Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And I am.
Yeah, and I'm Jared, this week's special guest.
This week, this month, the permanent special guest.
At this point, you are. You've been on the show more
than anybody but us, I'm positive.
Maybe Stella? Yeah, Stella gets on a bunch
because she does a bunch of games with you guys.
Yeah. She's she's like, she's our our
our third for the weekly squirrel APS like designated
member of the show. I've been trying to get some
stuff. Did I send you a pen?
No, I. Didn't I?
I had another thing that I was trying to get finished made.
And then when I do, I'll send you.
We got new enamel pins made. I'll send you, I'll send you
one. But but this is this is episode
201 for us because now every episode is just going to be in
sequential order since our 200 was our last one.
So welcome 1st guest in the two hundreds, Jarrett Crater of
Space Penguin, Inc. Congratulations on doing 200
episodes. That's a lot for a podcast.
And how many years is it? Is it 2 years now?
Or the end of the year will be 3.
You've done like 2 1/2 because so technically your episode 267.
68. No, this will be 67.
That was 66. OK, cool.
This will be episode 267. Yeah, so 3 1/2 years, I feel
like so. We're going to be, it's going to
be very soon until we hit 300 right after our 200 because we
just numbered them stupid. I just numbered them stupid.
But but yeah. So are you going to renumber
them then or I'm? Not going to renumber them.
It's just last episode will be #200 and this episode will be
#267 and people will think they lost 67 episodes but they
didn't. It's just.
Going to be. In order, Yeah.
So good times. And your hair is much shorter.
You got all. You got your ears lowered.
Yeah, got the summer cuts because of the definite heat and
humidity down here in Florida. Beautiful.
Is it like 80 degrees 80% humidity every single day?
It's like 85 to 95 and then like 95% humidity, so.
Does it rain every single day? It pretty much rains every day
around 3:00 PM for about an hour or so and just makes it
oppressively muggy outside. That sucks.
Yeah, it's pretty rough. So Florida's obviously the worst
because it way worse than what I'm about to say because it's by
the ocean. But the only things I miss on
the East Coast, because I used to live on the East Coast,
northeast, the very close to the ocean.
The only things I miss are fireflies because for some
reason there aren't any in California.
And thunderstorms. And it wasn't like in the
summer, it wasn't daily thunderstorms, but it was like
every three to four days. So instead of like the daily
buildup of humidity, it took three to four days.
But then you get like an entire day of just thunderstorms one
nice day, 2 muggy days and then thunderstorms storms.
So I do miss the thunderstorms. Nice.
I. Think I've heard Thunder once
out here in like. Yeah, we don't get thunderstorms
here. That rains a lot.
It's raining probably right now and it's like 50° outside, so
you. Don't get thunderstorms in in
the in the PNW. No.
That's unfortunate. Just rains, just lightly miss.
It's not even like a full range. It's kind of spitting on you,
you know? That's, you know what's funny?
When you tell people, I've said this numerous times, it's just
spitting to people in California and they get no fucking clue
what I mean. Oh, where?
Where you're just walking through a wall of water.
No, it's just like, it's just kind of like sprints in just a
tiny bit, just enough to like kind of feel it a little bit,
just spitting on you. Yeah.
But random rain tangent,
apparently this one, we're on it.
Really. It took me a little bit to
realize, but the West Coast, especially California, probably
culturally because a lot of the buildings are, you know, Mexican
style buildings, there is not a lot of awnings.
So when it rains it just you just get wet.
And on the East Coast, if it's raining outside, you could walk
down like 10 city blocks and not really get wet unless you're in
the road. And I really struck.
It took me, I remember the day that it was like, oh shit, like
I'm wet because none of these buildings have awnings at all.
You're just standing in the rain all the time because it doesn't
fucking rain. But classic.
How's Florida with? Awnings, there's plenty of
coverage, usually with trees and stuff like that.
We live in a fairly suburban area, so not a whole lot of
buildings. But yeah, if you go to like, say
you go to the grocery store, you're going to get soaked
between the grocery store and the front door of your car, the
door of your car in the front door of the grocery store.
Like it just you just, you just get soaked.
So. It's too, it's so weird that
it's such a completely different style of living because like we
literally used to like I remember being old enough to
drive a car, but still living at home.
