for our KS Campaign.

We will launch the Kick Starter in February 2027.

 

Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! I bring Big News!!!

The Book of Ruckus will be published in the near future, possibly by Christmas, however not by Wargames Illustrated. For reasons that I can not discuss here but will become apparent in time, WI will not be publishing Ruckus, instead it will be published by me independently with a handpicked team of creative people that I have asked to help.

It has been great fun working with Wi, I have learned a lot from them, and they have fully supported my game and distributed it around the world. Working with them has made life easy as they have not only taken care of the editing, publishing, distribution, layout and illustrations but also the majority of the photographs and no one does that better. They have also published an fantastic set of top quality cards.

However, we are going our separate ways, amicably I should add, which presents challenges but also opportunities.

It has always been the idea that we should publish one large volume with all the various new rules, Retinues and Scenarios  as “The BIG Book of Ruckus” this worked for both parties as a one off print run suits WI’s business model and I get my book published, however, we now no longer need to do just one print run, in fact it makes sense and is more flexible and affordable although less profitable to do several smaller print runs.

This changes everything. It’s no longer necessary to put everything in one volume and so there will be no BIG Book of Ruckus but a slightly more humble The Book of Ruckus followed by a first expansion. This means we can make the text fuller and more explanatory, and this has required a complete rewrite adopting a slightly different style.

The Book of Ruckus will contain the full rules, twelve Retinues, sixteen scenarios and Campaign rules. It will cover the late 13^th to the early 16^th centuries from HYW to the Border Reivers.

The Supplement will be “Outlaws to Outremer-Ruckus in the twelfth century”  and will contain half a dozen Retinues including Assassins and Templars, Crusaders, Turkic Warriors, Outlaws, Feudal Knights and ten scenarios. With This supplement includes rules for the Crusades, the Barons Wars and the Outlaws of Sherwood Forest Campaign.

If all goes well a second expansion An English Civil Ruckus including rules for Pirates and small ship actions will also be published.

We will publish a downloadable printable pdf with a print on demand option as well as a high quality printed book, the  cards will be included as printable pages at the back of the book. Printing cards is very expensive and is only really affordable in batches of 1000+ and so we will only do this if demand is sufficiently high. The price is yet to be determined but is likely to be between £25 and £30 for the book and £15-18 for the pdf.

I have an excellent team. Geoffry Solomon-Sims of Oakbound will be doing the layout and is my publishing guru, Marco Capparoni is creating the cover, Katie Morris is producing the page illustrations, and Frankie Haworth will be using his photoshop skills where required. Photography will be by me and Katie Morris. 

There will be no AI art!

I will of course keep you all updated with our progress

 

 

 

 

 

 

Causing a Ruckus at Bosworth

 

I had been invited to the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre to witness a walk in participation game of Ruckus, but I arrived far too early on a bright sunny May morning and so enjoyed a blissful, sun kissed solitary walk around the battlefield.

 I found it difficult to envisage the battle as so much of the battlefield is now wooded, however there is a large board at the top of Ambion hill which has a wide landscape picture depicting how it may have appeared.

 I sat in the sun eating my chicken sandwiches and reflected on the death of kings wondering if it was as pleasant a day back in 1485 and what Richard had for breakfast that day.

Pic the Sundial atop Ambion Hill

Pic it was a well-advertised event, Bosworth are certainly on the ball with their publicity.

 I had been invited to Bosworth to take part in the Drop in Wargaming Day that had been organised by Andy Murby and the legend that is John Martin and fellow wargamers  Ian and Craig. These happy gamers have been putting on wargames at the centre for some time now and their aim is to provide a quick, interactive gaming experience for the public and an introduction to gaming for even the youngest potential dice warrior. 

Pic Ian, John, and Andy

  The wonderful setting for our game was the Heritage Room

 The doorman- looks like Bosworth is a tough gig!

Pic-Craig and Andy setting up the table
The magnificent Heritage Room was spacious and airy and easily accomodated the huge table that the guys had prepared.

  The idea was to have a huge table and allow groups of visitors to play games of Ruckus in different parts of it at the same time. This seemed to work very well and was an inspiring idea, I would like to run something similar at Attack at Devizes. 

