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Experience Points #8: Pelgrane Press

Posted on 2008 under Experience Points

The second publisher that I had the pleasure of asking questions of is Pelgrane Press. Pelgrane Press is the force behind a variety of games, most notibly, Dying Earth and Trail of Cthulhu. Simon Rogers took the time to answer my questions.

Dying Earth

What is up next for the Dying Earth line?

We may have released our last ever Dying Earth game, although I may do one more XPS. The license expires in October, and we then have 6 months to sell our stock. PDF sales will continue during that period. We’ve done justice to the line, I think.

GUMSHOE/Trail of Cthulhu

Beyond your current lineup for Trail of Cthulhu products on the site, are more in the works?

Stunning Eldritch Tales has been a great success, so I’m commissioning lots of new supplements. Steve Dempsey ran the first part of large campaign set in London, Barcelona, the Ardéche region of France and elsewhere. Adrian Bott, who wrote the Book of Unremitting Horror, is also planning a very different world-spanning sorcerous adventure, although I don’t want to reveal too much about that. Robin Laws has written the outline to a player-driven supplement called “The Armitage Files” It does for the classic CoC player handout what the Kaiin city guide did for the citybook—takes a traditionally GM-driven resource and puts it into the players hands. It contains vague outlines of a mystery but give the players the option of deciding which elements to investigate, and in what order.

Adamant Entertainment has a license to produce supplements, so I hope we’ll see supplements from then in the next few months.

Is there a possibility of seeing Call of Cthulhu modules retooled or reworked for use with Trail of Cthulhu?

This is already happening thanks to the kind denizens of yog-sothoth.com. You can see their handiwork and a conversion guide at http://www.pelgranepress.com/trail/resources.html. We won’t literally be rewriting CoC modules, though. Converting this classic material, and creating new lines of our own would seem the best way forward.

How do you feel the reaction to your horror themed GUMSHOE games have been, like Fear Itself and the Esoterrorists?

It was Dave Allsop and Adrian’s d20 Unremitting Horror which took us in that direction. I really enjoyed the playtests for that book, but I wasn’t sure if it was a good match for d20. I suggested to Robin Laws that he design a new game which approached investigative gaming differently and used the unremitting horror creatures, and he created the Esoterrorist background for this purpose. Fear Itself was originally designed to be a game of personal horror included in the GUMSHOE Book of Unremitting Horror, but in the end I thought it better to release it stand-alone. It’s been a quiet success, very different to Esoterrorists and I’ve really enjoyed playing it.

I’ve been pleased and surprised. There are fewer people who enjoy the horror genre, but amongst those people the reaction has been very positive.

Do you plan on utilizing the GUMSHOE system for other genres?

Our next major release is Mutant City Blues, where PCs are mutant cops dealing with mutant crimes in the near future. It’s like Law and Order or CSI meets Heroes, with a dash of Top 10 and Powers. It’s not four-colour, though - the powers are circumscribed. Powers leave a forensic trail and follow a strict genetic correlation which allows the PCs to track down criminals.

Do you feel that your PDF products sell better then your print products? Do more of the gaming population seem to make use of PDFs in this age of the laptop?

I also released some innovative Trail of Cthulhu PDF products. First, I released a player’s version of Trail which included everything but the GM reference - about 40% of the page count - and secondly, a bundle of one GMs and three player’s guides. These have done rather well, although print sales dwarf them.

Well, it’s not a matter of feeling! We still sell most of our books, particularly the more popular ones through mainstream channels, although it’s quite possible we’d make more money (though sell fewer copies) if we didn’t. I discuss this in some detail here (http://simonjrogers.livejournal.com/55940.html). Most of our products include the PDF with the print version by mail order from our website or via IPR. For Trail of Cthulhu, we did a separate print and PDF release, partly to see if people find added value in the PDF, but it’s a bit early to say.

General Questions

Do you have any other new properties that we haven’t already covered that are currently in development? When can we expect to see them?

Other than Mutant City Blues, we have no specific products in development which I can discuss. I’d like to do a Complete GUMSHOE book, and a GUMSHOE Fantasy release, but I don’t think we are quite ready for that yet.

Several other publishers offer free micro-supplements or adventures on their websites. Does Pelgrane Press plan on offering these kinds of gaming aids to the community? If not, why? Do the fan-made supplements affect your position?

We already do. Trail of Cthulhu has a free adventure online which we released on Free RPG Day called the Murderer of Thomas Fell, our online webzine See Page XX has articles and resources for all of our lines and Dying Earth has a huge selection of free material. I like fan-made material. It can only help us, and build up the community. Fans have provided forms, character sheets, free adventures and conversion notes, and I am grateful.

What sort of challenges does an independent gaming publisher face? What did Pelgrane Press do to resolve these challenges?

The main challenges are producing good games, marketing, printing, providing products reliably and not losing money.

To address the last of these: Pelgrane Press is a part-time company. My full-time job is running ProFantasy Software. I really wouldn’t like to be in the game publishing business full time. It’s a dicey way of making money. That said, Pelgrane Press does pretty well financially. The best way to avoid losing money is to produce quality products, and not print too many of them. The biggest danger for small publishers is to do a large offset litho print run based on an over-optimistic projection, and end up with shelves of unsold books. Nowadays with the ubiquity of POD printers, this is less likely to be an issue. I took a risk with Trail of Cthulhu, which did sell through a large litho run quite quickly. I now have a dilemma with Mutant City Blues - litho or POD?

Good printers are very hard to find, and the best of them have problems, sometimes equipment failure, unreliable quality or bad communication. I have to keep a very careful eye on printing. I’ve had good luck with Vixen for POD, and Taylor for Trail, although this was a little delayed.

Marketing in such a densely packed market is difficult, and with little budget we rely on podcasts, my livejournal and the Pelgrane community to spread the word. Recently, we released a Free Games Day RPG, which I hope will boost Trail sales, and we’ve asked Fred Hicks to help us promote Mutant City Blues with public playtests and interviews.

To produce good games, I only employ good people. This is the worst place to economize. Working with inexperienced writers, even if you pay them half as much, is much more expensive and time-consuming that working with veterans. I rely heavily on Robin Laws to produce high quality, well written copy, innovative system design reliably and on time. Jerome Huegenin is practically my right hand man at the moment, with his layout, art and concept design for the GUMSHOE range. Much of its success is down to him.

By all accounts I’ve heard, GUMSHOE is an excellent gaming system that works very well. If any of these games sound interesting to you, head out and pick one of them up. All of Pelgrane Press’s games are available from IPR and your local gaming store.

1 Comment so far »

Happy Harbor Comics said

September 26 2008 @ 10:53 am

So some problems (printing) are universal. Dedicated and quality staff are out there and managing is the key but over-production can kill any product line quickly and easily.

I think with their Cthulhu line, they have a solid sales base that allows them to produce other material that may not be quite so (financially) popular. Good on them for having such a smart approach to thier business.

I may somewhat surprised about how little, so far, the impact of PDF sales have had on the industry. In hobby populated by tech geeks, I thought it would be so much higher and damaging to the print.

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Experience Points #8: Pelgrane Press

1 Comment so far »

Happy Harbor Comics said

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