And like we would all, you know, go grocery shopping with my
parents and then my mom would like make me run and go get the
car to bring it to the front of the grocery store because it was
raining. And like, you know, the I'd
alternate with my older sister and who's going to have to run
through the rain to bring it in versus again, California.
I can't remember last time I rained here, but you know, it's
his what it is. I mean, we're all going to be
boiling soon, but you know, climate change isn't real or
anything, so. No, it's all fake.
Fake news. Yeah, fake news.
I'm going. To see how many roads melt this
year. Yeah.
So, so, so so, so what's new with Space Penguin Inc?
What's been, What's been going on?
We have finished primary Karen fulfillment.
So all of that out the door now we're taking care of folks whose
packages have gotten missed or have gotten damaged in the
transit. So we're replacing those and
things like that. Shipping out boxes to retailers
the other day, exciting. I shipped out my first pallet
from here. Debbie and I like she actually
stayed home and helped me build the pallet and wrap it all up.
It was it's kind of fun for those who never shipped the
pallet out of residential. Hopefully you have a good
driver. And we did it and he was really
super nice and he had a powered hand truck and a lift gate on
his truck. And so he got everything out
really quick and avoided the rain, which is good.
We are currently Debbie is in process of fulfilling survivors
of the core wars are in PC deck for Mothership.
So y'all should be going out in the mail this week, which is
pretty good. Thanks.
I think that's going to be the first thing from mothership
months that's going to physically hit hit us because I
backed like like nine of those things.
But that'll be I think. I think a couple more have hit,
one of the ones that was UK based I think already fulfilled
because I talked to Luke Gearing about it and he said he already
got one. Maybe.
Maybe I didn't back that one. Yeah, maybe.
We'll be in the first few that will fulfill.
So then comes with a cool sticker, it comes with a cool
patch. Everything all usual.
Mothership project has a patch. Has a patch with it.
Unheard of. Crazy.
It was our first patch and I learned how to do it.
I didn't learn how to do it pretty well so and I found a
good place thanks to Marco told me about this place.
Called. The what is it called?
I can't even remember now. Not the shield, anyway.
The studio, the. Studio.
And they were super easy to work with and turn our patch around
in no time flat, which was pretty cool.
We're not going to do a whole lot of those just because we,
even though we do mothership stuff like say it's a
requirement of Mothership month to do a patch or something like
that. We'll probably do another one
like that. But normally we just don't
because we like to try to be able to ship medium mail if we
can, if, if at all possible. So it just really depends on
what goes in those packages because if you put a patch in
there, you can't ship it. You're not supposed to ship it
medium mail. I know a lot of people do, but.
If you get caught, man, they're going to say no, no, no, no, no.
Well, they'll, what they'll do is they'll remove your ability
to drop off that mail at that spot and then you'll have other
spots to drop it off at. And then that just complicates
your life because you, how are you that just, if I didn't have
my local post office to go to every morning at 8:30 right when
they opened, I don't know what I would do with myself.
Yeah. What now?
Now do like would something like this be able to go in media mail
or does it specifically has to be like a Zine like the for
those in podcast lanes like a card?
Technically that's an advertisement, so it's not
supposed to go. It's supposed to be 8 pages or
more and it has to be bound in order to in order to be media
mail. So like.
Writing on it as well, right? Yeah, an 8 page zeem works, but
anything short of an 8 page zeem.
So when you send out stuff like pamphlets, you're not supposed
to send those out media mail and things like that.
It's it's all kind of check with your local post office and
they'll give you a thing about and tell you exactly what you
can ship media mail and what cannot.
Some some places tend to like let you slide stuff through.
Unfortunately for us mine doesn't down here so we've
always just shipped ground advantage unless it was medium
mail. If it was just a book, so.
But I mean, you know, except for the people running the
government right now, respect your local post office.
I mean, you know, it makes sense to a point.
Like the reason media mail was a thing, so those people could
like share books and maintain intelligence and all those kind
of things. So it's like I, it's, you know,
be a little sneaky, but don't be too sneaky, I guess for, for
the, for the listeners, you know.
Yeah, so we've got survivors of Core Wars going out right now,
and then after that we'll be ghosted.
So is on a mountain, we'll be going out.
We had a minor snafu with that one.
Your boy here put in a stretch goal of a ribbon bookmark and
then failed to tell his printers to put in a ribbon bookmark in
that book. So in order to make that up to
all you lovely backers, we have printed the stretch goal that we
did not meet, which was the sellers, which was a pamphlet
that to almost did for it's like another expansion for the inside
of the one of the houses. It's the sell one of the houses.
