New Product for the RoL Game?

[JohnK]

Hullo, folks,

As the Subject line says...

It's been almost a year since the rulebook for the game came out.  Is there any news on when some new product will come out for Rivers of London: The Roleplaying Game? 

I haven't seen any mention of new stuff for the game on announced product lists, and Chaosium seems focused on stuff for several other systems. 

Hopefully, the game is not dead.

 

 

[g33k]

5 hours ago, JohnK said:

Hullo, folks,

As the Subject line says...

It's been almost a year since the rulebook for the game came out.  Is there any news on when some new product will come out for Rivers of London: The Roleplaying Game? 

I haven't seen any mention of new stuff for the game on announced product lists, and Chaosium seems focused on stuff for several other systems. 

Hopefully, the game is not dead.

 

IIRC, @Lynne H has stated she had an almost-complete manuscript in-hand (USA sourcebook? ... I think there was another project (collection of adventures?) in the "far advanced" and/or "likely to happen" pile, as well).

They were holding at least one of these -- IIRC -- so as not to spoilerize something unpublished by Ben A. (who gave them pre-publication access specifically for RPG-dev use).  I think Ben Aaronovitch himself has spoken of being interested in writing something for Germany, too; though I'm unclear if he was talking RPG, a lone novel where Peter Grant goes overseas, or a spin-off series.

I expect the upper echelons of Chaosium are looking at the the sales numbers, trends, etc.  Throwing too many resources at a product-line that's not selling is a fairly-certain path to bankruptcy.  At a guess, the RoL RPG is selling well-enough that they aren't discontinuing the line; but not well-enough to get extra resources the way CoC & RQ do.  BUT, I am not actually Chaosium, and I have no actual data from inside Chaosium.

It's worth noting that another major urban-fantasy novel series (The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher) got  a 2+1 release, then Evil Hat shut it down:  2 initial volumes up-front, Your Story + Our World; followed later by The Paranet Papers.  But EH isn't doing any more... presumably, because the line wasn't selling.  I'm unclear if this does or doesn't have bearing on Chaosium's RoL efforts, but the data certainly seems relevant...

[WisdomOfWombat]

Regarding Dresden Files and Evil Hat: I think that was never planned as line, but only as 2 books. The third book was quite a surprise. Back when Dresden Files was published, Evil Hat regularly published their sales numbers. Dresden Files was doing extraordinarily well compared to all their other products. But by now that was over 10 years ago, and Evil Hat hasn’t been doing very well for the past five years or so.

[Dangermouse]

I think I saw Lynne H post over in Facebook in Jan 2024 that there was some case files coming, starting  this quarter.

 

I didnt get to Dragonmeet in 2023.  That's where we tended to get updates on release very vague timelines.

 

[g33k]

On 2/8/2024 at 3:51 AM, WisdomOfWombat said:

Regarding Dresden Files and Evil Hat: I think that was never planned as line, but only as 2 books. The third book was quite a surprise. Back when Dresden Files was published, Evil Hat regularly published their sales numbers. Dresden Files was doing extraordinarily well compared to all their other products. But by now that was over 10 years ago, and Evil Hat hasn’t been doing very well for the past five years or so.

Thank you; that's good info.

Do you know why EH planned (from the outset) to take a successful/popular product-line and automatically sunset it?

[WisdomOfWombat]

Does a two-book release really qualify as a product-line? EH doesn‘t seem to be doing product-lines except for generally talking Fate. But to individual settings there is rarely a follow-up.

[g33k]

On 2/12/2024 at 3:26 AM, WisdomOfWombat said:

Does a two-book release really qualify as a product-line? EH doesn‘t seem to be doing product-lines except for generally talking Fate. But to individual settings there is rarely a follow-up.

This is a fair point.
But something like the DF or RoL novels are an ongoing, evolving target (hence EH producing Paranet Papers (and they arguably should be considering a 4th book at this point))... not specifically a "product line" with new setting-books and new class/race/whatever splatbooks.

But ongoing releases of adventures / case-files / etc seem like a reasonable thing to do (and, arguably, might help keep attention/sales up for the core books -- one of the key findings WotC's research found was that those other products didn't so much "earn profit" as themselves, but worked to drive core-book sales).

ETA:
The DF RPG had tons of attention & excitement, once upon a time... then EH stopped supporting it.  The "Official"  Paranet forum migrated to a fan-run site, and EH were no longer active.

And the forum has just kind of... faded since then; the spoilerific fan-theory page is still somewhat active, tho the regular-posters are fewer; but the general RPG-chat pages are ghostly-silent, where they used to run about as active as the RQ forum on this site.

Edited February 28 by g33k
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