#RPGaDAY 2017, Day 3: Finding Out About New Games

by ThomasNo Comments

The #RPGaDAY writing prompt for today is “How do you find out about new roleplaying games?” — a question I don’t have a good answer for. I mean, I used to read message forums and know about cool things that way. I also used to enter the neighborhood bookstore and stumble across something new. This is how I found out about Shadowrun, through a copy of Bug City sitting on a shelf at a Hastings in a slowly-dying mall in Bryan, Texas. It’s also how I found out about 7th Sea. (But that was at a used bookstore, a month or two after I discovered Shadowrun, so my big college era game was more cyberpunky than swashbuckly.)

I guess these days it’s social media.

Well, that and working on layout for books then getting told what’s coming out down the line but I can’t tell anyone about it until the company makes an announcement.

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#RPGaDAY 2017, Day 2: A Game I’d Like to See Published

by ThomasNo Comments

Today on #RPGaDAY: “What is an RPG you would like to see published?”

Probably one based off of Mass Effect.

Nicole Linross of Green Ronin, the company that publishes a roleplaying game based on Bioware’s other big IP, Dragon Age, said that they have been in talks with the Mass Effect team and Bioware’s licensing team over the years, but to no avail. The sticking point comes from the Mass Effect team, it seems. “The most recent time we dusted off our [Mass Effect RPG] proposal for them,” she writes, “licensing asked US why we ‘didn’t want’ to do the game and when we told them we’d be more than happy to do it, they merrily went off to the ME team who wasted no time in telling licensing they were *still* not interested.” This is a good company who has been working with the owners of Dragon Age (which has had its share of problems with approval turnaround times), so they know Green Ronin delivers fantastic good-quality work. But the Mass Effect people are just “not interested in taking Mass Effect to tabletop, it’s as simple as that.”

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Spine Treatments

by ThomasNo Comments

When obtaining art assets for books in the roleplaying industry, I have noticed there is a lot of input into getting the interior artwork and cover artwork. With selling pdfs (and other electronic editions) through places like DriveThruRPG, you’ll find that those files have the front cover, the back cover, and the interior. They are usually in that order so you can view the pdf as a two-up document with a separate page for the front cover, preserving the page spreads in the printed work. What seems to be forgotten — or at least not considered fully — is the treatment for the spine of the book. I find this odd, because at a store, your book is more likely to be shelved spine-out.

I hadn’t really noticed this until I developed the cover for Magpie Games’ Urban Shadows. For that book’s cover, we only had the front artwork which was to be placed on a black background. The back artwork was a composite of four of the character types, combined specifically for that space. We used an interesting typeface for the logo (and some chapter headings) with a white fill at about 85% opacity, re-purposing it for the spine. I wanted to make it big, bleeding over the edge of the printed spine. As a happy accident, this wound up looking amazing on bookshelves.

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