The Economics of the Box Set

Brave Halfling Publishing's John Adams talked about why his Swords and Wizardry White Box box isn't going through distribution. He originally had the explanation on BHP's site, but that seems to be taken down, and now just present in the comments of one of Grognardia's posts about the project, here. What's in that box?

• 6" x 9" Game Box (This is an actual game box manufactured for just this purpose)
• Four Rule Booklets (Characters, Spells, Monsters, & Treasures)
• A digest-sized copy of Matt Finch's, "Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming"
• Ten of Marv Breig's 3" x 5" Index Card Character Sheets
• Set of Polyhedral Dice
• Pad of digest-sized Graph Paper
• Pencil

The Primer is a 13 pages, the new version of White Box 111 pages... in full-size format. I don't know how they're formatting the booklets, but let's assume you're getting the same format, so double the pages.

So 28 pages for the Primer, and 4 56-page bookets. Plus the other stuff. Plus artwork.

(edit: Got the actual figures from the comments:

Book I is 28 pages, Book 2 is 25 pages, Book 3 is 36 pages, and Book 4 is 26 pages. Throw in a few more pages for the OGL and a few more for the blank spell/monster/notes templates. And really, 4 of these digest pages equal one US Letter sheet. So you're looking at between 29-35 actual US Letter sheets per each WB booklet set.)

I'm going to make some wild guesses concerning the box in my commentary here. For example, I have no clue about how much of a profit margin BHP have allowed themselves with this thing, but since John says, "And even if the publisher takes the base cost of all the parts of a boxed set and then sets the retail price by doubling it," let's pretend that's what happened. The original price was to be $29.95, so let's say his costs per box are a cool $15. Going by his 40% figure for the percentage of retail price that a publisher gets (which is cut even further if using other services as well, not to mention the publisher eats the cost of shipping to the distributor)... this box, with the above contents, with the assumptions listed here, would have a retail price of $75 if you bought it in your local store. That's more than Arkham Horror, a game that comes with a board and a billion cards and pieces and a big glossy rulebook, all in color.

That's not anybody, not the printer, BHP, the distributor, or your local store price-gouging, that's just the reality of short-run printing. Especially with boxes.

Every single thing you buy in a store has had these markups made.

$29.95, an amount that seems large to those of us that remember the days of $12 hardcover AD&D books, $12 Mentzer box sets, and $6 modules (all of these retail prices that have gone through the channels listed above, not direct-order only prices), and them printing tens of thousands of copies of each item at a time). I've been a price complainer as much as anyone in past years, but reality is reality. THAT WAS OVER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO.

$29.95, an amount that is so obviously not overpriced if you've looked into these things. And that's with black and white artwork on the box (which, looking at the artwork, I'd guess to be about 1.25" thick), and just headings colored on the booklets. That's with a 6 piece unmatched dice set. That price would have been higher (maybe much higher) with a 7-piece matched dice set, and if the cover of the box looked like the cover of the PDF.

As it is, John took a huge risk. Maybe this last 50 that sold out wasn't such a big risk since the high demand was already established, but let's just say that the 75 that was announced as added to the print run was a doubling of the original print run. $15 x 75 = $1125 risk.

These are exciting and scary times.

One thing I hope that comes out of this is that the businesspeople that control access to the stores look at this and get the stick out of their asses about "digest size" and "black and white." John wasn't kidding about that. I had some discussions where I was told black and white art wouldn't cut it for retail. Death Frost Doom's cover is black and white, and will stay black and white. I've sold over 300 copies with just a handful of vendors, very limited availability and accessibility for it. You'd think that shows that if it were available from your local game store in print with no shipping fee, it might move a few copies.

Maybe they don't sell as well as colorfulwowiezowie full-sized books, but the option of low-price booklets should be there, in retail. Maybe nothing so slipshod as my original Creature Generator or Fantasy Fucking Vietnam, but certainly something like Rients' Miscellaneum of Cinder (those would be dirt cheap to print in bulk) or McKinney's Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer should be impulse-buy RPG items in stores.

But you need to "product-ize" a book to get it that far, and it's really impossible to make a few-dollars item in RPGs these days. Not to mention when you realize that spending money can allow you to manufacture something really really cool, with hope that the market will bear it.

