Getting my Revolution RPG published

[Adam]

What exactly do you mean by "Deadlands style"?

[Demonspahn]

As far as I can tell, they can do your game in any style you want, even d20.  Mark worked pretty closely with us incorporating the design elements we wanted to include and he filled in the blanks for things we weren't sure of.   We were asked to approve the layout at several different stages and made changes to things we didn't like so creative control was still largely in our hands (for whatever that was worth).  
But yeah, like Adam said, what exactly do you mean by Deadlands style?

Pete

[Vault Keeper]

I mean have you ever pick up a Deadlands RPG book, I want my RPG to be printed like Pinnacle's RPG.

The same size, as books in that series.

[Adam]

Size how? Page count? Dimensions? The only Deadlands books I have here are standard 8.5x11 books.

If you go to http://www.goldenpillarpublishing.com/ and look at the various packages [Bronze, Silver, Gold, near the top of the navigation bar on the left] and scroll down to Printing you'll see the dimensions that GPP offers [they vary between plans, so be sure to check them all.]

[Valamir]

Vault, I hate to come off sounding rude...but do you actually have an idea of what you REALLY want?

The only thing we know about your game is you want to see it in game stores on the shelf looking like a Deadland's book.

I have to say...that's a HORRIBLE place to start your planning from.  What options have you looked into?  Is the game finished?  Has it been extensively playtested?  Do you already have the art lined up?  Has it been laid out?

What is it in your head that thinks being on the shelf in a local game store, in full printed glory is a "good thing"?  As Ron has already pointed out, what this often means is your game gets relegated to the dusty discount rack in a couple of months and you're out $10,000+

What is you motivation for wanting to sell your game to a publisher?  Are you aware, that even if a publisher bought it from you, they have no obligation to actually print it?  Your game could spend the rest of eternity in the bottom of someone's filing cabnet never to be seen from again, and you could do NOTHING with it, because you'd have sold the rights.

So far your requests for assistance have not filled in any blanks.  You've not really answered any questions, you haven't even given any back ground on what your game is like.  In short you haven't provided enough meaningful information for anyone to even begin to help answer your questions.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Hey Ralph, I think it's just a matter of us asking the right questions, at this point. Let me see if I'm getting the picture.

VK, by "Deadlands" book, I assume you mean 8.5" wide, 11" tall, and probably hardback for the core book, and probably several "core" books (e.g. Player's Guide, etc). The Deadlands rulebooks are also notable for its very high production value: slick paper, lots of interior color plates, and color text in many places. Is that right?

Publishing this kind of book is really expensive, and you might be surprised at some of the details in this case. Shane Hensley (a very nice guy, by the way) acquired venture capital in order to publish the book, and he had some eventual goals that involved Hollywood movie licensing. In other words, back then, it was all right for Pinnacle to lose money publishing the game itself - the whole venture was a risk, built on "springboarding" to a new medium of presentation.

[Shane or anyone who was involved in Deadlands publishing, please correct me if I'm wrong or misrepresenting anything. I realize what I've presented is necessarily very sketchy and over-simplified, and I want to emphasize that I am not criticizing the business model.]

So if you really want to put a book on the game-store shelves that resembles Deadlands, you probably should brace yourself to lose a hell of a lot of money. Shane had his reasons for doing this, and that's fine. The question is whether you have reasons for doing it too.

Best,
Ron

[Vault Keeper]

Yeah I know it will cost me some serious cash, which I don't have btw.


And yes I do have reasons for get this RPG on the shelves,

[Jack Spencer Jr]

And yes I do have reasons for get this RPG on the shelves,

Spiffy! Of course we could be more helpful if you would tell us those reasons, but let's work with what we've got here.

First of all, you might want to read the article War Story in the Forge Articles section. This is what you can expect from RPG companys if you try to sell your game to them. Seriously. Unless you do lots of freelance work and become a RPG-writing God and they start approaching you, you may not get better treatment. Worse, you may actually sell the right and then they don't publish after all and now you have no game on the shelf and you can't do anything with it anymore because you've already sold it, and I doubt it'd be for a very substantial amount of money, either, as Valamir had said.

You also might want to check out the article The Nuked Apple Cart for another angle, albeit less direct, to your situation.

You see, you have your reasons and that's fine and valid, but considering that most RPGs do not sell very well and that the production quality you're talking about is more expensive than most RPGs, and that even companies with big sellers like TSR (gone, baby) WoTC and WW are perpetually battling uphill against bankrupcy in spite of having the best-selling RPGs on the market (some could say "because of"), then unless you goal is debt beyond your wildest dreams, a basement full of unsold books which get turned into $10,000 worth of landfill the next time your basement floods, you may wish to rethink your goals.

I probably put that with a tad more sarcasm than necessary, but that should not detract from the main point. I am unsure of what your reasons are as you have not stated them here, but considering that a high-end production value RPG, the sort of thing you're talking about here, is a set-up for financial ruin (unless you have an ulterior motive like what Ron said about Shane above) then you should rethink what you really want out of getting this thing published.

If you do think about it and you're still firm in your resolve to get published, you have two options: either somehow work in the industry until you can eventually work out some kind of deal with a game company to get your game published. This is a tough row to hoe and it may never happen. I doubt is John Wick could get a game published by any old game company, game not a suppliment for an existing game.

Your other option is to self-publish which means you need to get money as you have none. This means you need to find investors. So you'll have to bug people with money, doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. Again, not easy, and hopefully someone has better advice on getting investors than my "bug people" advice. Just keep in mind, that these people will probably expect a return on their investment which you will have to make good on or else they'll sick all kinds of lawyers on you or, more likely, they just won't give you any money in the first place.

Well, that's all I've got. SO think about it and good luck.