Cool Isle of the Unknown Reviews!

How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying has a good one here. If that doesn't sell you on the book, what could?

Here's one from Dragonsfoot.

Suvudu has a Carcosa review as well.

Frowny Face and Happy Face Reviews

RPGnet review of Carcosa isn't very happy.

Aventuras en la Marca del Este has a happier Isle of the Unknown photo review.

A Blog About the Isle of the Unknown

Booberry (the best of the monster cereals, so of course also always the hardest to find...), of the new Giant Evil Wizard blog, is writing a series of posts about Isle of the Unknown and the possibilities therein. Don't know how long Isle will be the focus, but it's the focus right now and that's cool enough.

Carcosa is "The Best of the Best This Year"

Don't take my word for it, go read the review here. Lots of pictures. (see a translated version of the review here)

Also, a new review of the Isle of the Unknown.

Isle of the Unknown Reviews

The Alexandrian
All Games Considered 
Armchair Gamer
Aventuras en la Marca del Este
azirk73 Youtube review
Diehard GameFAN
Dragonsfoot
Game Knight Reviews 
Gnome Stew
Gonen's World
Gorgonmilk
Grognardia
How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying
In the Cities

Magician's Manse
Nerd Caliber 
Poltergeist
RPG World (video)
Silver Lodge
...and the sky full of dust
Ten Foot Pole
Troll in the Corner
Worlds in a Handful of Dice
Von der Seifenkiste herab...

Interviews:

Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown Now on Sale in Print and PDF

Carcosa

Weird Science-Fantasy Horror Setting. 288 A5 size hardcover. Full description of what it is here, PDF preview of actual book contents here.

The PDF version (which comes free with a print order) is an absolute state-of-the-art example of PDF technology, with extensive links, layers, and bookmarking. Click around on the maps.

Isle of the Unknown

Island hexcrawl full of the strange and unusual, suitable for any fantasy campaign. 128 page A5 size hardcover. Full description of what it is here, PDF preview of actual book contents here.

The PDF version (which comes with a print order) isn't quite state-of-the-art with the interior cross-linking as Carcosa, is fully bookmarked and layered.

Extras

Both Isle and Carcosa have optional add-ons. 250 of these are available for each book. Each book comes with an A4 sized map printed on canvas-like material and a double-sided full color A3 poster (both sides of the individual posters are shown in the pics here). Extras for each book are 5€ each. They are added by default, so toggle it to "No" if you don't want them. But you want them.

Discount Offer 1

Pembrooktonshire Gardening Society members get 2€ off the print versions of Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown as long as there are extras left for each book. When the extras run out, the discount is reduced to 1€ per book (the same discount Gardening Society members get on all print products in the LotFP store).

Discount Offer 2

Missed out on the Grindhouse Edition? If you buy at least 50€ worth of stuff from the LotFP store (say, the new Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown books), coupon code ULFIRE will get you a 12,50€ discount off the Grindhouse box.

The LotFP Webstore

BONUS

The Euro is in the crapper right now, so all of you non-Euro currency people can enjoy the best exchange rate in quite some time...!

(finally, right?)

Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa PDF Previews

Carcosa preview.

Isle of the Unknown preview.

There is a problem with the Carcosa cover at the printer, apparently the metallic foil isn't bonding well to the cover material. They are sending me a sample of their recommended fix (a different foil I believe), but it didn't arrive today. Independence Day is on Tuesday so even if it shows up Monday, arrrgggghhhhh delays.

(Isle and Carcosa are to be delivered at the same time so a delay on one is a delay for both)

Isle & Carcosa Extras

Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa will each have as extras the cloth map (discussed yesterday) and a double-sided full color A3 mini-poster. 250 copies of each will be available. (contributors get copies as well - 260 of each will be printed total).

The extras will cost 5€ each, and they are optional. But once they're gone, they are gone...

Note that in each pic, two copies of the poster have been laid down to show you what's on both sides.

Isle of the Unknown's poster has the keyed map on one side and an expanded print of Cynthia Sheppard's cover. The original plan involved a dust jacket and it wasn't until the last minute that we decided not to have one, but Cynthia had already completed the larger piece. We haven't told her yet...

Carcosa's poster has Jeff Rients' Periodic Table of Carcosa on one side (redesigned because the original wasn't in high enough resolution for this printing) and on the other a map of Carcosa keyed with relevant locations involved with the sorcerous rituals. Amos Orion Sterns had made a rough of this on his own after the first edition of Carcosa was released, and Geoffrey and I went nuts after seeing it. We really couldn't fit it in the book, but we knew we had to do something with it, so we had Amos tighten up the design and here it is as a limited edition extra.

