Part 2 of the Party

I just wanted to announce that Part 2 of the Ruthless Diastema Podcast series on Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road is live over on Geeky & Genki. This one gives a basic rundown of the rules of the game. If you missed Part 1 from last Friday, it's here.

In other news, I have been invited to participate in a Google+ Hangout to discuss the intricacies of AiO's magic rules on May 13th. And if you aren't able to attend, it will be recorded and posted for later consumption.

It's been suggested that I get deeper in to this whole social media thing to try and promote the game. I've already got a fan page on Facebook and a small presence on Google+. I'm reluctant to join Twitter out of fear that I'll wind up posting a steady stream of inanities like everyone else there.

What do you think? Where do you get your social media buzz?

Q2 2012 Quarterly Report

Slowly but surely I am getting caught up to the current day.

 Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road

Sales Channel/Product Type	April	May	June	Quarter Total	YTD	Last Year	Grand Total
Lulu/Print	-	-	-	-	1	7	69
Lulu/Digital	-	-	-	-	2	2	12
Lulu/Total	-	-	-	-	3	9	81
CreateSpace/Print	-	-	1	1	3	-	11
One Book Shelf/PDF	-	5	2	7	27	3	131
One Book Shelf/Print	-	-	-	-	-	1	2
One Book Shelf/Bundle	-	-	-	-	1	1	10
One Book Shelf/Total	-	5	2	7	28	5	143
Paizo/PDF	-	-	-	-	-	1	5
Amazon Kindle	1	1	1	3	8	-	8
Totals	1	6	4	11	42	15	249

 Adventures in Oz Characters Pack

Sales Channel/Product Type	April	May	June	Quarter Sales	Total Sales
OBS/PDF	1	2	-	3	34
OBS/Bundle	-	2	1	3	26
OBS/Total	1	4	1	6	60
Paizo/PDF	-	-	-	-	1
Totals	1	4	1	6	61

For those of you wondering why I'm not participating in this year's A to Z blogging challenge, I think you'll see the answer on this chart. The sales for April set a historical low. The only times I have sold less product were when I had no product to sell. I'm tempted to blame the blogging challenge, since this is the only April to perform this poorly and the months surrounding April were not similarly suppressed.

Also for the month of April, OneBookShelf put together a charity bundle to support the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. (It's Child Abuse Awareness Month again this year, too). I donated the Characters Pack this time, since I had already donated the corebook to a previous charity bundle.

It may have been a "perfect storm"  of the two events that caused sales to drop like this. But it's enough to make me rethink my marketing strategy.

A Few Minor Notices

This last week, we have lost 2 actors with Oz connections.

Annette Funicello, while famous for a number of reasons, was cast as Princess Ozma in a proposed Disney Oz film entitled The Rainbow Road to Oz, that unfortunately was never produced. (Jared Davis at the Royal Blog of Oz has more on that, including footage of Annette and the other Mouseketeers in costume as various Oz characters singing some of the songs from the proposed film).

Today, we lost Jonathan Winters, a brilliant comedian and actor, who appeared on The Shirley Temple Show in an adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Marvelous Land of Oz as Lord Nikidik.

On a brighter note, Pete Figtree at the Ruthless Diastema blogcast has begun a multipart series on Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. I don't know how many parts he's planning on, but part 1 went up today!

Future Product Musings

Blog Content Product: It's been suggested that I take some of the content from this blog and turn it into a product. My immediate thought is to take the spells and items that I've posted, along with the improved Transmutation rules and do a "The Wizard's Magic Bag" supplement.

There is also the possibility of just doing a "Best of the Blog" sort of thing. The question is: What counts as the best? I could very easily tell you what my most popular posts are, but there's not a lot of game content in them. What do you guys think? What's the "Best of the Blog" for you? Is there something you wish I would write about so it can go in the "Best of the Blog"?

Either way, I couldn't see myself charging more than $0.99 for it. The content has been free for ages, so my only costs would be putting a little polish on it.

Beyond the Deadly Desert: No, this has not left my mind. Unless I win the lottery or get some other windfall of money, my plan is to try and Kickstart it again. I'm not going to make an official announcement until I have the book at least 75-90% complete and I have a video I can put on the Kickstarter site.

I've had an idea for how I want the cover to look for quite a while. I wanted to do something of a variant on the "Polychrome on the Sand Boat" image that was used as the cover for the Del Rey paperback edition of "The Road to Oz." But mix up the people who are riding in the sand boat to make things interesting. Just like on the AiO cover, I wanted to present an adventuring party that didn't adventure together in the books, but very well could.

I definitely want Tik-Tok on the boat. He's not only a Crafted character, but he came from the land of Ev before he moved to Oz. But who else? I'm tempted to put Betsy Bobbin and Hank the Mule in the boat, since that would cover my Animal character neatly, but all of those characters (Polychrome included) have shared an adventure (Tik-Tok of Oz). Maybe King Rinkitink and Bilbil.

And I wanted to do something with Polychrome as well. I've talked about how I want AiO to be an inclusive RPG, and while I think that Oz does pretty well on gender inclusivity, I think it's got a ways to go in terms of racial inclusion. While a specific ethnicity is not given for most characters, it has been assumed that Dorothy and her friends are white for so long that I don't feel like I can mess with it without being too revisionist. But since Polychrome isn't technically human, I think I might have a little more leeway in her appearance. Rather than simply have her drawn in some particular ethnic style, I think I would mix and match ethnic features, garb and other details while trying to retain the basic idea of a rainbow fairy. What do you think?

Adventures in Equestria

Okay, I'm not sure how much of an April Fool's gag this is, as it's intended to be fully playable.

Last year (though not on April Fool's Day) I did a write-up of Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I suggested that if someone wanted to be serious about it, they could do custom character templates to represent the character types from that show. Somewhere between serious and silly, here we go.

(For the record, I do not consider myself a brony.  I enjoy the show because it's well written and doesn't pander to its audience. I also have more fun geeking out about other things.)

Earth Pony

 Size: 3

Athletics: 2
Awareness: 2
Brains: 2
Sneaking: 2
Presence: 2
Wits: 3

Traits: No Hands (-1)

Pegasus

Size: 3

Athletics: 3
Awareness: 2
Brains: 1
Sneaking: 1
Presence: 2
Wits: 2

Traits: Flight (2), No Hands (-1)

Unicorn

Size: 3

Athletics: 1
Awareness: 2
Brains: 3
Sneaking: 2
Presence: 2
Wits: 2

Traits: No Hands (-1), Unicorn Magic (1)