{"id":799,"date":"2006-12-13T17:00:26","date_gmt":"2006-12-13T22:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=799"},"modified":"2006-12-13T17:01:47","modified_gmt":"2006-12-13T22:01:47","slug":"dm-of-the-rings-faq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=799","title":{"rendered":"DM of the Rings FAQ"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m seeing a lot of the same questions in the comments of DM of the Rings. Rather than answering the same question in the comments of a dozen threads, I’m going to gather it all up here and deal with it in one post so that I can link back to it as the need arises.
\n
\nQ<\/span>: Are you ever going to publish this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A<\/span>: Obviously I’m using images from a major motion picture, which means this work can never be for sale<\/em>. My current plan is to finish this story and then gather up all of the strips, plus a few extras, and put them into a single PDF freely available for download. The versions you’ve been looking at are cropped and reduced and then abused by JPEG compression. I do this to save precious bandwidth, which has gotten scarce lately. When I make the PDF version I’ll use the crisp, high-resolution originals. <\/p>\n

Q<\/span>: Do you have paypal \/ a wishlist \/ a way to give money?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A<\/span>: Thanks, but no. I’m not doing this for money. Partly because of the legal and copyright issues, but mostly because then I would feel obligated to do it, and this would start to feel like a job and not a hobby. The best way to support the comic is to click on the ads whenever you see something you like. That pays for the bandwidth, which is all I ask. <\/p>\n

Q<\/span>: Can I take one of your comics and put it on my website \/ print it on a poster \/ tattoo it on my butt \/ make a commemorative plate \/ engrave it into a fine mahogany tabletop? <\/strong><\/p>\n

A<\/span>: Knock yourself out. You’re free to take as much liberty with it as I took with the original source material. I’d appreciate a link back here, but do what you will.<\/p>\n

Q<\/span>: How long will the comic run? When will it end?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A<\/span>: Good question. Since the beginning I’ve said that I’ll make these until I get sick of them. That seems like a good policy. I’ll make these strips until I get tired of them, or I reach some sort of ending.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Originally I made 22 comics. Buy the time I posted the third strip, I had 22 of them written. The series was supposed to end on strip #22, when the players rebelled and left to go play Mechwarrior. I didn’t think the strips were very funny, and I was mostly just making them to amuse myself.<\/p>\n

Then I realized I wanted to make more, and a lot of my friends (both my gaming friends and the friends over in my blogroll) said they enjoyed them and thought they were funny. Thanks guys, seriously.<\/p>\n

So, I started inserting new strips into the story I’d already written. For example, in the original run I spent 5 strips in moria: Teamwork<\/a>, Of Dubious Value<\/a>, Cartographer’s Lament<\/a>, The Epic Sounds of Battle<\/a>, and Our Dearly Discarded<\/a>. I managed to insert 7 more strips in there, so in the final run we were in Moria for 12 strips. I noticed the added strips were better than the original ones. I was getting better and<\/em> having fun and<\/em> attracting a lot of readers. Only a fool walks away from a deal like that, so I scrapped the original ending and opened it up so that I could keep going if I wanted to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Q<\/span>: What do you use to make the comic?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A<\/span>: I write up the dialog in Wordpad. I own all three of the LOTR movies, and I use Cyberlink DVD<\/a> to nab the screencaps I’ll need. I put them together using Comic Book Creator<\/a>. I use Paint Shop Pro 8<\/a> to edit the comics afterwards and do the things you can’t do in CBC. That’s it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m seeing a lot of the same questions in the comments of DM of the Rings. Rather than answering the same question in the comments of a dozen threads, I’m going to gather it all up here and deal with it in one post so that I can link back to it as the need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}