Oh, my store software won't let me apply the Gardening Society discount to the extras, so Gardening Society members will get 2€ off Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown, even if not ordering the extras. After the extras sell out, the discount will go back to the usual 1€ off.

That means if intend to buy both, you could sign up for the Gardening Society today for 10€ and be saving 4€ next week - and membership gives you 1€ off every print product in the store, always, so you could theoretically turn around and save more money than the cost of membership right away. And you get a kickass membership card!

(figured if I was going to promote something I might as well be completely shameless, right? :D)

Details on Gardening Society membership here.

A Look at the Isle and Carcosa Maps!

Just got the proofs in for the cloth map extras I'll be offering when the books go on sale next week. These maps will be printed in the appropriate book's endpapers, but I thought it would be good to offer stand-alone maps as well.

I originally planned on doing them in the soft-cloth Ultima style. But those aren't good for a lot of detail, because the ink bleeds too much on that material, and I wanted the hex numbers to show up on these maps. They're perfect for player maps, I think. (hexcrawl exploration purists are going to lynch me for that one, aren't they?) This next shot was supposed to show off the material - it's a soft canvas-like fabric, but the texture of the back of the map didn't show up too well... but you can see a bit more detail on the maps themselves so why not.

Isle of the Unknown - What Is It?

The book should be arriving soon, [Update: The printer tells me Isle and Carcosa will be delivered Monday December 5!].

So. Isle of the Unknown. What is it?

I was going to do some corny-ass hype, but I thought instead I should quote a few things from the emails Geoffrey and I exchanged after I received the draft of the book and we discussed what form the book should take.

Geoffrey:

Isle of the Unknown is a hard-core and pure old-school product. I write the sort of thing I wish other people would write and publish. I love, love, love the format of Judges Guild's Wilderlands products. This sort of thing moves my imagination, and it has (to my druthers) very little wasted space. It's 99% pure gold.

That's what I am aiming at with Isle of the Unknown. I want all the wonder of the old Wilderlands, with none of the "OK, I've seen that before." Orcs and shit were new back then, but not now. So I've done a Wilderlands[-style] product that is all fantastic and no nostalgia.

Of course I wanted more nuts and bolts detail about the island:

You've got several entries that are "in motion" such as: "2408 A 7th-level cleric in a red surcoat with a white cross is mounting his horse " with a situation then described. I think maybe the "in motion/situation" entries should be part of encounter tables with more permanent features (lairs, statues, settlements, etc) being part of definite hex descriptions.

I think the utility of a product like this is its ability to be used "out of the box" - and I think the "civilized" stuff, and encounter tables, is important to do that. Not saying to nail down names and things like that, but...

Keep on the Borderlands spent "equal time" on the Keep and the Caves of Chaos, for example, all without using names or defining interrelations between people and factions beyond the broadest of strokes, and I think this could benefit from the same approach.

This is what Geoffrey thought of these ideas:

The sort of additions you suggest have always seemed to me wasted space. Even the Keep was little used by us (in contrast to the heavily-used Caves of Chaos).

I remember that James Maliszewski regretted that you didn't give any D&D stats to the people of Pembrooktonshire, and he regretted that you didn't include more mundane stuff in Weird New World. What were you supposed to do? Give stat after stat that said "S 10, I 11, W 10, D 11, C 10, Ch 11"? The Pembrooktonshiretonians are all 0-level guys with 1-6 hp. They need stats about as much as do their chickens, goats, and pigs. It'd be wasted space. And Weird New World doesn't need stats for seals, penguins, and mundane Eskimos.

Similarly, virtually all the people on the Isle of the Unknown are 0-level nobodies with 1-6 hp and stats in the 9-12 range. It matters not whether they are priests, scholars, knights, peasants, bandits, or what-have-you. And do we really need or want a table giving a list of the types of nobodies that might be encountered wandering around the isle? Even their equipment is all common sense: priests don't have weapons or armor, knights have both, peasants are "armed" with pitchforks, etc. I would regard such information in a product as worthless or even kind of condescending.

Hamlets, thorps, dorfs, etc. are also a dime-a-dozen: "The hamlet of _______ consists of 102 people living in 12 thatched, single-room cottages. They are all subsistence farmers. They own nothing besides humble clothes, tableware, and pitchforks." And for the details of the larger villages, I think that's a job for Zak's Vornheim product.

