A short long overdue update about the production of The Lot Bay tabletop RPG.

Grief

In early April, I was about to send out a late update to clarify where we are and provide a new timeline, but then something very sad happened. On a quiet Saturday morning, someone passed away in an unexpected and brutal way. This was a total shock. To be honest, since then I had a hard time going back to RPG work, writing, and editing. I resumed work on TLB this week, actually I did it by writing about the recent grief in an indirect way.

Layout

I finished building the layout tool for The Lost Bay, www.pixelppr.com, and laid out the first two PDFs: the module Parabyte by Samantha Leigh, and The Traveller, an urban legend included in the core book. You should have received those by email a while ago (Parabyte was sent to the Urban Legends pledge level and above).

Styles for the books are established, and Pixel and Paper allowed for a quick layout test of the whole manuscript. It works well, but upon exporting the PDF of the book, I realized it was too big! It is too thick, too heavy to ship, and too expensive to print. I was not expecting that, and it has led to pruning.

Pruning

I am now cutting the foliage of the book. Do not worry; I am not removing anything too drastically. Actually, I am doing three things:

• Reducing the size of the Urban Legends. The Traveller and Chemwaste alone, in their short versions, are about 6,000 words long. They are playable as one shots, but can easily spark mini multi session campaigns. The last one to go is the revised version of The Hollow Hitchhiker, which now takes place in the Highways district.
• I have removed three urban legends from the book and kept only the more mature, tested, and played ones. That leaves 18,000 words of adventure in addition to The Travel Guide, the procedural part, which covers the six districts and is about 19,000 words. Lots of tables!
• I am cleaning the text. As the Urban Legends and Travel Guide are somewhat intertwined, I need to remove some references that do not make sense anymore.

Once this is done, the manuscript will be sent back to editing for one last pass, and while that happens, I will move on with the layout.

Summer

Right now, I am not able to give you a precise updated timeline. This is partly because I have all this unexpected work to do and partly because I am still a bit discombobulated. As I tend to systematically underestimate the work at hand, I would rather refrain from making enthusiastic projections for once. The book is most likely to be finished and shipped this summer, though I am not sure exactly when yet. I should have a cleaner timeline in one or two months. I am sorry about that.

New Home

Some of you might already know that I have opened a new website for the game: www.thelostbayrpg.com

I have shared a rules reference (an online memo), updated character sheets, notes on TLB solo playing, the character generator, community links, an example District, and more. I regularly post snippets of the work I am doing. It has already become the new home for the game, and ultimately, I will move everything here: from zines to resources to third party content. I also share RPG adjacent content, such as my work diary, sources, findings, and inspirations, TLB related things. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified of updates. The next post should be the bestiary.

I am really sorry that my private life is impacting TLB development, though I am not surprised; TLB owes so much to personal experiences and history. I am relieved to be getting back to it.

Thanks a lot for your support and patience. I hope life is treating you well.

All the best,

Iko