The Cottage is Changing For Me

 I was doing my mid-month sales check the other day and noticed no major changes. The money brought in was what was expected between new releases, with a nice emphasis on older works by myself and Peryton, which always means having made them just that much more meaningful. That is on top of making profit from them. Then I went outside to do some yard work and lumberjacking, I BOUGHT A CHAINSAW. Coming back inside to catch up on my blogging, hey it's my journal I checked my blog views for the last few weeks. I was floored. It was almost eight times greater than it normally is. While I usually get about one to two thousand hits, I was sitting there looking at nine thousand, almost ten, hits. AND boy was I disappointed.

Back in my small little world of a couple thousand hits, I had worked out a metric that seemed to work for the seventeen years this blog has been going on. Every eight hundred hits, I would sell between two to six products. That is excluding the sales spikes that come with new releases. Here I was looking at eight thousand hits over two days and couple thousand following over the rest of that week. Sales had remained normal so to say that I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. Despite increased coverage, I was still selling my usual products, not the new sexier products to people that are most likely digging up my work and then the more obscure stuff from 2000-2009 in support of products made in the 70s and 80s.

I have been living a much more professional RPG writer life than I ever have. Dealing with other designers and business managers. Heck folks, PeryPubbers has this new line of Monsters! Monsters! products by a T&T new-but-true-blood. I am wheeling and dealing with folks in the BX/OSR movement meaning more developments there soon. Getting contributing authors and artists is easier than ever. Likewise the Flying Buffalo Brand is being bought by some big business name meaning there will be some action going on there in a few months to a year. So with the disappointing indicator that more does not mean more, at least immediately, I started looking deeper into things.

While I figure that the OSR exposure is a more of a social endeavor because of incapability between my 2d6 system and their d20 matrix, I would've thought that the game collectors among them would've picked up something. But that is because I disbelieve as many of them claiming to be broke and often not having two nickels to rub together. I mean dudes, the tabletop RPG hobby is a small print industry. Meanwhile FBI, that's Flying Buffalo Incorporated and I have a few works involving the company, was bought out by what is essentially asset managers of the RPG field. It's pretty clear the new company is about selling back inventory and paying portions to the people holding interests in boxes of merchandise moldering somewhere-- like when slum lords get "bought out" by a group of slum lords really to be incorporated into their collective residual income scheme but removed from the day-to-day management of that property. That situation is not meant to expand market but to improve capital from existing hard property. So in short, if you're not caught up in the marketing of Strahd the D&D vampire, now available for the fourth time since the 80s, there is not a lot of money going around.

Maybe next month I'll see some boost in sales, but I am not counting on it. Perhaps I'll branch out into products that seem to be expanding, like 5th Edition or the OSR badly named title of the week or Chaosium-compatible horror works. Probably not. This is a hobby to me. I like my particular game systems.

Every Time at a Table: Aug 15th, ' 21.

 So we concluded the first campaign of Flash Gordon and the Sphere of Doom (FSOD) a couple of weeks ago. Our Flash Gordon (JerryTel) stormed out of the game because none of our group's Social Democrats or Liberals liked Donald Trump as president let alone would support his bid for being Dictator for Life, so we worked on the story that we had with the players that we had. Zarkov saved Sky City for Vultan. Ming meanwhile kidnapped Balin to score points with his usual enemies the Lion People, by presenting her to her betrothed Thunn the Lion-Manly Man.

From there, my group(s) has been busy playtesting the projected named T&T: Pulp Adventurer by Mark Hunt. Well there has been hi-jinks in Antartica, between investigators from Miskatonic University and some Occultists from Mussolini's Italy. Let's just call it the Fishing Boats of Atlantis. We have figured out about six hundred hidden weapons and a couple of insights into the psychic sphere that might or might not be delved into during the course of play. Of course the ten foot tall penguins added a whole lot to the climax last night. We partied on for like five hours after the game.

Thessaly, of Monsters! Monsters! workings, has promised us a 70s exploitation flick take on an adventure scenario. After this, I think it's time that the game gets released. I know Mister Hunt doesn't agree, but hey, we're PerryPubbers not a Swiss Bank account.

The First Book of Cha'alt

It was actually because of a misplaced bookmark. If you're like me, you're usually reading four to six books at the same time. I keep mine on my bedside table and read through a work for a few minutes before shutting off the lights and going to sleep. Each evening tends to be a different book-- my "scholar's mistress" to use a term coined by Fritz Leiber, so to speak. That is until one clicks and I read for a couple of hours everyday until finally finishing it. Well, for the past week, I've been reading Venger Satanis's Cha'alt. I started re-reading a part which seemed familiar but much more interesting than my first read through. To be fair to Darrick Dishaw, he tells you in his introduction the game script can be Vietnam to the gamer/reader.

Not to be too in the weeds in this review, but, the physical book is well crafted. Fairly solid binding and thick glossy pages, I am reminded of the days when books were tying to look new for at least fifty years. But with paper production being what it is these days only time will tell. It will hold up as well as anybody's High School Yearbook at least.


So the world of Cha'alt is one of those D&D worlds where science fiction and fantasy blend together, to give the reader a trip into sphere fantasy without changing the D20 dynamics. I always get excited by these takes that hearken back to the days of weird fantasy. Anyway, the planet was held under sway by entities known as the Old Ones, easily translated in Lovecraftian creatures, but one step removed because of D&D, you know. Then standard D&D species were able to take over and there was some high magical times where everyone tried to be what Gygax fans consider to be Tolkien-based, but then an apocalypse happened. Maybe there was more than one, who knows? What is left is world that resembles Arrakis and  Australia, as seen in the Road Warrior movies, and the Arduin Adventure.

The material divides the world up into areas and goes into a few details about each before getting into scenarios. Inside the scenarios, the author gets into a collection of encounters that can be NPCs or monsters or traps or interesting locales. All the scenarios are leading towards the massive dungeon that is the Black Pyramid. I forget how many rooms the meat of the book is, it kind of becomes room after room as one reads it.

As this is like the fourth work that I have read by Dishaw, I am impressed with his sense of craftsmanship. As an Adventure Gamer, the man is something like an architect that is his own lumberjack and then the carpenter. His writing goes through some lengths not just be a group of charts and lists, but masterfully using charts and lists that the random GM can pick up and within a day or two run their own sessions using the book.

Much of this book is analogy of internet culture from ten years ago, veiled through the devices of the Chase and the Crawl of what most OGL fans love these days. The weak points are a collection of topical humor done a bit too superficially. This is not always the case, but when the creator-GM is wanting to lecture a bit of style doesn't hurt. The guy who can make an adventure with PC's trekking through the inwards of a warped sandworm, can do better than a single paragraph harping on about feminism with an NPC that is his feminist nightmare given a "I hate men" motif. The strong point is that there is so much material to work with. I was impressed with the bandit bands out in the wastes who after a second reading were funnier than I had thought earlier.

Overall, because of craft put into the work, I rate it a King Kong on the Godzilla to the Smurf scale of my ratings. The skill put into the book elevates the themes it puts together.