I can't over-emphasize that each hex in Isle of the Unknown covers over 86 square miles of territory. That is HUGE. Thus any encounter table that was even remotely "accurate" as far as giving a realistic chance of encountering the fantastic spot within the hex would look something like:

01-10 It rains.
11-20 You seen some rabbits.
21-30 You meet a peasant digging for mushrooms.
31-40 You step in cowshit.
41-50 etc.
.
.
.
.
91-99 A dog barks at you.
00 You encounter the fantastic thing described in this product.

(Players would have a truly boring time of it!)

If, for example, I were to erect a man-sized statue in a forest of 86 square miles, it would take forever and a day for someone to find the damn thing. You could probably walk 100' away from it and still not notice it. And that's assuming you knew it was there and were looking for it. If you were ignorant of its existence, you could probably walk through that forest 100 times and never stumble across the statue.

Except for the "OMG, Carcosa has children getting raped!" thing, perhaps the most common complaint I heard was that it was too world-specific. I want Isle of the Unknown to be able to be dropped into any campaign with little or no fuss.

... and then a few nights later I got this email from Geoffrey:

As I was falling asleep last night (in that half-awake half-asleep state) the following idea occurred to me. Then at 4:30 this morning I woke-up and couldn't fall back to sleep because of this idea. As I type this sentence it's 5:09 in the morning.

More than anything else, art in an RPG product needs to be useful. I think back to my early RPG days, and what "sold" me on a product more than anything else? Monster Manual-style art. The day I bought my Holmes Basic set, I also purchased the Monster Manual. It was a no-brainer purchase rather than the PHB or the DMG. Why? Because of the multitude of monster illustrations.

Some months thereafter I went to the store, money in hand, to buy the PHB. Ha! The Deities & Demigods book was sitting there, brand new on the shelf. One look at it (with its MM-style art) and there was no debate: I bought the DDG instead. I could sit for hours looking at the pictures in the MM and the DDG (and, in the next year, the Fiend Folio). The PHB and the DMG? Not so much. Sure, drawings of adventurers are cool, but how can they compare to the compendia of drawings of monsters in the MM, DDG, and FF?

Consider two monsters from the MM that nobody ever uses: the masher and the slithering tracker. (Hell, I literally never even noticed the very existence of the masher for about 20 years!) Why does nobody ever use them? What do they have in common?

No picture.

What if the interior art of Isle of the Unknown is devoted solely to Monster Manual-style (by that I mean relatively small drawings of just the monster itself) drawings of the 108 or so monsters in the book? That's a lot of drawings, but they'd be relatively small. The drawings would make the monsters come alive, unlike the poor masher and slithering tracker.

Plus, the drawings overall would be cooler than the drawings in MM, DDG, or FF. After all, how cool can a drawing of an orc or a brownie be? In contrast, all the monsters in Isle of the Unknown are weird and relatively hard to picture.

How am I going to argue with that?

... so suddenly we had a big art book project and at the same time a balls-to-the-wall hardcore old school Judges Guild-style adventure/setting.

And it's almost here.

Previews from the actual book and looks at the limited edition extras in the days to come.

Isle of the Unknown is AT THE PRINTER

Hardcover (thread-sewn for those of you looking out for that), 128 pages, over 120 illustrations, full color throughout.

Should go on sale the first couple days in December.

I hope to make the 'at the printer' announcement for Carcosa tomorrow.

Suddenly, We Have a Deadline

I need to get things to the printer on Nov 7 in order for them to be out this year.

The plan is to get Carcosa and Isle to the printer (these have taken long enough...!), have them back around the first of December and ready to order and ship.

Carcosa will be 288 pages, deluxe hardcover (foil embossing on the cover, about 40 pages of art inside), going to be 3cm thick, looking at 30€-32,50€ on the price for these.

Isle of the Unknown will be a 128 page hardcover, full color throughout, tons of art. Looking at 20€ - 25€ for the price here depending on how we work some things.

Once the books are off to the printer I can concentrate on showing real previews that'll show some content and how the presentation will look.

Working on giving both limited edition (250) extras. The idea for Carcosa is a cloth map and a double-sided poster, both full color. Cloth map for the Isle, looking into other extras for that as well. Don't think I can offer the cloth maps for FREE, but we'll see closer to the time.

