Tynes Cowan Corporation News and Previews

Bumps in the Night: 400% funded means it's time for more rewards

As I write this our Kickstarter fundraiser for Bumps in the Night has just cracked the $10,000.00 mark. I continue to be astounded by the generosity of Pagan Publishing's fans and amazed at the goodwill that still remains for this company and products we make.

While I am still conflicted about whether to push this Kickstarter on to fund our next book (Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity) or run a separate Kickstarter for that project, I will nevertheless continue to add more rewards to Bumps in the Night for everyone who has contributed so far. Now that we have crossed the $10K mark I will add playtest notes for four of the five scenarios in Bumps in the Night. I did not playtest "The Westerfield Incident," but I did playtest all the others. And yes I will be speaking with the other playtesters and seeing if they might be will to add something of their own to the reports. 

I'm chasing down options for the other backer rewards you folks have suggested and will be adding them as soon as something can be worked out with the rights holders.

Stay tuned for more news.

Kickstarter Fundraiser Update: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

To say that I was surprised to see that you, Pagan's fans, met our fund-raising goal of $2,500.00 in less than 12 hours would be a bit of an understatement. By the end of our first day I was running out of words to describe how shocked I was by the generosity of our fans and by the good-will Pagan Publishing still has. Three days in and I am speechless.

Of course, since exceeding our fund-raising goals was not a subject I put any thought into, I have been playing a bit of catch up on this subject. Every time I think "I'll add a reward for everyone when we hit the $4K mark," suddenly we've passed the $4K mark. Okay, I'll add the new reward when we hit $5K...

ZOOM!

$5K is in my tail-lights.

$6K?

SPLAT!

We've got the $6K goal splashed all over our grill. Clearly I'm going to have to add the rewards and not worry about the pledge levels because you folks are exceeding my expectations faster than I can conceive them.

So let's begin by offering a couple of new rewards to EVERYONE who has pledged.

Everyone who pledged to this project will now receive two pdfs. The first pdf will be a collection of all the player handouts, floor-plans and maps for the scenarios in Bumps in the Night. That will save you from having to stretching the spine of the book photocopying those pages for your players.

The second pdf will be a set of pre-generated characters that I created for running the scenario "The Vengeful Dead" at game conventions. Your players may enjoy using them or maybe you can use them to fill out the guests at the resort if your players prefer to roll up their own characters.

However, that does not cover any so-called Stretch Goals, that is new aspects or enhancements for a project that can be added as new pledge levels are achieved. I won't add anything to Bumps in the Night that might delay the book going to press. I also don't want to collect funds for a project that cannot be immediately sent to press (or at least isn't extremely close to completion). Therefore the only Pagan project that could qualify as being ready to go sans an infusion of cash is the softcover edition of Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity. However, it requires a great deal of cash. To print and ship it would be (as per my last print bid) another $8,740.00 And that doesn't include paying the artists, the writers and the licensing fees.

So, I am hesitant to make the funding of Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity a stretch goal for this fundraiser. My inclination is to take any money over and above our goals for Bumps in the Night and put into a nice warm savings account, so that when we do a fundraiser for Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity, soon after this Kickstarter ends, then we'll just have that much less money to raise. I feel this would be less confused and allow for a package of backers' rewards that are tailored for a Delta Green product.

Nevertheless, none of this would be possible without you, Pagans fans and backers. So I am certainly willing to entertain any suggestions you have. Would you prefer a separate Kickstarter or would you prefer to try and pile on the momentum of this one and build it to a two-for-one fundraiser? I'm also interested in any suggestions you folks might have for additional rewards you might be interested in. Certainly there are playtest notes that could be shared. There are other Pagan Publishing books that could be mailed out with your copy of Bumps in the Night. None of these possibilities would be here if it wasn't for your generosity so I am open to any suggestions you might care to offer.

Kickstarter Fundraiser for "Bumps in the Night"

Greetings Agents and Cultists,

Pagan Publishing has just launched a fundraiser at Kickstarter.com to raise the rest of our printing and shipping budget for our new collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios entitled Bumps in the Night.

Bumps in the Night was written by John H. Crowe III and is set in the classic Call of Cthulhu era in the early part of the 20th Century. All five scenarios use the Call of Cthulhu Basic Role Playing mechanics, but none of them are based on the Cthulhu Mythos. Instead the players will have to face obscure horrors from the world of myth and folklore. At 120 pages, Bumps in the Night is beautifully illustrated by Rick Sardinha, Heather Hudson, Samuel Araya and Rhonda Libby. It will be produced as a 8.5" x 11" softcover, with glossy color exteriors and grisly grayscale interior artwork.

All writing, editing, proof-reading, illustration and layout are complete. All we need now is our print budget. We've raised some money through customer pre-sales but still need to raise another $2,500 dollars to cover the rest of the printing and shipping to our warehouse. If we meet our pledge goals, we can have a full print run ready to ship to customers in nine weeks (which includes the time we have to wait for Amazon Payments to release the pledged funds).

