At the beginning of Chris Pramas’s recent interview with The Escapist about the upcoming Green Ronin Dragon Age RPG, he starts generally, talking about the success of Green Ronin.
If you have the passion, just go for it.… It’s much easier to get your own company going than it used to be because you can start publishing electronically with little more than a copy of Adobe Acrobat. So if you are willing to do the work, you can get your own company going. Then concentrate on putting out quality material and building a reputation for it.
It’s an exhortation that speaks to the indie spirit. Although “independent” is usually taken to suggest a certain artistic style, it more properly speaks to an economic independence from the established machinery of production, be it represented in studios (in film), publishers (for books or video games), or what-have-you.
Lots of people like to think of themselves as open-minded and meritocratic in terms of the pop culture they seek out and consume. Geeks, especially, pride themselves on going wherever the good stuff is, and to hell with what the hoi polloi think.
I’m taking the long way around to get to it, but here’s my point: Head over to Josh Roby’s Rooksbridge site and have a read, or a listen, to the serial fantasy fiction he’s serving up. The PDF version of the first installment, “Dirty Work,” is free.
I put up a post pimping Rooksbridge here at Gameplaywright when Josh first announced the project, but I only got around to checking it out at length when I was making plans for how to endure the five hours between Minneapolis and Madison, South Dakota. I bought the audio files of the first two installments, listened to them in the car, and upon my arrival in Madison, immediately bought the next two (which constitutes all that there is, until installment five is released) to listen to on the way home.
As a meritocratically-minded lover of fantasy fiction, Rooksbridge is the dose of indie quality you seek. Josh is going it alone, putting it out there, reaching for the glory in the true indie spirit Chris was talking about, putting out quality material and building a reputation for it. And let’s be clear, so there’s no room for confusion: Rooksbridge is a really great story. If you’ve ever complained about how everything mainstream is garbage, or wished you could be one of the first to find the next big thing first, consider this one small road sign.