So we've done that instead. So hopefully no one's too upset.
We'll of course refund if people really wanted that ribbon
bookmark in their book. But I don't see a whole lot of
people being upset about a ribbon being missed.
I think most people would probably rather get.
More content. More content, something they can
use seems to me to make more sense over something.
It's a pretty slim book. It's 88 pages as well.
So it's like it didn't really need the ribbon in the first
place in my opinion. But we did put it on there.
So and then I screwed up and didn't do it.
So for all of you on Podcast Land listening, that you can
blame me. Well, just just just go to your
local Wait, not Joann Fabrics, because they're gone.
What what Whatever fabric store you have left, are there any
that are set around? Does Michael still exist?
Get a little strip of fabric, put a little glue in and and
you're good to go. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Glue the top your book together.
All of them. Yeah.
And then that's not this one, though a different.
One, it'll be fine. Yeah, right.
It'll be good you. Mean glue them together, and it
would be fun to try to figure out how to get the glue off
without ruining it. Yeah, yeah, I mean a real
adventure. Yeah, yeah.
You don't quite get like, the tephrotic nightmares crack with
that, I don't think. No, it's more of a RIP.
Oh shit, yeah. Yeah, so and then what's coming
up after as I was on a mountain? So currently in the works is
Liminal horror deluxe edition. We're getting ready to send away
to order up a proof copy of that.
The interiors aren't completely laid out, but we're ordering a
blue proof with blank pages and whatnot so we can measure
weights and things like that so we can get that back kit
pre-order store set up. It's that's kind of what it's
waiting on. We just had, Zach just did a
rough cover version just so we can see what the cover is going
to possibly look like. And then I'm going to order a
sample copy and then we'll be able to do tweaks and stuff like
that. It's a big book.
It's 432 pages, so there's going to be a lot of tweaking those
gutters and a normal liminal horror book.
There's plenty of room for the gutters anyway, but you want to
just make sure that you're not running the risk of running
stuff into the gutters. Yeah.
David Gutters, people remember your, your, your margins.
Yep, we've. Definitely talked about that on
the show before. And then what's after Luminal
Horror Deluxe? Luminal Horror, after Luminal
Horror Deluxe coming up this Tuesday, is Hopeless for the
Dead, which you have the flyer there for, which is the
infection scenario, Forbidden Psalm that Will has created,
Excuse me? And it's really, really solid.
It's got a great new noise mechanic so that you can
possibly be overrun at the end of the scenario.
And it's got some really cool decoy panic.
So you leave someone behind and if you wanted to, you can
actually cinematically play that out and have that last person
make their last stand, which is pretty cool.
Pretty pretty good zombie flick if you ask me.
I so I have actually been putting stuff on the shelves and
this do you see the shelf I'm pointing to right now in podcast
land? You can't.
But you see all that? Yeah, that entire shelf is
forbidden some. Hell yeah.
It is, it is 2/3 of the shelf. And then I have the last war box
the the Mini's box from War Games Atlantic.
So very, very lots of stuff. And there's more coming.
Cannot wait. Oh yeah.
So yeah, that goes, that goes live on Tuesday the 24th and
runs for a month. And then after that there's I
think we might be taking part of the fall off as far as
crowdfunding. We've got a Luke Gearing book
that's in the works right now. It's all our volume that may or
may not go to crowdfund. I think it's probably going to
go to crowdfund to help us print a larger print run of it and
then in. Can you, can you say what, what,
what that's what area of TRPGS that's going to be in or not so?
It's an adventure module that you can slot into most of your
classic medieval fantasy type stuff if you want to.
You can pop it anywhere you want on a map.
It's called War Unsuppultured and he wrote it a couple years
ago and it's just been in in production for that long.
And it's it's another slim volume.
But I really think going with these nice lighter hard covers
that we can build where you have a shit load of adventure packed
in there with good design and good page layout and good, good
reads and leads. I think that's kind of what
we're heading towards. We're still going to put scenes
out every month, but we want to tend towards larger, larger
books as things go. Not as large as like a 432 page
liminal horn deluxe. That's something we'll do like
once a year, once every couple of years, but leaning more
towards the 60 to 120 page count.
Yeah, so that's why and why. Why?
