There are a lot of people who’ve helped make this project possible. Andy Kitkowski is the most obvious and important, since he’s doing pretty much all of the business side of things (me being so helpless and useless with that stuff). Ryo Kamiya not only designed the game, but has been really awesome about answering my questions. My good friend Mike S. has been evangelizing the game, and offering help in the form of editing and suggestions.

One thing that deserves special mention at this point is my Eee PC. I bought a green 2G Surf a few months ago at Micro Center (the only place in town that actually had them in stock, and just the color I wanted too). It has let me work on Maid RPG on trains and buses, at friends’ houses and at school, and (while the battery lasted) during yesterday’s power outage, sitting on the front porch as the sun set. It runs on a variation of Xandros Linux, and I’ve been typing stuff up in OpenOffice Writer and using Gjiten (which I’m finding to be a brilliant little program) to look things up. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever owned anything that was quite that much of a conversation starter. While I was using it at a local Starbucks (to work on Maid RPG, naturally), not less than six people asked me about it in the space of an hour. (And one guy jokingly asked if it was made by Hasbro) .

Right now I have about 30 pages of scenarios to translate, which comes out to six scenarios total. Just this morning I finally finished translating the very last scenario in the very last book, “Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden.” It’s epic, both in terms of its story and its size (12 pages, which is about 3 times the length of a typical Maid RPG scenario), and it takes the tropes established in the game and renders them on a worldwide scale.

In the year 20XX the “Maid Hazard,” a mental waveform sent through the internet blanketed the world, and caused a forced an evolutionary leap in a significant portion of the population. Countless people, men and women, young and old, became young, beautiful Maids. The Maids possessed superhuman abilities, but needed Favor from normal humans (Masters) to function. That’s just the start of the 50 years of the A.M. (After Maid) calendar covered in the back story. By the time the scenario actually begins, it’s the year 50 A.M., and the few surviving Masters are desperately seeking a way to stop the machinations of the tyrannical Maid Empire, lead by the Final Maid, Eve. The PCs are “Alternative Maids,” Masters who don special “Alternative Maid Suits” to gain the powers of Maids without falling under the Final Maid’s influence.

Anyone who knows the kind of fiction I write can tell you, this is the kind of awesomely screwed up thing I would think of. I seriously want to put together a prequel scenario about people enduring the Maid Hazard and its aftermath.

Lastly, in response to some questions asked, Andy has posted a bit about how and where we’ll be selling Maid RPG in the comments of Update 1.