Vi kommer til Göteborg i morgon! And Vornheim Came!

We got confirmation yesterday that Vornheim was arrviing today. Then today they tell us it's coming tomorrow.

Alarm bells. We're off to Sweden first thing in the morning, so that's no good. That started a day of stress.

Some helpful employee of the printing company that drives an expensive car dropped off four boxes of Vornheim - about 100 copies.


For some reason one of the boxes was padded with... a ton of Vornheim dust jackets. All the books I've seen look fine, but I hope this doesn't mean there's a bunch arriving on Tuesday that will be naked.


Yeah, we kept telling them "Nobody here tomorrow or Friday!" and they'd say "OK, the rest will be there Tuesday!" but when we'd talk to someone new, they say "...and the rest will be there tomorrow!" Hopefully there isn't a pallet of picked-apart pallet of Vornheims waiting for us when we get back Sunday.

So we're off first thing in the morning to Sweden to attend GothCon. We are bringing copies of the Grindhouse Edition, Vornheim, Death Frost Doom, Grinding Gear, Hammers of the God, Tower of the Stargazer, Weird New World, plus a couple of Rogue Games' Cursed Chateau and Shadow Sword & Spell Basic and Expert books. We'll be at the convention Friday and Saturday, but not Sunday.

We'll be back Sunday night, and we will likely have no internet access until then.

We've shipped about 100 orders so far. About 200 more to be filled, but you have to wait until next week...

Oh yeah, I got a notice today telling me that my Frog God Games shipment is sitting in customs. We'll deal with that when we get back, and that will mean 11 Frog God Swords & Wizardry titles will get added to the webstore very soon. We've arranged it so if you order the print copy, you get the PDF free direct from our store.

That's enough news for now.

Mentzer, Mona, Raggi

... are the judges for this year's Ropecon Scenario Competition.

Details, in English, here.

(It doesn't say in the announcement, but I've asked for clarification: The competition is open only to those who will be attending Ropecon.)

I Am OLD (X-Men Related)

I used to be a huge comic freak. The X-Men were my favorites.

When I started on X-Men, Scott Summers was already married, and Kitty Pryde was older than me. I used to have a crush on Kitty Pryde.

So I'm bored this morning and channel flipping, and something called X-Men Evolution is on. I'd long given up on comics before there was ever an X-Men cartoon and I don't think I've ever seen one.

It's not dubbed! I can watch.

Oh. It's about Wolverine. Shit.

Still, all the X-Men besides Wolverine are kids. KIDS. Then I realize, "Oh yeah, they were pretty much all supposed to be young students back then. Except for Wolverine. And Banshee. And Thunderbird. And Sunfire. But you get the idea.

I never got the sense, not in the 80s X-Men anyway, that Nightcrawler or Rogue were teenagers. And I'd stopped reading before I recognized myself as older than Shadowcat, and she's definitely way too young in this cartoon, but that's how old she was supposed to be back when I was reading (Claremont was pretty crap at the whole "writing a teenager" thing, wasn't he?).

*sigh*

... and now on is something called Batman the Brave and the Bold. Teaming up with Sherlock Holmes fighting occult powers? Goddamn this is violent.

(Wait, that's Diedrich Bader? Evil Alien Conquerors is one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies. :D)

What the hell happened to cartoons these past 25 years?

(you can all stop laughing now)

Some Pictures (An Independent Publisher, The Glamourous Life of)

Taking a break from the box-filling grind...

Looked at the proofs for the large sheets that are going out with the bundled pre-orders. Thumbs up!
The kitchen table has been moved and is now Box Assembly HQ:
Here's another view of the apartment, with a Grindhouse box on top of the packing boxes for scale. The kitchen table used to be under that chandelier. And we have 2,000 hardcover Vornheims coming next week... someone on Twitter called my wife #martyroftheosr, and that's not far off...
Compare that to last year when we thought we'd trashed the apartment:
A portion of the 2,000 sets of dice and 20,000 character sheets.
When we return from GothCon, we have well over 300 orders to ship, including comp copies, contest winners, pre-orders, and retail & distributor orders. Here's a page from our shipping supply vendor's catalog. We use Mercamer here in Finland. When I had my metal zine in the US, I got my shipping supplies from Uline (actually, the box seals I use are from Uline because they're impossible to find at a reasonable price over here). Both companies have give me good supplies and great service and I recommend them both.
Here's a look at the spine of the Grindhouse Edition Rules & Magic book next to the Deluxe Edition Rules and Magic books.
Here is Command Center Iota - where all the magic happens!
Finch asked awhile back what we keep at our desk. Let me list it for you:

The top left panel below the plant (my wife's...) is where I keep the current month's receipts. On the first of every month I organize them and send them to my accountant.

Haven't figured out a use for the bottom panel. It's not a normal shelf, but more like a solid folder. I have an empty Levykauppa Äx plastic bag there right now for some reason.

In the center are my computer speakers and wireless headphones (for when the wife is asleep) up top, and on the desk itself around the monitor are my packed pen holder, blank note paper, customs and shipping method stickers, hair ties, screen duster, metal bookmarks, and other miscellaneous crap.

The top right shelf is a mess right now... a pile of notebooks, a couple of Deluxe Editions, my personal copy of Grindhouse, all my module releases, the blank Grindhouse mockup, and my supply of Rogue Games releases (about half spoken for with pre-orders). I need to clean this up. It'll probably be a stock shelf as I have dozens of titles from different publishers on the way for the webstore... some arriving next week, many on a slow-boat pallet shipment arriving probably in June. In particular, if you're a European OSR buyer, I'm going to be your best-bet hookup.

