Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for March 8th, and the episode title is “Print prices and aliens on Earth”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #278]
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Stonehome Games won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
I emailed the publisher on this morning to get in touch. It’s a start, and I’m optimistic because Stonehome Games has a support email address that I can find and use. My tip to any TTRPG publisher who wants a spot of publicity is to at least make it possible for busy media folks to get in touch.
The big news this week is that Roll20, who know control sites like DriveThruRPG, DMsGuild and the Storytellers Vault are having to put up the prices of print on demand books.
The first email about it made it look as if the cost of black-and-white books would shoot up. The second email, a correction, confirmed that POD books in the USA would indeed soar by between 20% and 50%.
The price of colour print-on-demand books, already expensive, would go up by more than 10% in the States, but premium colour will drop a bit.
There are modest price rises, around 3%, in the UK.
If you are a publisher, you can’t absorb this price hike in raw materials. You will have to pass it on to customers. Sorry if I sound preachy, but I’m legitimately worried about the fate of some American game companies.
And, of course, I am sorry for gamers in America, too. I think we’re all heading into uncharted territories.
In May, I shall be heading into the more familiar territory of Birmingham, the NEC and UK Games Expo. This year, to save money, I’ll be staying at the Crowne Plaza and I’m open to other changes too.
For UK Games Expo 2024, I did some video work from the expo with a few montage atmosphere videos, some page-turning of the books there and some close ups of board games. I wrote up, as best I could, news each night. However, I didn’t do any interviews either written or on camera.
What should Geek Native do differently, if anything, in 2025? What do you hope to get from our UK Games Expo coverage? Bronwen will be holding down the fort and will likely pick up Audio EXP, the podcast, for the Saturday, but I might be able to supply some soundbytes.
Also in 2025, Chaosium turns 50. Last week I nudged people towards our digitally cursed celebration post of the Call of Cthulhu publisher. This week there’s the news that they’ve finally launched a Discord.
I’ve hooked Chaosium into the Geek Native Discord so that those stories are automatically brought into our broadcast section when they share announcements.
Yes, Geek Native’s Discord is still going and still in soft launch. It’s been stuck there since lockdown. However, it’s a good example of what we could do differently for the UK Games Expo in 2025. Could we use it to send more multimedia from the weekend out into the wild?
Bronwen has been covering more TTRPG stories and this week picked up the news from Magpie Games that Urban Shadows 2e is out.
Urban Shadows 2e was demoed at GAMA, a US expo, and a reminder of how the convention season helps shape the TTRPG year.
I’d say that Bronwen’s main focus this week, though, has been Alien: Earth, with two posts about it. I’d recommend checking out the preview video, which gives us the first look at Timothy Olyphant as a synth.
My own favourite find this week was a Beholder springing out from behind a rock. Don’t worry; I survived.
This particular Beholder rock combo is actually a dice box, although it looks good enough to be a figurine. If you pop the top half of the Beholder off- and doesn’t that sound gross- you expose the dice cavity. Talk about a statement piece!
Expecting a retail release fairly soon, I took the chance to write up the free quickstart for Acheron International’s Helluva Toon. The game itself raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter and is a 1930s-style adult toon. Think Rodger Rabbit, but with more chainsaws.
I really like the sound of the game, but I’m not sure who I’d play it with. Close friends? Nah, that feels weird. Strangers? Differently weird.
Before the bundle outro I am pleased to say that I finally published my review of Crowbar Creative’s Dr. Grordbort’s Scientific Adventure Violence. It’s the first D&D 2024-powered game I’ve played. The review is very late because it’s actually a playtest review.
It’s adult in a different way to Helluva Toon because it satires sexism and toxic masculinity. The catch is that those are not always the sort of things my gaming buddies really want to see lots of in games. In other month long game, though, we generally acted like the British gentry of yesteryear and except our trophy hunting was off planet and more dangerous to our characters than the prey.
Lastly, that bundle deal is a good one as both Mork Borg and CY_BORG are in the Bundle of Holding this week.
On that note, keep safe, resist and see you next week.
