Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

Sorry I’m so late in posting. Been kinda ignoring Scarlet Moon lately and obsessively playing roguelikes (Angband and Tales of Maj’Eyal FOREVER!). I needed a break from all the spanking, so decided to explore other avenues to satisfy my masochistic needs. But I’m back at it. I’ve got the next episode planned and I’ve started working on it. So, yay for progress!

But that’s not the true purpose of this post. After a lot of consideration, I’ve decided to make Robin Pearce’s book Master of the Manor available. I have very strong misgivings about distributing someone else’s work like this, but Pearce has unfortunately gone dark, and they’d already had Master of the Manor available for free on their website before they went dark. So I’m mostly restoring the status quo.

Besides, Master of the Manor is an incredible game. For as long as I’ve been able to write an “Hello World” program, I’ve thought about creating a spanking video game. I tried several times over the years, never really getting very far. I never really had a good sense of what a good spanking game would like. What kind of format would keep the game reasonably scoped for a personal project, but still be rich enough to be properly considered a game?

Then I found Master of the Manor. A CYOA adventure with statistics, special abilities and a keyword system for remembering past actions. An incredibly rich, immersive and *interactive* game that would be dead simple to implement in a program. Almost from the day I finished my first play through of Master of the Manor I started working on what would eventually become Potion Wars, where I learned a lot of lessons that led to Scarlet Moon. This game inspired me, and one of the greatest tragedies of Pearce going dark is that people no longer have access to it.

So I’m making the game available in two formats. One, is the classic Epub format, that should be readable on any EBook or EBook program:
Master of the Manor – EPUB
.
The other is in plain text: Master of the Manor – Txt

I’m a plain text junkie. It lets me read the game in my terminal, and it’s very easy to search, take in-line notes if necessary, etc. Besides, Master of the Manor doesn’t do any anything fancy. So you don’t lose anything by reading it in plaintext vs. epub, except perhaps it’s not as easy to put on an EBook Reader (I wouldn’t know, I don’t own one).

One problem with the version that Pearce released as an Ebook was that it didn’t include any links. So you’ve got to do a lot of page flipping. I’ve included a special tags file with the text version that’s been generated by ctags. If you know what ctags is and how to use it, cool. Don’t read any further. Just download the text version, open it up in your favorite editor and take advantage of all that tags goodness to jump directly to page numbers.

If you don’t know what ctags is well then read on. Ctags is an old, venerable program that lets you build an index of one or more files containing plain text. It was originally built to make it easier to jump through software code, but it can be used for any plain text (I use it to navigate Scarlet Moon’s story content for example). I’ve generated an index of all the page numbers, so with the right editor if you put your cursor on/in front of a page number, like this: Turn to page |34, then with a simple keystroke you can jump immediately to page 34. No manual page flipping!

If you want to do that, follow these direcctions:

1. Download and install the Atom Text Editor (as an aside: I think Atom’s a bloated POS, but it’s the only text editor on Windows that isn’t Vim or Emacs *and* can natively read tags from an externally generated tags file).
2. Download and unzip the plain text version of Master of the Manor.
3. Open `master.txt` with Atom.
4. Read the book with your hand down your pants/skirt (VERY important).
5. When you reach a directive like `Turn to page 34`, place the cursor just before `34`.
6. Press Ctrl+Shift+r (I *think* it’s Cmd+Shift+r on a Mac).
7. Type 34 in the popup that appears.
8. Select the result that has just 34 on a line by itself.

Voila, you’ve now jumped to page (really section) 34.

If this is too many steps (it kinda is, really), then just read the plain text file and use your editor/Word’s search capability. Or download the epub and flip manually/use your epub reader’s search capability. Whatever makes it easiest for you to enjoy the spanky goodness.

As a final note, I will *not* distribute Dianne’s Promotion in the same way, so don’t ask. Pearce made a few noises about eventually releasing Dianne’s Promotion on the website like Master of the Manor was, but they hadn’t done so when the site went dark, and I’m not about to do it for them. If you want Dianne’s Promotion (I heartily recommend it, it’s almost exclusively spankings whereas Master of the Manor is spanking-heavy BDSM), then buy it on Amazon or Goodreads, and throw a few bucks at Pearce.

Oh, and I have a new e-mail: aka@spankingrpgs.com. I’ll probably keep the gmail around for a while longer, but I’d encourage you to e-mail me at my new address instead. Google’s been creeping me out lately, and I want to get away from them as much as possible.

AKA