Well, now I'm glad that over the years I've only purchased a handful of Palladium Books products at full price.  The only products that I remember purchasing at full price were The Valley of the Pharaohs, 2e Palladium RolePlaying Game, and Adventures in the Northern Wilderness.

I bought these books back in the mid-to-late 1980s.  Since, then I've picked up some other used books at highly discounted prices.  I doubt that I will ever purchase anything from Palladium Books at full price again.

That's prediction #1 down, I wonder how else my predictions for the next 12 months will rank

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;266405Once you realise that all these game companies are run by ordinary gamer geeks, nerds hopped up on Mountain Dew with cheeto-stained fingers, everything else makes much more sense.

I suspect many dot coms, F/X houses and video game companies have similiar origins.   Some of them are quite successful.  

Personally, I do not blame any publisher for drastically altering a work to fit their own personal vision.   The publisher - not the author - is risking their capital to print and promote the book.

I am hopefully publishing my own RPG next year and I am doing it on my own dime because I want 100% editorial control over content and presentation.  The cost of this total directorial control is that I must accept all the financial risks.

Quote from: Spinachcat;266535I suspect many dot coms, F/X houses and video game companies have similiar origins.   Some of them are quite successful.  

Personally, I do not blame any publisher for drastically altering a work to fit their own personal vision.   The publisher - not the author - is risking their capital to print and promote the book.

I am hopefully publishing my own RPG next year and I am doing it on my own dime because I want 100% editorial control over content and presentation.  The cost of this total directorial control is that I must accept all the financial risks.

Good points. Unless Kevin is rewriting stuff to screw folks out of payments I sorta don't care if he takes a submissions and rewrites the way he wants to publish it. I can understand a writer being irked that someone didn't think their stuff was up-to-snuff but that's how most people tend to think about their creations.

Quote from: Drohem;266525Well, now I'm glad that over the years I've only purchased a handful of Palladium Books products at full price.  The only products that I remember purchasing at full price were The Valley of the Pharaohs, 2e Palladium RolePlaying Game, and Adventures in the Northern Wilderness.

I bought these books back in the mid-to-late 1980s.  Since, then I've picked up some other used books at highly discounted prices.  I doubt that I will ever purchase anything from Palladium Books at full price again.

I separate my loathing of Palladium the company from the products, myself.  If they make a product I want, I'll buy it.  I still intend to at least take a glance at Dead Reign - the only reason I wouldn't buy it is because I suspect its take on zombies won't be what I want (and, frankly, I prefer a more elegant system these days).

I'm not calling for a boycott, after all, just calling the guy out for being such a tool.

Quote from: CavScout;266543Good points. Unless Kevin is rewriting stuff to screw folks out of payments I sorta don't care if he takes a submissions and rewrites the way he wants to publish it. I can understand a writer being irked that someone didn't think their stuff was up-to-snuff but that's how most people tend to think about their creations.

I fully support Kevin's prerogative to do what he wants with his money / business.  I'm not on a crusade for freelancer's rights or anything.  I just like mocking Kevin when he does stupid things.

When you constantly alienate freelancers to further your own ego, that's stupid.  When you talk about how much you love a book someone is writing for well over a year, then after it comes out tell everyone the writing sucked and you completely rewrote it and take away pretty much all the credit from the original authors (who you were saying were so excellent for the past 15 months), that's stupid.  When you've already done these things over a dozen times over the past decade and want us to believe your version of the story is true this time, that's stupid.  Etc.

Is there an original thread where folks complained about this?  I saw Kev's response, but not the original post.

Quote from: Zachary The First;266567Is there an original thread where folks complained about this?  I saw Kev's response, but not the original post.

There's a couple of locked threads in their Dead Reign forums.  Although even there it appears that another, earlier thread of complaints already "disappeared".

Well I too wondered that, so I took a quick look around. I couldnt find that. But then again that makes sense. You know Nimmy and the rest of the like mind think tank on the pally boards wont allow bad talk about their eminence. It probably been locked and/or deleted.

Well I stand corrected here you go.

Quote from: jgants;266549I fully support Kevin's prerogative to do what he wants with his money / business.  I'm not on a crusade for freelancer's rights or anything.  I just like mocking Kevin when he does stupid things.

When you constantly alienate freelancers to further your own ego, that's stupid.  When you talk about how much you love a book someone is writing for well over a year, then after it comes out tell everyone the writing sucked and you completely rewrote it and take away pretty much all the credit from the original authors (who you were saying were so excellent for the past 15 months), that's stupid.  When you've already done these things over a dozen times over the past decade and want us to believe your version of the story is true this time, that's stupid.  Etc.

