Tenkar - As of today, somebody got silver.
Glen - Yeah, somebody got silver.
Tenkar - It wasn't me.
Glen - Are we talking suppositories here?There you have it folks. WE are now officially "explicit." ;)
"I made my wife suffer through the new Hero's Brew podcast. She actually laughed a few times and didn't force me to replace it with her music!" - Ian
"I really enjoyed. It sounded like y'all have fun" - Buddy
"Great podcast! I really need to spend more time in the tavern." - Chuck
"I love your focus on gamers not sleazy publishers!" - Name withheld
Thanks you so much for taking a look at our fundraiser. The DOTS Tabletop Roleplaying Gaming Project is devoted to raising awareness in the gaming community for the need for accessible gaming books and gaming aids for the visually impaired community.
I am attempting to raise $1,800 ($1,500 for the printer $300 to cover funding fees, sales taxes, and shipping) to fund the purchase a braille embossing printer to be able to produce braille materials for visually impaired gamers. Additionally, the printer comes with a full suite of braille translation and tactile graphic design software.
Currently the printer is on sale with a $2,000 discount, and if we can purchase the printer in the next couple of weeks, the company will add in a second year warranty for free! So I have to raise the money quickly.
The cost for outsourcing braille books is astronomical. For example, I just finished translating a roleplaying game into braille and tried outsourcing the printing of a few copies for my visually impaired friends to edit. The companies wanted over $200 for four copies of an 80 page book. With the printer I'm hoping to purchase, it would only cost $1.50 per book.
Here's something esle exciting! This printer will print tactile graphics...imagine how exciting it would be for a visually impaire game master to be able to feel a dungeon map!
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| I'm just a screenshot to allow visual imaging on social media ;) |
Hey all--it's Gen Con this weekend! We're not there, and if you're not either (or even if you are, we aren't bitter) then here's a little sale on Victorious product to hopefully help you feel a little better about it.
Save over 60% on The Victorious Bundle! The core rulebook, introductory adventure A Night For Jackals and four supplements--Rule Britannia, Manifest Destiny, Phantasmagoria, and the Hunter & Hunter Catalogue.
Now through Sunday you can get this bundle, normally over $60 -- yours for $19.99!Purchases made via The Tavern's affiliate links go to support The Tavern and its various projects. That includes the Hero's Brew podcast. We just recorded the first episode last night and hope to release it this weekend.
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| Photo found on the Paizo Facebook page |
You can never have too many monsters, and this book is filled with them! No matter what kind of campaign, there are foes galore to stock its wildernesses and dungeons, even the unknown depths of its mysterious oceans. This is a compendium that contains the monsters from the rulebook and many monsters from the First Edition of the original roleplaying game, but there are hundreds and hundreds of completely new beasts. Note: this is a second printing of the original Swords & Wizardry monster book, updated with errata and hundreds of illustrations.
The largest compilation ever of monsters for Swords & Wizardry/0e. If you play the very first edition (0e) of the game, or if you play Swords & Wizardry at the gaming table, this book is a must-have! 186 brand new monsters await, along with hundreds of the older monsters so that they're all in one book.!
Monstrosities was created with the generous help of the Swords & Wizardry internet community, as you can see from the list of unusually brilliant authors whose erudition and eloquence grace these pages. The book’s successes are due to them, whilst any errors or failures in the transcription of their noble work are doubtless my own.
So, I recently gave up on trying to learn from the official InDesign "textbook". Shit was all Greek to me.
Fantasy Flight Games is proud to return Star Wars: The Roleplaying to print as a collectible set of two high-quality, hardbound books presented in a stylized slipcase. You'll find all the original game materials—just as playable as ever—and they're presented with the same graphic design and fake, in-universe Star Wars advertisements for the Imperial Navy, the R2 astromech Droid, and more.
Even the books' use of black-and-white, blue ink, and full color sections have been recreated, along with its use of still photos and concept art, some of which have been updated for this new 30th Anniversary Edition. Finally, the books come with a foreword by Pablo Hidalgo, one of the creative executives on the Lucasfilm Story Group.
One of the roles that The Tavern fills for the OSR Community (and the RPG Community at large) is to raise the bandwidth when there is a gamer or gamer's family in need. I spent 20 years in law enforcement, and law enforcement is a very tight community. Gamers are just as tight if not tighter and extremely generous at times like these.