Behind the blue screen lurks another smaller game…

…a jousting game. This was a capital idea, a short easy to learn game for short attention spans and one that fits perfecty into a visit to the Heritage centre. Everyone who played won a prize, usually a sprue of plastic warriors.

A simple fun set of rules “Jousts -Heroes of the Lists” by Ken Sidenblad and Ed Teixeira and available as a free pdf. There is a link at end of this article.

All of this terrain was also made by Andy

I witnessed children as young as 3 years old picking up terrain and figures and throwing (literally) dice and these happy gamers were quite content to let them! “We don’t use anything that isn’t cheap and replaceable” said Andy. “It’s important that it is a hands on experience”

John in particular showed exemplary people skills as he encouraged any and all comers to get involved. He has a set of simple starter rules that he has written. “Do you play wargames at home?” to a boy of perhaps six. “No” came the reply  “I do not have any figures.”

 “I bet you have Star Wars figures don’t you?” says John the reply was an affirmative “Well then just use those, use anything you have” and he gives the happy boy a set of his rules. John is THE gateway drug peddler of wargames.

  Every child and every player went out with a prize of some kind, many of which had been donated by Wargames Illustrated.

The majority of the terrain is scratch built by Andy and it is magnificent, inexpensive, and durable. 

There were some innovative features such as the thatched church roof being exchangable for a tiled one and a steeple that fits neatly into the top of the church tower, giving multiple possibilities.

And Drop in Wargaming was certainly popular! 125 people came to have a look at it, and many stayed to play. Here Ben from Edinburgh tries his luck against the unfortunate Craig who, in true Ruckus form, could not roll a six all day. 

I did join in for one game but spent most of the day answering questions, explaining rules and concepts and generally eating cake and having a thoroughly lovely time.

There are many things to see at Bosworth and many other activities. While we stayed cool in the Heritage Room and played games,  Knights in Battle reenacted scenes from medieval life and battered each other black and blue out in the hot sunshine. They were quite happy to line up for a photo if only to grab some quick respite in the shade. 

What a marvellous day it was, community centred, light-hearted, and full of fun! Bosworth had a picnic atmosphere, everywhere there were smiling faces and happy people, and I had three slices of Andy’s home made lemon cake which was as moist light and tasty as any cake I have eaten. I went home a happy man.  

https://www.bosworthbattlefield.org.uk/

Jousts Heroes of the Lists

Knights in Battle

Ruckus at Partizan 26

 

Well Partizan was excellent! Its a gathering of like minds and as such a lovely jovial atmosphere prevails. Everywhere there are games and gamers having fun.

And what games! Enormous great things with thousands of figures and dozens of elegant buildings beautifully displayed and tiny wee things with a few sometimes very large-scaled figures and finished to no less than the very highest of standards.

Overwhelming, outstanding...quite brilliant!

There was far too much to take in…

And we had a game to run…

The Queens Envoy at Partizan

A tale of Ambushment and Skullduggery.

The Story So Far. Sir Edwin Slackbladder, the Queens Envoy, is on his way to the Scottish Regent, John Erskine, with a message from her majesty the Queen of England. Good Queen Bess would like there to be stronger ties between the two nations and the message carries an expression of goodwill and plans for a more united future.

However there are followers of Mary Queen of Scots who would wish this not to be and would have Scotland seek a closer relationship with France. The notorious Reiver Red Rab McNab, who thrives on disorder in the borders, has been employed by Mary to take  Slackbladder prisoner so that the plotters may discover and thwart the Queen of England’s ambitions.

The Warden of the West March Sir Henry Scrope knows that Red Rab is riding and has set out in haste with a detachment of men to save the day.

And it went very well, in fact we won the prize for the best participation game. A big part of the reason for our success was simply down to how much my brave Ruckusteers, Christian Bailey and Jordan Linton enjoyed themselves playing it!

How could anyone not like a game when the players are so committed to every roll of the dice? So keen and enthusiastic were they that I had to caution them to slow down at one point.  I am sure that it was the sound of their laughter that drew the crowds of curious hobbyists to our table.

It made all the effort worthwhile.

Can the Queens Envoy get safely to the Pele Tower? 

We left the walls off and used various bits and pieces, tables, barrels, beds, chests etc to give it a lived in feel 

Bands of fierce Reivers wait their moment to ride to glory

And then they Attack...

