Nick Brooke

Updated again on 14-Dec-21: now contains 715 titles.

Apologies for the misattribution: I find life is too short to read Joerg's posts in any detail.

@Darius West keeps writing about “taking the Paps.” YGWV, but none of the sources describe it that way. Sor-eel manages to make it to the neutral ground around the Paps of the Goddess, and his people somehow cut a deal with the Eiritha and Old Earth cult leaders there: one that inter alia recognises the neutrality of the Oases and prevents the rise of Waha. (In my headcanon this is also what kicks off the Second Sable Conversion, when a handsome Antelope Lancer officer from the Hungry Plateau encounters the Queen of the Sables under the serious moonlight, but that’s just me. For more details, see Sitzmag Redmoon’s character sheet in Life of Moonson, Book One: The Characters)

Updated again, with the print edition of Simon Phipp's Secrets of HeroQuesting ($20, standard colour hardcover), and a new release from Dario Corallo: a set of printable cardboard stand-up counters for The Rainbow Mounds (€2.00 for 16 tokens). There has also been a Copper bonus content drop for our art book A History of Malkionism: a dozen pages of emails, group chat transcripts, sketches and line art showing how the first four illustrations were created. I'll share similar notes for the next four pics (Prince Hrestol & The Serpent Kings) as soon as we hit Silver. If you want to see more art books from Katrin and me, please consider leaving ratings and reviews for this one at DriveThruRPG: if it can pay for itself, we'd both love to make more stuff like this for other parts of Glorantha!

To be clear: if you post your corrections in the wrong thread, they probably won’t be seen, so don’t bother doing that. It’s a waste of time.

Please also take another look at my previous feedback re: shield combat rules in the soloquest.

Next instalment at Silver (101 sales), and more drops after that until we hit Electrum. If you help me sell my book (by posting ratings, reviews and happy feedback), we'll get there even quicker!

OK, I'll run some numbers for you. This is ball-park stuff from when we were pricing up A Rough Guide to Glamour: the details changed last July (with expensive premium and cheap standard formats), but the principles are still the same. Let's say it costs about $15 to print a 120-page book. So we price our PDF at $15, and our printed book at $30. Chaosium customers are used to the idea that digital cost is half physical, and those numbers look sensible alongside other RPG books in the marketplace. We sell a PDF for $15, we earn $15. Half of that goes to our platform (DriveThruRPG: 30% share) and publisher (Chaosium: 20% share). Split the $7.50 that's left between the authors and artists who get a share of royalties: in this case I get about 30% of the creators' share. Let's say $2.25. We sell a printed book for $30 plus shipping, the printers take $15 because that's what it costs to print (inc. their margin), and they also take all the shipping costs because they're the ones paying to package and post it. We have $15 left in the kitty, exactly as intended: it all gets divvied up the same way. (There is some wobble room because of differential US & UK printing costs: I tend to average those when working things out). When Chaosium prints thousands of books the same size, you can guarantee they did not cost $15 each to print. Big print runs mean small print costs per unit. Ergo, their margin on a print sale is higher than their margin on digital. So they have the leeway to offer an "incentive" discount to get customers to buy printed books from the company store, as the company gets more income that way than they would if the customer bought the printed book from a FLGS after the distributor takes their cut. (Customers also have an incentive to buy from FLGSs in the Bits and Mortar scheme, because everyone likes supporting friendly local game stores. Customers who don't care about that stuff can buy PDF-only from DriveThru, or physical-only from online sellers: they have choices, all with their pro's and con's). Selling through DriveThruRPG, we don't have that leeway or that incentive, and you don't have those choices: there's only one storefront, with no distributors or FLGSs in the picture. Also, the way I do it, we don't get a bigger margin on print sales than we do on digital. (Other creators can do it differently: I'm talking about my pricing model here) But your suggestion means someone loses income -- it won't be the printers, and I don't see DriveThruRPG or Chaosium volunteering to take smaller shares to implement a print discount, so at the end of the day it's me (and my co-authors and artists). I suppose I could always increase my cover prices (say: PDF is $20, print is $40, so now my margin on a print sale is $25 not $20 and I can start to get clever...), but that hurts my sales. And I know that only 10% of my customers have bought Glamour separately in both formats, so at the end of the day it's a pretty small problem. After all: this is a luxury product I'm selling here (a book for a silly elf game), nobody needs to buy it, our prices in both formats are reasonable, and any money I make from community content gets reinvested to buy art for my next books. So all in all, I feel pretty good about the way things are working today. (But I'm an accountant: I would say that, wouldn't I?) If you can see a flaw in this (other than the hardy perennial, "we asked your customers, and they want better products for free"), please let me know. I've been doing this less than two years, it's quite possible I've missed something, and maybe the smart answer is to jack up all my prices/margins and then get cute with the differential between PDF and print. But that makes work for me, and hurts my customers, and I don't really want to do it: I'd rather just sell great books, in PDF and print formats, at reasonable prices.

