This is the ninth of our scheduled Director’s Briefings.
Firstly, we’ve consistently stated that our tweaking of HARP Fantasy is not a new edition of HARP, but rather an enhancement of the existing design to fix issues that have been identified through years of gaming experience. HARP Fantasy does not need a full reboot – the system as a whole is not broken, and there were so few full book supplements published for the system that we are not out of ideas for financially viable expansion products. So if you consider the original 160-page HARP to be version 1.0 and the 192-page sequel to be version 1.2, then our enhanced HARP Fantasy will be version 1.5. Now from a financial business perspective, we would like our fans to buy our enhanced HARP Fantasy because we are running GCP Ltd as a business and products should make a profit, and from a gaming/business perspective, we want our fans to be using enhanced HARP Fantasy because it will make supporting you easier in all respects. Of course in troubled financial times, finding $20 USD for a version 1.5 might discourage fans from an immediate purchase. It’s not a gaming business secret that the majority of a product’s sales typically happen in the first few months after release, which means that most of our fans will have purchased the original and 192-page pdf editions from very defunct incarnations of the Mjolnir store and probably won’t have their receipts.
So we’re going to do something different. We will make a time-limited discount coupon available on OneBookShelf and all its affiliates, which will allow anyone to buy HARP Fantasy as a pdf at a mere 5 USD. We will publish the coupon on the ICE forums and through the mailing list. There will be a time limit to redeem this coupon, so please do not procrastinate. This is a headsup so that you all know this is what we are going to do.
Secondly, speaking of discount coupons, the feedback is that most people don’t have receipts for previously purchased pdf products and some folk have lost their access details to the still-existing but dormant Mjolnir store. So we’re going to make things easier still – open your pdf products to page 11 and take a screenshot. Then email the screenshot(s) to me at gcp.store.transition@gmail.com and I will issue the appropriate coupons.
Thirdly, negotiations continue with a number of freelance authors of products lost in the copyright limbo. We have secured agreement for the return of Cyber Europe and it will go back on sale as a searchable scanned pdf soon as the contract receives all the necessary signatures. To speed up the return of some RMSS products where we already have agreement, we may release these as searchable scanned pdfs in the short-term so that they are not stuck in the rebranding queue.
Fourthly, I’ve deliberately delayed this Briefing until after April 1st so that I can surprise you with the genuine news (and no fooling) that seven new Rolemaster products are well underway and the first full drafts of some of these are scheduled to arrive very shortly on editorial desks in the very near future. That’s all I am going to say in this Briefing about them; stay tuned for more information.
The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early May.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