Check out our Kickstarter page to learn all about the rewards available to those who help make Bumps in the Night a reality.

For those folks who pre-ordered Bumps in the Night at GenCon or from Arkham Bazaar, if you also want to contribute to the Kickstarter fundraiser, we'll add the money you've already spent to your new pledge for purposes of calculating rewards. There's no reason you should get less just because you supported this project earlier than anyone else.

Click anywhere it says Kickstarter or Bumps in the Night to go to our project page at Kickstarter.com and donate to the cause.

Bumps in the Night ready for Pre-Ordering

“From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”

– traditional Scottish prayer

Go ahead…

Say your prayers
Light your lamp
Load your revolver

It won’t do any good.

Pagan Publishing is proud to present Bumps in the Night: five non-Mythos scenarios of supernatural horror and mystery from author John H. Crowe III. Inside this musty tome you won’t find deep ones, or shoggoths, or Great Old Ones, but you will find loathsome horrors perpetrated by both the living and the dead. Ghosts, demons, poltergeists, spirits and the undead are the order of the day.

What horror is devouring the locals in “The Westerfield Incident?”

What has caused the graves to open in “The Vengeful Dead?”

Can the Investigators save themselves from “The Bitter Venom of the Gods?”

Will they unravel the “Curse of the Screaming Skull?”

Can they bring peace to “An Unsettled Mind?”

It won’t help your Investigators if they’ve read the Malleus Monstrorum or own their own copy of the core Call of Cthulhu rulebook. There’s nothing in those well-thumbed volumes to help them here. In here, they’re on their own.

Bumps in the Night is written, edited, play-tested, illustrated, laid out and proofed. All we need now is our print budget, so we are turning to you, our fans, to help us bring this project to the public. We are asking those who pre-order to pay $25.00, (the full SRP is $24.95). In exchange pre-orders will be shipped out before orders to distributors are.

Also, all domestic pre-ordered books will be shipped out to customers for free. International pre-orders will come with a $5 discount on shipping costs.

Pre-orders can also get Bumps in the Night signed by author John H. Crowe III for a total price of $30.00.

We will take pre-orders until the end of September, then we’ll work on raising the rest of the publishing budget via other means.

Of course, if the book is not funded sufficiently to go to press by 12/31/11 we will refund your credit card for pre-orders or donations in full.

The ball's in your court Pagan Fans! Let’s make this happen.

To place a pre-order please follow this link to Arkham Bazaar, who handle all of Pagan Publishing's mail order business these days.

More Con News, Bumps in the Night, Reprints & PDFs

As events rocket past once again I have fallen behind keeping the general public up to date on the comings and goings at Pagan Publishing.

First: Con News

Pagan Publishing will be attending Gamestorm in Vancouver WA, just across the river from Portland. The con is held at the Vancouver WA Hilton Hotel from March 24th to March 27th. Hope to see you there. I plan to run some Delta Green scenarios and some stuff from our upcoming Horrors of War collection.

Second: Bumps in the Night

Bumps in the Night creeps forward. The second edit/proofread of the interior is being done and it'll soon be time to start soliciting printers for bids. When the book is ready to go to the printer we will start soliciting you, the loyal Pagan customers, for pre-sales to support the cost of printing. We plan to offer PDFs along with the pre-orders.

Reprints & PDFs

We're still looking to do reprints of out of print Pagan products and still plan to take the first step into that arena via pdfs through DriveThruRPG. Delta Green is re-laid out right now. Delta Green: Countdown is next and then The Golden Dawn and other rpg titles will follow. Delta Green: Alien Intelligence and Delta Green: Dark Theatres will be next on the agenda. We're working with Arc Dream to bring other Delta Green titles to pdf publishing.

Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity and Bumps in the Night

Again, it's probably old news for those of you hooked into the Delta Green mailing list or Yog-Sothoth.com, but Arc Dream Publishing will be getting their hard-cover limited edition of Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity back from the printer this month. They have less than 200 books left to sell, and since they're going to be taking them to GenCon Indy (and sharing booth space with Pagan, Dagon Industries and Cubicle 7) there's not much chance of there being any hardcovers left to buy after August 8th.

As for the soft-cover mass-market version... Pagan will be getting that out in six months, as per our agreement with Arc Dream. Look for it around the Valentine's Day Massacre.

As for Bumps in the Night, we're almost done with final editing and layout. We'll have some proofs at GenCon Indy that folks can look at and place pre-orders with us. Folks who pre-order will also get a PDF of the book before it goes to the printer. We'll have options available for on-line pre-ordering up on our site just after GenCon Indy.

Next blog... well, I don't actually have one yet. Maybe after GenCon we'll have some more actual play recordings of Call of Cthulhu games for you to listen to?

RPPR Interviews A. Scott Glancy

Ross Payton from the Role-Playing Public Radio podcast threw away two hours of his life interviewing me. And now you can too! The interview was supposed to be about upcoming products and projects but often devolves into profanity laced war stories from old Call of Cthulhu games.

