It’s hard to imagine now, but print catalogues were an important part of marketing in the early 2000’s. A standard promotional technique was to print and direct-mail hundreds or even thousands of print catalogues – and Goodman Games did just that. Many times, in fact.
This update will feature a lot of graphics, because we’re going to show you five years of Goodman Games print catalogues!
In 2004, 2005 and 2006 we printed lengthy full-color catalogues that were distributed via mail order and conventions. At this time we also printed posters and postcards. Social media didn’t exist yet, and print media was still very much a thing.
In 2007 we printed a booklet called “Adventures in Retail” designed to help retailers sell our products. It was distributed at the GAMA Trade Show that year, and contains so many promotional tidbits that are specific to that pre-internet era.
These catalogues show the expanding Goodman Games product line, and the importance of backstock in this era. 2004 was 8 pages; 2005 was 12 pages; 2006 was 16 pages.
The last catalogue we produced was in 2009, at the dawn of the 4E era. Because all of our d20 backstock was rendered unsalable by the announcement of 4E, the 2009 catalogue is a mere 4 pages long, compared to 16 pages in 2007. 4E would go on to fail as a game system, and digital media was growing in importance. Those two factors combined to make that 2009 catalogue the last print catalogue we would ever publish.
In these catalogues you can see announcements of several products that never came to be, for one reason or another: Zoopolis, The Dungeoneer RPG, Spellburn: Frontier Fantasy, and the DCL. The DCL was the Dungeon Crawl League, an organized play concept that fizzled when 4E itself fizzled.
Here are the pages from those historical catalogues!
2004 Print Catalogue
Notice the last page of the 2004 and 2005 catalogues. It includes boxes for the mailing address labels and postage. These were direct-mail catalogues, designed to be mailed.
2005 Print Catalogue
2006 Print Catalogue
In this 2006 catalogue, on page 13 as shown above, you can see an advertisement for that exciting new thing called e-books!
Hello everyone! Today let's discuss DCC #34: Cage of Delirium, by Wes Schneider, with soundtrack by Midnight Syndicate, featuring this amazing cover by Erol Otus!
But first, for those who missed it, make sure you check out this interview with Stu Horvath that recently appeared on our YouTube channel!
Now, on to today's update. Let's talk about DCC #34: The Cage of Delirium, written by a man who is now one of the principal designers of D&D at Wizards of the Coast.
"The cream rises to the top,” as the old saying goes, and over the years we’ve found that the writers we appreciate enough to hire are often appreciated by other publishers, as well. One such writer is F. Wesley Schneider. His current title is Principal Designer for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast.
Many years ago, Wes was a freelance writer looking for work who stopped by the Goodman Games booth at Gen Con. His presentation at that meeting is, to this day, one of the most impressive job interviews ever. That led to several assignments, including DCC #34: The Cage of Delirium, an adventure originally manufactured with a CD packaged into the inside back cover. Wes was kind enough to jot down some notes on this important adventure.
Remembering Dungeon Crawl Classics #34: Cage of Delirium
By F. Wesley Schneider
Dungeon Crawl Classics #34: Cage of Delirium shouldn’t exist. A nonlinear horror adventure integrating the gothic music album Gates of Delirium by Midnight Syndicate, the project was plainly too different from the other offerings in the DDC line, too niche, and too complicated to produce. To this day, I’m still surprised Joe Goodman was game.
A lifelong fan of horror roleplaying, I frequently use music to help build an ominous atmosphere during my games. This made the work of Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka’s Midnight Syndicate familiar compliments to my long-running Ravenloft campaign. I purchased Midnight Syndicate’s Gates of Delirium during Gen Con in 2001 and remember taking notes while listening to it in my hotel, already imagining how to string the tracks together into a full adventure. I’d go on to elaborate on that plot in the coming months, imagining in detail how I’d run an elaborate, gothic novel of an adventure for my group. And like so many passion projects, it went nowhere—just a creative flight of fancy playing out only on notebook pages.
Years passed and I found myself working on Dragon magazine while freelancing on various projects, such as Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classic line. After I’d completed work on Dungeon Crawl Classics #12: The Blackguards Revenge, Joe asked if I had anything in mind for something next.
I can’t believe Joe was game for a 64-page gothic horror adventure ignorantly paralleling Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” I never expected Ed and Gavin would be amenable to a hack-and-slash tale rooted in the world of their Gates of Delirium album. I can’t imagine the price and logistical pain of bundling a CD and an adventure together to ensure players got a very particular, atmospheric ghost story. And certainly no one foresaw the whole thing getting nominated for Best Adventure at the 2007 ENnies.