The economics of large commercial print-runs (like Chaosium's) are completely different to those of print-on-demand (via Lightning Source). Feel free to check the cost of printing books on DriveThru's website: those tools are available for everyone to use. Any money that goes to pay the printer does not go to the creator, publisher or platform: how would you suggest DriveThru gets around that? Remember that they're primarily a PDF distributor, with a small sideline in outsourced print-on-demand.

To celebrate our Copper best-seller medal (for over 50 sales), and to thank our customers, I've just uploaded the book's first bonus content: Illuminating Malkionism - part 1. This is a collection of emails, group chat logs, concept sketches and B&W line art showing how we created the first four illustrations (The Kingdom of Logic, The Ice Age, The Exile from Brithos & "I Fought, We Won"). If you log in to DriveThruRPG, you'll find it in your Library or on the book's product page. If you'd like to see more of this, please spread the word on social media / game-related groups and forums, and leave ratings or even reviews over on DriveThruRPG: it really helps!

The digital edition has 43 pages & 19 illuminations. This is an artbook, not an article.

The Seven Mothers Cult works the other way around: we're very affable to people, as a rule, and look what we get in return...

One last data point from me. We've sold Glamour 829 times, to 752 customers. As the publisher, Chaosium gets the customer ID for each transaction, so I can analyse the dataset looking for multiple sales of the same product. Just 71 customers (9%) bought the PDF and then came back for a printed copy; 3 customers bought the PDF and came back for two printed copies. (They are the best customers!). Bundled data (print+PDF) and format split (premium vs. cheap) was in my earlier post. And that's yer lot.

Updated again, with the illuminated edition of A History of Malkionism, by Nick Brooke & Katrin Dirim. My classic article introducing the mediaeval West of Glorantha for How the West was One players has been gloriously illuminated by Katrin Dirim. First published in 1994, much like the Abiding Book of the Jrusteli God Learners, the article’s text has remained pristine and unchanged from that day forth, despite the worst efforts of accursed heretics and revisionists. The illuminations are completely new, and it was an absolute privilege and delight working with the brilliant Katrin Dirim to bring the history of Malkionism to light via the medium of gorgeous mediaeval artwork. 16 manuscript pictures depict key moments in Malkioni scripture and history, as well as three studies of the Western peoples: the ancient Brithini, maritime Waertagi and detestable Vadeli. From the Ice Age to the God Learners, from the Serpent Kings of Seshneg to Arkat’s Dark Empire, gain new insights into Glorantha through the eyes of a visionary steeped in the artistic traditions of antiquity and the middle ages.

But what is the point of this navel-gazing? As the programme stands, we have to bring out books out in PDF. If they sell well in PDF, we can bring them out in print later. If we do an end run around that, DriveThruRPG will shut down the POD option, disappointing between 32% @Nick Brooke and 67% @Squaredeal Sten of our customer base. Before the rules changed, one book did come out in both formats simultaneously: Valley of Plenty. In total, it sold 141 print (43%) and 186 PDF (57%) copies: that's nowhere near 67% print / 33% PDF. You can see that in the bar chart above. And don't waste my time saying "but that book was for QuestWorlds, proper RuneQuest players have different preferences because reasons..." As you know, we can't implement Chaosium-style discounts for "early" PDF buyers. The economics of POD via DTRPG are completely different. So buy our books, or don't buy them. In PDF, in print, or both. Wait for print if that's your preference; if it never happens, so be it.