(of course, I have no idea how Goodman Games is making a single penny off of the Dungeon Alphabet, with it being hardcover and full of name artists... or how Maliszewski and Rogue Games are making any money off of The Cursed Chateau at their prices either, but hey, more for us. Both of those are available at Noble Knight right now, by the way)

My interest in all this should be obvious, and I'm watching the events with a keen eye. I'm going after expensive art talent, going to have a full-color box cover, full color booklets inside, a matched 7-piece set of dice, and a ton more handouts. And I want to push it into retail. I hope my risk pays off just as well as John's...

First Artist Announcement

Kevin Mayle will be doing the cover of the as-yet unnamed wilderness adventure to be included in the LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing box set.

He's done the coloring job for LotFP's Insect Shrine of Goblin Hill cover (as yet unreleased, planned to be the first thing after the box set now), multiple color pieces for Fight On!, and many homages to old TSR art pieces, including the once-controversial Holmes cover "cover."

This cover art will of course be full-color.

The adventure itself will be a maritime adventure with a pirate theme, introducing basic elements of wilderness adventuring and of course having the touch of surreality that's a LotFP trademark.

There will be more copies of the adventure printed for those that may want it without getting the full box.

Truth be told, the reason it'll be a maritime adventure is because I'm just going to cut and paste certain maritime OGL rules into my manuscript, and I don't know if anyone has ever used them, whether in their current form or their original incarnation in the 1981 box. If the adventure uses them, I have to playtest the rules in order to run the adventure before it sees print. Convenient, eh? :D

Progress!

The box cover: I'm still waiting on quotes from a few artists I've contacted, but I'm already sifting through the bids and galleries submitted. They're still flowing in (even one while I'm in the middle of typing this). I wrote on Sunday about some artists being delusional, but I have to tell you, the final decision is going to be painful. No matter who I choose, I'm going to wonder "What if...?" concerning a ton of other artists.

There are three other covers that need to be done for booklets inside the box, and I'm selecting artists and making offers there as well. The budget on those is but a fraction of what I'm spending for the box cover, since they really won't be nearly as important a promotion point. It would be really cool to spend top dollar for every illustration in here, but then I'd have to charge $100 for the game.

I haven't begun selecting or doing anything much concerning the interior illustrations. Laura will be doing at least some, hopefully a bunch, but there will be plenty of opportunity for others in there as well.

... and there are (cross fingers) a great many projects in the future, so I will be keeping all this artist information on file.

I have to say, choosing artists is a lot more enjoyable than trying to arrange a photo shoot singlehandedly.

I got box price quotes from the printer this morning. Scary isn't the word. I need to see what I can do about that. My local printer is outsourcing box-making, so maybe I shouldn't be using them as an agent to make boxes, mmm? I'm happy with their booklet work, and they'll be getting quite a lot of business from me concerning the inside of the box. We'll see.

And of course, writing continues. Having all the pretty wrapping won't mean a hill of beans without the actual content to fill it out, hmmm? Not to fear, hard at work!

And congrats to BHP on the success of their box set. You continue to give me hope that I won't just be sitting on hundreds of these things til the end of time... :D

More Death Frost Doom (and other stuff!) Comments

Here and here.

And Death Frost Doom, just under 6 months after release, is still sitting in Noble Knight's top 5. wooo!

oof! Reflections of the Past Few Days

Economics. Box sets. Reality. blleeehhh...

The reality is that producing a box with nothing in it would result in a retail price resembling The Grinding Gear. Looking at the cost to get dice in bulk, and thinking of retailer markups putting an empty box with dice into distribution... brrrr

Problems:

I'm doing a short run. 500 copies. The temptation is to do 1000 to bring the price of everything way down, but the resulting debt and clutter around the apartment would likely be intolerable as it's not like 500 will fly out the door, let alone 1000.

Being in Europe. 1€ = $1.44 right now. That's better than what it's been, but effectively, what I call 5 bucks, you call seven-twenty. The sales tax here is 22%, which affects the cost of every bit of manufacturing I do and every bit of supplies I buy. Also, shipping of a box from here to there... *shiver shiver* The one saving grace here is that there is no import duty into the States on either books or games.

