First Reader

An invitation for collaborators

This is an invitation to read (or perhaps experience) from an almost finished offering from Hounds & Jackals… something before anybody else does, and to tell us honestly what happened in your head while you read it.

It is not much work, and it is genuinely useful to us. It also cannot be done by anybody who already knows the material, which is the whole problem, and why we seek First Readers.

Why a reader

Everything here is written and rewritten by the person who thought of it. That person eventually loses the ability to see the work at all. They know what every sentence means, so nothing reads as confusing. They know what happens on page forty, so nothing reads as slow. They have read the thing two hundred times and can no longer tell whether it is any good.

A first reader can. That is the entire value, and it lasts exactly once, because the second time you read something you are no longer a stranger to it.

What the role is, and what it is not

A reader, not an editor. That distinction matters more than anything else here.

An editor fixes prose. We are not asking anyone to fix anything, and no one should spend a minute trying to improve a sentence. If a paragraph is clumsy, we can find that ourselves.

A reader tells us what happened to them. Where they got lost. Where they skimmed. Where they laughed, where they were bored, where they wanted more, where they put the thing down and did not pick it up again for two days. That is information nobody inside the work can produce, and it is what we actually need.

You are not required to like it. A reader who did not enjoy something and says so clearly is worth a great deal more than one who was kind. In fact, if something genuinely does not work for you, that is often the most useful thing you can tell us, and it is the thing people are most reluctant to say. Being kind or harsh is not what we need… we just need your authentic, honest feedback.

What there is to read

From time to time, we will have offerings we need a First Reader for. For people interested, we would like to know roughly what interests them and what their backgrounds / knowledge of areas that may be useful for this process. If and when we have something that seems a good fit, we can reach out and see if you would like to read it.

In broad shapes, the current projects fall into these:

Adventures for the table. Self-contained scenarios a game master could run in an evening or two, across quite different registers: espionage, superheroes, martial arts, giant monsters, psychic thrillers.

Horror campaigns. Longer, system-neutral, and meant to be played over several sessions. Gothic, historical, and psychological rather than gore.

Books about the craft. Not games. Books about how to run one well, and about the responsibility of building an experience for other people. Readable by anybody who has ever taught, performed, or held a room.

Other things entirely. There is a cookbook from a bar that does not exist, illustrated books, and companion material for concept albums.

Most people take one. Some take two. Nobody is expected to read everything, and choosing what you actually want to read is the best predictor of a useful response.

What you get

Your name in the credits of the finished work, as an Editorial Reader. Everyone who contributes to a Hounds & Jackals project is named, and that includes you.

A free copy of the finished work in PDF when it is published, and if it’s available in a physical form, a code to print it out at cost.

And an early look at something nobody outside the house has seen.

Two requests

Please read it yourself, and please do not use AI to summarise or assess it. This is not about AI rules. What we are asking for is your experience as a human being reading something for the first time: confusion, delight, boredom, surprise, impatience. A model cannot be confused and cannot be bored, so a summary would give us nothing we do not already have. Your attention is the entire point.

Please keep it to yourself until it is published. Unreleased work, and anything you learn about what is coming, stays between us until it is out in the world.

A Guide

If and when you do accept one of these assignments, a small little guide will come with the work which gives some tips and suggestions on how to make reader notes, any specific areas we are wanting you to focus upon, and anything else we can think of to help the process.

Contact us if you are interested in adding your name to our roster of First Readers.