So I know you guys.
I mean, we've been talking about this since the beginning and
it's been really cool to talk to you since like really early in
Space Penguin with like, because you've taught us all so much
about like the way publishing works and like how you like kind
of like level up in publishing to be able to get farther and
farther with your reach. Is that part of it is, is that
to be able to have like more kind of like hefty stuff on
shelves and bigger places as opposed to disease or?
That's the biggest, one of the biggest things we hear from
retailers when we go to ACD Expo, which ACD is our largest
distributor, they're the second largest in the States and they
cover something like that, like 6000 accounts or something like
that, game stores, brick and mortars, you know, stuff like
that. And that's the biggest thing we
hear from retailers is if it doesn't have a spine, it's hard
to merchandise. So, you know, as a company that
does primarily Zenes, we're, we're well aware of that.
And you know, we've come up with solutions over the past several
years and several of us and my good friend Beckett Lauren has
come up with several solutions for retailers over time as well.
It's just one of those, if you, if your books got a spine, it's
easier to shelve so it's easier to see and then people can pull
it out and kind of look at it. Totally makes sense.
Well, that's why my Zen's are on this giant spinner rack here
instead of instead of on the shelves.
So. And some places have spinner
racks and things like that, like comic books.
It's the same thing that comic book retailers dealt with.
And so one of the solutions is a comic book waterfall where it
kind of spills off the wall and stuff like that.
And so there have been several retail spots that have adapted
or adopted acrylic wall holders and things like that to work in
that fashion and spinner racks and other possible
merchandising. So where you can see the full
cover of this thing? Got you.
But but also nice to have spying books and and that's kind of why
you're going that direction. Yeah, it's fun.
If we could put out a new hardcover every month, believe
me, I would be putting out a new hardcover every month.
That would be super awesome and super amazing.
I don't know where I would find the time to do that.
Yeah, seems like a tall order there.
Yeah. And then you were saying
something after after the loop gearing project for the
potential crowdfund. There's a large fantasy book
called Potheca, which is a city kit book in order to build, you
know, to help you build a city for your fantasy games, written
by Chris Ramdeen, who wrote Old School Stylish and Neilson.
And that's going to be a big one that might come out, might go to
crowdfund this year, might go to crowdfund early next year.
We'll see it's been in development for a while too.
So can't really talk too much about that one yet because we're
not quite sure exactly what the final thing is going to be.
But it's definitely going to have a bunch of NPCS, like 108
NPCS and then a way to build your own city of of really cool
and awesome stuff. So that's.
Awesome, got some fun. Sounds like system agnostic
stuff coming down the pipe, which will be neat.
Yeah, definitely leaning more towards stuff that you can slot
into whatever's, of course, supporting our main lines,
Forbidden Psalm and Liminal Horror, but also just coming out
with more stuff that you can use with whatever else.
Someone, Stella the other day posted up the back of someone's
book, I can't quite remember who, but it says compatible with
role-playing, which I think is awesome.
It just needs to just things are compatible with role-playing as
opposed to a specific system, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Systemagnostic is always
interesting, you know, especially like in the OSR space
because you know, one of the qualities of like at least the
through line of what is kind of, you know, pre 2019 OSR is that
they are all compatible roughly. Like the dice mechanics are
roughly ish the same and there's just some subsystems that are a
little bit different. You know, things are a little
bit different now. So, you know, you can't really
just give like monsters in hit dice, you know, So it's cool to
get newer system agnostic stuff that you really can just like
toss into any rule system whatsoever and still be able to
run it, whether it's adventures or like a city building thing.
Because there's, there's some stuff that's out like like that
does like city building, like I think Cess and Citadel is a is a
big city builder, but it'd be really cool to get a different
take on being able to build like a whole city and stuff.
Cool, that's what we're hoping for.
Yeah, going to be neat. And then so that's I mean that
sounds like that's the year for Space Penguin Inc.
So potentially 2 more crowd funds on top of at some point, I
assume you're home losing multiple rooms again to to giant
boxes with liminal horror in it. But new releases you got
something out this month Right now I think it's been out of
like 10 days ish. What are we talking about today
that you can grab from Space Penguin Inc?
We're talking about Empire of Hatred by Sam Sorensen, and
that's actually Sam on the cover.
Mine's downstairs. So it's a hex crawl, ostensibly
written for more org, but usable with pretty much any system.
