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?