Where do we go from here?

Having taken a look at the very beginning, now it's time to ask, as Buffy and the gang once sang, "where do we go from here"?

For those not in the know, James Daswey has bought a controlling interest in Vigilance Press and is going to be running things from here on out.

What does this mean?

Well, obviously we're going to change the way we do business. Longtime readers of the blog will know that I love this idea. Change is not something to be feared.

Here's a little secret: I hate business.

I ran Vigilance Press as a means to an end. Namely, I got to make the books I wanted to make the way I wanted to make them.

The USHER Dossiers is a great example of this. I love that book. Love it, love it, love it.

But Vigilance Press was growing, and taking more of my time from a management standpoint. This meant I was writing less and less, which gives me phantom limb pain.

Now James is an artist and a damn good one, and he has an artist's eye. So expect a lot of visual sprucing up of the old place as we move forward.

As for what won't change, you can still expect to hear me blathering on here, and in your game books. I am continuing to work on Nuclear Sunset: Northeast, which will probably be the next thing you see from me, as well as some super secret projects that James and I are really excited about.

The future is here and it will be interesting, not to mention fun!

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.