Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 2885674" data-attributes="member: 6777">I may be coming at this utterly uninformed, but I disagree 100%.The odds that any FLGS would stock copies of Lehman's Polaris RPG are pretty minimal. This isn't because he's cut out the middleman; it's becasue his product isn't D&D. He's so far down the food chain behind D&D, Exalted, WoD, Palladium, GURPS, etc. that even through normal distribution channels, he'd be lucky to sell a few hundred copies of his game. None but the most hard-core FLGS are even going to stock his product.He can sell that many, and probably more, by selling his product himself, at a fraction of the cost in time, effort, and money. Lehman is absolutely justified in avoiding the entrenched distribution model; it's not even functioning reliably for the companies that can afford to use it. Why should he?And who knows? If his product is successful enough, it WILL end up in those same stores, and do so when it was financially viable for Lehman. That's what seems to have happened with Luke Crane's Burning Wheel.As for meeting people, fan-created destinations like ENWord, RPG.net, and The Forge have done far more community-building in recent years than any RPG publisher. WotC is the only publisher I can think of that actually spends money on outreach... if you consider demo teams for their products "outreach". The other demo teams I'm aware of (Legion of Heroes, MIBs) are pretty much all-volunteer.Absolutely. Head on over to <a href="http://www.burningwheel.org" target="_blank">http://www.burningwheel.org</a> and takle a look at the previews for Crane's upcoming Burning Empires SFRPG. Or to <a href="http://www.theknownworld.com/" target="_blank">http://www.theknownworld.com/</a> for the Origins-nominated Artesia FRPG. Full-color gaming goodness.And even though they are B&W softcovers, I would stack Burning Wheel, Polaris, or InSpectres up against any mainstream RPG product. I mean... typography. BW actually gets typography. And glorious, readable layouts! Hallelujah! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I can think of at least two big, successful mainstream publishers who regularly churn out product that looks, in the first case, like it was typeset using safety scissors and glue, or, in the second case, like Walk Disney threw up on it after being sideswiped by Iron Maiden's custom van.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /> And editing? Please. Big money = good editing is contra-indicated by just about every mainstream product in existence.</blockquote>

Verification