So, Evil Hat is limited in what it can do at any one time, but over the years we’ve been gifted with an incredible resource — our fans — who have, time and again, come through for us in terms of getting the word out, providing ad-hoc support of our products, acting as a distributed grass-roots customer service and sales force, and so on. Heck, the reason there’s an SRD of Spirit of the Century that has been acting as our Fate 3 SRD for the past several years is because some fans stepped up and created the document(s) for us.
We couldn’t be more pleased about this, but it’s also humbling to realize there are so many folks out there willing to jump up and help us out whenever we ask for it. It’s that realization that keeps us from making constant requests of our fans. (A good thing, too — if we pushed out too much “signal” through our fans, the general public would tire of it, and eventually our fans would too.)
All the same, we need your help today.
We want to make some parts of the Dresden Files RPG available under the OGL, but we simply have had no time or resources to do the work, there (more on what that work is in a moment). So we thought: why not see if we can “crowdsource” this one? Toward that end, we’re looking for some volunteers to help do that — and as thanks we’ll dole out some free stuff to the people who step up.
That said, there’s definitely some pain-in-the-ass elements to the process. Here’s what would need to be done by a volunteer squad:
- Siphon the text out of the PDF via copy & paste (thankfully our PDFs do not restrict this!)
- Reformat the text as a RTF file, with no line breaks in the middle of paragraphs and any spacing or spelling issues introduced by the copy & paste process cleaned up. Bonus points if you do any boldfacing or italicizing that was shown in the original form.
- Strip out ALL references to the Dresden Files intellectual property, either replacing with generic stand-ins or simply excising sections of text that aren’t crucial to the understanding of the text (here, it’s usually fine to just delete examples outright, but in other cases there will be references to the DF series woven into the text that needs a more surgical extraction and replacement).
- Provide the resulting RTF to us for editing & acceptance. If it makes it through that process to our satisfaction, you get free stuff!
We have some specific sections we want to turn into independently available OGL content; we aren’t intending to open up all the content in the game just now, though this is not necessarily where we’ll be stopping, either. Here’s what we’re looking at:
- The Basics (YS16-22) [[Edward]]
- City Creation (YS24-50) – This is a long thing, and moreover may need to be genericized to something like “Setting Creation”, but for starters we just need the stripped-down-and-sanitized-according-to-the-above-process take on it [[Daniel]]
- Advancement (YS88-96) [[Mick]]
- Aspects (YS98-116) [[Tom]]
- Mortal Stunts, specifically Stunt Creation (YS146-149 stopping before the examples), with the “mortal” adjective stripped off wherever it occurs [[Edward]]
EDIT: YOWZA! Volunteers for everything already!
To be clear, this post doesn’t mean we’re saying that the above stuff as-is is already open content. It’s not, but we’d like to produce a new version of each of them so that it can be.
So here’s what I’d like to see: folks volunteering in the comments, explicitly, so we don’t end up with four folks all doing the same block of work. Please don’t volunteer unless you’re able to take on whatever you’re volunteering for fairly immediately, so we don’t end up with someone proclaiming they’ll work on a section and then nothing coming of it for weeks. It’s absolutely fine for you to split your work up with other volunteers, however (e.g., maybe someone wants to take on the first ten pages of City Creation, if someone else is willing to take on the rest).
So how about it? Are you able and willing to step up? Tell us!
36 Responses to “We Need Your Help”
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I could do basics and mortal stunts.
As always, I’m your huckleberry — I’ll take Aspects (YS98-116).
Actually, this doesn’t seem so hard. Allow me to be the first volunteer. I’m happy to take on the Basics or City Creation (or both).
Thanks Edward, and Tom. You’re “it”! Contact me at evilhat at gmail if you have questions or have a file to hand off. Also let me know what your Evil Hat product wishlist looks like.
If you can give me a tentative deadline, so I can work it in, that’s great. If the deadline is ASAP, that’s cool too. 🙂
Daniel, we’ve got an volunteer for The Basics, but City Creation would be a big boon. On that note, knowing your skills & such, email me before you get started?
I’m in. Give me a section or two that doesn’t get claimed by someone else and I’ll work it.
Tom, yeah, the deadline is ASAP-ish. I’d like to get this out there in a timeframe measured in weeks (and that includes us handing the files off to Matt Gandy in-house to do some post-volunteer-effort editing).
I’m willing to help out, but I’m not sure how hard/time consuming it will be. Specifically, I’m willing to try “Mortal Stunts”. Will comment further tonight if I run into trouble.
P.S.
Should I be using the PDF I have downloaded (months ago – but probably the official version) from Evil Hat, or is there a specific link to the PDF fragments you’ve specified?
knnn
Mick, you’re on Advancement.
Whoops. I didn’t notice the above comments. Cancel my effort on Mortal Stunts.
I will check again when I get home from work and will help with what is left.
I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at the City Creation section.
@knnn – It looks like we just got volunteers for everything, but so long as the PDF you downloaded was downloaded after the books became physically available in June of last year, it should be in good shape. But I think Mortal Stunts is covered. 🙂
@Thomas, Daniel’s on point with that, but if he runs into trouble, you’re his backup.
Wow, that was fast! Keep me in mind for future sections.
Ping me if you have any needs. I am willing to take a bunch on for the guys at Evil Hat.
I spend a few hours a day thinking about your products anyway, might as well make that useful time.
This is great news Fred!
Gotcha, General. I’ll Advance right into it.
Damn, already filled up. And I’m really good with PDFs too (I used to work for Adobe). Well, if you need anything else, add my name to the waiting list.
Are you still looking for help on this? If so, I’d be game for doing City Creation or advancement.
Let me know!
Not presently, Christopher, though if one of the above volunteers ends up tapping out, we’ll keep you in mind. 🙂
Well, if someone wants to take Aspects from me, I can hand it off — just got another editing gig sent my way last night that has a hairy deadline. If not, I’m happy to move forward with Aspects, since I committed to it.
Silverwizard, Scott, are either of you available to step in for Tom?
Yeah, I’m available. I can start on it this evening.
[…] wird ein Dresden Files SRD geben, kündigt Fred gerade auf unserer “Schwesterseite” faterpg.com an. Es wird durch […]
@Scott Cool. Then I officially hand it off to you. Thank you.
Thanks Scott!
[…] es auf faterpg.de, der offiziellen deutschen Seite zum Spiel. Fred Hicks, einer der Autoren kündigte dies auf der der offiziellen englischsprachigen Seite zum Spiel gestern an. Wer sich nun freut das […]
I’ll volunteer as backup, if anyone is having problems making sufficient progress. I write specification documents for a day-job (300+ pages is not unusual), use the full Adobe Acrobat and I have a “motivated self-interest” in seeing sections of the DFRPG become available through OGL.
I’ve translated to Spanish -for my personal use only- those chapters, with the exception of Advancement and the Baltimore-Chicago examples of the City Creation chapter. It would be nice if some spanish speaking fans could translate those missing sections so we can assemble some kind of OGL version (previous comparison with the English version approved by Evil Hat).
Just sent the City Creation RTF!
The volunteers have all submitted their stuff. We’re going to need to run the results through an editor or two, but this initial work done is a huge first step in our intents, here. Thanks everyone!
It’s been 4 months, have you made any progress on this task? Do you still need help with editing? I’d love to help if I can do anything to speed the process….
Higher priorities consumed the editor we assigned to the job. We *are* working on it…!
Fred, did it get finished?
See the Resources page, and look for the genericized Dresden stuff!
http://www.faterpg.com/resources/