No issues if a writer doesn't want to work for him here. I would suggest though that when dealing with creations, like we are, the ego thing is probably not only on the side of Kevin. As long as the writer is getting paid what he is due, it shouldn't matter if Kevin takes a submission and uses it 100% as is or re-writes 99% of it.

Otherwise we just have a pissing contest betweem two writers who think they write better than the other guy. If that makes sense.

Quote from: Drohem;266525Well, now I'm glad that over the years I've only purchased a handful of Palladium Books products at full price. [...]  I doubt that I will ever purchase anything from Palladium Books at full price again.

Why? Weren't they any good?

Is this that weird thing where because you think the authour or band member or director or whoever is a fuckstick, you can't like their work? That's wacky.

Would the 1812 Overture be less glorious to listen to if it turned out Tchaikovsky beat his wife? Would FATAL become a fun game if it turned out Byron Hall was a Salvation Army worker helping the substance-abusing homeless?

Wacky.

Quote from: SpinachatI suspect many dot coms, F/X houses and video game companies have similiar origins.   Some of them are quite successful.  

Sure. And lots ain't

But hey, we're not talking about the success of rpg game companies. Sembieda's successful, isn't he? We're just talking about how muddled and disorganised game companies are. I've seen a lot of small businesses, and it's quite remarkable just how fucked up and confused things can be and people still manage to make a living out of it and be successful. You talk to the manager and get one impression of the business, then you look in the cash register and get an entirely different impression.

Sembieda's a gamer, through-and-through. Same with Steve Jackson, Mike Mearls, or any of those guys. Once you realise that, all the rest of their muddle and the petty arguments about nothing make sense.

Quote from: CavScout;266543Good points. Unless Kevin is rewriting stuff to screw folks out of payments

I think it has happened too consistently over the years to entirely mark this possibility off the list.  And I think in Dead Reign's case, it's at least a deliberate act of revenge.  The authors were doing the book to break into the biz with a writing credit.  KS has now denied them that.

Quote from: Gabriel2;266595And I think in Dead Reign's case, it's at least a deliberate act of revenge.  The authors were doing the book to break into the biz with a writing credit.  KS has now denied them that.

Sounds like just a battle of egos, each thinking they the better writters and only one who could actually publish. :idunno:

I guess it's time to roll out Bill Coffin's estimable rant once more...

QuoteIt starts with Kevin receiving a manuscript proposal for Rifts Greenland. Kevin likes the pitch and greenlights the project. Whatever the freelancer's ideas for the book are, Kevin gets jazzed over the concept of the book and develops all on his own what the book ought to be. Only, this is going on while the poor freelancer is writing the book, so surprise, surprise, when the book gets turned in, it's not what Kevin wanted. This is a classic case of somebody hating Black Hawk Down because when they went ot see it, they were in the mood for M*A*S*H. So, Kevin does what he does best, he writes the freelancer a patronizing letter on how excited he was when the project was first pitched and how disapoointed he was that all that promise never materialized. Sometimes, the freelancer doesn't take this well, and he goes off on Kevin, which is never a good thing because then it prompts Kevin to call his other writers, read to them the letters he and Angry Freelancer traded back in forth and lament about how sad it is that there are so few professionals in this business.

But back to work. We now have a Rifts Greenland is not to Kevin's liking, but he wants to put the book out, both because he wants his vision of it realized and because he needs new product. Objectively speaking, it might, in this case, be smart to write off Rifts Greenland and instead put out the book he's been working on himself. Only he can't, because he hasn't been working on a book himself. He's been busy running a company by chewing out the guys in the warehouse, fighting with Disney over preserving his right to sell Rifts tee shirts he'll never produce once the movie comes out, and calling his other freelancers to bitch about how difficult his life is.

Thus, as shipping day looms, Kevin has no Rifts Greenland, and no Mechanoids Space, BTS 2E or whatever he really ought to have been working on all this time. But he's got bills to pay, so he must produce something. And, since he got all fired up about the very idea of Rifts Greenland way back when the project was first introduced, he started pimping the book thirty-two seconds after he received a signed copy of the book contract from the freelancer. So now the public expects Rifts Greenland whether its ready or not. And what's more, he put the book on a release schedule that would only be met if every stage of the book's production goes entirely according to plan.

There are (surprise!) a few problems with this. One, by now Kevin ought to know full well that unless he's got a dependable full-timer writing for him (ala CJ Carella) he hits his schedules a fraction of the time. So, until he goes a year or two hitting every single release date on the nose, he ought to budget 50% more time for his projects than he does. Or at the very least, he should have the decency to not get bent out of shape when his unrealistically planned project goes overdue, further cementing his company's reputation for having one of the most unreliable production schedules in the business.

