Tuesday, August 9, 2011

A Brief History of Vigilance

As we move into the next phase of Vigilance Press, I thought it would be nice to take a nostalgic look back at the company that's been a part of my life for almost 10 years.

The year was 2002.

I had just bought Godlike and was reading Mike Mearls' d20 supers rules in the back and said to one of my players, "these are all right, but I'd do this, and this, and then that". Anyone who knows me knows how completely in character this is.

One of my players said "yeah why don't you" and away we went.

Now we'd been playing it for awhile and we were having a blast, and we'd ALSO been playing Darwin's World, which I discovered on RPGNow. As I looked into the site's terms of service, it seemed that setting up a "company" was ridiculously easy.

Even though I'd never been published as an RPG writer, I decided to do it, and put together a 50 page PDF called "Vigilance". Really, I thought I'd never do it again, and gave no thought whatsoever to a company name.

However, the site required me to pick one, so since Vigilance would be the one and only book I'd ever write, I called the company Vigilance Press.

And then a funny thing happened. The book made money and companies that had weeks before not even returned emails from me were suddenly entertaining serious freelance pitches.

I was off and running, and really all because an impulse decision.

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