Goodman Games

Something you do not mention in your submission guidelines is the issue of previous publication. Many good articles are publicized on local campaign pages, just as they used to be published in little-known fanzines back in the day. What is your view on this?

To be more concrete, if I have published something on my campaign Wiki, are you still interested in publishing it? It is not a highly popular or well-published page, more an online reference for friends, tough it is occasionally (like 2/year) mentioned on boards like ENworld.

Thinking about the open call for ritual submissions primarily.

"Accepted submissions will be commissioned for exclusive publication by Goodman Games"...meaning it can't be published anywhere else. If you are able to remove it from those other locations, that shouldn't be a problem.

Tempting, tempting!!

Now to fight the laziness that would prevent me tidying up my home rituals.

MMM

With regards to rituals for submissions; would you prefer rituals which are directly applicable to 'adventuring' or may we stray a little into rites which might be more useful in character driven gaming?

Another question: The old 3.5SRD contained a lot of spells that would be rituals in 4E. What is your view on replicating these? It is almost inevitable that many 4E rituals will have similar effects, but what about using old names and such?

Starfox wrote:Another question: The old 3.5SRD contained a lot of spells that would be rituals in 4E. What is your view on replicating these? It is almost inevitable that many 4E rituals will have similar effects, but what about using old names and such?

Great question! While some 3.5 spells and 4E rituals might look alike, be sure that your ritual is born out of 4E --- we're not simply trying to fill in the "3.5 gap" but rather explore mechanics and magics that are uniquely 4E. Rituals open up a lot of possibilities that didn't exist in 3.5; explore these possibilities before reskinning old 3.5 spells into the new edition.

Remember how disappointing it was to open up the old MERP book and find the spells that mimicked AD&D ... and how cool it was to find the new spells that accomplished stuff that AD&D could never conceive of? (Or maybe you don't. MERP came out, what, 20 years ago?) Regardless, the ideal manuscript will be new magic, something that is both mechanically balanced and exciting, all at once.

//H

I sent in a bunch of rituals now. Many of those are conversions of 3E (and earlier) rituals that were lacking in the PH and other sources. While I see the value of new rituals, I also feel that the loss of a good magical effect is a blow to the game.

I realize there is a risk some of these will appear in Arcane Power. I did not try and "camouflage" their origin in any way - keeping the original names. Many of the effects evolved a great deal on migration to 4E and are now new effects, just keeping an old name. Changing these to new names is pretty trivial.

if you like what I did, things can naturally change in an editing process. if you don't... Well, then there is no need to discuss it.

Thank you, Starfox. Back from D&D EXP now, and catching up on my emails. Expect an email from me this week.

//H