Freelance Game Submissions

New game submissions, unlike those for supplements to our already existing lines, fall under three general categories: new settings/themes for our Silhouette CORE Rules engine, d20 system books, and brand new games.

New CORE Settings/Themes

We are always looking for new lines to add to the CORE line-up. These are complete projects, typically taking the form of a core 256-page book intended for players, with a possibility of follow-up releases if the game does well. This represents roughly 110,000 words, including game stats (rough sketches will also be needed for maps, if applicable).

The book must contain everything a person needs to play in that setting, with the exception of the rules (which are separate books, either the Silhouette CORE Rules or a d20 system rulebook). This includes world background, equipment/vehicles/spells/etc. (with stats for both SilCORE and d20), archetypes/classes, short sample adventure (or, preferably, an adventure generator) and any additional rules needed to fit the genre (psionics, martial arts, etc.).

To streamline the submission process and avoid unnecessary work, we ask that you send in an email to rdubois@dp9.com with the Subject Line "New CORE Setting Proposal". The body of the email should contain your full name, address and email, plus the answers (as short as possible) to the following questions:

1. Core Theme: a short (in general, the shorter the better) sentence that describes the central concept of the proposed game, the "hook" that first attracts attention to it and makes people want to play.
2. Heroes: what is the default role for the player(s)? What kind of characters can one play in that setting/game?
3. Objectives: what is the player characters' function within the setting? What do they do (or try to do/accomplish)?
4. Threats: who (or what) oppose the player characters? What is the source of the conflict(s)? Who are the antagonists/villains?
5. Magic/Technology: what kind of skills, tools, weapons or equipment will be available to the characters? How powerful/abundant are they?
6. What makes this setting different from everything else on the market right now? Why would a person be interested in this?

If we think your idea has potential, we'll contact you to discuss a writing contract. We always buy all rights, so please don't submit settings that you want to use elsewhere (to write a novel, for example). Setting authors always get priority for future assignments in the same line.

d20 Books

While we've published only one d20 system book so far, we're open to doing more. Given that the d20 market is extremely crowded right now, however, it will take a really amazing proposal to knock us off our feet -- not just another monster manual or "race/class" book. In general, the more "generic" (i.e., useful to a majority of gamers) the subject, the more likely we are to be interested. For example, an adventure generator is more likely to attract our attention that an adventure; a companion book to the D3E PHB, explaining how to recombine and "tweak" the existing classes to get more useful characters, is more likely to be published than a book that just adds new Feats and Prestige Classes.

Follow the standard submission rules to build your proposal. We're aiming for hardcover books if possible, so the minimum length would be around 75,000 words (everything included). As with all our projects, we buy all rights to the books we publish.

Brand New Games

We often receive messages from people asking if we would be interested in publishing their new roleplaying rules/card game/board game/etc. While we are flattered by the attention, properly developing, testing and publishing a quality game system requires lots of hard work and financial investment, and is not something we go through lightly.

New roleplaying game systems are right out. We already have our own, and we dual-stat all our books for the d20 system as well. We see no reason to publish yet another set of rules in a crowded market, no matter how good they are. The same goes for miniature wargaming rules.

Card games are also out. A good collectible card game requires almost a million dollars in budget to compete in today's market, and is not something we want to get into. A more classic, non-collectible card game is cheaper, but still expensive and risky to do -- you can always make a submission, but unless you are prepared to sell us all the rights, we are not interested. The same goes for board games, which are very expensive to develop and market.

We do not publish computer games or any kind of software, so no need to ask. (We can, however, license the computer game rights to our various intellectual properties to any interested software developer.)

Any question or inquiries can be emailed to rdubois@dp9.com with the Subject Line "Submission Question". Thanks for your interest!