I’ve spent my life making games and that work regularly reaffirms that it’s a wonder that absolutely anything ever gets created. The odds are stacked against every creative venture, and the best plans can slam into a wall for infinite, unforeseeable reasons. But the first barrier should never be telling yourself an idea is too wild to pursue. Be audacious. If you’re lucky, you’ll find parters like Joe Goodman, Edward Douglas, and Gavin Goszka who see audacity as exactly the reason to try something new.
And always keep your notes.
Illustrations From Cage of Delirium
Thank you Wes for these memories! Here are a few images from the adventure. So much great art in this title!
A great landscape piece by Will McAusland.
Jason Edwards' elegant style.
Jesse Mohn is a versatile artist with many styles.
An early piece by Stefan Poag. His graphic sense is evident.
Two themes of Goodman Games for just about forever have been “cross-genre” and “dungeon crawling.” One product that brought both together was Brendan LaSalle’s Xcrawl. Brendan’s first published credit with Goodman Games was DCC #10: The Sunless Garden, which happened while Brendan was also publishing Xcrawl through Pandahead Publishing. A few years later, Goodman Games wound up publishing Xcrawl. Let's start with Jeremy Mohler's amazing cover to Necromerica, the first Xcrawl release from Goodman Games:
Jeremy Mohler's cover to Necromerica, the first Xcrawl supplement from Goodman Games.
As Stu tells it:
Welcome to Necromerica 4702 (2006) was the first adventure Goodman Games published for Brendan LaSalle’s Xcrawl, a game set in the far future, where life is cheap and dungeoncrawling is big business for livestream broadcasters—a prescient cross between The Running Man, Smash TV, reality TV, professional wrestling and Critical Roll, built with the d20 System. The parody of Joe’s usual DCC introduction goes a long way for establishing the tone:
“Remember the good old days, when orcs were just orcs, dungeons were just dungeons, and bone-sucking pit slime did 1d6 damage, just like everything else in your campaign world? Well, those days are good and gone, sucker. Xcrawl is a world of sell-out superstar adventurers, corporate-sponsored action and live-on-pay-per-view mayhem. Enter at your own risk because if you die...YOU DIE!”
In other words, a perfect fit for Goodman Games, where high-stakes action increasingly made a spectacular character death a reward rather than a punishment. LaSalle had been publishing Xcrawl through Pandahead Productions, the company founded by Brett Brooks (now also Goodman Games’ marketing manager) and his wife Allyson. Joe had met them at an Alliance Distribution open house early on in Goodman Games’ existence, and then crossed paths in Atlanta several times, which led to Brendan writing some DCC adventures. In 2004, he revised Xcrawl from being a d20 sourcebook into full-fledged ruleset compatible with 3.5, but the book faced headwinds in the wake of the d20 bust, resulting in a two-year lull for the game. Joe had aways been interested in Xcrawl and, in light of Brendan’s good experiences publishing DCC adventures, the pair made a deal to publish new Xcrawl material through Goodman Games in exchange for a royalty. The game’s mix of over-the-top reality TV-style challenges, dark humor and gleeful violence made it a natural for convention tournaments.
Those early Xcrawl releases from Goodman Games were so much fun. Eventually we would go on to publish the Pathfinder edition of Xcrawl, and later the Xcrawl Classics rules set. Look at this picture from Gen Con 2014, where Brendan fell in love with the printed edition of Maximum Xcrawl. We received the advance copies of the pathfinder edition of Xcrawl and unboxed them immediately on the streets of Indianapolis. Brendan stares lovingly at his creation:
Here are a few images from the early Goodman Games releases of Xcrawl. Between the interiors by Brad McDevitt and Cliff Kurowski, and Jeremy Mohler’s covers, these turned out great.
Jeremy Mohler's cover to Las Vegas Crawl.
Jeremy Mohler's cover to Dungeonbattle Brooklyn. This adventure was one of the very first products ever released for a Free RPG Day.
Cliff Kurowski's image of a washed-out medusa taking a smoke break backstage. And she has a pet petrified rat. One of my all-time favorite Xcrawl illustrations.
An action-packed Brad McDevitt interior for Necromerica. Another fantastic Xcrawl interior.
This Brad McDevitt interior may be the first time in the history of the industry that an orc was illustrated in boxer shorts.
The Donkey Kong room! By Cliff Kurowski.
Such great illustrations! Tell us which is your favorite in the comments. And tell us about your experiences with Xcrawl over the years!
Many threads came together in the years 2005-2006. One of them was the continued magnetism of cross-genre games, this time with Etherscope. Another was the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of pewter miniatures.
