Fallen Fane is a live-action Ars Magica scenario.
It was written to be played by a couple of dozen people in an afternoon at a game convention. For a few years, at the end of the twentieth century, I was writing about one of those per year. Fallen Fane was the last one I did, and after I’d run it twice, a couple of my friends also ran it.
Around that time, Atlas were looking for a completed manuscript that they could have ready to publish if there were hold-ups in the publishing schedule for Ars Magica. I think they’d just had a delay, and wanted to avoid having another one. I showed them the draft, they took it and paid me for it, and then production went fairly smoothly for a while; and when it did go wrong, they didn’t have a chance to publish it.
As a result, the draft was still sitting around when I became Line Editor, and we finally used it just before Fifth Edition came out, about five years after I wrote it. As it contains no rules, that was actually a very good time to put it out. It does currently hold the record for ‘longest delay between payment and publication’, however.