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 13th
to the early 16th 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
