Monday Meeting With Myself

Rich is on his yearly vacation, communing with nature or taking his family to Wallyworld or something. It’s something that requires him to be away from email, and the very idea of that causes my brain to shut down, so I don’t remember exactly what he said he was doing. However, before he set off to the Great Unplugged, he asked me to handle the Monday Meeting blog.

Of course, there is no Monday Meeting, so it’s all very esoteric. Am I meeting with myself? Do I pretend to meet? Should I log into Skype and talk to myself for an hour? How can I possibly have off-topic jocularity? I mean, I have been playing The World Ends With You: Solo Remix on my iPad, and I have a lot of random thoughts about the intersection of traditional RPG tropes into modern culture and the hyper-mercurial nature of fashion as enshrined in gameplay, but who will I tell these random thoughts to now?

Breathe, Eddy. It’ll be okay. You can get through this. And actually, now that I think about it, one of the questions I get asked a lot is what I actually do for Onyx Path these days. That might be a good thing to go over.

The easy answer is that I now work full-time for CCP on the World of Darkness MMO, and have since October 2011 (although I have been working on it to varying degrees since 2009). When Onyx Path was formed, Rich and CCP both asked me to act as a liasion between the two companies, since I share part of Rich’s brain on where we wanted Onyx Path to go back when it was “CCP Transmedia,” and CCP wanted to make sure someone who is invested in RPGs is getting the right resources from the company involved. So, once a week I meet with Rich on Skype and we talk about the current projects, any outstanding needs between our two companies, and what we watched on television this week. I also organize the CCP approval process, trying to get things in front of the right people at the right time.

To make things a little more confusing, there were some projects that CCP was in the process of working on before Onyx Path was formed, so I had a small number of duties to wrap up from that phase (ending with me developing Victorian Lost). Soon after that, Matt and Rose both tempted me with short fiction work. Bill followed suit, and next thing I knew I was writing and developing books for Rich again, although this time I’m doing it all as a freelancer for Onyx Path. None of this is actually related to my CCP duties, but they don’t consider it a conflict of interest (Bill is also doing some freelance work on Apocalypse, for example), so here we are.

I’m not actually a full-time member of Onyx Path, and a lot of the duties I was doing for CCP/White Wolf (such as proofing print-on-demand, organizing the schedule, and so on) have moved to other capable freelancers working with Rich. But the relationship I have with Rich both personally and professionally sometimes muddies the waters a bit, so it comes across that I know more about things than I really do.

Speaking of knowing nothing, people are emailing me the status of stuff this week.

 

Art Direction (Mike Chaney)

Hunters Hunted 2 – PDF went live on Wednesday. PoD files are at Lightning Source.

M20 – Should have all the sketches in over the next couple of days.

Rage across the World – All the art is in and approved!

Anarchs Unbound – All the art is in and approved.

Syndicate – Final proof is with CCP

Void Engineers – Seen sketches for about half of the stuff.

Demon – Sam [Araya] has completed two pieces thus far and is working on the last 3 this week.

Necropolis DC – Cover is in and approved.

Guildhalls of the Deathless – Artists are working on art.

Strix – Final proof is out to CCP.

MtC Ready Made Characters – Getting descriptions from CA as those were left out of the text.

Changing Breeds – John Bridges is talking over comic ideas with Stew.

 

Development/Writing (Rose Bailey)

First Draft: Ex3 core, MtC DC, m20 core, WtA White Howlers, DA Darkening Sky, HtV Monstrous Basterds

Second Draft: v20 Red List

Post-Second Draft Development: WtA Book of the Wyrm, VtM Rites of the Blood, VtR Blood and Smoke

To Editing: MtA Void Engineers, DtD core, w20 Cookbook

Today’s Reason to Drink: It’s not Onyx Path related, but I have a new book coming out soon! If you’ve never read the original Sherlock Holmes stories, or want to start a more critical analysis of the original material, you may enjoy Watson Is Not An Idiot, available October 30th through MX Publishing. You can pre-order from the US or the UK.