So You've Met... Flip through

1. Camera One
2. Tell Me Stuff
3. We Shall Never Speak of It Again.
4. Castoffs
5. Camera Two
6. Phila

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ITEM 1: I WAS TOLD IT WOULD ARRIVE FRIDAY BUT GOT IT ON WEDNESDAY–THIS IS ALL HAPPENING MUCH TOO FAST

Hey, the "proof" for So You've Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire showed up two days early! I flipped through it alone*.

I found a layout error. No spoilers about the spoiler, but know it isn't a big one. I'm sort of mad because it was a -predictable- error and of a type that I triple-checked for. I'm suspecting that, during checks, I actually found the error, fixed it, then somehow undid the fix with a sloppy button press.

And I confirmed with the printer that, yes, these are the actual page blocks for the final book. They printed all the page blocks and then sent me these to approve. I'd had digital proofs, which is standard practice, but sending me the page blocks after they'd already printed them all is new. Maybe they weren't really proof-proofs but proofs-of-life?

Whatever the reason they were sent, handling the page blocks calmed me the fuck down about the quality of the book printing. These look good.

The wrinkles, according to the printer, come from the process of prepping the signature packets I received for review and shouldn't be in the finished books. I don't think I'd've cared if they were, they did not offend and kind of gave a nice texture-moment.

Note: The aside below has me mixing up Mickey Rooney and Andy Rooney, which is forgivable. But I also, somehow, mix up Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. That is NOT forgivable. I leave these errors intact in this copy and paste in order to properly shame myself. 

* Sometimes the word "alone" makes me remember Shirley Temple singing a song in an Andy Rooney movie. Every time she'd sing the word "alone" she'd turn and project it at Rooney with a meaningful sort of glower. And, like so many things in my life, I was first exposed to this through a ridiculous channel: I briefly had Martin Arnold, an Austrian experimental filmmaker, as a professor and he was working with the Andy Rooney movies as... Oh shit. Here's Arnold's finished film, which I don't think I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFcw1zBCYco I remember setting him up with an Avid so he could edit an early version of it. I'm watching it...and no, he didn't use the part where she uses the song to scold the Rooney character. I kind of get that choice. Temple was really being a personality when she did it and I think the Arnold version wasn't about that.

ITEM 2: GIMME YR QUOTES ABOUT THIS GAME YOU NEVER HEARD OF

I'm really bad at business things. I'm lazy, self-indulgent, and prone to grand excess. Maybe those last two are the same things? Maybe substitute in "self-sabotaging."

The game I sell the most, of course, is Thousand Year Old Vampire. The second best selling item is Old Morris Cave and the third is A Collection of Improving Exercises. But...

The game that people seem most excited to talk to me about is A Sargasso Sea of Space (SARG). It's everything that TYOV (and everything else I make) isn't: It's fun, it's funny to play, it's family friendly, you do it with others. There's cards and very little shame.

I recently learned that a handful of stores are not only carrying the game, they are -reordering- the game. It seems like the stores that are doing well with it put out a copy in their borrow-and-play sections and that's what is generating sales. Maybe.

I'm thinking I should give the wholesale market another try, so help me with this: If you played SARG and enjoyed it, gimme some sort of quote that I can use to promote it. If you are a store and are successfully selling it, gimme a quote about THAT and tell me how the heck you're doing it. Just respond to this email.

ITEM 3: THE BLOG

After I send this email, I'll fuck around and see if I can easily dump the newsletter into the blog format.

Honestly, I don't think I like the blog all that much. The best part is the conversation aspect but that's a no-go because there's no inline responding. It also means more stuff to worry about: Moderating and checking the blog for comments that need responses.

I could turn off commenting and get rid of the most onerous aspects, I guess. I'll figure something out.

And, honestly, I'm a lot more comfortable in the slightly-walled-garden of the newsletter than I am in a blog.

ITEM 4: WHO DIDN'T MAKE THE CUT?

The composite above didn't get used in either of the sequels. It's a nice thing but the background noise didn't match the aesthetic-logic of the TYOV-likes. At the same time, the background noise felt important to the artwork–removing it would have been unfun but it also felt wrong.

I need to dig through my work folders and find the unused artwork and set it aside for later. Otherwise things get lost because my organization system wasn't that great.

The original artwork came from a German magazine. Can't remember the name or year.

You can see that I didn't change that much. I squatted the left guy forward and drew in his boots. The coffin was drawn entirely from scratch except for the little handles.

The papers... I have no idea about the papers. I know I drew a lot of them but I thought that the 'core' papers touching the coffin were taken from somewhere.

...

That "..." above is me opening up the Photoshop files to figure out why I did some of the things I did. I got interested in it enough that I made a little video of me flipping through the layers.

The cool thing is that, while digging through the layers, I found a cool thing. I'm setting that video aside for a later newsletter because I don't want to give you boobs too much youtube.

(That old timey insult in the previous sentence was done purely for alliterative purposes.)

ITEM 5: DEERNICORN TYOV VIDEO

Heart of the Deernicorn publishes the astonishingly fancy Fall of Magicand City of Winter, along with other stuff. Ross and company produce things that are so -real- that I don't know how to talk about them. Big silkscreened scrolls, printed by hand in the forests of central Washington.

Also, full disclosure, they are a reseller for some of my stuff. They're the people who've been successfully selling A Sargasso Sea of Space to retailers.

They are doing a series of Thousand Year Old Vampire sessions this October. I like how Momo (in the video above) and Andi (not in the video above, but here's an audio thing of Andi talking to me about TYOV) talk about games.

ITEM 6: I AM ABBREVIATING PHILADELPHIA

So many of you were so helpful when I asked for advice about finding interesting places for a book release event in Philadelphia. I sincerely appreciate it. Also: All of your help was for naught. NOTHING. YOU GET NOTHING. YOU LOSE. GOOD DAY SIR. You should have not stolen the Fizzy Lifting Drinks.

But yeah, I am going to be in and out of Philadelphia with zero time on either end of PAX U. Alas.

OTHER BUSINESS

1. Last week I finished playing the PC game Aliens: Dark Descent and did something I've never done with a campaign game before–I immediately started playing it again from the beginning. I'm a sucker for the Alien universe and this game did such a good job with it. The last level did some interesting/annoying things that I want to talk to someone about.

2. Game designers: Put random number generators in your game books. Most prisons don't allow stuff in that can be used for gambling, so dice aren't accessible.

3. I have so, so much old game stuff I need to sell. Sorting things, I had a long run of continuously being shocked at how much some particular item had sold for on ebay.

The best moments were when I couldn't find a listing for a thing on ebay because it is just that rare. I'd ask on a collector site and get some honest responses, then a handful of people would PM me asking about that ol' junk I have and how they'd be happy to take it off my hands and surely I don't want those dirty old game books cluttered up my home. It was like I was living that story about the villain who disguises himself as a rag and bone man so he can trick the young bride into giving away...what was it? Some sort magic knick-knack.

Okay, that's all! Thank you for reading this!

Tim H