Onyx Path’s 2014 Top 10 List (Part 1) [Monday Meeting Notes]

Monday Meeting

As promised last week, here are the first five items on our Onyx Path 2014 Top Ten List:

10) Onyx Path tripled its full-time employees. Yep, there’s three of us. That’s been our punchline, but it remains a huge jump for us to hire employees. Regardless of how well our Kickstarters go, or how excited folks get for a particular book, the tabletop RPG business is still so small that most publishers either have other types of games besides paper RPGs they are successful with, or they do this as a part time gig. Thanks to you all for giving us the support that enabled this to happen this year!

9) We expanded the kinds of products we could offer this year. Books, including deluxe editions and PDFs and PoDs, we can do. Onyx was set up as a company optimized to create game books, that’s where the vast amount of our experience lies, and is structured as a business to then feed those book files into online sales channels. As visual creators, we can do more sorts of projects, but we need the sales venues to then get the projects to all of you. This last year, we added cards and posters via DTRPG (DriveThruCards, actually), and T-shirts and other t-shirty things via RedBubble. We have a ton of shirts up and keep adding more as Mirthful Mike and Impish Ian can manage, are looking at more ways to use cards in tabletop games, and are going to add more posters to the list as next year rolls along. We will continue to look for good partners for other sorts of projects next year, as well.

8) The Exalted 3rd Edition art buy got started, and almost finished, this year. I know this sounds really minor, because after all Mirthful Mike does art direction for at least two books a month, but it was actually a big step. Part of what Exalted brings to us is a very different kind of visual style, and to make sure we used the illustrations to emphasize that EX3 is a very new look at Exalted indeed, I asked Mighty Maria Cabardo to try and find us new artists from around the world to illustrate it. But since neither she nor the artists were necessarily familiar with Exalted (it wound up that a few of them were, actually!), it was an ongoing learning process that required a lot of back and forth between them and myself and the Devs. And, of course, part of the reason this is on the list is the fact that we couldn’t start the art buying until the text was in a sufficient state of completeness: which meant the book was light-years closer to being finished than at the start of the year. So any way you look at it, the EX3 art buy was a milestone for a major project for us.

7) Your stories of the impact our games (both Onyx Path and White Wolf ones) have had on your lives. As our social media presence has expanded and more and more people have been let in on what Onyx Path is all about, we’ve received amazing and heartening stories from you talking about how our work has changed your lives. This is so huge for us, particularly in the sea of often hyper-critical messaging that has been rife this past year, and really gives us the kind of lift a creator needs to keep trying to make something special. If you are a regular reader of this blog (and really, you should be) you’ll already have read some of these stories in the comments sections, or maybe shared one yourself. Here is a link to Black Hat Matt McFarland’s Promethean 2nd Edition blog featuring one email I got late last week describing the impact Promethean: the Created has had on one fellow’s life and Matt’s reactions to it: http://theonyxpath.com/learning-how-to-be-a-person/ It is amazing, and to me it really illustrates why I still feel that what we are striving for with our projects is something far more than an easy to read game. We are striving for art, because art changes us, and stories such as these confirm that sometimes we do get awful close to that goal.

6) We started creating the nWoD Second Edition core books. As mentioned elsewhere and at the Gen Con panel this year, we got the OK from CCP to do what I considered to be sorely needed: 2nd Editions of the nWoD game lines. Eight years is a long time between editions, and our creators had a lot of chances during that time to consider how they would reconfigure those lines. Blood & Smoke: the Strix Chronicle was repackaged as Vampire: the Requiem 2nd Edition, and has served as a model for how we can handle both the nWoD Core Book 2nd Edition, and the upcoming Werewolf: the Forsaken and Mage: the Awakening 2nd Editions, and more. This will be huge for giving new players a clear idea of what book they need in order to start playing as they page through DTRPG. And creatively it feels great to make the changes we’ve been thinking about for so long. So great, in fact, that we need to share it with you. First, the PDF and physical copy PoD versions of Vampire; the Requiem 2nd Edition will go on sale at DTRPG on Weds the 24th (Santa’s little gift for you), but wait, there’s more!

Then, we have two Holiday Sales that you can opt into: From Christmas Day morning (the 25th) until Monday morning on the 29th, all Onyx Path and White Wolf PoD book prices will be reduced 15%, which is pretty much “at cost” for most of our books. This even includes VtR 2nd as mentioned above! Then, if you are a member of our Onyx Path Mailing List (look to the right on this page to sign up) we will be providing you with a 20% off code for all PDFs at DTRPG in the Wednesday sales email we send out. This is our way here at the end of the year of saying thank you to all of you without whom we could not have had a year worth making a Top Ten List for!

Ho ho ho!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM ROLLICKING ROSE (Projects in bold have changed listings)

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

W20 Pentex Employee Indoctrination Handbook (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Book of Secrets (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Cursed Necropolis: Rio (Mummy: the Curse)

Secrets of the Covenants (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition) – In Open Development

Wraith: the Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition

V20 Black Hand: Guide to the Tal’Mahe’Ra (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition) – In Open Development

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

W20 Changing Ways (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Demon Storytellers’ Guide (Demon: the Descent)

Beckett’s Jyhad Diary (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

“Sardonyx” System Rules (Base rules set for Scion and the Trinity Continuum)

Redlines

Mummy Fiction Anthology (Mummy: the Curse)

Arms of the Chosen (Exalted 3rd Edition)

W20 Shattered Dreams (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Mage: the Awakening 2nd Edition, featuring the Fallen World Chronicle (Mage: the Awakening) – In Open Development

W20 Novel by Mike Lee (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Beast: the Primordial core book (Beast: The Primordial)

Second Draft

Exalted 3rd Fiction Anthology (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Development

V20 Red List (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

V20 Ghouls (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

World of Darkness Dark Eras- Vampire chapter (WoD Dark Eras)

Fallen World Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Mage: the Awakening)

Promethean: the Created 2nd Edition, featuring the Firestorm Chronicle (Promethean: the Created)

Editing

V20 Lore of the Clans (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

Sothis Ascends (Mummy: the Curse)

M20 How do you DO that? (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Development (post-editing)

World of Darkness Dark Eras core book (WoD Dark Eras)

Werewolf: the Forsaken 2nd Edition, featuring the Idigam Chronicle (Werewolf: the Forsaken)

Exalted 3rd Edition core book- From Holden: “Almost done. Thought I’d have it ready to send by now, but I have barely been in the house through the first half of the week due to holiday family stuff, and then during the second half everyone got laid low by Ye Olde Yearly Holiday Cold.” (Exalted 3rd Edition)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE