By Allan Goodall, (c) 2009.
Several folks have asked about the length of This Favored Land. Originally the book was supposed to be 128 pages long. So how did it blossom to 226 pages?
You can thank the playtesters for that.
The original manuscript was brought in at around 85,000 words. When we received feedback from the playtesters, there was one word that was used by all of them: more. They wanted more background information, more ideas for running campaigns during the American Civil War, more example characters… more of everything, really.
With Shane’s direction, I added the content that the playtesters asked for. As a writer, this kind if freedom is incredible. I stripped out a lot of stuff I wanted in the book in order to hit the original page limit. Much of what I had mentally edited out was content the playtesters desired. Most of it saw its way into the final book.
Heartfelt thanks go out to Shane Ivey and John Marron for their editing work on This Favored Land, Fred Hicks and Shawn Camp for the page design, and Todd Shearer for the illustrations. Everyone did a fantastic job on the book. I particularly have to thank Todd for taking the images that were in my head and bringing it to life, and for taking my sketchy notes on Fairview, Missouri and developing a usable map out of them.