Beyond Monks - The Art of the Fight

[Chainmail Bikini]

Hi folks,

I just want to to let everyone here know about our first product, Beyond Monks - The Art of the Fight, and to thank our customers for making it a success. It debuted on rpgnow.com 's bestseller list at #20 a couple of days ago, and has received several good customer comments on their site.

Beyond Monks - The Art of the Fight is a fantasy martial arts sourcebook available as a downloadable 64 page PDF. You can get more information on it at:

http://www.chainmailbikini.com/products.html

Our second product will be Call of Duty, a book on paladins, and is in development. Let us know what you want to see in it, since customer feedback directly influences our products.

Thanks again!

James Garr
Chainmail Bikini Games, Ltd.
http://www.chainmailbikini.com

 

[JoeGKushner]

Any chance we'll see a print version soon? I don't mind PDFs but prefer print ones when avaialbe so always ask.

 

[Ranger REG]

I too would like to see a print version appearing at my FLGS.

 

[Chainmail Bikini]

Any chance we'll see a print version soon? I don't mind PDFs but prefer print ones when avaialbe so always ask.

There is definitely a chance of it happening, but not soon. I personally prefer printed products as well, so you can bet it's something we want to do.

But realistically, we're a very small company and don't have the resources (time or money) to get our products properly printed and distributed. We're better off spending our time developing our next couple of products and supporting Beyond Monks.

With luck and some hard work, maybe that will change and we'll become larger. If it does, we'll probably revise and expand Beyond Monks to include some things we didn't have time to playtest before bringing it to print.

James Garr
Chainmail Bikini Games, Ltd.
http://www.chainmailbikini.com

 

[enrious]

Our second product will be Call of Duty, a book on paladins, and is in development. Let us know what you want to see in it, since customer feedback directly influences our products.

Thanks again!

James Garr
Chainmail Bikini Games, Ltd.
http://www.chainmailbikini.com

Beyond Monks is very well done.

Regarding Call of Duty - two things spring to mind.

1) Some advice running paladins who are not "knights in shining armor", like the 2e Complete Paladin's handbook seemed to suggest.

Some roleplaying ideas about wyrmslayers or undead slayers or how a paladin can exist with most parties.

2) I play an undead bane paladin (paladin Kelemvor in FR) and one of the things my dm and I worked out was an alternate to the Paladin's Mount because I didn't think it fit in with the character. We ended up using a modified ability from AEG's Undead.

My request for this is to give some suggestions for replacing standard paladin abilities with alternates.

 

[Chainmail Bikini]

Re: Re: Beyond Monks - The Art of the Fight

Beyond Monks is very well done.

Thanks!

Regarding Call of Duty - two things spring to mind.

1) Some advice running paladins who are not "knights in shining armor", like the 2e Complete Paladin's handbook seemed to suggest.

Some roleplaying ideas about wyrmslayers or undead slayers or how a paladin can exist with most parties.

2) I play an undead bane paladin (paladin Kelemvor in FR) and one of the things my dm and I worked out was an alternate to the Paladin's Mount because I didn't think it fit in with the character. We ended up using a modified ability from AEG's Undead.

My request for this is to give some suggestions for replacing standard paladin abilities with alternates.

Thanks for the feedback. This is exactly the kind of stuff we need to know. Dealing with roleplaying issues will take up a large portion of the book, since it's so central to paladins. And alternatives to special mounts is a good idea, since mounts aren't useful in many campaigns.

James Garr

 

[enrious]

I wouldn't limit it to the Mount ability, but I doubt you would.

I personally think role-playing material should consist of the bulk of this book, running alternate paladins, paladin interactions, resources a paladin can use (such as his church) and so on.

I'm not opposed to new feats, spells, or classes, but with the multitude available from just the WotC stuff (not counting third-party), I don't know how useful I'd find a book with 40 pages of game content and 10 pages of advice on running a paladin.


Perhaps you may also wish to devote a page or two of advice for the DM running a game with a paladin in the party.

 

[tensen]

When I first went through and read the Beyond Monks product, I thought it was well done, but just not what I was looking for. After reading through it a few times, I am finding more and more that I can tweak just slightly for my purposes. I still am not that happy with the cost of the PDF product, its a little higher than I wanted to spend (give me a similarly prices print product and I'd be all for it.)

Your layout is very very good.
The artwork I could do without what you included in there. Please in the future if at all possible, include artwork of specific things in the product. There is a lot in there that I would have really liked to see some artwork depicting.

 

[Chainmail Bikini]

When I first went through and read the Beyond Monks product, I thought it was well done, but just not what I was looking for. After reading through it a few times, I am finding more and more that I can tweak just slightly for my purposes. I still am not that happy with the cost of the PDF product, its a little higher than I wanted to spend (give me a similarly prices print product and I'd be all for it.)

Your layout is very very good.
The artwork I could do without what you included in there. Please in the future if at all possible, include artwork of specific things in the product. There is a lot in there that I would have really liked to see some artwork depicting.

Thanks for the feedback.

On pricing, we're going to try to price our products as competitively as we can, while still trying to be profitable. For a 64 page PDF densely packed with playtested rules content, we feel Beyond Monks is priced appropriately at $8.00. But we're new at this, and could be wrong. Long term sales will tell us for sure.

You'll never see a 64 page printed product for $8.00 though, because it wouldn't be profitable. Even WOTC's 32 page printed products are $9.95, and those are adventures, which require much less playtesting than a rules sourcebook.

I agree that the interior art can be greatly improved in our next product. Our highest priority with Beyond Monks was good game design and playtesting, and we really didn't put as much effort into the interior art as we could have, or probably should have.

Call of Duty will have higher quality art, more art, and it will be appropriate for the content. But it will still not be the highest priority. Packing the book with great rules and roleplaying ideas that you can use to have more fun is the priority. You'll probably see less interior art in Call of Duty than in the products of other publishers. If any of our products go to print, we may redo the art, as we feel art is much more important in a printed product.

Thanks again!

James Garr
Chainmail Bikini Games, Ltd.
http://www.chainmailbikini.com

 

[Chainmail Bikini]

I wouldn't limit it to the Mount ability, but I doubt you would.

I personally think role-playing material should consist of the bulk of this book, running alternate paladins, paladin interactions, resources a paladin can use (such as his church) and so on.

I'm not opposed to new feats, spells, or classes, but with the multitude available from just the WotC stuff (not counting third-party), I don't know how useful I'd find a book with 40 pages of game content and 10 pages of advice on running a paladin.


Perhaps you may also wish to devote a page or two of advice for the DM running a game with a paladin in the party.

Call of Duty will be less crunchy than Beyond Monks because a book about paladins really demands more roleplaying stuff than a book about martial arts. For instance, I can't imagine writing nearly a hundred feats appropriate for paladins, or not writing several pages on the Code of Conduct and other issues. But it will still be fairly crunchy with lots of new options for paladins (and some new options for other classes).

James Garr