I do believe things will shake out so that there is the same shipping cost for ordering both as there would be for just ordering Carcosa (no difference between the price for a 501g shipment and a 999g shipment in the Finnish postal system)... but I won't know for sure until they return from the printer so no pre-orders... they go on sale when they arrive.

Looks like Monolith and then hopefully a flood of smaller (and cheaper!) adventure stuff for 2012. The only big-ticket item I have on the schedule right now for 2012 is Exquisite Corpses - Poag is still working on it.

Isle of the Unknown Cover Art

While I'm on the boat to Sweden hoping a Poseiden Adventure LARP breaks out, I decided to go to the ship's internet kiosk and check my email... Geoffrey's approved the cover art! Here it is...

Art by Cynthia Sheppard. This isn't the whole piece; it's a wraparound so this is only really half of it, but this is what will be on the front cover panel.

Art Preview Post Through Time!

I made this post five days ago... yet here it is, just now! How odd.

You know what would be odder? If I got in a car crash on the way to the cottage or if I was eaten by a mink once I was there or if I got hit by a meteor or something, and then I'd be dead, and then this would be A BLOG POST FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!

Here's a Carcosa piece by Rich Longmore. Did I hear someone say they wanted Kirby-inspired robots? Why yes, I think I did.

Screw you, FLAILSNAILS! We've got... what the hell is that?

Maybe I should show you something a little more normal... oh bloody hell.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Isle of the Unknown monster pics by Amos Orion Sterns)

Isle of the Unknown mage by Jason Rainville:

Carcosa + Isle of the Unknown Art Preview!

Since I'm already gone for the week by the time you read this, I should put some pretty pictures here. 'cause that's how I roll, and other embarrassing catchphrases.

A Carcosa piece by Rich Longmore:
An Isle of the Unknown monster by Amos Orion Sterns:

An Isle of the Unknown mage by Jason Rainville:

Isle of the Unknown Art Preview 3: MORE MONSTERS + Blargle

I've had a nasty habit of writing 3/4ths of a blog post lately, but then not posting them. So here's the money shots of all that unposted writing, without the arguments behind them:

• G1/2/3/D1/2/3 is as much of a story-loaded railroad as I3/4/5
• Death on the Reik is perhaps the awesomest adventure ever
• The answer to "Is there room for another...?" is always yes, as long as it's good enough
  
• Guns may change the flavor of your setting but they won't change the actual play of your old school game one bit
• My publishing philosophy moves further along the "pay your people, make everything awesome, if it costs it costs"
• Ropecon story from Mentzer: Gygax wrote Keep on the Borderlands so he could get the "included in the basic sets that are selling by the hundreds of thousands" royalties instead of continuing to let Mike Carr get that loot with In Search of the Unknown
• It's weird to be worried about how well I did at GenCon...
  

And, as advertised, here are some more monster pics from Isle of the Unknown. Concepts by Geoffrey McKinney, artwork by Amos Orion Sterns.

Isle of the Unknown Art Preview 2: MONSTERS!

There will be over 100 new and unique monsters in Geoffrey McKinney's Isle of the Unknown.

All of them are being illustrated by Amos Orion Sterns, all of them in brilliant full color!

Three examples:

It's my understanding that the line work has been completed for all of them, and there are still 40 or so left to be colored.

I've seen the cover art (by Cynthia Sheppard) and map (by Jason Rainville) drafts and I hope to show you those soon.

I'd apologize for the delays, but since we're not sitting here with our thumbs up our asses I'll instead apologize for being optimistic when originally announcing the release dates (I was originally planning on Grindhouse to be out in December of last year, to let you know how unrealistic my expectations are).

We'll get this out when every possible bit of awesomeness has been squeezed into it, not a moment before, and hopefully not too long after.

First Isle of the Unknown Art Preview!

Two mages from the Isle:

The mages on the Isle have all been illustrated by Jason Rainville (who is also doing the map). Amos Orion Sterns is doing 109 monster pics, and Cynthia Sheppard is doing the cover.

Each of the mages will have unique powers (not tied to spell lists or the usual magic system), all of the monsters are new and unique. And everything's in color!

Depending how layout ends up as far as the page count, there will definitely be an index of monster listings (a bit challenging as none of the creatures has an actual name), but I'm hoping there's room to present all the monster stats as a mini "Monster Manual" style section for ease in poaching them for your home setting.

It will rock, this book.