A History of Malkionism, Nick Brooke's classic article introducing the mediaeval West of Glorantha, has been gloriously illuminated by Katrin Dirim, and is available now from the Jonstown Compendium, for just $7.50 in PDF. My article was previously published in 1994, in the Sog City Conference Guide and in Tales of the Reaching Moon #13: the Go West! special). Like the Abiding Book of the Jrusteli God Learners, its text has remained pristine and unchanged from that day forth, despite the worst efforts of accursed heretics and revisionists. The article was written as a crash-course in Malkionism, to enable the players in How the West was One, our 70-player live-action role-playing game, to quickly grasp the fundamentals of Western religion and history. It takes a deliberately neutral, mainstream perspective which could be broadly agreed on by both the Hrestoli Idealists of Loskalm and the Rokari Realists of Seshnela, the two dominant sects of Third Age Malkionism, while also introducing the major races and heresies of the West. The illuminations are completely new, and it was an absolute privilege and delight working with the brilliant Katrin Dirim to bring the history of Malkionism to light via the medium of gorgeous mediaeval artwork. 16 glorious manuscript pictures depict key moments in Malkioni scripture and history, as well as three studies of the Western peoples: the ancient Brithini, maritime Waertagi and detestable Vadeli. From the Ice Age to the God Learners, from the Serpent Kings of Seshneg to Arkat's Dark Empire, gain new insights into Glorantha through the eyes of a visionary steeped in the artistic traditions of antiquity and the middle ages.

Obviously not. The other tribes were surprised when they changed sides at the Battle of Moonbroth. Ha ha ha ha ha.

There are no circumstances under which I would say that over two thirds of my customers are not “true fans.”

I think the theory is probably rubbish, but Valley of Plenty launched in print and PDF simultaneously (back before the Electrum rule came into force); I’ll check out those numbers tomorrow. But even if it’s correct that “the average RuneQuester prefers print” (although 68% of sales are PDFs), what difference would that make to community content creators? We still have to sell >250 PDFs before we can start work on the print version, and there are clearly >250 people who are happy to buy our books in digital format. What’s the alternative?

You'll be wanting a Black Spear, then: it's gorgeous!

We say YGWV nowadays. By definition, your Glorantha will vary. So yes, it's a YGWV thing. Tales #15 isn't the Guide - it's a RuneQuest magazine from the nineties. I think Jeff added the comment that Moonbroth is "currently the religious center of Lunar Prax" to the Guide text because he liked what I'd done with the place fifteen or so years earlier, but that's just, like, my opinion, man. I took the basic framework from an old Digest post by Malcolm Serabian, and added the missing religious dimension (with pilgrims and heresiarchs). My Moonbroth had several grandiose imperial construction projects (a big new Temple, Moonbroth New Town, the Governor's Palace, the Spa complex, etc.), because I wanted the Empire to leave some impressive ruins behind in Prax for the tribes to fight over in the Fourth Age. Nowadays I get a lot of wistful pleasure contemplating post-Lunar Prax...

I wrote a short piece about the first invasion @Darius West, it's in one of my Gloranthan Manifesto collections, qv. Yes @JMV, Moonbroth Oasis has always been connected to the Lunar cycle, since before the rise of the Red Moon, centuries before the Lunar Empire came to Prax. There are many heterodox and indeed somewhat heretical Lunar worshippers at the Oasis, blending Pelorian and Praxian traditions: the Treaty of the Paps kept them safe from imperial reprisals during the Lunar occupation of Prax, but things are different now the Pol Joni and White Bull Cult are back in the saddle. My old article in Tales of the Reaching Moon #15 covers some of this, and there'll be much more in a future Jonstown Compendium release. (Not many people know this, but the Red Goddess herself is said by some residents of Moonbroth to have visited the Oasis during her Goddess Quest)

Updated again on 03-Dec-21: just short of 700 titles. I think there's another tranche of Storytelling Collective writers' workshop creations coming through...

Pardon me, but that seems facile. “If we ignore all the initial PDF sales, there’s a clear preference for print.” Sure…