The Dresden Files RPG

We are just now cresting onto the other side of the big hill that was the release of the Dresden Files RPG.

We started the preorder in April, on Easter. The release hit at Origins at the end of June, and the shipping operation began at the warehouse — and commenced eating our warehouse’s face for breakfast. Thankfully that wrapped up in early July, so there should only be a few straggler orders now not yet delivered (though folks who ordered internationally, or domestically via Media Mail, may still have another week or so — them’s the breaks with those shipping methods).

It’s been a bumpy ride, but it’s also been an exhilarating ride. And all the while distribution (and thereby game stores) have been hopping on board with their orders as well.

The upshot of this? So far, The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story has sold close to 5,000 copies, with Our World not far behind.

Those of you following along at home may remember that this is out of an initial print run of 6,000 copies of each book. So we are, technically, running low — though we still have books in stock, and have shipped off several orders recently to distributors who are quickly realizing they just didn’t order enough the first (or second) time around to meet the demand.

Dropping down to 1,000 copies of Your Story is why we’ve kicked off the reprint process with our printer, which should mean more books will be in hand by late August. We’re having another 4,000 copies of Your Story and another 3,500 copies of Our World printed up.  If we’re projecting this right, at worst we might see a week or two lapse in availability.

Some folks have written to us (and thanks for that!) to tell us about conversations they’ve had with their game stores about the Dresden Files RPG being out of print. We’ve investigated each of these claims, and it has always emerged that someone in the chain (this is a lot like a game of “telephone”) misunderstood the distributor’s message of “we sold out and have more on order”. For some folks the message that a distributor doesn’t have any more books right now simply translates to “oh, that title’s out of print” and “the publisher didn’t print enough”.  Neither of those things are true, since we still do have books available for sale both to distribution and direct to customers, and because we’ve already got that reprint ball rolling to make sure we minimize any short-term out of stock situations that arise.

So, let’s be clear about this: The Dresden Files RPG books will not be out of print any time soon. We’re committed to keeping the product available for purchase for as long as it’s financially viable to keep doing reprints (and as long as Jim will let us).

Six thousand copies was already a pretty ambitious number for a roleplaying game in today’s RPG market, but thanks to the fans we’re on track to smash that figure in another few months (maybe less), and are setting our sights on smashing more figures after that. Thank you all!

We’re back from Origins! And naturally, we’ve come back to an absolute storm of people asking about when their books will ship. The short answer to that is they very likely already have, with the longer answer being… well, longer. Here goes an attempt to do “longer” without getting TOO long.

Shipping Started On The 23rd: In actuality, it may have even started a day or two earlier than that. But note our careful use of the phrase “start shipping” throughout our announcements — at the scale we operate at, we simply can’t take a population of 1,600+ preorders and get them all shipped out on the very same day.  The warehouse is working through all of this pretty rapidly all the same, on the scale of a few hundred orders per session, despite some hiccups like fedex not delivering the refill of packing materials on the day it said it would, or medical issues for one or more of the packing squad, or some of their crew needing to run off to Origins to make sure everything works on the ground there as well.  I asked the warehouse to do their best to serve our earlier preorders first, so they’re going through these mostly sequentially.

Slowly Entering Tracking Data Is Slow. It’s Also Manual, and Done By One Guy: I (Fred) am the guy who enters information into the Evil Hat webstore. I also do other small tasks like take care of my one-year-old, coordinate the Evil Hat team at Origins, run the company’s day to day administrative bits, answer the customer service emails (while on the road, at Origins), and so forth! These distractions mean that I haven’t had time this past week since I flipped the switch that let the preorders transmit to the warehouse to enter in any tracking data (that’s what the change of order status to “Preparing” meant). I’ll get started on that this week, but I won’t be surprised if folks get their packages in advance of the tracking information going out. Again, 1,600+ preorders is a hell of a work-load, and entering that data has to happen alongside everything else I just listed (and more).

Our Warehouse Is In The Middle Of The Desert: So even UPS — the method we’re using for any “free shipping” order in the USA — can be a little slow in getting the shipments out there. We’ve got them on a regular “dead-head” rotation out into the wilds of the black rock desert, though, with all the packages we’ve got for them these past and current weeks. But it does add time.