And Now For Something Completely Different - Discussion About Upcoming Stuff

Nothing grotesque here except for some business talk.

Still have a very few last minute art bits to finish out the Grindhouse Edition, and it's in final proofing now.

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit is going into final layouts and proofing during this weekend.

The plan is to have everything to the printer the week of the 21st. We'll see...

Not 100% finalized, but the retail prices will be somewhere around 12,50€ for Vornheim and 37,50€ for the Grindhouse Edition.

Pre-orders will open when they go to the printer and I've got the commercial PDF versions together (hopefully just a day or two after). There will be a free bonus thingy for people who pre-order both at the same time. (also, the shirt will go up for pre-order, but you don't need to order that to get the free thingy)

Next week I'll be opening up the Gardening Society again for memberships. That'll happen next week, I just need to get the formats of a few things done and straighten out how I'm going to arrange the benefits.

While down at the printer dealing with the color proofs (who the hell decided that screens would use a different color palette than printers? grrr. GRRRR.) I also discussed formats and pricing for Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown.

Carcosa is going to be awesome. Looking at 192 pages right now, a cover as wonderful to touch as seal skin, with a foil-pressed cover. The printer rep did not look amused when I asked if human skin was available for the binding. Looks like the interior pages won't be able to be thick parchment-like paper without putting the costs through the roof. We should know who the artist is going to be for the whole Carcosa project by the end of next week.

Isle of the Unknown is a bit vexing. The book is looking like 128 pages, maybe 160 depending on how we handle the art. McKinney and I have big plans. Every monster in this book is new and unique, and we want them all illustrated. Plus there is a common theme through several of the areas described and I want those to get their own full page pieces. And we're trying to do this full-color - bring this island to LIFE. That's just about 125 color pieces.

We're trying to keep the final retail price below US$40for each of these books, but that's getting really tough with all the color we want in Isle...

Isle of the Unknown and How it Will Define LotFP as a Publisher

The Grindhouse Edition of Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is in a holding pattern on my end as most of what I need to do to it now depends on the art that hasn't yet been delivered. (to the artists reading, this doesn't mean rush... better for it to be slow and good than quick and sloppy)

So I've finally had the chance to really start looking over and planning details about Vornheim, Isle of the Unknown, and Carcosa. Vornheim: The Complete City Kit's format is entirely functional - Zak and I will be taking advantage of the format of a physical book and using it to do things beyond just being the storage medium for information. We'll also be taking advantage of the Free-PDF-with-Physical-Purchase to make the combo do even more things (I am really struggling to not use lame business lingo here). I'm hoping it'll be considered innovative, but at worst it'll simply work.

Now Zak's a obviously not just a writer - he's also the artist and his mind works in many more directions than mine does. In other words, he has a lot of ideas that seem very strange to me, but for the most part we're going with his direction. I'm the publisher but he's the guy on Vornheim. The mandate from Zak is to do all this while keeping the book as affordable as possible. None of the fancy bits of the book are unnecessary - they all have a game-play function. Our format and page count was set very early on and we're going to deliver all this to you with a lower-than-$20 price tag (exchange rates willing).

Impressed you will be. But this is all very specific to Vornheim and not to LotFP productions going forward.

Carcosa already had a low-budget version released a couple years back and my vision for the re-release is big. It's going to be a fancy hardcover, on the outside resembling a forbidden magical tome. One idea we're looking at is keep the cover itself clear of any publishing gobbledygook or sales stuff and include that info on a OBI strip type of thing.

Again, very project-specific as Carcosa is entirely its own thing with a history.

Isle of the Unknown is something else altogether. No particular physical format is suggested by the concept. So what to do?

If we keep the font that previous LotFP adventures have used (Times New Roman 8pt), we could condense it down, have a bit of artwork to fill out the page count, put the map on the reverse of a detachable cover and have the package resemble Hammers of the God. Module-as-Usual.

However, if we increase the font size a bit and make the thing a little more readable, this is no longer an option. We're looking at perfect-bound, with questions about where the map goes. Not insurmountable, but not module-as-usual. Then I get this email from McKinney the other day:

James,

As I was falling asleep last night (in that half-awake half-asleep state) the following idea occurred to me. Then at 4:30 this morning I woke-up and couldn't fall back to sleep because of this idea. As I type this sentence it's 5:09 in the morning.

