![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bliss Stage Pre Order
Seven years from now, humanity is in ruins, devastated by a ferocious alien occupier from the edges of our understanding. The adults of the world have been undone by the aliens' seduction, and the future of humanity is now a slowly dwindling population of child survivors.
Bliss Stage is a role-playing game about love and war and hope and coming of age, to be published by the award-winning These Are Our Games this year. Starting now, it is available for pre-order.
But there is still hope for humanity's future. A small group of survivors, led by a still-waking adult, have managed to reverse engineer the alien remotes, and have used this technology to make a new generation of weapons that can be used to strike at humanity's enemies in their world of dreams. This weapon is called an Alien Numina Inversion Machine -- or ANIMa -- and it allows a teenaged pilot to enter the dream world and form a mechanized battle-suit out of the spirits of her friends, lovers, and enemies. With this weapon, she can fight the aliens on their own terms, striking at the very heart of their occupation. Now, after seven years of despair, this brave group of soldiers are striking the first blows of a war that will determine the fate of the earth, humanity, earth, and their own hearts.
In the game of Bliss Stage, you will tell their story.
The cost of the pre-order is $36. Included in that is:
- Ignition Stage: A limited edition book which will be available only through this pre-order and at GenCon 2007. This is a spartan version of the game with little-to-no art. It, and no future version, will include a unique short-play scenario, FINAL ACT, to get you playing from the moment you receive your book. I estimate that it will be about 130 pages long, perfect bound, about the size of a manga volume. This will be sent before or during August 2007.
- Acceleration Stage: An unlimited edition book with color cover, lavish interior illustrations by Jake Richmond and Shizero Nezze, and design by Joshua AC Newman. This full version of the game will also feature an expanded text. It will be about 200 pages long, and also about the size of a manga volume. This will be sent before or during December 2007.
- Personal messages in the Ignition Stage book, if you want one.
- Special thanks in the Acceleration Stage book, if you want it.
- Future versions of the game, as well as any game-related merchandise, will be available to pre-order customers only at considerably lower prices.
- Free shipping anywhere in the world.
There have never been battles more terrible than these battles. There has never been a war more important than this war. No one deserves to see the things you've had to see. No one deserves to do the things you've had to do. But if you can do it, if you can win, then no one will ever have to fight a war again.
And if you lose, it doesn't matter anyway.
Secure your pre-order now by sending $36 via paypal to taogames@gmail.com . Remember to include your shipping information, and if you want have an inscription or special thanks.
Please do spread this to websites, blogs, forums, and so on. I will be updating this post throughout the weeks to come with more teasers and game information.
no subject
Do you have any advice on getting the word out? I had a big initial spurt of orders but I'm worried now that it's trailing off.
no subject
One: I'm not sure if my ramble about online promotion (http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/275182.html) is any help -- though I'm betting you already do some of it -- but there might be something that could be mined out of it. A quick glance-over makes "find some podcasts who'd be willing to do an interview with you about some aspect of the game" pop to the top of my head, but there may be more.
Two: Consider providing advance (PDF? Print-proof?) access to a reviewer participating in RPG.Net's upcoming Sci Fi Week.
no subject
Basically it would work like this:
- You give me the data to list the preorder on IPR.
- We'd list it under whatever pricepoint and terms you wanted.
- You could at any time pull out a list of the preorders using the publisher order extraction tool I recently set up and mentioned over on the IPR chat group.
- I'd also be building a list of the preorders every time I pull out the order information for sending to our warehouse (I'm doing this with Finis) in a spreadsheet format. I can provide the spreadsheet to you at any time, or at the conclusion of the preorder period.
- You can still do all the shipping based on the above information files; if there are any shipping revenues generated from the preorders, Brennan can cut you a check for that when you're ready to do the mail-out. This would let you precisely control your shipping methods. Or, you could instead have IPR do all of that once you deliver the products to our warehouse (though I figure, for alacrity reasons, you may want to stick with the ship-it-yourself gig).
Granted, this all means IPR would still take its 15% cut, and "free shipping anywhere" isn't possible with our setup, since we don't have any way to offer free shipping conditionally to international addresses -- though you'd already hit free shipping domestically with the $36 pricepoint. But it's possible that that 15% cut (a bit over $5) would be something you'd be willing to afford for the increased exposure of front-page billing on the site.
We *can* do it in such a way that retailers do or do not get access to the preorder, if you wanted to stick to direct sales. If instead you did want to go with allowing retailer preorders, it'd be at their usual 42% off followed by the 15% IPR cut (meaning revenues of about 50% of cover, or $18-ish).
Drop me an email if this sounds like something that would help sustain the level of preorders that you're looking for. But don't feel like I'm pressuring you to take us up on this! I just want you aware that it's an option. Doing the SOTC preorder with IPR worked out pretty well for me, and the Finis preorder seems to be doing pretty well for Ryan Macklin.