For the masochists out there, you can listen to the interview here!

Next post... Actual game books!

Look to the Future... a sneak peek at what Pagan's working on for 2009

Greeting Agents & Cultists, 

I thought I would take the time to bring everyone up to speed on what's happening with Pagan Publishing in 2009. Here are the projects that we have in the queue for 2009.

Bumps in the Night: collection of five new scenarios by John H. Crowe III. These scenarios break the mold in that the horrors players face are not drawn from the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. These terrors are drawn from folklore and mythology. Inside you will find vengeful revenants, hungry undead, Sumerian Demon-worshiping cults, malevolent mummies, and poltergeists haunting the body of a crippled girl. We expect it to come in at 192 pp softcover PAG1014 $29.95.

Delta Green: Countdown, Pagan Publishing’s Origins award winning supplement for the Delta Green line of Call of Cthulhu supplements will be reprinted this summer for the first time since 2001. The only difference between this edition and previous editions is that the fold out map of Club Apocalypse will be removed because it has been reprinted in Delta Green: Eyes Only. We anticipate keeping the price at $44.95.

Mysteries of the Old West: This is our next big project. Mysteries of the Old West is a sourcebook for playing Call of Cthulhu adventures on the American Frontier during the days of the Wild West. Six-guns and Shoggoths! In the next week we will begin fishing around for folks to contribute artwork and layout skills. We anticipate the price will be at least $39.95 Look for it around Halloween at the earliest. 

The Unspeakable Oath: It is time for Pagan to dust off the Unspeakable Oath and get it back on track for a regular publication schedule. We've got enough material socked away for a couple of issues. Our intention is to keep the price below $10.00 and the page count around 32. Look for the first issue at GenCon 2009.

Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity will be published by Pagan Publishing and Arc Dream Publishing as a limited edition hardback. The print run will be sold by Arc Dream through pre-orders and direct mail order. Chaosium will also have a large number of the book (per our license agreement), and customers can order the book from them too.

The infamous "Vapor-ware" product The Cult of Transcendence will be included in Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity.

Six months later, Pagan Publishing will produce a mass market trade paperback of Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity which will be available to distributors and via brick & mortar game stores. Since Delta Green:Targets of Opportunity is likely to be released just before GenCon in August 2009, it is likely that our mass-market edition will be our first product of 2010.

Speaking of 2010, look for Horrors of War, will be Pagan Publishing’s flagship book in our Horrors of War series. While future publications will concentrate on Call of Cthulhu scenarios set against the backdrop of wars from across time and around the globe, our first Horrors of War is a sourcebook and scenario anthology set during the Great War (1914-1918). Biplanes and Byahkee! If you want a preview of what these scenarios are going to be like, check out this recording that was made at GenCon 2008 when I play-tested "Dig for Victory" on a group of unsuspecting victims.

There is a small chance that we will publish "The Last Flight of the L58," as a stand alone scenario. Set aboard a WWI German zeppelin on a long-range mission to Asia, I play tested this for the first time at GenCon 2007, and three times subsequently. It's ready to go, with some editing, so we may remove it from the scenarios in Horrors of War (which is currently bursting at the seams with nine scenarios) and try and get it out in 2009 just to whet your appetites.

Other items to look for in 2010 will be the long awaited Post 9/11 update for the Delta Green campaign setting. Yes, we are working on it. More news to follow.

Be seeing you,

A. Scott Glancy, President TCCorp, dba Pagan Publishing

Product Database now online

Greeting Agents and Cultists,

As we continue to improve our website, I'd like to direct you all to our product database. You can get there form anywhere on the site by clicking the button on the left marked PRODUCTS. It's searchable and contains everything Pagan Publishing ever created over the last two decades. We're in the process of including links to eBay searches to assist you in tracking down that out-of-print product you've been dreaming about.

Please let us know if there is any way we can improve the database's performance to give you the information you want to see. 

Please note that our T-Shirts are available through Cafe Press and links are provided through our Product database.

Also! The script for THE KING IN YELLOW (as imagined by Thom Rhyng) has been available for some time through Lulu.com. Of course we've been pretty craptacular about directing folks where to buy it, but that ends today. We will be taking some steps to get Delta Green: Alien Intelligence and A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult back in print through Lulu.com this year.So look for those two titles soon.

Be Seeing You,

A. Scott Glancy, President TCCorp, dba Pagan Publishing

Mysteries of Mesoamerica Now Available

Pagan Publishing is proud to announce the return of Blair Reynolds to the world of Call of Cthulhu! 

Laid out and illustrated by Blair Reynolds,The Mysteries of Mesoamerica is a labour of love, and it shows on every page. With a sourcebook by Clint Staples and four scenarios written by Pagan regulars John H. Crowe III and Brian Appleton, Mysteries of Mesoamerica is a product that will move the bar by which products in the RPG market are judged.