We are doing our absolute best to make sure this stuff happens as quickly as we can make it happen — but yes, many game stores will have the game in stock already because, frankly, they outnumber us and are gonna be just a tad more efficient at spreading product throughout the land. But everything “free shipping” from us is getting shipped out from UPS, and tracking information does exist, so we’re hoping we can get as on top of this as is possible now that I’m back from Origins and many of the preorders are already shipped!

July 4th Update: I’ve been piecing some more details together over the course of the 4th and had a brisk conversation by cell phone with the warehouse head as he was on his way with his family to the hospital (again). The rundown can be found over at RPG.net: http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=12437409&postcount=202

July 6th Update: Some more perspective on the shipping situation over on Fred Hicks’ blog, Deadly Fredly: http://www.deadlyfredly.com/2010/07/some-lessons-from-kinda-screwing-up/

So on July 10th, just a few weeks after Origins wraps  up, a game store up in Oakland, California is holding an in-store mini-convention dubbed Dresdacon, to celebrate the release of the game. That store is Endgame, which may well be one of the best game stores, if not the best game store, in the USA.  Endgame is local to lead project developer Ryan Macklin, who will be on hand and running one of the sold-out tables of Dresden Files RPG goodness. Evil Hat collaborator Paul Tevis, author of A Penny For My Thoughts, will be on hand as well.

Recently we’ve been able to announce that Fred Hicks, one of the game’s authors and the guy who did the layout (and forgot to give himself a credit in the book — typical), will be on hand as well, all the way over from the East Coast, cementing Dresdacon as the official west coast release party. Fred won’t be running a table, but he will be on hand behind the counter to shake hands, sign books, and answer questions all day long. He can also talk about the other games in Evil Hat’s catalog, of course.

If you live in the area, we hope you’ll come by to join us, even if it’s just for conversation! Though if you’ve already downloaded the game’s PDFs and think you’d be up for running a game, Endgame still has room for two more tables and plenty of players clamoring for a chance to play.  We’d certainly appreciate your help in making this as big of an event as we can make it!

Last week we announced that the books would start shipping on the 30th of June.  We’ve been looking that date over for the last week, talking with our distributors and our warehouse and so on to make sure everything is in place for that date to happen. And that’s when we realized something.

We’ve got it all together well enough that we can ship earlier than the 30th! (That’s right; for once, we’ve got a date on the schedule that’s moving in the other direction.)

Accordingly we’re moving our ship date to June 23rd. That should put books in folks’ hands a week earlier — for some people. during the same days that Origins is happening, where the books will be making first contact with the fans. And that feels about right.

So, we’ve had some bad news. Two of our volunteer GMs, Jon Hixson and Tom Cadorette, aren’t going to be able to make it to Origins. In Tom’s case he’s been eaten by a sudden plumbing crisis, which figures — water grounds out magic, right?

These are the game slots affected:

That said, we are looking for folks to step in and take over these games (no obligation to run the same “pitch”, just the same system) so the folks who signed up for them aren’t left stranded without gaming.

Good news is, we already have some takers! Both of Jonathan Hixson’s game slots will be taken over by none other than IPR founder and Mortal Coil author Brennan Taylor. We’re also talking with a couple people about taking on Tom’s S7S game on Saturday.

That said, we do need some replacement GM talent for Tom’s games! The two Dresden Files games (2pm Thursday, 2pm Friday, both definitely sold out) are crucial, but we’d also like to get someone in there who can run A Penny For My Thoughts using the Prisoner questionnaire Tom wanted for that one. If you’re interested and available to do this, please let us know so we can get this taken care of! You’ll have our thanks and a PDF of your choice from our catalog if you’re able to step in.

The one that’s probably in greatest trouble is Friday 2pm. On that day and at that time several of us will be joining up with Chris Hanrahan (of Endgame, That’s How We Roll, and 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction) over at Jeni’s Ice Creams in the North Market. If you’re signed up for that game and it doesn’t end up with a GM, please come on over and join us. If you can show that you were one of the folks signed up for that game, we’ll buy you a scoop.

It’s finally happening!

We’re far enough along, and enough things have fallen into place, that we can say this for sure: the books will start shipping on or around June 30th (basically, the week after we get back from Origins). This is true with our distributors as well, so at least in the USA, that should mean customers who’ve preordered from the Evil Hat webstore or from their friendly local game store will see the books arrive in early July.

