rosco60559 wrote:so pb doesn't just call one of you guys up and say that they're looking for ideas and let you loose to do your thing very often? sounds like a waste of talent and ideas not assigning ideas and letting you guys go nuts. not to mention it could put a huge dent in that huge list of books they keep listing every year that they want to put out.
First of all we are freelancers, we're not staff writers who get assigned specific material.
Palladium Books is not Time Magazine nor is it Wizard of the Coast in which a dozen writers
get together and get told what to do and how to do it. Each one of us came up with an idea,
wrote it down, submitted it, Kevin like it, saw it went with HIS vision of that particular game
system, and made it cannon. That's what happen and will continue to happen. Kevin is never
going to say hey Taylor write me a zombie book. That not how it work around here. Now what
does happen (not in my case) is we sometimes sit around and bounce ideas across. Out of
curiosity, at Gen Con 2015, I asked Kevin, the three headed dragon that was on the cover of
Palladium Fantasy 1st edition and appears now on some T-shirts, I asked if that dragon was a
real creation that the Defilers fought or something he just drew up. He told me something he
drew up. Around Christmas time, I said that dragon is a symbol of Palladium Fantasy and it
should be something real in the game. Not just cool art work. So Kevin gave me some
parameters. I spent a week came up with an idea and submitted it. He LOVED it so much he
expanded upon the idea and now the dragon is cannon and will appear in the upcoming Rifter.
This is how Palladium book operates. All current freelancers both writers and artists will tell
you the same thing. What you're asking for would exist if we all sat in cubicles in the Palladium
office and Kevin called a meeting and assigned worked for us to do as staff writer. Yeah that
would be kind of cool if it happened that way, but you loose some of the magic and creativity
in the process. That why Kevin will write some book in the way he wants them to appear
because only he knows what should be there. And other time he gives me the freedom to see
PF in my own unique way that will fit into his vision. And he let guys like Taylor White come up
with a fascinating and cool concept like Chaos Earth Resurrection. He tells Chuck we need
some artwork for Northern Gun and he draws these amazing images that just blows your mind
away. That is the freedom we freelancers enjoy. And me personally, I wouldn't have it any
other way
. And yes sometimes a cool idea will bump out another cool idea. I feel bad new
material keeps bumping poor Jason Richards Chaos Earth: First Responders. But at the same
time Palladium Fantasy has a Bizantium. Rifts will have some cool new books coming out as
well. And one day Jason's book and some of the other books in the back log will see print. A
new idea has be put out right away because well...it's a cool and neat idea that will sell. That's
the name of the business game. The best part being a freelancer, it means our lives don't
depend upon Palladium books. We all have real lives outside of Palladium and we write/draw
on the side. Many of us wish what we love we did full time. I'd rather spend my whole days
writing away then cleaning the bathrooms of a casino, but Palladium books is not that kind of a
company, and unless something phenomenal brings in a ton of cash, that will never happen.
I'm not talking about a book that sells 15,000 copies or 50,000 copies either. I'm talking about
a book would have to sell like a Harry Potter novel. The RPG universe doesn't exists like that
anymore, and hasn't been that way since the 1980s and early 90s. The point is we work for
Palladium because we love the Palladium system and enjoy the opportunity Kevin gives us.
Where else could I sit around with a group of people and debate whether or not you could
teleport into pool of water without any adverse side effects?