V20 Black Hand – Vaguely Open Development

Vampire: The Masquerade

Happy Tuesday!

I just got finished handing off essential documents for V20 Dark Ages over to Mike for layout and art direction. Boy are my arms tired. But my next development project right now is V20 Black Hand. Not settled on the name yet. I’m thinking, “Dark Conspiracy: V20 Guide to the Tal’Mahe’Ra”. We’ll see.

Anyway, I don’t have the time to do a full open development process here. We’re on a tighter deadline than some other books, and I have a pretty good idea of what I want to see. I may share some drafts down the line, but in the mean time, I wanted to pull back the curtain a bit on the early parts of the process for me.

This is two documents. The first was my pitch outline. I talked to writers, then we had a bunch of email conversations, requests for sections, that sort of thing. Afterwards, I gave them all assignments. They’re not 100% final, since I’m still in the process of sending out contracts. But this is basically what the book will look like. You’re missing some context, so bear with me. I literally have over 1,000 emails pertaining to this outline. I doubt anyone would want me to post all of those.

This is a super exciting book for me, because I have some CWoD veterans, some new writers, some super awesome indie game designers, and some people who have been working with me on the revived Dark Ages line. This is a group of people who have shaped and been shaped by this book.

Here’s our preliminary outline.

Here’s the final assignments that morphed out of it and the surrounding discussion.