OSR Solo – translations

OSR Solo was Deal of the Day on DriveThruRPG last month.

When I wrote that booklet I gifted it to the community. The entire contents are under a Creative Commons license, you can do what you like with it.

The next day I was contacted by Piotr Koryś, of GRAmel, asking to translate it into Polish. There was no need to ask, as it is public domain, but it was nice to be asked.

Then yesterday I got this:

Dear,

I write to you on behalf of “Hirukoa Publishing House”, we are a company dedicated to the promotion of and participation in all types of roleplaying, fantasy novels translations, comics, strategy and card games. We are based in Salvatierra in northern Spain.

I am writing to inform you that I am going to translate the title OSR SOLO into Spanish and make it available for free download on DriveThrurpg. Many thanks for your time,
Yours sincerely,
Javier Barroso

I am kind of hoping that the tone comes from English not being their first language. The second paragraph rather irritated me, and it takes a lot to get me annoyed.

For a start, it really isn’t difficult to find out my name, it is written in the front of the book. If you haven’t bought the book, it is on the product page; but I will let that slide.

There is something about being ‘informed’ that really grated.

It annoyed me that they want to give the translation away for free. It is their effort to translate it, they can throw their effort away, I don’t care. I always make sure that you can access all the contents for free, but giving stuff away for free makes it that much harder for people to make a living from writing for RPGs.

If people cannot make a living from it, we cannot invest in art, or any of the other talents/skills needed to make new stuff.

On the other hand, if you would like to translate this, or any of my titles, just ask. Stuff that is Creative Commons, I will happy promote once you have released it. Stuff that isn’t, I am quite happy to revenue share with you. The more people that discover solo play, the better as far as I am concerned.

Some of my titles have been translated into Polish, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I know someone is working on some German translations as well.

If you do translate something, make sure you earn enough to cover your time and effort!

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