A Missive on Play

Hi All!

So I am back and catching up on the Romancing Jan World. All mail backlog, including NPC letters, was sent out early the morning of July 11th as soon after I got back as possible (I got back at 6am on the 10th), and the Publisher notified me the gazette went out on the 12th or 13th. (We sadly can not control the schedule of the Publisher. We sent it to them on the 5th, after that point it is out of our hands.) If you feel like you are missing mail, please feel free to send us an email at gm@romancingjan.com and let me know the last thing you received and I will happily send you what scans we have received since so you can catch up.

I have received a couple missives, but only a couple, since the digital Gazette was sent out on the 5th, and only in the last 24 hours that alerted me to the fact that there may have been a database scrabble in the Debut RSVPs that led to some character information mix-up in the July Gazette. I want to apologize for this. I would never intentionally “God mode” a player character unless that player was one who actually prefers to be passive and wants me to create things for them. They exist in this community and I love writing for them as much as I love just reporting on what others of you write about yourselves, but I do my best to keep those two styles different. After looking at the way our RSVP database was set up and some issues in it that resulted in me having to move information around, before we finally found the right configuration that we used for the Denouement this month, it is entirely possible some notes got scrambled in the process leading to some write ups that would be incorrect for your character.

I want to apologize for that, and if this happened to you, please send me an email at gm@romancingjan.com or use the Newspaper Submission form to submit a suggested correction for August.

I do apologize for the backlog and the errors, but please remember that unlike a digital game, which can be run 24/7 by computers, or a weekend LARP that only runs a few times a year, we are a small group of human beings with human lives, and other full time jobs but this game still runs in real time, every day. We need breaks occasionally. We try to arrange those breaks to cover each other, but that doesn’t always work out. This game is run at a loss, meaning it costs more in human labor than it pays for, and thus it can not be our top priority. Our health, families, and full-time jobs have to come first. Part of this being a by-mail game is that it is intended to be a slow gratification experience and allow us to balance it with the rest of our lives, not consume them.

My biggest concern and disappointment right now though, is that the couple of missives I have received imply some ill intent on the part of myself or my team with errors or slow downs in the last month. It also alludes to other people having issues with the content printed that have never been reported to me or my team.

I would like to reiterate that I can not fix issues that are not reported directly to me. I do not read the unofficial discord and I do not believe in trying to deduce problems from rumor and hearsay. I have been fully transparent with this community; from disclosing the finance