Of course, if you’re not a preorder-er and want to fondle the books first before buying, come see our booth at Origins 2010, where they’ll be making their first public appearance.

Evil Hat Productions Brings The World of Harry Dresden To Life With The Dresden Files Role Playing Game

Silver Spring, Maryland (January 26, 2010) - After 4 years in the making, Evil Hat Productions is not only pleased but proud to officially announce The Dresden Files Role Playing Game (RPG) will release at the Origins Game Fair, June 23, 2010. Fred Hicks, one of the founding partners of Evil Hat, said, “Stars and stones! This project has been a labor of love for a great many people for a few years now. The thought of sharing these books with people, getting them in their hands, and having people role playing in the Dresden-verse is making me all misty.”

The Dresden Files RPG is based upon the wildly popular series of books by New York Times best selling author Jim Butcher. With eleven books published in the series, and Changes, the 12th book set to release on April 6, 2010, the Evil Hat crew had a wealth of characters and plot to draw from. “When Jim came to us a few years back, and asked us if we wanted to work on a role playing game based on his books, it took us about a millisecond to say ‘yes!’ He has been one of our biggest supporters on the project, and is just wonderful to work with” said Hicks.

Hicks went on to say, “We based The Dresden Files RPG on the ’Fate’ game system we used on the award-winning Spirit of the Century. We took everything we learned from Spirit, and then updated, revised, play-tested, and fine-tuned it to produce an experience that closely matches the novels themselves. That experience is also defined by the wealth of background we were able to add to the game from Jim’s amazing stories, including a comprehensive look at all the characters and creatures from the first ten books. We are sure that along with being a phenomenal game, it will also be a fantastic resource for fans of the books.”

“Originally, we were planning to do this game in a single volume. As time went on and word count grew…so did the amount of flat-out awesome we knew we had on our hands. And so our game grew out of the confines of one book, into two gorgeous volumes,” Hicks added.

The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 1 – Your Story and The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 2 – Our World will make their first appearance at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio June 23, 2010.

“We wanted to release these books in a bit more of an intimate setting, so we chose to make our big ‘coming out’ at Origins. It’s a small enough show that we feel like we will be able to spend more time with the fans, and thank the community that has been so supportive as we have been working on this. All plans point to physical copies of the books being available for the release event. But  if Fate (ahem) intervenes and they do not arrive for the show floor, we will offer an ‘instant content pre-order.’ This will allow folks to walk away with full PDFs of the books right there, and have the books shipped directly to them,” Hicks said.

Preorders may begin prior to Origins, depending on how the production timeline works out.  Shortly after Origins, The Dresden Files RPG Volumes 1 & 2 will then go on sale both to Retailers and Consumers through the Evil Hat online store, as well as through Indie Press Revolution.

-        The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 1 – Your Story ISBN 978-0-9771534-7-3. Price UPDATED (2/26) – $49.99. 400 pages, full color interior, hardcover.

-        The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 2 – Our World ISBN 978-0-9771534-8-0. Price UPDATED (2/26) – $39.99, 270 pages, full color interior, hardcover.

-        Retailers, for more information on how to order Evil Hat’s full line-up of titles, please visit http://www.evilhat.com/home/retailer-information/

-        For more information on Evil Hat Productions, visit: http://www.evilhat.com

-        For More information on The Dresden Files and Jim Butcher, visit: http://www.jim-butcher.com

-        Follow The Dresden Files RPG on Twitter @Dresdenfiles

-        Press contacts, please email feedback@evilhat.com

It’s Harry’s Birthday

Harry Dresden was born on a Halloween, so we thought it would be fitting to birth a special announcement of our own: having wrapped up our “text completion” goal at the end of this month (today!), we have settled on a target date for publication–Origins, 2010 (June 23-27, 2010).

Now, we’re calling this a target date rather than a definite publication date for a reason: you can miss a target, and given our historical curse with missing stated dates, there’s a chance that’ll happen here (more on that in a moment).  That said, if we can pull it off in any conceivable way, we will at least run an instant content preorder at Origins.

What’s an Instant Content Preorder?

