Tuesday, October 4, 2011

What the Hell, Frog God?

I try to be easy to get along with these days, especially with my fellow publishers with whom I have a business relationship (in this case a sales outlet for another publisher's goods). There are rants and raves that some people in this scene deserve, but I'd rather sit at the adult table for the time being. And complaining about what other people do with their releases is silly, since I can just show my way with my own releases, right?

But sometimes I see something so dumb I just can't keep my mouth shut.

The good news about Frog God Games is that they continue to pump out material at an impressive rate. Swords & Wizardry is well supported and plenty of their stuff gets a consensus thumbs up, so they're not flooding the market with crap.

I have 10 copies of the S&W version of the
Tome of Horrors on their way along with 5 of their other new releases, for you Europeans who want a bit better deal on shipping, by the way.

The bad news is that one of those new releases is the new printing of Matt Finch's The Spire of Iron and Crystal. The module is awesome, and in fact is one of exactly two modules (the other being Maliszewski's Cursed Chateau) from this OSR thing that I tell people that I wished I'd written and/or published myself. I can't say enough about how awesome it is.

Why is that the bad news? Well...

2009, self-published:


2011, published by Frog God Games:


(edit, for clarity, here's a larger image of the One Night Stands cover on another module)



So the adventure doesn't even get its own cover, it gets the embarrassing One Night Stands naughty joke cover that's on the whole series.

Great Mullen art that was directly related to the module substituted for art that doesn't have a damn thing to do with the module it covers.

Is there any excuse?

Hands up if you think a modern day classic has just been downright defaced.

*raises hand*

34 comments:

  1. I purchased the Frog God pdf of this module. It has the One Night Stands cover. Not sure if that means the print one does as well, but the Mullen art is nowhere to be found in the pdf.

    Either way, one of the best modules ever written in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I can't really tell what's going on in the 2nd pic, since it's so small.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Here's a bigger image of the cover graphic.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Holy Jeebus that's awful. Well I'm really really glad I have a copy (and PDF) of the original printing. And yeah, it's a fabulous module, I used it for a very successful con game two years ago.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The new cover art is pure rake-toothed suckiness. I saw that cover on Troll and Toads site and thought, 'man, who buys a crap module called, One Night Stand?'
    If I had seen the other cover instead I'd have thought, 'Oh FUG! I've gotta run that mod!'
    In short, both hands raised.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Er yeah, that's no good. Great Mullen art aside, the Swords & Wizardry trade dress is simple but effective, so I don't see why they've changed it for whatever that is up there.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I don't own either one, but this gives me a feeling sort of like seeing Jabba the Hutt digitally inserted into the original Star Wars. Well, not that bad, but more or less like you say, WTF George Lucas/Frog Gods?

    ReplyDelete
  8. *hand raised*

    I assume the vastly awesomer-looking self-released version is no longer available?

    ReplyDelete
  9. If it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it.
    *raises hand*

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hand raised.

    Old school art is much more than a simple image, it signfies both genre and time period (80s) in a way that other styles simply don't/can't.

    *Raises Hand/Pumps Fist*

    ReplyDelete
  11. Yes! I appreciate a lot of what FG is doing, but the crappy and recycled covers is a real turn off. I have the pdf of the original, but would like to buy a hardcopy (I'm anti-pdf these days,) but I'm not going to buy it with that unattractive, recycled cover. Maybe I'll get lucky on ebay or NK.

    ReplyDelete
  12. It looks like they went with the "spicy cover" approach that made Weird Tales so popular, but this approach rarely works for RPGs, unless the focus of the game is sword & sorcery, but this cover makes it look more like a softcore romance novel. 9_9

    They made a big mistake with this one, as a cover is meant to be evocative of the books contents, and the new one has little or no relevance. Both are done in that color-pestle-on-black format, but the original cover really captures that Erol Otus vibe, while the new one looks like one of these dreamy, girl-friendly Carol Heyer pics from the dark years of TSR.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I was in luck! Noble Knight had a Black Blade printing. They still have it listed in stock, so evidently they have at least one more copy.

    ReplyDelete
  14. And so noted in my reviews of the first in the series: ONS1.
    http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=59

    ReplyDelete
  15. Wow. Not only an art fail. How did “one night stands” get to be so much bigger than the module title, author name, or S&W logo? I can see making the art mistake, but I wouldn’t think you’d need any design knowledge or talent to realize “one night stands” shouldn’t be the biggest text.

    And if you’re making these kinds of decisions, you should have at least two people to run things by so they can kick you when you make that kind of mistake.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Hand raised. I could run an evening of adventure or two based on just that original cover!

    ReplyDelete
  17. I actually said 'ewww' out loud when I scrolled down far enough. That's a travesty.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Man, I was really hoping this post was going to be about some argument you were having with an actual frog god. Dis. A. Pointed.

