The last week has been amazingly hectic and soul-crushingly disappointing because, despite my very best efforts, I was unable to get the e20 Universal Rulebook ready in time to have it to sell at Gen Con.

The single biggest factor in this was me overestimating how quickly I could get through the layout process. I’ve done layout on smaller projects (such as the Revenge of the Sith Collection, some other Star Wars web enhancements, and e20 Lite), and I tried to extrapolate from that to figure out the time I’d need to complete the job. Unfortunately, it seems that the length-to-time relationship isn’t linear. For example, if something is twice as long, you not only have twice as many page references to insert but also twice as many distinct places those page references can point to; in other words, this particular task would probably be closer to four times as much work even though it’s only twice as many pages. (Since the e20 Universal Rulebook is over four times longer than anything I’d done layout on before, you can probably imagine how these things add up.)

Complicating this was the fact that a couple of sections of the book were still getting some final development and editing to reflect the final changes we’d made in response to playtesting. When you have first-time freelancers contributing to a project, they really have no way to anticipate what sorts of problems they might encounter; some did exceptionally well, but others needed a lot of extra help. I had thought I’d have enough extra time to pick up the slack and help them finish their assignments, but my error on estimating the time required for layout meant that I could help out far less than I thought I would be able to. The result is that these assignments took a lot longer to finish, and that in turn kept me from being able even to start their layout until much, much later than anticipated.

In the end, those sorts of things added up and required more time than I had. Right up until the very end, I thought I could still squeeze enough time out to manage it, but it just wasn’t possible. We worked really hard to try to finish before the end of Gen Con, but there was just too much going on at the convention to be able to achieve the level of production we really needed to tie up all the loose ends.

So, to everyone who had come to my booth at Gen Con wanting to pick up a copy of the e20 Universal Rulebook, I sincerely apologize for letting you down. I will have everything finished and sent to everyone who has pre-ordered a copy (including all patrons who contributed up front) as soon as possible, and I’ll post another update to let you know when I know the exact date that will happen.