Buying monographs?... flying blind, I call it

[The_Tatterdemalion_King]

Me too, TTK. I've toyed with the idea over the years. I've concluded that unless you have a complete team (artists, layout, writers, distribution capacity), all of whom are working for shares vs. payment up front, and by the time you get done giving Hayward the copies it wants for a license, you have to sell around 500 copies @ $20 to start to break even.

Being an artist and layout guy already, I am feeling more... entrepreneurial about it than someone who would have to look around for someone to do a professional polish on presenting the material. Working on spec when I feel I could do 90% of the work myself isn't as problematic as, say, shopping around a screenplay.

I am really interested in other means of funding (like crowdfunding) or different distribution methods to get things into digestible price points. App-sized prices for smallish, frequent periodicals (like WotC's current Dragon+Dungeon presentation) does sound like a neat alternative to me.

I'd love for one of the licensees to regale us with their real world up front costs/how many had to be sold to break even tales, but I don't see that kind of confidential information being bandied about the forum.

Actually, Simon Rogers does just that for Pelgrane's stats.

[Asmodas]

I can vouch for Sevenfold Path. I bought it purely because it was written by Jeff Moeller (Nightcap from Mortal Coils is still one of my favorites). Sevenfold Path is very good and worth buying.

Ben Tull

[neorxnawang]

I can vouch for Sevenfold Path. I bought it purely because it was written by Jeff Moeller (Nightcap from Mortal Coils is still one of my favorites). Sevenfold Path is very good and worth buying.

Ben Tull

Thanks Herr Doktor.

[GreveMagnus]

I can't recommend Colonial Terrors, unfortunately - missing stats for NPCs, a poor grasp of the English language evidenced in the writing, and not enough notes for the Keeper for the various scenarios. An example which comes to mind is a brief note that if the PCs proceed too far down a cavern (how far is too far, exactly?) they'll either die or wind up in another dimension. That's it.

Some potentially-interesting set pieces with more fleshing out, but as it stands the monograph needs massive copy-editing and more detail in the scenarios (I'd say making the scenarios less linear as well in terms of spoonfeeding clues, but Keepers' mileage may vary).

I would also advise giving Colonial Terrors a miss. I haven't even read it, but looking through it, I notice that two pages have accidentally been left completely blank - so the book isn't even complete. Waste of time and money.

At the very least, wait until a fixed-up, complete version becomes available.

[GreveMagnus]

Update to the above post. I contacted Chaosium, and Fergie was kind enough to let me have a free PDF version of the book so I could print out the missing pages.

The PDF seems to be complete.

[Fredde72]

I have bought a couple (10-15?) of monographs and have to agree on the difference in quality.

"Machine Tractor Station Kharkov 37" is one of my all time favourites, "Gatsby and the great race" is another.
And when I say favourites, I don't mean favourite MULAS, I mean favourite role-playing book.
They are both simply stunning work.

Given that, I have to say that, not beeing a native English speaker, I am not so bothered by bad grammer, neither am I very bothered by missing stats for NPCs or monsters. Stats are easy to wing, if you need them at all, and as long as the writers intention can be discerned spelling errors is somewhat ok.

But, some of the MULAS are just plain bad. When I buy role playing books, I am looking for original "adventures", or storylines.
Some MULAS have nothing of this. A boring, old fashioned, linear dundgeon crawl (even if it doesn't nessecary take place in a dungeon) is all there is.
That, I can also wing, whenever needed, probably with the same level of success. So, of my MULAS maybe 75% has never seen play, because I don't want to throw that kind of "entertainment" on my players.

Can't we set up some kind of "rating with comments" archive here at Yog-sothoth, both for MULAS and other material?

/ Fredrik

[Tigger_MK4]

I cant vouch for jeffs other work, (or the others on your list, cjristian) but i do have Primal State, which i found to be a reasonable monograph, and i am happy to have it in my collection.

I 'd just like to add my voice to the rest of you, in that I find it near impossible to guess which monographs to get, as some are far better than others.

Ripples from carcosa, Machine tractor station, cthulhu invictus ( now a full product of course), mysteries of tibet, and berlin 61 are probably those i have found the best so far. I wouldnt say (with due respect to the efforts of the respective authors - producing a monograph is darn hard work) that i thought any of them were perfect, BUT they ARE worth getting if you feel the need for a cthulhu fix and you have most other things in print.

I've been fortunate not to have bought any of the really bad ones (thanks to various warnings from postings on the board) but i do have one or two that i've been less impressed with, usually more because i felt they were bland rather than poor.

I dont own Gatsby, but everyone i know speaks highly of it ( iirc its by the author of "my little sister will make you suffer" from cthulhu britannia). Mind you, my local group does include its author...

[Noble]

Why don't we as a collective, offer help to any would be monograph writer, with a 'free' non-professional editor service. Even someone else giving a read through of your work, would get rid of a number of faults. If we help the writers out, it only improves the product, and I may be more inclined to buy one with the Innsmouth seal of approval.

[christian]

Great suggestions by Fredde and Noble. Paul, what do you think?

[PoC]

Having a page or two in the CthulhuWiki with "Recommended Monographs" or similar could be very useful.

[G.Roby]

PoC, thats sounds like a great idea!

and I just posted a Review I wrote for The Sevenfold Path
hope that helps a bit.-

[wombat1]

It is interesting that many people are still speaking fondly of Machine Tractor Station Kharkov, which is one of the earlier modules. I went to graduate school with the author, Bret Kramer, at Iowa State University, and was able to play in one of the early tests of that scenario. (If someone wants a good bet for a longer work they ought to see if Kramer would write his 1920's London campaign up.) The History Department that Kramer and I were in stressed careful preparation of texts--nothing went out to academic conferences without being read before groups, at least among the medieval history students, who were not always kind to one another, and who had some reputation among the other graduate students of the department for playing rough. The journal that was hosted was copy read for every issue--graduate students were paid to read the entire thing aloud, punctuation and all. Invariably a number of corrections had to be made before printing. But those mistakes were caught and those corrections were made. The final version of Kharkov shows the same sort of care went into it--I remember playing through it and then we sat and essentially debriefed it for a while, and that was by no means unique. I would not be surprised to hear that it went through the same sort of editing and reading process that was accepted as the professional standard for the students in the Department.

I accept that these are very much labors of love for their authors, but one sometimes wonders about the extent to which they are treated as items of craftsmanship. That would account for the uneven nature of the work. It would probably lead to many fewer monographs, but I suspect that it would lead to better or more even quality among them.

[SailorMoonUnit]

Long time lurker, first time poster. This thread has been very informative - I had no idea that Chaosium was so lax about what they published for their monograph series, but I've already become rather cautious about them, having been badly burned by "Mythos Magic." I never wanted to be "that guy" who stands at the retailer booth at the con and reads the supplement before deciding whether to buy it... but now I'm afraid I might have to be. It's that or swear off the monographs altogether...