Enough good things happening out there that I figured I’d call a few of them out.

If you’re a small press game designer who would love to have access to Adobe CS5 but stymied by the price tag, consider applying for the Terrible Grant. One small game company will get a copy of the software, free and clear. This is, not to put to fine a point on it, an awesome thing.

Dresden Files RPG preorders have been going well. We’ve hit the 1000 preorder mark for Your Story and were nearly there (have maybe even cleared it) for Our World. Calling back to Fred’s extensive breakdown of the costs of doing business, that’s a good number to have hit.

David Hill’s Maschine Zeit has been rocking the Kickstarter process. His goal was $650, and he’s cleared $2000 at this point. He’s already agreed to do a supplement in response to all the support, and if things clear $2500 by Friday, he’ll bring all contributors in on another (as yet unnamed) product. This is a badass looking game, and if you’re curious, I totally suggest getting in now, if only to get the pdf when it’s $10, rather than the $15 it’ll be post kickstart. Plus – cute little kid next to poster of space-horror!

Happy Birthday Robot has also rocked its Kickstart goals, so Daniel is trying to find ways to turn that success into books for schools.

Elizabeth Shoemaker has put up preorders for the revised edition of It’s Complicated. If you’re unfamiliar, It’s Complicated was a neat little game that I would best summarize as being designed to play out large knots of complicated relationships. The mechanics are simple, but the situation generation setup, based around the physical act of drawing lines to represent connections, then using the points where those lines cross as points of play, it clever, novel and just neat. However, the initial game was definitely a little bit bare bones – lots of promise, but not necessarily a lot of direction with what to do with these clever ideas. The revised edition fleshes the game out and answers some of those questions, so I’m excited enough about it to have already bought it as book and PDF.

The Shared World Bestiary and Shared Word Writing Camp exist to make me wish that I was younger or that my kid was older.

Joe Konrath has released his ebook, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. Konrath, if you don’t know, is a successful author who has found more success releasing his older titles as ebooks and generally really testing the ebook waters. He blogs about it regularly, and is a fantastic resource for looking at where publishing may be going. it may or may not be the case that the role of the author is changing, but if it is, there’s a good chance it’s changing in this direction. The ebook is only 3 bucks and totally worth it.

Five Minute Marvels, encouraging you and your kid to draw a little every day, was just one of those things that made me go “Awwww”.