The instant content preorder concept, which we piloted at Endgame out in Oakland, CA (one of the best game stores in the nation), is a pretty simple one: you plunk down the money in advance for your copy of the game, and you get the PDF of the game right away, usually on CD.  There’s no extra charge for the PDF–this is simply a way to make sure that the customer gets to walk away with something tangible and immediately useful when placing a preorder.  This worked so well for Evil Hat via Endgame that we suggested it as a battle-plan for Hero Games when it turned out they wouldn’t have Hero System 6th Edition in physical form in time for GenCon this past year.  So they ran with it– and it was a smashing success, with them selling 220 (or so) copies at the show despite having only 200 CDs on hand.  At Evil Hat we really like the combination of print and PDF products, and we figure this sort of preorder makes the most of its possibilities, commercially and for our fans.

Hard Target

We’ve picked Origins because it’s one of the first conventions of the summer gaming convention season, and it’s big, and we like going to it.  Strategically, mostly that first thing; if we miss the target of having physical copies at Origins, there’s still a chance of being able to bring the physical thing to a few other game conventions later in the summer, especially if they’re conventions that Indie Press Revolution establishes a presence at, since they carry our stuff and use the same warehouse service we do.

This all brings up the question: what stands between here and the target, and why do we still consider it hard to pin down?

First off, just because we’ve completed the text doesn’t mean the text is done with the editing and revision process. We’ve got the next two months blocked out for what we call “final vetting” (both copy-editing and reading over for consistency), which may cause some members of the team to vanish from public view in fits and bursts.  That gets us to the beginning of 2010.

We’re hoping to get some additional involvement from Jim Butcher as well, but– here’s our scheduling curse in action– we’ve managed to hit this point in our process just as Jim is set to be his busiest ever, continuing his work on Dresden #12, Changes (beware spoilers), and then heading straight into some work to get an anthology of Dresden Files short stories put together.  So we’ve got to put some amorphous padding in our timeline to allow for the possibility of getting some Dresden Files RPG unique content from the man himself.  That might not happen anyway, but if it doesn’t we figure folks will still have plenty of Harry Dresden goodness to console them– both from Jim and from us.

Even outside of that, 2010′s timeline can be pretty hairy.  Let’s take Hero Games’ release of their Sixth Edition product as an example: the book was already in the process of being printed in August, when they ran their preorder at GenCon. So folks got the books just a couple weeks later, right? Wrong– those books have just started shipping this past week.  And all of that was based in the time it took the printer to get the books printed, and the books shipped over and through customs.  And more to the point, this is not unusual at all, so that’s a highly unpredictable several months variable in our schedule.

There’s also plenty that has to do after the text exits the editing and approval stages that will be eating the rest of 2009 and the earliest parts of 2010.  There’s money wrangling, settling on the right printer for the job, and before all that, there’s several months of book design and layout, not to mention some additional art acquisition that will need to be done.

Add all of this up, and even with us being as far along as we are today, on Halloween 2009, we’re still looking at a big chunk of time.  There might be just enough slack in it that we’ll be able to pull off a late June target, but there’s far and away no guarantee. (On the other hand, this is also the first time since our decision to stop announcing dates that we’re willing to, well, announce a date!)

But It’s Still Time For Candy After All

So that’s the trick, but we still think that being able to announce our target date publicly is a pretty good treat.  We’re going to be busy as heck in the coming months, but we’re finally seeing daylight at the end of that long tunnel, and it’s gotten us energized like never before.

In the meantime, we’re going to continue to give y’all biweekly peeks into the game’s content, just like we did with Laws of Magic, Character Types, Harry’s World, and now Old World Order.

And this is far from the last time we’ll be posting explicitly (and at length!) about how well the game is doing and how good our aim at that target is looking to be.  We love to run Evil Hat as transparently as we can, and we’ve got no reason to stop doing that now!

That said, there is something you can do to help make this a success: be noisy about your interest!  Tweet, blog, facebook, or whatever else you like to get the word out.  The less time we have to concentrate on doing that, ourselves, is the more we have to focus our attention on getting the actual thing published. And keep talking with us here, on this site in the comments, or over on the RPG forum at Jim Butcher’s boards.  Our fans are what keep us going in more ways than one!

A Note to the Media

Finally, if you have a podcast or blog and would like to interview us about the project, we’d love to talk with you! Email Ryan Macklin, Lead Project Developer, at ryanmacklin@gmail.com, and he’ll be happy to put you in touch with the team.