It's got this really great map, hex map in the front that covers
the different terrain types in different locations and things.
Then it has your crawl procedure and how long it takes to travel
over certain types of landscape and things like that.
And then each of the different textures, each of the different
zones areas has its own weather and encounter table.
So like Hex Carl should. And then your main hexes are
keyed. So yeah.
Yeah, it's it's it's so it's it's very much it's Mark Borg,
but kind of like compatible with Merkborg.
We're not necessarily from what I read, and maybe I'm completely
wrong and I just missed a bunch of stuff.
It's not like this isn't like a hex crawl across Galagan Beck or
anything. Like this is like a completely
different kind of like generated world, right?
Like I know that the Sam on their blue sky and even on the,
the Spaceman page talked about they used a lot of, if not
almost all of the things from Heretic and Ferratory, the early
Merkborg scenes, and also some feats and and relics from a
couple other things too. And it's very much like a, it's
almost like a religious kind of not pilgrimage, but you're
trying to like have this kind of like holy Emperor and like
delivering a like an item across for, for the, for them.
It's, it's really interesting. It's very.
I don't. I can't think of another giant
hexcrawl for merkboard. Yeah, it's I think it might be
the first one. Someone probably point out that
there's already been several, but who knows.
But yes, it uses those items by just mentioning them and all of
the all of the items and the monsters are available and
freely available. More, more first party content
and 3rd and 2nd party content that you can find on the work
board website. So you can, the the intent is
you have your hex crawl and you have your weather procedure and
then you're traveling across and then if you need to then you
reference the more workbook or you reference ferratory or
heretic or the tenebrous reliquary and things like that.
It's neat to, to specifically be able to like, if you're going to
use all of that, it's cool that it's all freely available
content because like most of Mark Borg's first party stuff is
free anyway, which is awesome of, of free league and, and
Joanna Paley and everything. But that's just a really
interesting thing. I mean, it, you do have to like
dig through four books to, to find all the stuff, but it's
neat that you don't have to pay for anything else.
If you just pay the, I think $15 for the Zine or $10.00 for the
PDF. Getting to be able to use all of
those things is really, really cool.
As opposed to just maybe having one is like an adventure starter
or something. Having access to all of the
monsters, adventures, relics, feats.
I mean, some of the feats, it's like, yes, you can use them, but
one of them is literally like jump off a mountain that's
10,000 feet high. If you survive, you get a feat.
So it's, it's really neat. But like you said, that's,
that's Sam. That's Sam right there on the
cover yelling, yelling real loud at you.
So what have you guys published any Merkboard prior to this?
I'm trying to think of anything you guys put out that was
Merkboard content. Forbidden Psalm was totally
well. Well.
I mean. Originally, yeah, yeah.
Felt around Merkboard. Yeah, This is the first thing
for more porn that we've done. We're going to.
We're going to have to get an Empire Hatred skirmish game for
this compatible with Empire Hatred.
Copy and have him make one up and he'll like turn me over a
completed book in like a week. Yeah, I was going to say a day
later you'll have the entire thing done.
It's crazy. Like he finishes in a day when
I've like not finished in four years.
And it'll never not boggle my mind how good the quality is
after that as well. Yeah.
And then I know, you know, Sam has put out a bunch of stuff.
I know. Oh, I was just going to ask,
like, have you guys ever put anything from sand before?
But. Sees of sand.
Sees of sand was a was a big a big thing from sand before as
well. I have it literally sitting on
the top right there. And that was also kind of like a
big like hex crawlish or like giant thing that you can use the
things, right? Yeah, sailing sands thing, you
know. Exactly.
Sam goes big or doesn't go, it feels like on these big books.
He definitely understands The Expanse.
He's actually running a war game for us right now called
Cataphracts. And it's a play by posts.
So it deals with a lot of fog of war.
So we just have like forum posts and things like that.
And he drew this huge map and all these armies and things like
that. And he must be playing the game
24/7, like to be able to, to run it for us as there's currently,
I want to say we broke the 30 commander mark.
So there's like 30 different armies going across.
And so he's got to be keeping track of this on a map at his
house, like where, where he's at.
And then we're supposed to be keeping track on our own little
maps and we don't get the whole map of the whole area.
You get like a fog of war map which makes it very interesting
for play by post and we've been playing that for like 3 months I
think. That's pretty cool.
