Friday, March 4, 2011

Lulu OSR Goodies, POD and the Curious Business of Game Publishing Online

I was looking at The Lair of the Evil DM when I discovered this amazingly questionable but still cool book:
Star Frontiers Digitally Remastered

Legal? Seems unlikely. I've been to Bill Logan's site before and figured that either he had connections or was testing the temerity of Wizards of the Coast regarding an otherwise all-but-abandoned property they inherited from the legacy of TSR. Admittedly Star Frontiers has seen a bit of action in print, most specifically in some non-specific alien adaptations in D20 Future a few years back, but that's about it. The spirit, the legacy of this game remains untapped. Anyway, I decided I'd better order a copy before a Hasbro lawyer got all excited about this (although maybe, just maybe their list of "things to issue a takedown on" burped when it came to this particular property....who knows...!) and will letcha all know more when I see it. I'm pretty sure Bill's not making any money on this; the cost of admission is about right for Lulu's base printing/handling costs.

I also spotted this, which I'll be ordering just as soon as I have more free cash floating around:
Knockspell 1-3 (Softcover)

Matt Finch must have vetted the test copy (something I guess I need to do more often as well!) as it is now up! Looking forward to finally getting the print edition compilation...PDF's still hurt my eyes over time.

Finally, Lulu informed me that my first print effort for The Rising Dark had some sort of burp; apparently something to do with the PDF files being combined. It's fixed now, I believe; my previous test print was issued just fine, so I'm not sure what exactly happened....this is the second time that a print-ready PDF on Lulu's end "stopped working" despite having functioned just fine for many copies, so not entirely sure what that's all about.

Meanwhile, The Realms of Chirak is on its way to my door with a proof copy from Rpgnow. I am very excited about this; I've bought a couple other books in POD format from rpgnow's new service and they are in my opinion of better overall quality than Lulu. Even better, the operating/production costs are cheaper than Lulu, and Rpgnow has the added benefit of a much higher level of visibility to the target audience. Once I've got the POD copy of Chirak in hand and it looks good, then I may just turn to getting all of my other works worth doing up on POD there as well.

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