The second problem at this stage of the game is that Kevin never actually looks at a finished book until it's a few weeks away from its date with the printer. This, my friends, is akin to a flight crew performing a pre-flight check on a plane that is taxiing down the runway. If Kevin were smart, he'd give all incoming manuscripts a full edit the moment they hit his desk a) to see if they are any good and b) to speed the production process along. Kevin's editors would certainly do a better job of making sure the book is what Kevin wants if Kevin molded it a bit himself to begin with.

But no, what happens is Kevin gets the book, often holds on to it for a period of time, then drops it on his editors, who he routinely criticizes for not really being able to edit. Then, 12 days before print time, he expects to be able to do a quick brush-up edit himself on a book that by his reckoning, shouldn't need it anyway. This particular recipe for disaster, in comparison, makes mixing buckshot, nitroglycerine and pistachio ice cream together in a Slurpee machine seem like the next big thing in frozen desserts.

Thus we come to the best part of the process, where Kevin -- already disgruntled because he feels obligated to rewrite Rifts Greenland into what it should have been in the first place, and even further disgruntled because he feels this is pulling him away from the projects he really wants to be working on (even though he really wasn't working on them anyway) -- undergoes a commando rewrite of the project. He's got about two weeks to do it in, a vision of the finished project and about three half-decent ideas ot get him there. Obviously, Kevin can't get blood from a stone, so he writes up some half-strength filler material, knocks about some reprint material, and takes what he likes from the original Rifts Greenland manuscript, giving himself co-credit for having the wisdom to give it a second chance. If he's really hard put, he'll take a look at the art that's already come in and mine it for ideas ("Hmm...this D-bee wasn't in any other books, but it looks cool, so I hereby declare this guy the Grinkle-Nosed Hogtailer R.C.C. Nobody will mind if I reprint the picture, especially once I Xerox it and scribble a few more details on it myself..."). If he's got a freelance writer he works with who he trusts, he'll call them up and ask for a quickie section on something that tangentially refers to Rifts Greenland by the end of the weekend.

What's that, you say? When does he play test any of this stuff? That's a good question. Too bad it's got a bad answer. For starters, he's only got a few days between when he finishes a book and when he gets it out to the printer, so there's no time for a proper shakedown. Not that any of this needs one, don't you know, because the Palladium engine works, it's rock solid, the fans like it judging by the number of books that have sold over the years, and all those jerkoffs over at RPGnet who keep telling him to revamp the engine can kindly take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Third, when I was still working for the man, Kevin didn't role-play anymore. He was too busy running a role-playing game company. (Some poor saffron-clad Tibetan is up in the mountains right now trying like hell to wrap his brain around that one.)

Once Kevin's ready for layout, he prints out the whole mess and fires up his wax machine because he still puts these damned things together by hand. What's that? Desktop publishing software? Naw, he's faster without it! To his credit, he lays out the book in fairly decent time, but he also illustrates why all Palladium books have a simple two-column format. Kevin isn't going to cut columns to shape or deviate from formula because he might have to reflow a section of the book, and when he does, all those columns have to be standard or else none of it works. Where this really makes you want to bang your head against the tip of an artillery shell is when he lays out 80% of the book, discovers that he'd like to rename an alphabetically ordered item on page 5 and decides that it would be too much work to reflow the rest of the list. You know how every so often in a Palladium book you'll have a series of NPCs or OCCs or something and one of them is grossly out of alphabetical order? That's why. I used to think it was because Kevin couldn't read the alphabet. Now I know it's because he's truly, madly, deeply in love with putting books together in ways that even Monty Burns would decry as old-fashioned.

Voila! He's finally got Rifts Greenland in the bag and off to the printer. And all it took was him not sleeping for a week (after he already skipped a week's sleep handling the Post Office of the Apocalypse sourcebook fiasco), telling a fresh freelancer to go take a hike, calling up his other workers to say that somehow this might be his best work yet, executing a slapdash layout job, recycling artwork and telling himself over and over again that nobody does it like than he does. In that regard, he's dead on, because 1985 ended way back in NINETEEN EIGHTY FUCKING FIVE.

http://spleen.mearcair.net/rifts/coffin.htm

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;266578Why? Weren't they any good?

Is this that weird thing where because you think the authour or band member or director or whoever is a fuckstick, you can't like their work? That's wacky.

Would the 1812 Overture be less glorious to listen to if it turned out Tchaikovsky beat his wife? Would FATAL become a fun game if it turned out Byron Hall was a Salvation Army worker helping the substance-abusing homeless?

Wacky.

Actually, no, the products weren't that great.  There were some cool ideas that I could mine from them, but, in totality, they weren't all that great.  That's why I have not made a serious effort in collecting products from Palladium Books.  

Yes, if I knew that Tchaikovsky was a wife beater it might change my view on support his works.  In the case of FATAL, probably not; it's just that bad and tasteless.

What is wacky to one man, may not be to another man.