Hello everybody!
I'm Renee Ritchie, the editor slated to work on Six Guns Lasers. This is my first opportunity to really dig into the Traveller system, and I've been reading the Twilight Sector books every free moment I have. The setting is nothing short of fascinating, and I love the level of detail given to countless aspects of life in the Twilight Sector.
Martin Dougherty, our author, recently provided
a great preview of one of the weapons that will be featured in Six Guns Lasers. The Rourke 'Light Cobra' is small, but it's fierce. I wouldn't mind packing one of these babies myself as a day-to-day weapon.
If you like what you see and want to see more, kick us a few bucks. Backing the project for a dollar gets you front-row seats in the creation of the book, and you can have your say with what you'd like to see in the book. All of the backer levels get you access to this forum, in addition to the other goodies promised.
Now, about crowdfunding...
The typical image of someone who's crowdfunding their project is the poor broke schmo with a great idea, but no personal means to unleash it onto the world. That's not always the case, though. Several well-established companies and individuals with awesome ideas do crowdfunding for various products to reach out to the community. Neal Stephenson's CLANG is an excellent example of that (and I'm still kicking myself for not contributing to that one). Launching a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter or IndieGoGo isn't any indictment on the financial stability of the organization launching it.
My entire professional experience in the RPG industry has been through small press indie companies. In addition to working with Terra/Sol Games, I'm the in-house editor for Machine Age Productions, and we do Kickstarter campaigns for all of our major releases. For folks like Mike and David Hill, my boss at Machine Age, it ensures you can pay the people working on the product, such as outside authors, artists, editors, layout designers, and the like. Relying on product sales to pay your talent after the product release is risky at best for small presses, and if you don't pay your talent, you won't be able to hire them back, and other artists and editors and authors won't want to work with you. Also, by funding new creative ventures this way, other resources from product sales can be allocated to improving imprint-wide infrastructure, like upgrading the website, getting better web hosting, appearing at conventions, promotional materials, and the like.
As Mike said previously, if the Kickstarter fails, Six Guns Lasers won't get made. While I'll be sad that I won't be working on it, it makes much more sense to give the readers what they want. It's why we have the developer's forum option for this project, and if you're already backing and have ideas you'd like to share with us, that's the perfect place to do it. Alternatively,
contact us on the Terra/Sol website. Help us make the things you want to see.
I, for one, would love to hear from you.