Hi Everybody!

This week I'd like to let all you wonderful folk out there in on why we're releasing Limited Series games and what that means. Basically, we realized that releasing endless supplements just doesn't work in every case. We're actually pretty lucky (and grateful) to be one of the few RPG companies left with fans who will follow a game line and pick up every supplement. Thanks, gang! But on the creative side, the endless model gets harder and harder to make work because there are some ideas or pieces of a setting that call out to be explored, but don't appeal to most of the players of a line. There are directions that take us to ideas that sound very cool, but which aren't in keeping with the ideas, themes or mood that the core book and line are following. Work on any ongoing series for long enough and all those frustrating moments when you couldn't create something that you thought was cool begin to add up and take the fun out of it all. It becomes "just a job". And that's not a point that should ever be reached, because frankly, there are a lot of places where just doing your job and not really caring is OK, but game creation isn't one of them. And those places pay better too. :)

There's also a practical, economic reason too: Retailers and distributors have for years known that individual supplement sales are less than core book sales and so order accordingly. It takes something extraordinary to even come close to a core book in any given line. Our Players' Guides did well for us that way back in the day, as did those books that tied into a marketing theme like Year of the Hunter or the Gehenna books. But it wasn't the marketing alone (ie, just purely the noise), it was the easy way you could describe a central idea or theme that tied those books together.

So then, knowing all this some years ago...six or seven IIRC, we wanted to bring back Wraith the Oblivion. But we realized that any relaunch following the endless model was incredibly problematic. We had already done two editions, the direction was hard-wired into the setting and that direction clearly had limited appeal. People who liked Wraith LOVED Wraith, but there weren't enough of them to keep a line running, and those people who had tried Wraith before and didn't like it disliked it to such a degree that they were unlikely to try another edition. Enter the Limited Series publication model. With a Limited Series we could tell a different kind of story, with its own continuity, but still have it touch on the themes we enjoyed from Wraith. Best of all, with the releases being limited, we could publish only the stuff that really worked for the idea behind the line and keep it focused- which meant the books would be easier to sell as a unit conceptually. Thus was Orpheus born as a Limited Series.

Seeing how that worked out, analyzing fan reaction and sales numbers and retailer and distributor feedback, allowed us to continue with the idea when we reimagined the WoD after Gehenna. We knew we'd be redoing the Big Three of Vampire, Werewolf and Mage but after that we wanted to have the ability to explore which new game lines came out. If we went by previous publishing strategies, then every year we'd need to create a new ongoing game line as well as hiring new staff to create that line- and that line would need to sell as well as the Big Three to justify all that effort and expense. Rather than being locked into a gamble like that as we had been in the past, we decided to create a new facet of the WoD a year as a game line, see what the interest was, and decide whether to add to that Limited Series after it was completed. That way, we knew what sort of resources we'd need to commit, we could explore ideas that excited us and any given Limited Series would contain all the cool stuff that you guys need to play.

I wanted to push the concept of the Limited Series a bit further though, so while Promethean and Changeling were rolling as we'd planned, I also greenlit Scion as a three book LS. This was the first time we were creating a new RPG game world in a while, and I felt like it was such a fun concept that it needed to (and could) really shine as a Limited Series. Part of my plan after becoming creative director was to shake up our release schedule in terms of not producing the same sorts of books from month to month as I felt (and still do feel) that we'd gotten into a bit of a rut. So, following the same logic as what we'd used for the onset of doing LS's, I put into play an individual book or two that are a kind of mini-limited series. Some of them provide a self contained look within a current line that can be played separately or as part of your chronicle like the phenomenal two-book Rome set for VtR, some are a particular author's vision of an aspect of the WoD like Changing Breeds which was developed and partially written by our old friend Phil Brucato, and one at least that was a totally unique look at the WoD as a sort of parallel game experience- apocalyptic, action oriented and d20- by Monte Cook.

So what's next in 2008 for LSs you ask? G'head ask...

Well, there the new WoD game line, the 6th one, what's it called again? For some reason I can't remember... Then there's the five book Clanbook series for VtR which not only deeply explores the history of the clans and their present night activities but also contains an ongoing mystery woven through all five books that leads to a very cool project at the end of the year. There's WoD: Innocents, which provides a kind of play in the WoD that most players have never tried before and which rests in the educated hands of Matt McFarland (that there's a clue, son, a hint ah mean). Also, and very cool news this is, we will be publishing two more Scion books- the first is called something like Scion: Ragnarok and will provide additional rules and cool stuff for playing an Aesir-themed chronicle that takes you til the end of days and beyond. Later in the year we'll be offering the Scion Companion and since we won't be able to get that out until later in 2008, we're going to publish sections of the book as PDFs in the beginning of 2008 first: new purviews, pantheons, relics, antagonists, etc. Probably on a monthly basis, we'll let you know when that's firmed up.

Thanks-

--richt