The middle right shelf has my history reference and current reading. I have 17 Osprey Publishing titles dealing with the 16th and 17th century as well as book on early firearms, conquistadors, the reformation, inquisition, 30 Years War, three on the English Civil War, and one about Vlad the Impaler.

The bottom shelf has my permanent gaming reference. I use... XRP's Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, Silk Road, and Ecology and Culture. Troll Lord's World Builder, Extraordinary Book of Names, and Insidiae (all from the Gygaxian Worlds series), Mythmere's two Adventure Design Deskbooks, the Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future corebooks, and Goodman's Dungeon Alphabet and Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role-Playing Games and Their Modern Simulacra.

Also on this shelf is my layout software's user guide. ... and my current CDs in rotation! I do not (and will not, ever) use an all-digital format for music or books. I'd be a vinyl snob if I could afford it, but I can't, so it's CDs or nothing. The current pile:

Briton Rites For Mircalla
Ghost Opus Eponymous
Blood Ceremony Blood Ceremony
Blood Ceremony Living with the Ancients
Upwards of Endtime From Genesis to Apocalypse and Beyond
Hour of 13 The Ritualist
Witchcraft The Alchemist
Orchid Capricorn

So a lot of retro doom stuff. Three albums from three different bands with Phil Swanson on vocals, oddly enough.

I need to talk about Capricorn's packaging. This album has convinced me to do a Referee screen for LotFP, because look at this frickin thing!

It just looks like a normal digipak CD...
But it's not! It's a multi-panel cool piece of work. The surface of the whole thing, inside and out, is like a hardcover book, not cheap cardboard.
The art, when the case is half-folded, forms one image on the inside.
But of course when it's completely unfolded, there's lots to see as well.
They placed the booklet over there on the left.
And the CD sleeve over there on the right.
So I'm thinking, if a tiny label (The Church Within Records out of Germany, a very excellent, if obscure label with great bands on the roster) releasing the debut record from a band that effectively nobody's ever heard of (but quite excellent - best album I've heard in years!) can do this (and it costs no more than a regular CD; the special edition is even more grand)... so can I.

It'll be months before I can get to this, but imagine... a four-panel hard board screen with A4-sized panels. Some magnificent work of art on the player-facing side. Cool color-coded tables on the Referee side. Perhaps in the ends are booklets - maybe one of optional rules, the other an adventure.

That would be killer.

Grindhouse Books HAVE ARRIVED!

I forgot to take a picture of the books on the pallets outside the front of the building. While we were unloading them and bringing them upstairs, you should have seen the looks on peoples' faces as they passed by and looked at the covers outside. :D

Anyway, books look good; don't see any pixelation in the images, text is clear, the color art looks nice and vibrant (can't tell so well from that second pic, but "evidence of existence," not "attractive advertising photo," was the goal there.

Mission accomplished. I did good. Now to assemble, pack, and ship these fuckers, all the while selling a bunch of them.

Vornheim arrives next week.

One Last Pause

The winners of the "Follow This and That" "contest" have been notified. Don't unsubscribe just yet - if someone doesn't respond I'll be picking new winners. And I'd really like to rock on Cyclopeatron's May rankings. ;)

Just up late dealing with art notes for Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown as I'll be busy these next couple weeks.

The Grindhouse books arrive tomorrow. Er, later today (Thursday). I'm terrified. I'm having nightmares about faded text and pixelated art and off colors. Thinking that the proofs were somehow not representative of the final product. I have some people coming to help haul boxes up to the apartment (the truck is going to drop pallets outside the front door) in exchange for pizza (how many hallmarks of a truly professional publisher can you find in that sentence?), but when it's all done I'll take pictures of both our hopelessly full apartment and the finished books.

Until then, I am in a state of EEK.

And some editorial:

I just had a pretty good pre-order drive exceeding my goal by 25% and I'm a fleaspeck sized RPG publisher. The Grindhouse box is selling faster than the last printing as well - what took the Deluxe box 6 weeks to sell, I just did in 2, counting direct orders only. And that's with an absolutely shit $/€ exchange rate right now, which makes all those US orders more impressive. (THANK YOU)

Evil Hat just started a Kickstarter drive for this Do game, set a $4000 goal, and has already raised $12,000+ in four days. Evil Hat's a rising star but not one of the big boys (I'd say at this point due to the slow release schedule more than anything else).

If the truly small publishers (in the RPG sense) can do five figure product opens, then the rumors of the RPG industry's death are...

... wait for it...

... greatly exaggerated.

As they always have been.

Good night.

The Boxes Have Arrived!

The books to fill those boxes are supposed to be delivered on Friday. The dice have been here for months and the character sheets and OGL sheet have been here for almost two weeks now. When the books arrive I'll start putting the boxes together (all the boxes besides the one on display are still flat).

Vornheim will be here Tuesday or Wednesday next week, then we go to GothCon. When we return, we'll start preparing the pre-orders for shipment, and that will start once the shirts arrive, hopefully soon after.

Those pictures of how much of a mess this apartment was last year during box assembly? Haha, that was less than a third the number of boxes I'm doing now, plus I have another product arriving as well.

Fun, fun times, if you don't ask my wife what she thinks of the arrangement.

(buy buy buy for her sake!)

Are You Following This Blog?

11:59pm Wednesday night I randomly select a blog follower to get a free Grindhouse box.

(will do the same for LotFP Facebook followers and Twitter followers...)

Poag: Hard at Work on Exquisite Corpses (Art Pic!)

Fangoria's Fangorotica Feature with Luna and LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Cover Art

See the pics and read the interview here.