Surprise Day Out

[shannon_a]

Went to Endgame today with the plans to board game. Unfortunately the auction last week had apparently already fulfilled everyone's going-to-Endgame quotient for the month, and so I was alone--even though in recent months the board gaming has apparently been quite well attended. A shame, as I only make it to about one board game Saturday a year, but ah well. Got to talk with Chris H. some and browsed a while to spend more auction credit.

I'd hoped to get some of the new HeroQuest supplements from Moon Design, but discovered that they're making it hard to buy their products again. They're back out of distribution and they set a $200 minimum or something on orders directs from retailers. I honestly don't know how Moon Design thinks they're going to stay in business. Companies that think they're going to survive on PDFs and direct sales are taking an incredibly short-sighted view that doesn't consider where their new customers are going to come from over the next ten years, but maybe that small horizon is enough for some. Still, when a big Glorantha fan like me isn't buying their products because I can't do so through my FLGS, there's a big problem. Honestly, the price points ($50-60) don't help either. (At least they're at RPGnow, which they were refusing to do a few years ago.)

So, instead I decided to give my money to people that actually want it. I picked up a few more things for Pathfinder, some battle maps, and a couple of indie games: Microscope and Diaspora. I'm reading Microscope right now and it looks like a really cool game, about basically detailing some historical era in some science-fiction, fantasy, or whatever world. Maybe I can get the Saturday crew to try a session some day.

Afterward I went out biking. I went down to Jack London Square, followed the shore line to the corner of Alameda, went out to Alameda briefly, then biked back to Lake Merritt through some so-so areas of Oakland. From there I came home via Grand to Piedmont, stopped briefly at Dr. Comics & Mr. Games, then managed to bike home with a short magazine box (for the office organization that's been ongoing for a month or two).

My copies of Galaxy Trucker, Vikings, and Macao got a very nice tour of the East Bay.

Unfortunately, I got a bit sunburned while out, mostly on my forearms. The neuropathic pain blocker I take makes me extra-sensitive to sun, and I'm usually religious about using sunscreen if I'm going to be out for more than an hour. Today, not so much due to the surprise nature of the trip. I was only out in the sun maybe two and a half hours total or something, but it was a really bright sunny day, and that was enough.

That's actually the first time I've gotten burned since I started taking these meds a few years ago, so I guess it just underlines that it really does make me sun sensitive.

Tomorrow: dogs and targets. Maybe.

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Ob, I think Moon Design actually wants your money, but they want it on terms worse than most other indie game publishers. It wouldnt surprise me if MD thinks their business model is to provide boutique prices to a relatively captive audience; after all, other indie publishers have to attract a fanbase while MD might feel they have the luxury of a pre-existing one. I don't know how closely Greg Stafford is to the MD business, I suspect not too close at all, but I find the prices he is attaching to his Pendragon supplementary material also pretty crazy and gather that they are priced with the same general notion: make a higher percentage from a smaller but established fan base that leans towards completist behaviour. I have not bought either of the MD Glorantha supplements either, mostly because of price, but also because I am a lot less interested in Dragon Pass as a location than in Prax, the Empire proper, Balazar, or other places in the world. Dragon Pass seems to be getting the Kygor Lytor treatment: covered and recovered over and over and over; I might have preferred each edition of the Hero Wars game to focus on a different area of the world, so that the coverage got wider, but RQ/HW/HQ has never really done that much... and to be fair, most of the other Grand World gaming projects have done mostly similar things.