The Warden rides to the rescue 

 Shootists on the hill! These guys were Outlaws, Broken Men, who randomly shot anyone! They were activated by the Happenings Card

These woodcutters were feisty ones and caused no end of trouble to both parties

These shepherds were unfazed

The view from Punishment Hill

The provisions got left behind...

Slackbladders party! 

As they near the Tower a crowd forms, is it a welcoming party?

...maybe not

Despite falling off his horse the Envoy arrives at the Tower...

...and lives to flee another day!

I had a very successful meeting with Roger Gerrish about the BIG Book of Ruckus and met dozens of Ruckus fans and so saw very little of the show and the only pics I got were of our game.

Big thanks, huge thanks to both my Ruckusteers, didn’t we have a great time?

And extra thanks to Chris for the pics.  

The Long Road to Partizan - The Plan

 

The Cunning Plan

So we are going to Partizan, but what game are we going to present? I knew I wanted to use the Reivers, but I didn’t know how.

I played several games with Rob Squires, Jordan Linton, Mark Taylor and Chris Bailey featuring an ambush using the Reivers figures that we had between us, and we began to gain a feel for how they worked on the table and slowly an ambush scenario started to evolve.

Then I painted the Queens Envoy set from FOW and that inspired the scenario. The Queens Envoy- a dark tale of Ambushment and Deep Skullduggery in the 16^th Century…

Pic the information board for Partizan

We played this through a few times but never had enough reivers figures to provide a balanced scenario and although I was pleased with my version of Slackbladder and his men, in practice they proved to be nearly invincible. Slackbladder was an excellent leader and a very capable fighter too which did not feel right for the appalling coward he is meant to be. It was back to the drawing board and eventually I arrived at a much less impressive, but more cunning Slackbladder and brought a dashing Lord Flashheart into the game to provide leadership and cahoonas.

It was only in the week leading up to Partizan that I realised that I had given my only Flash figure away as a prize at BIG Ruckus VI. I emailed Dan at Wi and he offered us a loan of the Wi GIM model…woof! 

 Now that we knew what we were doing, several of the Ruckusteers started creating Reivers Retinues. I wanted to have about eighty figures on the table which is what we had with Robin Hood last year and it looked about right. However, due to the vagaries of life only Chris was able to get some figures together which left me wondering if we had enough to stage the game. 

Pic the Irish always ready for a fight!

I thought of a plan B which involved a raid by Finn Mac Cool and his Irish as I have a lot of Irish and this would save a lot of figure painting which is time consuming. It was reassuring knowing that we had a ready-made force that we could take instead and we plodded on.

I carried on painting regardless. I had some very fine Garrison men printed from FoW by Chris and created a small Elizabethan escort for Slackbladder. With these and with Chris’ Reivers we have enough figures. Yay!

 

Last year I had no idea what to expect of Partizan, we took the same mat and terrain as we game on week after week, nothing special, we had a great day and to my everlasting surprise we won the Duncan McFarlane award for the best demo game.

This year I wanted to make more effort and create a demo game specifically for the show, a game that we could take to several shows this year. We will run it as demo at Partizan, but I also plan to use it as a participation game at other shows with up to 6-8 players and a choice of 4-6 different scenarios going on at the same time.  The scenarios will be drawn from a deck of cards for each player. As one player completes a quest or drops out we will have another step in and I aim to have continuous play throughout the day.

We will be taking the game to Attack at Devizes, Colours at Newbury and Crack Con in Derby.

 Having painted the figures and the buildings, created a new faux fur mat and some new hills  and renovated my tired old trees I turned my attention to the fluff and the playing aids.

The Profiles for each Character were printed and mounted on card. There are fourteen of them. They will be placed along the sides of the game and act as an aid memoire for the Players.

I also created some information boards. The Border Reivers is a little known conflict even among wargamers and I thought a little information might increase interest. The wonderful illustrations of Angus McBride always draw the eye!

One final detail will be 7 meters of brightly coloured cloth to cover the table which on the day before we depart I still don’t have! Lawks!!!          

If you are at Partizan please do come and look at the game and say hello, we are on table DG 34, next to the toilets.

If not , see you on the other side…