Hey all--Bill here.
I understand the thoughts behind the hardcovers--but just so you know; we hire top writers (Ed fricking Greenwood!), hire top artists (Terry Pavlett, among many), and hire top cartographers (Alyssa Fadden and Robert Altbauer).
I also got a ton of feedback that fans needed a lower price point buy in (those pain in the butt surveys we ask you to do on backerkit actually do drive how we deliver products). I also got feedback from a majority of our fans that people wanted shorter "portable" books so that at the table they could play with a module rather than carry a 300 page book around.
And finally, the main reason is simple economics--we cannot afford to do short adventure compilations in three systems. Publishing short adventures costs a bunch more than big sourcebooks. We have been seriously working in the adventure market for some time, and we just don't sell enough of them to maintain that $3-5 pricepoint for each of them that we did in the first few QOD books. Not if we want to pay writers a fair wage.
We would need to sell at least 300 sets of each version to make it worth printing the hardcovers (that is because minimum print runs on library bound hardcovers is 500). So really, what this means is we can either a) sell only pdfs or PODs, b) only make 5e modules (we sell a lot more 5e than the other two systems) or c) do what we are doing now.
We have actually lost money doing the QOD books for SW and Pathfinder, and as you can tell from the add-on sales, we have a lot of extra inventory left over (and the compilations are GREAT books, cheap--so everyone should get them--I especially love QOD 1's ant adventure!).
So why do we still do adventures? Well, I personally like them. I think they offer the best bang for the buck of any book besides a rulebook. I built Necro and FGG both on adventures, and we will continue to make them as long as folks buy them. I also want to make SW books (I play SW, and so do many of my friends) and Pathfinder books (our long time Pathfinder fans deserve books as well). Simply put, we need to be able to order how many we need and not 500 of them.
Now, on core books (like Bards Gate, the Blight, etc.)--we sell way more books than we sell of short adventures. Those will continue to be made in baseball bat-proof hardcovers because we want to do them that way. So don't worry about that. I too, love hardcover books; so we will not abandon them for our main product lines.
That being said, I still want to make short adventures a couple times a year.
In other news--the books will likely have page counts of approximately 24-60, depending on title and system (PF is a lot bigger). So they are still a pretty darn good deal at the price--especially when you get the 16 unit lot.
I think everyone understands the 32 and 48 book buys---that is for the completionist customers who want 2-3 game systems of the total set.
ps--We also targeted the adventure levels based on customer feedback (you all said no more low or super high level stuff--so we went mid-level in response (that one was over 80% on the surveys).
These adventures are solid, with something for every gamer. From the FR feel of Ed to the creepy, surreal style of Lance, combat heavy Curtis adventure, and thinking man nature-based Sustarre, and I think all of our fans know how Tom writes. Every one of these 16 adventures will get use and is useful to a GM running games that last 2-3 sessions before moving on to the next thing.
BillThere you have it. From the Frog's mouth.
I'm confident that SWN would've died in its crib if I hadn't released the base game for free.
When you're a small RPG publisher, your biggest enemy isn't production expense. It's not retail accessibility. It's simply being noticed. Between Amazon and OneBookShelf and Scribus and stock art, anybody with the price of a burger can get a game or a supplement onto the market. And anybody has. Your offering is struggling for notice in a sea of other games, and you haven't got the fanbase to spread word of what you're doing. Your only chance is to pique some casual reader's curiosity enough to get them to download your product and give it a glance.
It is much, much easier to do that when there's no price attached. From what I've seen, even Pay What You Want products lose downloads because people don't even like the implicit social contract of maybe theoretically having to pay if they like it. They don't want to deal with that, so they just don't download it. A completely-free, fully-playable product that shows what you can do is what a lot of small publishers need to convince readers that they're worth spending money on.
Of course, that then implies that there is something else they can spend money on. An open door isn't very helpful if there's nothing in the room beyond. And all too often, small publishers work like the devil to make their game and then don't do anything more to support it. It's perfectly fine if that's what they want to do, but if they want to make a modest business out of their work, they need to think beyond the present creation.I'm pretty sure Swords & Wizardry Light would not have received the same reception without being available for free in PDF and Print.