Etherscope brought more than just a great game, though. It also brought the idea of softcover editions – which would later become important in the spreading popularity of DCC RPG. Stu writes:
Etherscope (2005) is another game published by Goodman Games but developed by outside designers, in this case Brits Nigel McClelland and Ben Redmond. The game envisions a world where the fifth Platonic element, Ether, is discovered by Victorian scientists, giving the British Empire a technological edge that extends its power and influence into an alternate historical timeline. Based on the d20 Modern rules, it’s a very steampunk world of difference engines and Etherspace demons and Scope cities (essentially Ether-driven cyberspace hubs). The corebook establishes a unique look, a fusion of Victorian and Art Nouveau aesthetics that is crisp, new and unlike anything else on the market at the time.
“It was great! Victorian steampunk mixed with The Matrix,” says Goodman. “I always enjoyed the cross-genre stuff, so it fit in with Dinosaur Planet and Dragonmech.” It was successful enough to support five releases beyond the core rules, lasting until 2007 when general weakness in the d20 market led to slowing sales. As ever, it’s the core book that makes the money and the supplements that eventually lose it.
The line led Joe to an important idea. As was common practice then, the core book was first published in hardcover, which sold out. Around the same time, the game garnered an ENnie Award nomination for Best d20 Product. “I'm gonna give myself a pat on the back,” he says, laughing, “This was me understanding how distributors and retailers worked. I realized if I just reprinted the same book, they treat it as a restock, and I'd sell a small number, but if I made it a brand-new SKU as a softcover, I'd get initial stocking orders and sell more. And I thought that would do better, especially if it had the big sunburst saying it was ENnie-nominated. Of course, regular book publishers have been doing this since forever, but in our little niche industry, it felt like a big innovation.”
The idea of reprinting a core rulebook in a softcover format would come around again for Goodman Games in important ways later.
The miniatures line was something of an evolutionary marker. Pewter miniatures were nearing the end of their era as 3D printing and cheap mass-produced plastic miniatures were taking hold. Soon Kickstarter would completely change the miniatures market. But for a few years around 2005-2006, the DCC minis line had a good run. Here are a few photos from that era.
The miniatures on display at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL. Kudos to Games Plus for celebrating 50 years in business!
Of all the Goodman Games products that "aren't Dungeon Crawl Classics," the one that receives the most attention to this day is DragonMech. It is, in a nutshell, "medieval fantasy mechs." As the back cover blurb says:
After an age of destruction, the Second Age of Walkers is now at hand. Explore the ruins of the surface world in sturdy iron mechs powered by steam, magic, or the labor of a thousand slaves!
In today's update, we will dive into DragonMech. But first: Phil Reed recently visited the Goodman Games offices and we recorded a video on the art book. If you are wondering what The Fantastic Art of Goodman Games will include, this video tells all about it!
One more preamble. Thanks for an awesome Gamehole Con!
Happy birthday, Goodman Games, at the opening night party!
How to Write Adventure Modules That Don't Suck - which is like our 20th or 30th or maybe 100th time running this seminar! Left to right: Mike, Harley, Brendan, Joseph, Chris
Seminar: The Secret Origin Story of DCC RPG. Left to right: Harley, Doug, Joseph, Mike
Huge turnout for our booth raffle!
Now, back to...
DragonMech
Stu tells the DragonMech origin story well in this excerpt:
Where Zeitgeist designed Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor and Goodman Games published it, for Dragonmech (2004), Joe wanted to try it the other way around. He’d act as the design studio and have it published through White Wolf’s Sword & Sorcery imprint. “I provided a complete layout, ready to publish, ready to package,” says Goodman, “There was a complicated formula where I got some percentage of all the sales that went through distribution. And I did it because I assumed that White Wolf would have much better distribution than Goodman Games.” The game was also one of Joe’s first experiments with outsourcing the layout, art direction and graphic design, which was handled by Eric Mona’s Super Unicorn, who had previously worked on Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds.
The game was based on Joe’s home campaign at the time with his high school friends, “My brother Mike, Alan, Garrick, Stephen, “the other Steven” Pellicer, Ben Rhoades. I dedicated the book to my wife.” It was another of his cross-genre concoctions, with city-sized steampunk mechs housing thousands of people stomping across a post-apocalyptic fantasy landscape. “I built the whole thing from scratch,” he says, “I ran the group through several homebrew adventures; the first two, maybe two-and-a-half books were 95% generated by me and that gaming group. Some of the appeal was the gameplay, but the look and feel was amazing in that first edition, and I attribute that to Super Unicorn. They got the credit for it.”
Sales were good. After the core book, the arrangement continued for five more supplements, and Goodman Games published a sixth before d20 gave up the ghost. “It still comes up, people still remember it. Once a month somebody asks me to bring back Dragonmech.”
Yes, that art was AMAZING. Here is a random assortment of interior art...
One of these days, we should bring this back. One of these days...
That gaming group was one of the high points of those days. Such a great group, that held together for years. Only one photo remains of those times - this one:
Ah, DragonMech. I know some fans want to bring it back (hi Dieter!). Anybody else interested in a modernization of it at some point?
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