More than anything else, art in an RPG product needs to be useful. I think back to my early RPG days, and what "sold" me on a product more than anything else? Monster Manual-style art. The day I bought my Holmes Basic set, I also purchased the Monster Manual. It was a no-brainer purchase rather than the PHB or the DMG. Why? Because of the multitude of monster illustrations.

Some months thereafter I went to the store, money in hand, to buy the PHB. Ha! The Deities & Demigods book was sitting there, brand new on the shelf. One look at it (with its MM-style art) and there was no debate: I bought the DDG instead. I could sit for hours looking at the pictures in the MM and the DDG (and, in the next year, the Fiend Folio). The PHB and the DMG? Not so much. Sure, drawings of adventurers are cool, but how can they compare to the compendia of drawings of monsters in the MM, DDG, and FF?

Consider two monsters from the MM that nobody ever uses: the masher and the slithering tracker. (Hell, I literally never even noticed the very existence of the masher for about 20 years!) Why does nobody ever use them? What do they have in common?

No picture.

What if the interior art of Isle of the Unknown is devoted solely to Monster Manual-style (by that I mean relatively small drawings of just the monster itself) drawings of the 108 or so monsters in the book? That's a lot of drawings, but they'd be relatively small. The drawings would make the monsters come alive, unlike the poor masher and slithering tracker.

Plus, the drawings overall would be cooler than the drawings in MM, DDG, or FF. After all, how cool can a drawing of an orc or a brownie be? In contrast, all the monsters in Isle of the Unknown are weird and relatively hard to picture.

My first thought was "Oh fuck that. It'll cost a fortune to have someone draw all those things. And that'll double the size of the book." I'm not going to have all these illustrations done and then make them teensy tiny, after all. Basically, Isle of the Unknown goes from being a module ("small project") to being a setting ("big project") on just the weight of visuals, with the same written content.

... and not that it would be solely the monster art in there - this would be going into offset printing territory for sure and at A5 size we need multiples of 32 pages, and as there's little chance that it'll magically end up being the exact number of needed pages I'll also need enough art to fill out that page count. I want readable fonts but not exaggerated giant lettering, and blank pages sitting at the end of a gaming supplement are lame. Plus there's still the cover that needs to be gorgeous (I agree with this and if I didn't need to keep up good relations with people I'd name some names of recent OSR cover art that isn't just "kinda bad" or "understandable given the budget," but art so bad it makes me feel embarrassed for all involved). And the map needs to look professional.

Do I want to take that step? It's nice that he's got all these ideas but it's easy to have ideas when someone else is bankrolling them.

But wanting to make sure McKinney is happy with the final product, I checked around. It turns out I could do this, although the art budget would be through the roof. Yes, that cost gets passed on to you, the buyer, but with the new page count that would be required, I think the price wouldn't be outrageous for what you'd get.

Then I did my first close reading of the entire book. Holy balls, all these monster descriptions talk about color! Hmmm. HMMMMM. Not that color is necessary for the illustrations, but one should check into all the options. All-color monster illustrations not only increases the price of each piece of art individually, but a different type of paper than planned will be required for the book, and printing in color is more expensive as well, and any extra pics would also have to be in color or it won't seem like a cohesive product. Geoffrey's island is described so vibrantly that I can't say that the color would be an unnecessary luxury - color is integral to the imagery McKinney uses.

But going all-color moves us into strange territory - the risk becomes not only large but dangerous, and while I believe people will pay a quality price for a quality product, there does come a point where too much is too much.

(disregard POD pricing models - with offset if you're going all color it's the price of commissioning color vs black and white that jacks up the cost of the book more than paper or printing costs)

Isle of the Unknown is (or was until now) a smaller release on the schedule, so really what I decide for it will set a standard for what a "run of the mill" (horrible way to put it) LotFP release looks like going forward. I have a little while before I'll start commissioning any of this stuff, but that just means I'll have more time to agonize over the decision.

So what to do?

Keep in mind that Isle of the Unknown is a sandbox. Not a setpiece module that you'll run for 1 - 3 sessions and then be done with it. It can form the skeleton of an entire campaign which never leaves the Isle.

I want every release to be special and as high-quality, inside and out, as I can make it.

I believe that the perception of OSR products as "cheap" hurts us more than helps us (remember that the classic TSR products were extremely high-end for their time and not cheap on release) on a variety of levels. In an age of freely available PDFs, legitimate or otherwise, competing on price seems utterly daft. Sparse production values in a book designed to spark the imagination hardly make the book more worth owning.

But how much is too much?