There are several reasons why I don't move the printing offshore.

A- One of the points of the project is to have a complete game to present to European markets so I can then sell my adventures. Why the hell should Fantasiapelit (Finnish game store chain... literally "Fantasy Games") stock Death Frost Doom, or any other module of mine, if they're not stocking any game that Death Frost Doom is advertised to be compatible with?

B- I'll be assembling the boxes and filling them by hand. There will be a decent amount of loose sheets in the box (character sheets, introduction page, graph paper, reference sheets, etc) and I'm just paranoid enough to not trust some production guy at the printers who I'm sure cares very very deeply about such things to put it all in the box in exactly the right order.

C- As far as my research shows, those big Chinese printing discounts require rather large runs. I suppose I could look into Estonian printing but I sometimes have communications issues with the printer down the street, solved by showing them examples of existing products by other publishers. Outsourcing to another country where I don't have that face-to-face contact seems like nothing but stress.

So the final product will cost a bit. I have shaved the total page count a bit, as the Tutorial section was originally envisioned to be a fully functional Mentzer Basic clone. Seriously. I'm that bugfuck nuts to have conceived of an entire clone as just the first part of a larger box. Sanity has prevailed, and the tutorial will just be solo adventures, following Mentzer in format, but of course completely rewritten with a more LotFP atmosphere. Probably not going to have people making Kill Iri-Khan shirts and dice games in 20 years though.

I should have a completed draft of the entire tutorial book ready at the end of this week, at which point I'll know which terms are defined and how in the Tutorial so I can tackle the main rulebook without repeating effort. Two weeks after that I hope to have a serviceable rules document document that I can post and pass out to my players to transition my weekly game from BFRPG to this. "Go along with this and you'll get a free fancy box in a few months!" will be the bribery method. And then all the tweaks I've made on a rules-theory standpoint that I haven't used in-game yet will get weekly play while I'm working on the Referee book which will be the biggest pain in the ass to organize and write intelligibly, since it's going to take all the assumptions and standard bits of Our Favorite Game (can't mention any specific compatibilities on an OGL project! *sigh*) and throwing them out and redoing them from scratch. Not that I'll be making that stuff up from whole cloth, but I will have to take my philosophies and approaches and make them accessible to Joe Reader.

But there will be no monster lists or bestiaries, standard magic item lists, or encounter charts as there are in every single version or clone of the game.

The one bright spot in this morass of planning and work and hair-tearing (this is my job, so it's entitled to provide some of that), and something that has energized me about my project, has been this Brave Halfling box set and its success. I don't know how much John has told people publicly and how much that he's told me in confidence, so I won't repeat any production details of the product itself. Suffice to say when he announced a box set with graph paper and pencils and dice I was all "aarrgghhhhhhhh!" Since Brave Halfling has a couple things in the distribution chain, I thought that $29.95 was an in-store retail price. I was really tearing my hair out wondering how he did that (much like I'm puzzled about Goodman Games' low prices on a few things lately). But it isn't so. It's a short-run direct-order item, and at $35.95 (the pre-order price plus shipping as I checked for several US ZIP code) still sold out in very short order. It confirmed that the old-school community will pay a bit for a premium item simply for the cool factor.

Whether my final result will be cool or not remains to be seen, but I have reason now to believe it can be a success if it is.

(of course, they were sold out before I had the money to place my order, frazzlebapgrrrrcrunch)

I still don't know what the final costs for LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing will be, and I have a lot of writing to do before I can find out, but I know it won't be a budget item. So the question is, how far do I go?

I've been contacting dice companies looking for quotes. Including Gamescience and Q-Workshop. Those are not cheap dice. One might say they are extravagant dice. But I want all options open when it's time to pull the trigger.

And then we come to artwork. I posted my call for artists in a few places, and the portfolios and quotes are pouring in. Let me tell you (and I am not going to name names), there are a lot of artists that are simply delusional. I guess it goes with the artistic talent in some ways, or overestimating their own talent, but whew. They either think I'm an idiot or they need some perspective.