How many people are in that? I think there's like 30 plus
right now. Oh, you said 30 command?
Wow, that's a yeah. I mean, yeah, if you're running
30 people through anything, play by post.
The only thing I've ever done. By post you mean like discord or
you mean like are you mailing letters?
By Discord. You got it.
Just imagine if it's all just like mailing letters, but you
like T stain all of them and like burn the edges and do like
a whole thing every time. That'd be insane.
I mean take a year and a half just to do like one round, but
that'd be really neat. I had a question and then I said
something stupid and then I completely forgot what my
question was about it. Oh, the the so no maps is what
you said. There's also a thing in this
like very clearly right off the bat it says like all the
contents of the caravan you're with and you get no map.
So you're really just wandering around this hex until you figure
out where the heck you're going. Which I think is interesting
because basically the entire book from like page one on is
just like there's like a page of like loot and like what's going
on. And then the entire book is just
keys and like random encounters in different locations and stuff
like that. It very much fits that kind of
like obviously it's not. I mean it's for mark boards
wasn't like system agnostic, but that same kind of idea of just
like you could theoretically play any system with this and
just run it because most of the things you know, even if you go
to Merkborg it really easy to do into any system.
So it's just like a giant like 50 page hex for all which is
name. Yeah, well, and that's this
thing too, because you it's got weather procedures and it's got
your encounter tables. So as as you're going through a
hex, if you go through a non key hex, then you're expected to,
you know, roll reaction, roll surprise, as you normally do for
whatever system that you're using and things like that.
So like I said, like while it's written for more org, it's also
usable with pretty much any system.
That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.
Flags, you know. Yeah.
Does it give it some legs? And I think Sam also said on
their on their blue sky. This might be the first teach
RPG with like a picture of the creator on the cover.
Yeah. Could be.
I can't think of 1.
I do like that the cover is like, I guess a like a quote UN
quote version cover on the front, like no logo treatments,
no like anything like that, which is really cool.
It's just a shot. It's definitely very unique
comparatively. Yeah, I would ask Taylor's how
it does in stores because I bet once it gets in stores, I bet it
grabs more board fans and things like that.
Well, it's a very, it's a very boring picture.
I definitely like if you, if you held us up and asked me to guess
which is which game this was for, I feel like that would be
my first guess. So I think I think they
definitely, you know, met the prompt with that, which is good.
And then the map which you said before, like as you said, like
go bigger or or go home, I guess.
And that's a shit load of hexes. Yeah.
It's a shit load of hexes. Podcast land.
Watch the show where go buy the game.
But but yeah, I will be curious if someone's like, I'm actually
like there's four other. I mean, there's 8000 Merkborg
projects are compatible with Merkborgs, so I'm sure someone
put a hex crawl on a shower curtain or something by now.
But but but it is interesting. Really good idea, I kind of want
that. What the hex crawl on the shower
curtain? Yeah, I kind of do.
Just put this X crawl on a shower curtain.
I mean, it makes sense. It's got the right size.
And then you just, and then you just use dry erase markers or
wet erase markers in your shower wall and you just mark which
where you're at on which hex as you're playing through it.
There you go. Play the shower.
Always be gaming. Always be gaming, even when
you're showering. Even when you're shower.
Well, I mean, it sounds like with the amount of stuff that
Catapracts is going, Sam must be doing in the shower as well or
he's not getting anything done right.
And well, there's one thing that I don't know.
We we talked a little bit about the beginning, but you said this
is future future. Am I allowed to ask what's on
that side of this card? I forgot if that was go ahead.
So this run from the dark folk core role play, what's what's
the story with this? So that's Will's Welsh folklore
inspired fantasy role-playing game coming out, probably going
to hit crowd fund sometime later this year, and he's working on
getting a grant to get it translated into Welsh as well.
Oh awesome. Which is really cool.
Can't tell you too much about it yet because I haven't read it
yet, but it's you're it's yeah. It pretty much uses Wales as a
map, but then kind of not. And it's good too, is going to
be in black and white, maybe maybe some red, but more it's
it's own system from the ground up.
So you don't have to worry about being able to piece together
with something else. So that's.
Awesome. It's we really need to see what
what Will does with the tabletop role-playing game because
obviously like they know how to design whatever, but pretty much
everything that people know know them for is is forbidden Psalm
and you know, the skirmish game aspect of it and stuff.
