After Free RPG Day 2016, I talked about most of the cool promo game booklets we picked up at the event in “Astral Projections.” There was one booklet I left out after a lot of thought, the Slügs! bestiary offered by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Why? Because I got disgusted–before I even made it to the titular giant slügs!
It was the introduction by developer/publisher James Edward Raggi IV that got me. I expected to read how cool and fun the system was and that this game was one of the best I’d ever play. A game developer should love their product. I also wasn’t surprised that the first paragraph also mentioned the stats inside were compatible with all kinds of fantasy RPGs. That’s a good marketing strategy when your small company’s flagship RPG line is for a genre that is dominated by a couple Really Big Names.
So what was my problem? The publisher took up the rest of the inside cover ranting about the Suckiness of Big Gaming Companies and how this publisher was the only one who cared about the players and making great games in the spirit of the hobby’s 1970s-80s heyday. It was 100% jerkiness. Yes, a couple of the jabs were pretty clearly aimed at games I love. Snarks about narrative dice with inexplicable symbols–think the writer might mean Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars RPG? And that was just one of the nasty remarks. For the record, yes the comment would leave a bad taste in my mouth even if it was about a genre or title I can’t stand.
A big issue Flame Princess had was that they felt the Free RPG Day organizers were pushing gaming companies to provide one-shot adventures rather than materials that could be used over and over. Failing, Flame Princess clearly implied, to provide the most value and long-term usefulness for gamers. Never mind that a couple years ago, when I first learned of the company and its flagship game, it was via a Free RPG Day adventure, “Better Than Any Man.” OH-kaaay…From what I recall of my read-through, (the weird/horror subgenre isn’t usually my thing and it has been 2 or 3 years), this is more a full arc rather than a one-shot. And I can understand that Flame Princess and Mr. Raggi might have decided that giving gamers something they could use over and over, that wasn’t system specific would be a better way to go than the organizers’ suggestion.
But why the hell did Mr. Raggi decide to make such a big, fat hairy deal out of it in his intro? It would have been classier–and kept me interested in reading all about the slügs–for him to write a few words about how Flame Princess wanted to do something different, in the hopes that gamers could use this supplement over and over, not just for a single weekend or 1-2 nights of gaming. Followed by some cool hints about the slügs and what inspired the developers. But, nope, he had to blast the whole industry as not caring about their buyers. Come on, Mr. Raggi and company! If you all felt so strongly that one-shot Free RPG Day modules weren’t just a bad marketing strategy, but morally wrong somehow–you could have simply told the organizers, “Thanks, but no thanks,” and published Slügs! as a free PDF on your website.
This kind of thing will affect whether gamers decide if your products are worth their time and money. That Slügs! intro turned me off from reading the bestiary–not to mention shopping their online store.
Linda Whitson
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I feel moreover this is a very bad attitude to take when even the “Big Game Publishers” are extremely small in the grand scheme of things. This isn’t Microsoft crushing some tiny non-competitor just for kicks, it’s a niche industry that can only benefit from having a famous, well-funded face to introduce gamers into the wider world of RPGs.
…Sloogs? Slewgs?…
Yeah, acting like a classless twit is a great way to make people not only ignore your Free RPG Day offering, but stop buying from your company entirely. Let us not forget that Free RPG Day is basically advertising, and if what you’re advertising is a bad attitude, people aren’t going to want to pay attention to you.