But there are also a lot of really great artists out there looking for work. Absolutely phenomenal talents.

The quotes I've received for the box cover artwork have started at 25€ and have gone all the way up to $1000 and even more.

My thoughts on artwork (this is where I start collecting pissy people points):

When it comes to interior illustrations, I'm a lot more flexible. I love the black-and-white stuff. This stuff (my old Artwork post). The work that Laura has done for me in my adventures rocks. I can't imagine anyone doing a better job on the High Priest's Temple in Death Frost Doom. That moon piece especially in The Grinding Gear was almost a formatting afterthought illustrating a moment's diversion within the adventure but is absolutely flawless in execution and gives the whole package a more surreal vibe that helps it overall. A few of her pieces in the upcoming Hammers of the God and Insect Shrine are so good that if Trampier decided to get back in the biz just to re-do those illustrations for me, if Otus or Holloway or whoever offered to donate free art to replace what Laura did, I'd turn them down.

In other words, I'm quite happy with the way my interior artwork looks, and will be adding to the stable only as projects become more demanding than Laura's time can deal with (which will be the case for this set).

But covers? There is a reason I wanted a photo for the box set. Because I couldn't think of an artist that can do this without making it look fake. And I don't want it to look fake. I want it to look like it is in my head.

To explain a bit: I can't think of a simple RPG company whose cover art I like. Much of it comes down to art direction I know, but if Bob in the office tells Mike at the easel to draw something stupid, no matter how good the technical quality of the final piece, I'm going associate Mike with drawing stupid shit.

Black and white art invites a viewer to fill in mental blanks. At least it does for me. Color art does not, and my mind fights what a lot of color art is showing me because my brain is telling me there should be something else there instead. Artistic stylization in color clashes with my imagination. Everyone from Vallejo to Frazetta to Royo to Earl Norem to Pete Mullen and the rest of "our guys" and the stuff I've released and have in the queue fit this category.

You have to look at things like Dragon Magazine covers to get fantasy color art that I get excited about. Robin Woods' stuff on issues #97 and 105. Daniel R Horne's cover on #126. Parkinson's "What Do You Mean We're Lost?" and "The Big Stash." It seems that this sort of thing doesn't get put on the cover of many RPG books. ACTIONSTYLE seems to be what people use high-end artists to do (thought exercise: Imagine Boris Vallejo doing the original cover for the 1e Players Handbook). My current cover concept isn't without action, but more resembles Dragons #109 or 126. Confrontation and anticipation. But we'll see what happens with it.

I'll be waiting a week or so for the submissions to trickle off and then explore these portfolios a bit more, narrow them down, and then decide how much I really want to spend, and who I trust to make my vision real.

(more insanity: I've made a couple offers to people about publishing their stuff after my box set comes out, and I'm already thinking about this level of art on their stuff... I need a production staff, dammit, but it's not in the budget)

But this project is going to be a serious investment and risk. Do I mitigate that risk, or go for broke? "As special as I can make it within a reasonable budget?" or give in to the fact that "reason" and "RPG Publishing" are opposed concepts in the first place and just make it unqualified "As special as I can make it"? Do I think about market issues or do I just do what I want to see without compromise (this is the question of breasts but I don't intend any erotic imagery at all in this image)?

Questions that must be answered, but not quite yet.

And I've got a game in two hours that has nothing to do with any of this. I've been writing this all morning while making game notes while holding conversations in IM at the same time.

Exciting times, may they continue for a good long while!

Call for Artists

'allo...

This box set thing just gets more involved. One thing is for sure - the cover must be spectacular. Not "good for old school," not "good for that sort of thing," but something that would look striking on a store shelf and would have the average person saying, "That's really frickin cool!"

I'm pursuing one option: A photograph. The Flame Princess battling a snake demon. I've got people I'm talking to, the costumes would be custom made... but I have my doubts on doing it this way. Mainly because the people I'm working with are offering no ideas or initiative, I feel I'm pulling the whole project myself, and that really sucks. With two models, a clothesmaker, a photographer, a digital manipulator (also one of the models), and a location to manage with this project, not to mention having to be the fashion designer, it would be a miracle to get anything done, let alone the amazing piece I need for the cover.

