I don't agree that D&D defines what an Flesh golems means. Flesh golems as an animated pile of body parts stitched together and moving only due to golem magic is a common fantasy trope that exists in everything from live action movies to books. I have never encountered any Flesh golem while playing D&D, but have encountered Flesh golems in everything from RM to animes.

The weird thing about D&D is in fact that they insist on putting the Flesh golem classification on Frakenstein monsters despite the obvious differences to a golem. I suspect the background is that D&D recieved criticism about lacking rules for creating Frankenstain's monsters and the designer solved the issue by claiming their golem rules covered the Frankenstain case.

The same problem does not exist in RM, in Construct companion we have Golem creation on page 45 and Amalgam creation on page 89. Making it so that RMU cannot recreate the Flesh golem from previous editions because D&D have used the same monster name for other names is stupid. Considering that Nicholas wrote Construct Companion I think it is a given that RMU should stay compatible with previous editions so it is possible to make an updated Construct Companion for RMU.

Everything being viewed right now when I checked were a couple dozen forums opened only 3 to 6 seconds apart.
I'd bet a whole lot of money those are bots.

I've never seen consistent forum traffic like this, besides big releases or other notable events. I'm seeing 200-300 users/day. Is this bots or is there an increase in new user/unregistered activity? If it's new users how do we engage them more effectively? If it's something else, what is it?

The marginal cost is very low, but you still have the upfront costs of writers, editors, layout, art. With the volume we are talking about, even when you spread that out over every sale, it's still significant. If, say, we doubled our sales by using Kickstarter (which I think is generous), it's not enough change that.

Well, it doesn't cost more to layout quality art than cheap art.

I think between improving the appearance of the product, and Kickstarter's network advantages, it would not be a stretch to double or more your sales.

Since ICE is print-on-demand, that's kind of moot. You could do an actual print run, which might in fact save money, but there's no staff to receive and ship the books.

I feel like if you accidentally sold 5000 hard copies, you could probably go ahead and pay a little to get some help with fulfillment.

It seems like quite a bit of thought has already been put into this. I'm just floating out some thoughts, as someone who has done projects with a lot less cachet than a new Rolemaster edition.

A Kickstarter can only generate more funds if either 1) it causes significantly more people to buy the product than otherwise would, or 2) it causes buyers to pay significantly more per copy than they otherwise would. It's not clear to me how either of those would work. Aside from those things, it just moves more of the sales up front instead of later on. Often it does that by offering a discount, which is counter to purpose #2. Also, it costs money to run, and Kickstarter takes part of the proceeds, so it's got to do so by a large margin to be a net gain at all. I don't see how that would have worked, even ignoring the question about who is doing the work.

Kickstarters consistently generate extra sales. First of all, Kickstarter is its own network. There are literally thousands of RPG players on there that just browse around, looking for projects to back. Second, it tends to inspire a heave-ho, let's do this vibe. So if you get all the existing fans to say, heck yeah, let's get a version with better art, you can get a lot of people to commit to purchasing, because there is both a perceived benefit, and a perceived sense of urgency. Third, Kickstarter campaigns catch a lot of eyeballs. They get shared around on social media, on forums, etc.

In the case of RPG projects, PDF sales have virtually no overhead, so structuring the price structure of the project to be mostly PDFs all but guarantees profitability. In the case of hard copies, you can right-size your print run to maximize your savings on printing costs.

But to me the first question is: why not more stock art? You would probably need a custom piece for the blue people and for the hawk people, but most of the stuff in these books is pretty generic. If cost is an issue, why not just get a Dean Spencer prescription, or pick up some of Eric Lofgren's not-quite-as-overused options? All you really need is a catchy piece of cover art; if you can't find something you like, that isn't already over-used, spend your budget on that.

I've seen plenty of books with smaller audiences with more investment in the art. Rolemaster is a classic game with an existing audience. I don't understand how it went to print with such an uneven, unprofessional appearance.