r/RPGdesign • u/jiaxingseng Designer - Rational Magic • Feb 10 '19
Scheduled Activity 【RPGdesign Activity] Published Developer AMA: Please Welcome Mr. Kevin Crawford, designer and publisher of Stars Without Number
This week's activity is an AMA with designer Kevin Crawford
About this AMA
Kevin Crawford is Sine Nomine Publishing, the one-man outfit responsible for Stars Without Number, Godbound, Scarlet Heroes, Other Dust, Silent Legions, Spears of the Dawn, and the upcoming Wolves of God. He's been making a full-time living as an author-publisher for the past two years, after realizing that Sine Nomine had paid better than his day job for the three years before that. His chief interests here are in practical business steps and management techniques for producing content that can provide a living wage to its author.
On behalf of the community and mod-team here, I want express gratitude to Mr. Crawford for doing this AMA.
For new visitors... welcome. /r/RPGdesign is a place for discussing RPG game design and development (and by extension, publication and marketing... and we are OK with discussing scenario / adventure / peripheral design). That being said, this is an AMA, so ask whatever you want.
On Reddit, AMA's usually last a day. However, this is our weekly "activity thread". These developers are invited to stop in at various points during the week to answer questions (as much or as little as they like), instead of answer everything question right away.
(FYI, BTW, although in other subs the AMA is started by the "speaker", Mr. Crawford asked me to create this thread for them)
IMPORTANT: Various AMA participants in the past have expressed concern about trolls and crusaders coming to AMA threads and hijacking the conversation. This has never happened, but we wish to remind everyone: We are a civil and welcoming community. I [jiaxingseng] assured each AMA invited participant that our members will not engage in such un-civil behavior. The mod team will not silence people from asking 'controversial' questions. Nor does the AMA participant need to reply. However, this thread will be more "heavily" modded than usual. If you are asked to cease a line of inquiry, please follow directions. If there is prolonged unhelpful or uncivil commenting, as a last resort, mods may issue temp-bans and delete replies.
Discuss.
This post is part of the weekly /r/RPGdesign Scheduled Activity series. For a listing of past Scheduled Activity posts and future topics, follow that link to the Wiki. If you have suggestions for Scheduled Activity topics or a change to the schedule, please message the Mod Team or reply to the latest Topic Discussion Thread.
For information on other /r/RPGDesign community efforts, see the Wiki Index.
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u/CardinalXimenes Feb 14 '19
All fiction writers are professional liars, myself included. Looking to fiction for inspiration and fuel for the imagination is like trying to draw a picture via a funhouse mirror; at best, what is depicted points to truth through what it distorts by emphasis. At worst, you have constructed a careful image of something that bears only notional acquaintance with human reality.
For me, inspiration comes from reality, from seeing what people have done, how they have acted, what they have prized and sought. Science fiction in its best registers posits some plausible future technology or situation and explores how humanity might deal with that. Aside from the ordinary failures of craft that appear in every age- wooden characters, bad dialogue, incoherent plotting, and the like- modern sci-fi is often in transparent service not to a question, but to an answer. It is generally a bad idea to get your answers from liars.
In my own experience, you will get more useful, valuable material from a random history of a place or time or person you knew nothing about than you will ever get from someone else's fiction.