I'm not dropping the idea yet, but I do want to explore other options. Art instead of a photo. Anyone out there qualified and willing?

Full color, two figures in snowy woods, 1500s vibe. I don't want it to look stylized or particularly like a fantasy piece, although of course there will be fantastic elements to it. That Plan A is a photograph should tell you the feel I'm going for. I want this to look realistic, if not real-looking.

I have a budget, but not a huge one. Will need the art by the end of March.

Interested parties send their galleries/samples link (don't send large files to me directly) and their rates for a full color cover piece to lotfp@lotfp.com.

I'll also be needing a lot of other artwork over the coming months, but I don't have the details yet (and by the time I do, Laura won't have time to do the several dozen pieces I'd need). Lots of black and white and several color pieces that will not require such exacting standards. Send links and rates to the same address above, thanks!

Thank you.

The Dungeon Alphabet Arrives

Nice surprise in the mail just now!

As a publisher, I don't know how in the hell Goodman Games can afford to retail this for $9.99, but WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Wait til you guys see Otus' Monster Shitter (with steam) and Mullen's inside covers...

This is the stuff.

Nothing to See Here

Been writing at a furious pace.

Been arranging business deals. There are already announcements I could be making because the contracts are signed, but I'm wanting to wait until I can make availability announcements instead of acting like you should care that signatures have been swapped.

Been tearing my hair out dealing with suppliers.

Been wondering why my "art department," who I think of as "collaborators" more than independent contractors, don't seem to think my ideas are all as cool as I think they are - and are not offering their cooler ideas, either. :P

LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Version 0.01

Here.

It's not a coherent piece of work, it's not nearly finished, blah blah, but I think you'll see the basic ideas so far. This isn't a new game, just a slight variation of the game, where the differences here can be ported over to other games, or ignored entirely.

One problem I'm having doing the basic writeup of the rules is that I'll be having a tutorial booklet in the box which will introduce a lot of game concepts, so I'm not sure how to introduce them in the rules book. Should it also be explanatory, or assume the reader has either a working knowledge of the tutorial or traditional gaming in general?

Also, I seem to be wavering on whether to use pronouns or not. ah well.

Anyway, here's a first look, the "rehearsal tape" version.

The New Year

2009 was my best year in recent memory; certainly since 1996. A solid relationship the entire year, didn't move the entire year, didn't worry about where I was going to live the entire time. Got busy again writing on a regular schedule, started a business, caught more than a couple cool shows and hitting music and movie festivals. I'm hoping 2010 is even better.

My only disappointments have been that I haven't gotten my weight under control (although my gamers might understand, seeing all those baked goodies she makes and that's just on game day!) and that I didn't have a good idea for Tools of the Trade III on New Year's Eve to follow up last year's. Actually, I did have one idea but it would have probably gotten me kicked off Blogger and ruined a lot of New Years parties: A recreation of the goatse.cx picture, with me bent over spreading my cheeks, and an illustration of a Carrion Crawler photoshopped in to make it look like it was crawling out my butt. Certainly would have "topped" last year, but sanity prevailed there. Except now in your mind's eye. :D

As for business:

My goal is 10 releases for 2010. We'll see about that.

2009's releases sold a total of just over 1000 copies, print and PDF combined. Over 400 of those were Green Devil Faces, which leaves 600 of the for-profit books... fully half of which were Death Frost Doom. As a whole, not pulling a profit yet, but I wasn't expecting to this early. That my first product has been the biggest success is a surprise, but I won't complain as I hope to sell hundreds of more DFD copies this year. Various schemes are in the works for the business.

My sales goal in 2010 is to average 300 copies of each new release, print and PDF combined. We'll see.

Later on today, maybe before midnight local time (5pm Eastern), I'll put up the working document of LotFP Weird Fantasy Role Playing and link it here. Character creation, spell lists, as well as some magic, adventuring, and combat rules will be in there. Regular updates will follow until it's done.

Lots of work to do. It will get done!

Good luck to all of you in 2010 as well. Life and gaming (as a hobby and as an industry) are what we make them. Steamroll obstacles, crush opposition, and rule your world... or die trying!