the Miniature World of Mike Peters

 

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