What Kind of Demo?

[FraserRonald]

Hey All. Posting this a few places so please forgive me if you've seen it a bunch of times. If you meet me and tell me you got annoyed by this post, I'll buy you a beer. Honest.

Here's the situation: I'm a partner in a new d20 company--Sword's Edge Publishing--and we'll be releasing our first product on 1 Sept 04 at RPG Now. The product is a no-FX adventure but includes new weapons, vehicles, a new PrC, information on a fictional nation and some information on a few groups (CIA SAD, the Increment and some Dept 7-type groups). Products at RPG Now usually have a Demo.

The question: considering that this is an adventure, what would you suggest for the demo? Initially, I thought of including a couple of weapons, a new vehicle and the blurb on the Increment, however that doesn't really give an example of the meat of the product--the adventure.

Any thoughts?

 

[Roudi]

Well, from what I hear, a piece of fiction based on the adventure will appear in the first issue of MODERNIZED. That's a start.

For a demo, if possible, I'd recommend posting some of the hooks and initial encounters - to give interested people a taste of how things start. If the adventure introduces new equipment, classes, rules, etc., a sampling of some of them (or even just mention of them) might be prudent.

On a side note, TheLeGames has an interesting method of producing a product demo. They leave in the majority of the flavour text for their book, and only provide one class-worth of crunch, leaving the rest of the statistics out. It gives you one hell of an idea of what you're buying, but still promotes a purchase rather than just sticking with the demo.