And you know, that is compatible based on work board.
So I'm really, really excited to see like I did more than
anything. I'm just like, what's the dice
mechanic? Are we doing D20 roll under?
Are we doing 2D6? Like that's what I'm really,
really excited to be like Will who's, like we all said, whose
work we really enjoy. I want to know like the first
game, you know, the first big game, like what do they jump on
to? So I'm I'm very curious.
I think I did get they did send me a little a little preview of
something. And I will say the layout looks
fantastic already. Yeah, so, so very excited for
that. So that's potentially 3 crowd
funds this year then for you, potentially, possibly maybe
three more on top of on top of the multis you've already done.
That's, that's, Remember, Remember like a year ago when
you're like we, we don't really want to do crowdfunds.
Yeah, We've just figured out how we figured out how to do them
and land them and in the appropriate amount of time.
We were two months late on Karen.
We said March and it was more like the end of May, which and
we all know in crowdfund and Kickstarter land, that's
actually not that bad. It's not at all.
It's surprisingly good. But it was still frustrating me
because I really wanted it to land in in March.
Now we've we've figured out how to adjust, you know, adjust
that, but adjust for that. Now we're giving more quarters
as opposed to an actual month and shaving in more time for
when it actually, you know, some of these bigger ones like Karen
and Liminal Horror Deluxe where we've got like 2000 + 4000 in
the case of Karen, you know, backers.
It, it doesn't change the work that goes into the creation of
the thing. It takes the work on the
fulfillment side of things. And so we've learned how to
scale our time to better fit that.
If we didn't have 4000 copies of Karen to ship out, you probably
would have been done in March. You know, if it was closer to
1000, it probably would have been done in March.
But it's just the sheer volume of the work.
There's only so many hours in a day with two people doing this
and Debbie doing the majority of the packaging because of how she
hand stamps every box and things like that.
It, it just definitely takes more person hours to to do these
bigger ones. So but we've been able to stick
the landing on survivors of the core wars and Zozana is going to
come out pretty shortly thereafter.
And I think I had said that those would be in people's hands
in quarter 3. So it's the beginning of it'll
be the beginning of quarter three shortly.
So I kind of got figured out how to do those, which is good.
I'm pretty happy with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, at this point with any crowdfunds, like if it comes out
within six months of like the day you said it would, that's
pretty. That's that's really great
considering, Yeah. Considering the number of
projects that are literally years late, yeah.
It'll be out in two years, don't worry.
Yeah, or or they'll just stop answering the comments and stuff
and disappear. But do you think you're going to
get to a point or is the hope or if you even want to get to a
point where you're how like a warehouse and like workers doing
this or do you want to stay at the size where it's you and
Debbie? I think we're going to stay at
the size where it's being Debbie for a while, probably for a
couple of years. We're talking about a relocation
at some point possibly. And Oh yeah, once we get that
relocation, we're going to need a couple more years and that
base, you know, if we get a larger space to work out of and
have all our storage at, at the same place, which would be
really cool. But we, yeah, we don't, I don't
see us hiring on more people. I see us being able to pay
ourselves a little bit better. Good.
And I, our collaborator for the marketing at some point in the
future. And, but, but sticking with us
is the best way just because we know what we're doing and we
know how to do it. We need to do it several years
in a row, in my opinion, before we try to bring on other people
to physically help with that aspect of it.
So now what? Now let's let's say for just for
for for the sake of argument, what happens if you if something
just goes off and you end up with like 8010 thousand backers
on something like do you do you? Would you just do it in like
bigger waves or or what would? We would we could potentially
look at a three PL. third party logistics company to help out
with that. Someone like Flying Cloud or
Quartermaster Logistics, someone that that does that sort of
thing. But we, I mean, I had originally
thought that that's what it would take to do Karen, but we
proved that we can do Karen, which was 4000, right.
So yeah, it's just, I think probably 5000 would be about the
mark where we would be strongly considering a third party
logistics company to do it for like a board game, one of the
board games one of these years. If we get there, that might be
definitely something that we look forward to.
But no, I think we, we know our limits and we know how to tell
people when we're they're going to get their stuff, which I
think is the most important thing to be able to do in this
business when you're crowdfunding is to be able to
try to hit those marks. And I think we've proved to
ourselves that we can do it for X amount of copies.
