about the universe forum commander Shop Now Commanders Circle
Product List FAQs home Links Contact Us

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Free RPG Day

Steve Cole writes: My good friend Aldo over at Impressions Advertising came up with a tremendously good idea. He has dozens of RPG publishers sending him thousands of RPG books. Some are old books that didn't sell, others are new books, most are small print-on-demand books created out of existing material just for Free RPG Day. He is collecting all of the books at his secret headquarters, and in a couple of weeks will ship a box of mixed RPG books to 300 stores. These stores will then hand out the books for FREE (hence the term "Free RPG Day") to anyone who wants them. Thousands of gamers will get free books, and will get to see the offerings of publishers they never heard of.

We did a book for this project, based on the "follow the numbered paragraphs" adventure THE TEMPLE ON TERILEK PRIME, including sample characters (with stats for both GURPS 4e and d20v3.5) and the rules for phasers and tricorders. This was supposed to be EASY for us to do (it's all material from three other books) but turned out to be harder than expected. We had to integrate the d20 and G4e stuff into a cohesive paragraph structure, and we had to write new character backgrounds (as well as some data for the Klingon officer and the Orion Pirates) since the people getting the free booklet would not have the whole rulebook. We had to write a new introduction and a new advertising page. All in all, it took me three entire days, but if 1,000 giveaway books gets us 100 new customers, it's worth it. I could not have done it without the help of Jean Sexton, Steve Petrick, Andy Palmer, Gary Plana, and Jonathan Thompson.

You can find out more about it at http://www.freerpgday.com/FreeRPGDayFactSheet.pdf if you want. It's 23 June, and there is a list of the 300 stores smart enough to sign up for this bonanza on his site. If your store did not sign up this year, make sure they get on the list for next year. Aldo started the project for 100 stores but had 300 sign up before he could shut down the sign up page.