Stop Press (Seriously, Though Not Stop Press)

Today, 13th Age goes to press.

The endless ways in which printing might go wrong never cease to surprise me. Taylors have a big plant vacation between now and GenCon, so this is cutting it fine, and the team have been working late nights, with hair pulled out where it is present, and there has been some off-colour language, from me, anyway.

The proofing process has been interesting. 13th Age has been a big collaboration, and the layout has been fiendishly complicated, technically. The first proof was too dark, strange artifacts appeared where there should have been transparencies, and it’s taken Taylor’s top chap Craig Landers to fix things at the printer end and Chris Huth to make changes at the layout end, while Rob Heinsoo and I just muttered in the backgrounded and wrangled everyone. We even called on Beth Lewis, Pelgrane Emeritus, for sage advice. Craig told me in his Texas drawl to stop bugging him while his working, so I did.

For Rob, it must be a distinct contrast to working at Wizards of the Coast, where he could no doubt just breeze in, write a roleplaying game and then pop to the Hasbro cocktail lounge at lunchtime for Mohitos and olives.

So, Craig took these pictures on his iPhone of the interiors so the colours are not accurate.