In the last 24 hours, my wife — formerly an employee of Sun Microsystems, now acquired by Oracle — got laid off, and Evil Hat started getting courted by a distributor now that our press release about the Dresden Files RPG is getting more circulation. Both bear talking about.
I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.
This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden Files RPG. (Yes, we’re splitting it into two books. No, I don’t want to talk about that here. I’m talking about it enough other places already.) Our press release doesn’t talk about distribution; it says we’ll have it on sale through Indie Press Revolution (and therefore through retailers who get books from IPR), and we’ll have it on sale through our own web store.
Now, that’s not the whole picture, but it’s most of it. (We have a good relationship with UK-based distributor Esdevium, and we’ll likely continue to work that relationship for getting products over to the other side of the Atlantic.) The question, then, is why is that most of the picture? (i.e., why aren’t we diving at distributors aplenty and trying to get signed up?)
Today, I bunt. I’ve got layout on my mind, in the sense that I need to get back to doing that, rather than blogging.
But it occurs to me that by this point, if you’re following this blog you know why you’re coming here.
Why is that? And what should I be writing about to keep your particular itch scratched?
My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing. I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit. (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. This has the upside of getting lots of story in big coherent swaths, but it also has the effect of mainlining the entire season of a TV show in two days. You’re simultaneously full up of the good stuff, and empty because there isn’t a similar volume waiting for you on day three.)
Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.) At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter. And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.
But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table. So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)