But yeah, if we were like the 8000 copy mark or something like
that, I definitely would be looking at shipping that sort of
work to a three PL. just because we'd still need to do our
monthly zenes and other smaller projects and being able to keep
up with everything. So if we had a smashing success
of like 8 or 10,000, yes we would consider switching that
off. You just reminded me too.
I don't think we've told you at all.
And and the episode dropped like an hour ago.
So but we're we're changing the show up a ton.
Oh, I need to change this window too.
Remind me to change this one, Hunter.
OK, the weekly scroll tabletop podcast.
What we're going to be So we're going to be talking not just
about teach RPGs, but war games, skirmish games.
I know we've talked about forbidden song, but more so and
also board games. And I totally escaped me until
you said that that you are a huge board game person.
So we're going to have to, yeah, we're going to have to have you
on for more than just not cat chats and actually come on and
and talk about some, some old, new and crazy board games here
on the show. Can we talk about like 1970s
sports games? Whatever you want.
Whatever you want, yeah. Baseball 1896, I think.
I knew that's what you were going to say too, because you've
talked about that one before. Yeah.
Yeah, 100%. That sounds literally like
exactly the kind of board game we want to talk about on the
show. We specifically were talking
about bringing in more like 70s and 80s teach RBGS to like
buddies and Burrows and stuff. So some like 1980s baseball
board game. 100%, we'll talk about that.
Nice. I would I would love to get to
one of these days. I'm going to be able to play
that. Yeah, I mean, I wish.
We'll have to bring it next time we're at a cotton together and
we'll sit down and and and play it and and we'll get it figured
out. It's probably.
Pretty bad to be honest with you.
That's again. Fun is fun, man.
Like if something is so bad, like there's only a very narrow
window where something is so bad you can't enjoy it, you know?
Because like it either is, is it's OK enough to be good or so
bad it's fun. It has to be like a perfect
amount of like shitty to actually be bad and to not enjoy
it. So as long as it's slightly one
way or the other, I think we'll be good.
Nice. We'll, we'll, yeah, we'll make
it fun. Yeah, come up with a list.
I know we've already said come up with a list of older teach
RPGs you want to talk about, but board games for sure.
I know that's a passion of yours and something that we want to
start expanding into. So we'll definitely start out we
hitting you up for those. I have one.
I have one that's just called tennis.
Yes. OK.
Let's do it, let's do it. I know, Kobayashi commented.
Because we, we're going to start doing solo games too.
A some a joust based solo game like that's called like flying
ostriches and flying somethings and other.
I don't know if you guys played, I don't know if you played
Joust. Have you ever played Joust?
When I was a kid, we had like we had Super Nintendo and then you
would get like you could buy cartridges that just had like 10
old arcade games on them. And my favorite one was always
like #2 or whatever and had Joust.
And it's basically like you're flying an ostrich, but you're
like, as if you're like a knight with a Lance and you just have
to get like the right angle where you're slightly higher
than them to beat them. And you're just like shooting at
each other, like jousting on flying ostriches and stuff.
Sounds sick. It sounds sick.
Joust is Joust is a pretty amazing arcade game.
It's pretty. And then we like want to see.
Well, there's some deep lore behind it too, behind those
ostriches and why they fly and the different things that you
run into on different boards. I'm going to deep I'm going to
be on Wikipedia for the rest of the day.
Thanks so much but apparently there's a solo adventure game
based on it, so I definitely have to check that out so so
yeah oh gosh is that is that everything?
I mean, every time we Oh yeah, that's right, you did have a
heart out. That is, I think everything
that's going on right now is Space Payment Inc, right?
Yep, Karen, box set goes to RE retail, so it's available in our
stores starting this Wednesday and available in stores starting
this. As soon as that pallet arrives
in Texas and gets split up between Acd's warehouses, people
can pick that up at like their favorite book shops and game
shops and some. We had a bunch of retailers who
backed online and offline and we've restocked a couple of
people already, so that's pretty cool.
Yeah, that is pretty much what's been going on with space so.
Snap the Karen box that as soon as you see that if you didn't
back it before, go grab Empire of Hatred right now from San
Sorensen over on Space Penguin Inc.
And and that's going to be us for today because I totally
forgot Hunter has to go to work at his.
My heart out was 8 minutes ago so I got to go.
So jerk now. It was always a close one and
we'll see everybody in like 2 days.
Bye everybody.