    ReplyDelete
  19. wow...seriously?
    The Spire is one of the most respected modules in the OSR. It's one of the top three modules of all time IMO. Who thought that defacing it was a good idea? I suppose not everyone is a Mullen fan, but did they even bother to read the module before slapping on this cover? And what the hell is with the title? Are they hiding it? I for one wouldn't have known this was The Spire. Is the One Night Stand series that popular?

    This is some serious Jaba shit as far as I'm concerned.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Yeah, I don't get the Frog God strategy of emphasizing their series over the individual modules. Seems like a way of artificially making their stuff seem cheap as hell. "It doesn't matter to you, our dear customer, which of these adventures you'll get - they're all the same, they even have the same cover art!" Truly an unique approach to situating your product on the market when other publishers are putting a lot of effort into communicating why this or that particular adventure module might fit your needs. And heck, they don't even do the serial design right - any book designer could tell them that for a general and uniform design you want less specific graphic design, perhaps having just an abstract piece on the cover, instead of putting an arbitrary and non-related painting on each cover in the series. It's totally incomprehensible why this is the house style at Frog God, where they seem to be doing this not with just the One Night Stands, but other series as well.

    For a much better visual design on a series of adventures that share book design and editing approaches, I'd like to point to the XRP Advanced Adventures line - they manage an understated and uniform design that still allows the individuality of each product to come to the surface.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Why can't Frog God Games just let its S&W products keep their amazing Pete Mullen covers?!?

    ReplyDelete
  22. The original cover art & design are so fun & effective that they make the module worth reading in public just to elicit all the queries of what that cool thing is.

    Not only is the "One Night Stands" series' cover art lame & embarrassing, but even the series' name itself is lame & embarrassing, too. If I had any of those modules, not only wouldn't I read them in public, but I'd hide them from myself when I wasn't reading them.

    In other words, my hands are raised. They're raised very high, indeed.

    ReplyDelete
  23. You can still get the Original at the Frog God page. Just look under "legacy products".

    ReplyDelete
  24. Unfortunate. I guess I will continue to treasure my copy, the very first one printed with the original cover.Mythmere. Muahahahah!

    ReplyDelete
  25. This is something I'm going to re-visit with Bill now that the company has been in operation long enough for us to take a look and re-evaluate the initial decisions we made at the very beginning. Just so that people understand, one of the primary objectives from the outset was to keep the cost of the modules low: FGG modules are very inexpensive for the buyer. Putting individual art on each cover would increase the price and put us about at the same pricing as XRP and others. Part of my focus on that is because in my income bracket a few dollars of extra cost on a module makes a difference to the decision of whether to purchase it or not, but as I get a better sense of the "market" I think that (a) I'm more price sensitive than most people, and (b) if people draw the conclusion from the outer appearance that a module isn't high quality, they won't buy it at any price even if it's at a low cost. People do judge books by their covers. :)

    Part of the issue here is simply that, as people have noted, the generic cover for the "One Night Stands" series is non-general, so it looks like it's a picture from the module within rather than looking like a cover for a series of different modules. The generic covers for the Hex Crawl Chronicles and the Northlands Saga work much, much better as general covers than the one for the One Night Stand series.

    So I plan on discussing that balancing act of "low price" versus "covers-sell-books" with Bill, at least to re-evaluate whether the initial decision concentrated too much on keeping prices low.

    ReplyDelete
  26. @Matt - while you're at it, talk about including removable 11x17 hexmaps (grainy JG-style paper is optional) with the Hex Crawl Classics! ;)

    ReplyDelete
  27. Also, speaking of the Hex Crawl Classics, a recent reviewer wrote than the printed maps aren't very legible, as they're B&W and based on the color PDF's. If that's the case, either a map made in B&W to begin with or a colorized print version of the map would be preferable.

    ReplyDelete
  28. One Night Stands sounded tasteless to begin with, and that combined with how Bill managed to come across as a jerk when he posted on home made stuff...

    A lot of home made stuff is more professional looking than that.

    Trust is easy to squander.

    Goodbuy Troll God, Welcome lotfp/lulu/osr/whatever!

    ReplyDelete
  29. @andreas

    Really? I feel like no matter what he says or puts on the cover, the thinking man's option is always to judge the book by what's in it, in th end.

    ReplyDelete
  30. "...the thinking man's option is always to judge the book by what's in it..."--Zak S

    Quite true. But relying on potential customers to do that probably isn't a wise business practice, though.

    "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."--H. L. Mencken

    ReplyDelete
  31. @Zak S

    Well EXCU-U-USE me!

    I didn't realize that it's even possible to have a private conversation in the public comments of somebody else's blog. Perhaps because it's not.

    ReplyDelete