You can probably figure out how much work these booklets took, and I thought I’d write some more as an explanation of how we got into doing it. Because my character was going for the Throne, I decided she would take the approach of knowing as much as was humanly possible about everything, so we started writing summaries of all the Winds of War and Fortune before each event. The idea to publish all the titles and who held them came originally from Alexis, because an IC newspaper editor finds it useful to know who to chase down for news. Two seasons later, we figured out it was a relatively short process to turn the Winds summaries into something pretty and saleable as well.
You can see how the content of the Winds (and the number of Imperial Titles!) has expanded over the four years. The OC process got longer and longer, and the print and assembly run took several hours, even with the assistance of Mattmatt, who plays Kaspar von Holberg.
Summer 382 ran very late, and we had real-life work crunches - so we gave up and published the googledoc draft on the dedicated Anvil Almanac FB group The version linked in the index was put together for close advisors and staff of Imperial Offices, hence is branded a bit differently.
Autumn 382 wasn’t printed at all. The one here is an “online exclusive!” By 11am Thursday morning we still couldn’t get it down below 36 pages without rendering the font too small to be legible - it needed to be 32 pages to make the booklet format work properly and we had just plain run out of time.
For the last three seasons, the content was spread across two publications for reasons of space and printing logistics. One dealt with “Imperial Concerns” - ie the Winds - plus valuable analysis from Amy who plays Liesel van Holberg (Master of the Mint) - of all the commissions opportunities, plus a nifty version of the Empire map annotated with income from each territory. The Imperial Titles were split out to a separate section. We didn’t print as many of those because Amy, who did all the selling, reported that there wasn’t as much demand. For those last couple of editions we were summarising around 90,000 words down to around 9,000 for each “Imperial Concerns” section.
Incidentally, after the first couple of seasons, the money was a bit of an irrelevance. If easy money were the object, there were far easier options to make six to ten thrones - eg selling home-made cake, or home-brewed alcohol. It was mostly a labour of love.
