The News from Board Enterprises

As many of you know, Board Enterprises is celebrating its 25^th year in business.  Yep!  1991-2016.  Probably older than a number of you reading this.  Well, for us, this year has been all about The Legend Quest Silver Anniversary Omnibus Edition.  We are still shooting to have it out before the end of October, so please keep your eyes open for that!  You can see some of our info about it here.

We have also just released Speed Characters, because we know that trying to create point based characters can be very difficult.  Check out our write up of it here or just go and buy it here.  (and thank you if you do!)

So what’s in store for next year?  Well, we’ve been planning that and we think we may have actually come up with a plan.  Here’s the outline:

First, we really do want to support the Omnibus edition and anyone who is trying run a game with it.  So we’re going to release a Campaign Starter Kit that should lay out an entire campaign for some starter characters.  Everything is provided here (really!  everything!).  Plus if the background and history in the CSK isn’t enough for you, we’re going to put out the companion piece Open Spaces describing the “kingdom” that campaign takes place in in even more detail than you got in the campaign book.  It’s a little piece of fake Ireland in our fantasy world!

But wait, there’s more!  We’re going to bundle everything together plus add in some of what we use to give out as our “Game Masters’ Guild” set.  This will have some simple encounters, lots more starting characters, and who knows what else.

So OK, once we feel we have truly given Legend Quest and the game masters the support they deserve, we are going to switch gears a bit.  We had thought about doing the omnibus book as a crowdfunding thing, but it didn’t feel right.  We thought about doing Fletnern as a crowdfunding thing, and it seemed impossible.  I mean the book would be about 1,600 pages at least.  I’ll never get that done.  So here is what we think we’re going to do, and we’re open to comments!

Rather than keep releasing books like A Baker’s Dozen Villains, Urban Developments, and City of Rhum, we’re going to release pieces of everything all together.  How do we think we’ll sell that?  Well, as a crowdfunding thing.  The strategy shakes out like this:  For every dollar you kick in every month (we’re probably using Patreon), you get a vote as to what the theme of the next month will be.  Every month, we’ll keep putting out these blogs!  Every month we’ll keep putting out more entries for World of Fletnern.  But every month we’ll be putting out the types of things that would have filled books like Coins of the Road (transportation and trade goods), Facets (gemstones, including their magical aspects), Lifestyles of the Magical and the Mundane (how life works in the big cities, including monetary stats for players and GMs to use), and on and on it goes.  

I had planned to bill this as a surprise box.  You never know exactly what you’re going to get inside, but it’s going to be a ton of stuff!  When I’ve explained it to a couple of you blog readers, it came back translated as, “Wow, that’s how Dragon Magazine used to be when it was good.”  Since Dragon Magazine called Legend Quest; “a real gem of a game.  One of the best systems I’ve ever seen”, we absolutely love Dragon Magazine!

The overarching “plot” of this is to legitimately get us communicating with you, our content consumers.  What do you want?  What don’t you want?  You will be voting on content, so we should be pleasing the majority of you.  Feel free to start communicating with us now!  Honestly, we’ll listen!  We may not do what you say, but we’ll listen to you!  If you make sense, we will follow your advice!  Board Enterprises really wants to be your favorite place to come for content on table top gaming, game mastering, and world building, never forgetting character creation!  But to be that, we need to hear from you!

We’ll have a survey up pretty soon about what everybody is hoping for on themes.  We think the theme thing will help, especially when you’re going back over things later on and want find specific stuff.  Oh, and did we say that every dollar you give us on Patreon will also grant you $1 worth of product?  Yep, you’ll have your own private Board Enterprises account and we’ll send out product whenever you want to spend those BE Bucks.  It really is a two-for-one sale that never ends!!