Saturday, December 15, 2012

Bandits & Battlecruisers - questions, concerns, doubts...


As you probably know, writing of Bandits & Battlecruisers is coming to an end. I have 104 A5-sized pages of initially formatted text, the only thing I need to do before completing it is to re-write spaceship combat and space exploration chapters from the Terminal Space, create descriptions of some spaceship-sized monsters (three is a bit too little, don't you think? :D) and create stat blocks for eight more sample starships.

And this is moment when I should start asking some really important questions.

As I stated before (can't find that post, so probably it was on G+), Bandits & Battlecruisers: the Ultimate Edition will be not available for free. That's the reason why I wanted to make it really good-looking, with nice borders, formatting and cool artwork. Unfortunately, I have no money to hire artists so things got really complicated. But there is seemingly obvious solution - crowdfunding.

At first moment I was very optimistic - easy way to gather some gold to pay people for their artwork. I even wrote on Geeplus that there will be a Indiegogo campaign once I finish the writing. Sadly, there is some serious problem standing in my way.

That problem is a fucking Atlantic Ocean! Combined with shitty Polish postal services, shipment costs for printed version of the game will be at least $8 to $10. Little too much for a rulebook costing less than $20. It gets even worse in case of shipping costs for any additional goodies, such as t-shirts or original artwork (even as much as $20 for shipping - it's fucking sick). That's the reason why I don't want to start a crowdfunding without possibility to receive any physical objects, with just PDFs and stuff.

So here is a question - do you have something against buying a game with little artwork + some probably well-known public domain images? Good thing is that it will be 1) cheaper, 2) available much faster than with all that ass-kicking artwork. Please remember that this game will be not a simple fusion of Terminal Space and Bandits & Basilisks - it will have hundreds of additional options; in example, there will be - let me check it - 23 new random tables or charts, 10 new starships, new items, new starship components and so on...

6 comments:

  1. I'm perfectly OK with few images if it causes the publisher less stress and still gets a good product in our hands. These days it seems that Old School gaming has become a little to premium obsessed for my tastes. One of the initial appeals of the 'movement' was the grass roots feel to it initially. Don't get me wrong I can appreciate a good art piece (And TS has some of the best in the business as far as I'm concerned,) but it's far from necessarily.

    There's also some amazing pieces that have fallen into public domain if you know where to look. I really dug the use of golden age comic books in "Hideout and Hoodlums." I'm a huge fan of vintage scifi comics and i think there could be some untapped resources out there for our corner of nerdom. (Check out http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php if you think this idea has any legs. I think Youthful Magazine's "Captain Science" is my favorite.)

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    1. Thanks alot for the link - it saved my life!

      About Old School feeling associated with OSR products - yes, definitely I agree with you. That's why I was so obsessed with stuff posted by Blair (and images made for his Planet Algol).

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    2. Unfortunately most of them are in color but I found some interesting ones :-)

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  2. Carcosa didn't need no fuckin art to be awesome ;)

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  3. I don't buy OSR stuff for the art but the content.

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