It’s no Radio Lightning, but Polish Radio’s External Service interviewed me this morning about Grey Ranks. And I found out we’ve been added to the bibliography page at a really good Warsaw Rising site. We sent the Warsaw Rising Museum (which Frederik Jensen just visited - he says it’s excellent) a copy and they are looking it over, which I’m pretty excited about. I’m hoping for a laundry list of errors and a lot of enthusiasm, but we’ll see!
I just found out that Grey Ranks has been short-listed for the Diana Jones Award.
We’ve been getting a ton of email from people in Poland in the last few days, and here’s why. Piotrek Czarnieki, a reporter for Gazeta Krakowska, has been picking my brain about Grey Ranks, American roleplaying, and related topics for a while. It’s been a fun conversation. One exciting development is that he talked up Grey Ranks to the Uprising Museum staff, and they want a copy for their collection. I can’t wait to find out what Piotr wrote, as I understand about one word in seven.
Update: We’ve had twice as many downloads of our free sample .pdf in the last week as we had in the previous year.
C. W. Richeson gave Grey ranks a thorough and very positive review over at rpg.net. But even the most positive review can’t be perfect:
“My only gripe is that the book has an awful lot of white space. While initially the extensive sidebars cover this up, later on there are times where only half of the page is being used. Despite that flaw, there’s still plenty of material here.”
And that’s a minor thing, really, but it’s funny how hard we tried to prevent that appearance. The 6×9 format, with marginalia, is a beast to work with. We thought about abandoning marginalia at one point, but decided against it. As a result there are pages that are emptier than others. The alternative would have been to interrupt the flow with call-out boxes or something, and we didn’t want that.
Steve and I cooked up a video demo for Grey Ranks. Part One and Part Two are available if you want to check them out - it’s a little goofy, but it’s an experiment. I’m interested to know if this is helpful as a pedagogical tool in understanding the game, and if it interests people in the game as a marketing tool. We’ll see on both counts. We shot it with a digital camera on a tripod, basically shot for shot, and then I edited it in the crappy “movie maker” app that ships with Windows. It was very much a rapid, simple production, and quite easy to do.
Also on YouTube: Some Polish kids playing live action Grey Ranks.