A Cubicle with a View
Last time I talked about how Cubicle 7 Entertainment had gotten to where it is at the moment – a company that some will have heard about (largely due to Doctor Who), but not an RPG ‘household name’. Hopefully the announcement of The One Ring: The Lord of the Rings® Roleplaying Game has moved us up a few notches on the name recognition scale. I suppose we’ll find out at Origins and GenCon Indy!
It’s a strange place to be as a publisher. We released 20 products last year, which is a fair number, but compared to what’s coming it’s the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got 82 products scheduled for release by the end of August, 135 by the end of the year. Admittedly, some of those will be delayed if their development hits a snag, but I think it goes to show the change in scale that we’ve seen in the last year.
Where’s it all coming from?
We’ve got The One Ring release, support for Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, Qin, Starblazer, Victoriana, SLA Industries, and Call of Cthulhu, as well as a few new lines making their debut. One of those is a new modern BRP game, another is our Genesis Descent setting for Cyberpunk. More details soon...
A good portion of our release schedule expansion is due to the publication partnerships that we’ve put in place. We initially started forming these partnerships to help small publishers whose games we felt deserved wider recognition. The programme has grown from there, and attracted some more established publishers who liked the set-up. Now we’ve got 12 partners in place, all producing fantastic work and distributing it out to a wider audience.
Here’s a run-down on what you can expect in the coming months:
Adamant Entertainment – Adamant were the only publisher with an official Pathfinder support product at GenCon last year, and have more Pathfinder products on the way. They were the first company we teamed up with once we went full time. This year promises to be a big year for Adamant, as the new Steve Kenson (of Mutants & Masterminds fame) penned superhero game “ICONS” has been announced and is getting a lot of forum attention and preorder sales. We’re also really looking forward to Tales of New Crozuban, based upon China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station”, “The Scar” and “Iron Council” novel series, which is due out at the end of this year.
Alephtar Games – we’ve just released Rome BRP – a wonderful historical setting, which even includes authentic Roman graffiti! They’ve got Dragon Lines coming out next which looks at Martial Arts and The Dragon Empire in BRP and then Crusaders of the Amber Coast which is set in the Baltics at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
Arc Dream – I’m sure Arc Dream requires little introduction. We’re really excited by the release of Wild Talents 2nd Edition, out in March. This will be accompanied by The Kerberos Club – a Victorian Wild Talents sourcebook that’s getting a huge amount of interest – and followed by further WT support in the form of Grim War, eCollapse and other titles. A new pocket book edition of REIGN (REIGN Enchiridion) is coming out in May, and Arc Dream and ourselves have lots of plans for later in the year too!
Beyond Belief Games – Simon Washbourne’s “Barbarians of Lemuria” has been selling really well since it hit store shelves last December and he has a bunch of older games that may very well be reappearing through us, as well as his recent PDF best seller “Dogs of War”. Simon never seems to stand still and is always working on new projects so I expect we’ll be seeing more of him later in the year too…
BoxNinja – 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars was one of the big hits of GenCon back in 2008 and we were very pleased to be able to help Gregor bring the game to a wider audience. Whilst 3:16 was sci-fi based, Gregor has been working on a fantasy variant (Carnage Amongst The Tribes) and also a Roman version (AD316) which, between us and the fans, we seem to have managed to get him to agree to release as a print version later in the year.
Cakebread & Walton – Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton are two British game authors – you may remember Ken from some old Warhammer Fantasy RPG and GURPS titles, as well as from the pages of Arcane magazine back in the 90’s. Anyway, Peter and Ken approached us about publishing their new “Clockwork & Chivalry” RPG, set during the English Civil War (1641-51) but with magick and strange clockwork technology. We read the manuscript, loved it, and signed them straight up. The game will be using the RuneQuest II engine that Mongoose Publishing released earlier this year and should, itself, be out in the summer.
Jabberwocky Productions – Nathaniel Torson not only writes for our Doctor Who RPG but also produces his own material under Jabberwocky Productions. He’s the brain behind “Barbarians of the Aftermath” – a post-apocalyptic setting for the Barbarians of Lemuria game. You’ll probably see a number of other “Barbarians…” products coming out from Jabberwocky over the next year or two too...
John Wick Presents – John Wick is another name that doesn’t really need any introduction. The creator of such classics as Legends of the Five Rings and 7th Sea, as well as a whole host of games under his own “Wicked Dead Brewing Company” label. Houses of the Blooded was a major hit on the Indie circuit and that has largely transferred over into the retail store and distribution channels as well, with some absolutely fantastic reviews appearing in various languages. John has a host of games he’s created and we’re working with him to bring several of those to stores over the next year too, as well as possibly some new Houses of the Blooded books…
Postmortem Studios – James “Grim” Desborough is another of the UK publishers/authors that we’ve known for years. He’s written for a number of companies (WotC, Mongoose, and for us on SLA Industries) but also publishes his own range of games and support material as Postmortem Studios. His range of “100 Adventure Seeds” are ideal for time-strapped GMs or people wanting a source of ideas they can use as a springboard for their own campaigns and adventures.
Radioactive Ape Designs – You can find Colin Chapman’s name in a host of books from Eden Studios, White Wolf, Exile Game Studios, Morrigan Press, etc and his current game, through his own R.A.D. studio is flying high in the PDF Charts. Atomic Highway uses the new, fast and simple, V6 Engine and shows us a post-apocalyptic dark age inspired by a host of movies like Mad Max, Death Race, etc.
Savage Mojo – a truly international affair spanning the UK, States, France and New Zealand, Savage Mojo (previously Talisman Studios) have a great range of Gamescape maps as well as producing Savage Suzerain for the Savage Worlds system. They have a load of setting books coming out for Savage Suzerain – really looking forward to Noir Knights (1930’s Great Depression full of supernatural conspiracies) and the brilliantly named Shanghai Vampocalypse (ancient mystical magic meets cybertech in 2048 with more than a dash of martial arts goodness!).
Triple Ace Games – a British company producing outstanding Savage Worlds settings and adventure books. Hellfrost came last year, this year will see their Daring Tales of Adventure Compendiums come out across a variety of genres (Daring Tales of Chivalry/Space Lanes/Sprawl, etc) as well as their first non-Savage Worlds product – “All For One: Regime Diabolique” which takes us to France in 1636, where the King’s Musketeers battle against corrupt nobles, black magicians, demons and secret societies.
Why be a partner?
Every company will have its own reasons for partnering up with us, but for many it comes down to time and risk.
People generally get into the games industry to make games. It takes up a huge amount of time to arrange print, warehousing, distribution, sales etc. And, even then, things like distribution don’t happen immediately – the distributor has to want to take your products.
Publishing with us cuts through a lot of that, and leaves people with more time to spend on the game-making part of the job.
The risk factor is critical to small businesses, where not getting paid on time on one invoice can put them in real trouble, especially when they have just sunk most of their money into a print run. So, publishing with us helps reduce their risks and their initial outlay.
Until next time...
Thanks for reading, I hope to see you next month. If there’s anything you’d like me to cover in future, please let me know!
