Oz Character of the Month: Zeb Hugson

Something of an unusual choice this month. I already did Santa Claus last December, so the easy one is done.


Name: Zeb Hugson
First Appearance: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
Template: Child in Oz

Size: 2

Athletics: 4
Awareness: 4
Brains: 1
Presence: 2 (horsemanship)
Sneaking: 3
Wits: 3

Traits:

Friends List: Jim the Cab-Horse

Goodbye Thanksgiving, it's time for Christmas already!

I'm sure many of you are getting stuffed with turkey today, and plan on doing your shopping tomorrow on the infamous Black Friday. But thanks to the glories of the internet, some stores never close. And some of those stores are mine.

Starting today is the Big 25 sale at RPGnow, DrivethruRPG, and Lulu.com (print and PDF). From November 25 (Thanksgiving Day) through December 25 (Christmas Day), you can save 25% on Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. That's only $5.99 for the PDF or $11.24 for print.

Also, a new item is available today. Now you can get your own poster map of Oz over at Zazzle.com. It's the same map from the Adventures in Oz rulebook, now for display on your wall or wherever you put your Oz collectibles.

In other news, I got my hands on a copy of Oz: Dark and Terrible and am planning on posting a review in podcast form. Watch this space for updates on that.

Getting Ready

Sorry about the late blog post.

As much as I hate the mad mercantile rush around Christmas, I am forcing myself to participate. I've got a couple things that will be happening come Thanksgiving Day. I'll be having a Christmas sale at Lulu, DriveThruRPG, and RPGnow. And I'll be debuting a new product over at Zazzle. on that day as well.

Slightly farther out: I've been working on getting POD book printing through OneBookShelf. The first proof copy I ordered had some problems, and I had to get the file massaged before trying again. I ordered my second proof copy today. If that passes inspection, people can buy a print copy of AiO from DriveThruRPG and RPGnow. That also means that I'll be able to sell that holy grail of modern RPG marketing: The Print/PDF Bundle.

I am working on a new product right now: You've all seen my "Oz Character of the Month"? Well, I'm planning on putting that information onto nicely formatted character sheets. I've got a collection picked out featuring characters you've seen before and some statted out for the first time in this product. Illustrations have been provided by Oz illustrator S.P. Maldonado. I just need to do a little more writing, then get it certified and laid out pretty. No timetable yet, but I'm hoping it'll be available during the Christmas holiday season.

I Hate Christmas!

Actually, I really enjoy Christmas. While I don't get as many toys anymore (damn growing up!), it's still fun to check up with the family and play with the nephews' toys (though they're getting older now).

What I don't like about Christmas is how aggressively mercantile it's become. While out shopping for Halloween candy, I see displays with Christmas trees and Santa Claus. Thanksgiving gets no breathing room at all. It's primarily used to mark the day before "Black Friday", which is the day that people trample other people to death at Wal-Mart... I mean, the biggest shopping day of the year.

The worst part about this is that this is my first Christmas on the other side of the fence. As someone with something to sell, I'm going to have to find a way to tap all of this mercantile Christmas spirit while trying to make sure that I don't lose my personal love of Christmas.

Oz Character of the Month: Jack Pumpkinhead

There are those who would say I'm late with this one, but I say I'm right on time.

Name: Jack Pumpkinhead
First Appearance: The Marvelous Land of Oz
Template: Crafted Person

Size: 3

Athletics: 2
Awareness: 3
Brains: 2 (pumpkins)
Presence: 3
Sneaking: 1
Wits: 2

Traits: Crafted, Craftsman: Pumpkins

Friends List: Ozma

Jack Pumpkinhead is the most curiously mortal being in the land of Oz. While his wooden body will not wear out, his pumpkin head spoils on a regular basis. So he maintains a pumpkin farm in the Winkie country near the Emerald City so he always has a fresh pumpkin on hand to carve into a new head whenever he needs it. He has also carved a home from a particularly large pumpkin where he entertains guests and serves them various pumpkin-based delicacies, made from pumpkins that he has no need of as heads.

What do I do for an encore?

Thanks to everyone who purchased the charity bundle from RPGNow. Over $60,000 was raised to help Doctors Without Borders as they provide relief to flood victims in Pakistan.

But now I've got an interesting problem. Over 2,000 people have downloaded my game (even if they bought the bundle to get their hands on big name games like Icons, Exalted, or Starblazer Adventures) and I have nothing to follow it with. No supplements, no extra promotional items.

Typically, when you give away something for free, it's because you want them to buy a product later. Give away a free sample of cereal to get the customer to buy a box of it. Give away a core rulebook to encourage people to buy supplements.

But my supplement plans are proceeding slowly. I do have a fairly quick and easy project in the works, but I've had such bad luck with announcing release dates that I don't want to risk it right now. In the meanwhile, if you came here looking for supplements, sourcebooks or adventures modules (Take that, Google!), you can always find a new Oz character posted here every month.

To all the people who found Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road in their bundle: Tell your friends about this game. The more people buy the game, the more ability I will have to produce those supplements for you.

Gareth-Michael Skarka is full of crap

Gareth-Michael Skarka has been in the RPG industry for quite some time. And so he knows lots of stuff. But sometimes, he drops the ball.

In a recent blog, Gareth predicts the upcoming death of the tabletop RPG industry. A startling claim. His evidence? The Dresden Files RPG sold 3,000 books in the 3rd quarter of 2010. "Back in my day," I can hear the old man voice creaking "3,000 copies was a solid initial order."

But what does this really prove? Not as much as Gareth thinks it does. It proves that the RPG industry works differently than it did back in the 90's.

Because in the 1990's, the only way to get an economical price on book printing was to buy a lot of them. Only printing one or two at a time was an insane proposition. You had to order in volume. At least 1,000. 3,000 isn't too far off. Thanks to print on demand technology, those low per-book prices can be had at a much smaller volume.

Also, once you printed up your 3,000 copies in the year 199x, the next step was to sell to a distributor. Once you had done that, your involvement with selling those books was essentially done. It was now up to the distributor to sell the product to retailers, who then sold it to the end-user.

But come the year 2000, we got the 3rd edition of D&D and the resulting d20 glut. Gareth calls it an "explosion", but really, it was a glut. Too many people were trying to hitch their wagon to the d20 brand, publishing their old D&D campaigns and modules and trying to make a million dollars. Some of them might have actually done it. But they did so at the expense of the distributors. Distributors and retailers wound up saddled with literally tons of stuff that nobody wanted as customers realized that the d20 System logo was not an assurance of quality.

Fast forward to now and you might find a distributor who'll buy 3,000 copies of your game, if you're lucky and have an established track record. They've learned their lesson on that one.

So today's RPG publisher is leaner and meaner than those of yore. Instead of printing 3,000 books that will probably still be sitting in a warehouse somewhere six months from now, they are able to print a few at a time, responding swiftly as demand increases and scaling back when it doesn't happen.

Nothing's going away. It's just changing.