Thursday, March 25, 2010

LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Status Update

Things are moving swimmingly.

What the box set will contain as of right now:

Introduction sheet
Tutorial book (48 pages, full color cover)
Rules book (48 pages, full color cover)
Magic book (48 pages, full color cover)
Referee book (48 pages, full color cover)
Recommended Reading pamphlet (12 pages, no cover)
10 character sheets
5 graph paper/hex sheets
1 set of 7 polyhedral dice
1 pencil
2 ad sheets promoting other companies' products

plus two adventures:
Tower of the Stargazer (16 pages, color cover) Beginning Dungeon Adventure
as-yet-unnamed maritime adventure (16 pages, foldout color cover)

Looking at a retail price of 40€ locally, and somewhere around $65 in the US (not including sales tax in both cases).

(good news on that, we'll see where we're at come June/July)

The first print run will be 610 copies. I expect the assembly and packing and shipping of these boxes to be such a pain that this will probably be a one-time-only limited run, but we'll see about selling these 610 before worrying too much about what would come after.

Artists:
Cynthia Sheppard, box cover artist
Martina Münch, Tutorial cover artist
Laura Jalo, interior art and photography for the Magic cover
Peter Mullen, Tower of the Stargazer cover artist
Kevin Mayle, maritime adventure cover and interior artist
Dean Clayton, interior art
Ernie Chan, interior art

The two adventures will be available separately for those of you that don't need another full game. The Hammers of the God adventure and the 3rd printing of Death Frost Doom will also be printed the same time as the box set.

The Rules book will have the box cover art as its cover. The Referee book cover is still undecided; my wife's aunt is apparently an artist of some ability and we're visiting her this weekend to see if she is suitable and able to do something over the next month or so. If not, a Clayton pieces could be done up in color and used as a few are thematically suitable.

I'd say actual written work is 50% done, but that unfinished 50% is represented by a ton of outlines, notes, past discussion and such to where it's more a matter of organizing what's been done rather than coming up with anything from whole cloth (maybe 20% needed for that, and a lot of that is the maritime adventure).

Tower of the Stargazer (think Dio and Blackmore's collective career high point) will be an introductory adventure, hand-holding the Referee's hand through running a module. Think of the methods used in B1, B2, B3, and the Mentzer starter dungeon.

I'm also having two logos made. Both will use the current LotFP logo as the base (really, just adding some text under it), but LotFP will officially have two product lines:

LotFP: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing will cover rules and supplements specifically for the game (no supplements currently planned) and will use the OGL.

LotFP Adventures will have include adventure modules and any non-system dependent sourcebook type deals. They'll use the format you're familiar with from LotFP, they'll be compatible with all the usual suspects plus the new game (and keeping the more generic type of stats), and they will not use the OGL.

Playtesting for Tower of the Stargazer, using the new rules, begins Wednesday.

We're still looking at probably a month on the box cover art, which drives me nuts, but at the same time, everything I've seen as far as the prelims for it give me full confidence that it will sell copies all by itself.

Back to work!

3 comments:

  1. Wow, this is awesome, I am incredibly eager my oldest friend... I'll spread the word.

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  2. Good call for making the boxed set's adventures available separately. Got to get those!

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  3. I'm also looking forward to your latest developments. I've been reading your Creature Generator work, and it is very good. You make a great point in the introductory material regarding veteran gamers knowing too much about monster capability. It's great to keep them on their toes with variation. I digress. Cheers!

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