Don't Lose Your Mind won the Silver Ennie for Best Writing. I was the minor-key element in that -- I did the layout, sure, and came up with the high concept for the book, but it was Benjamin "Bailywolf" Baugh's killer writing and Ryan Macklin's insightful, demanding editing job that honed that crazy blade to a keen edge. I'm very proud of them for this win.

Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies won the Silver Ennie for Best Setting. Chad Underkoffler gets a mountain of credit here as well, though I am all the same still very smug and satisfied about this one, as I really pushed Chad hard to deliver the kind of setting presentation that *I* could remain interested in (I am a notoriously hard sell when it comes to setting writing). Seeing it win was a real validation of the hard work Chad put in to make that goal a reality.

Great job, guys! And thank you so much for being a part of the Hat.

That makes three silvers in three years for us, I think (the first went to Spirit of the Century a couple back). Crazy-pleased, that's me. :)

You can pick up both products at the Evil Hat webstore: http://www.evilhat.com/store/

As well as IPR and DriveThruRPG!

Thanks be to boxninja for snapping these photos of the IPR booth at GenCon 2009:





(Clickin' on 'em will get you biggers.)

EDIT: And some Hero 6th Edition stuff too. What's odd and wonderful about this is seeing physical manifestations of stuff I've worked on. (Steve Long hit the copy shop and got one-off printouts of the two books done up so folks can browse the new edition. Also, see the preorder CDs done up for the con!) These ones are thanks to gamera_spinning.

(Ennie-Nominated) Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, seen at the IPR booth at GenCon:



You can pick up all of Evil Hat's games there, including A Penny For My Thoughts (look around and see if Paul's there, so he can demo it for you), Don't Rest Your Head, (Ennie-Nominated) Don't Lose Your Mind, and (Ennie-Silver-Winner) Spirit of the Century.

And as mentioned on @IPRTweets, IPR's booth number at GenCon is 2139. Drop on by (wish I could)!

We're pretty lazy here at the Hat, when it comes right down to it. Lazy -- and lucky. At many a convention, our games are represented not by Official Company Representatives, but instead by the fans. This is how we like it! (It's also more sustainable, and durable, in years like this one where finances and/or newborns are keeping most of us at home.)

If you're running an Evil Hat game at GenCon this year (or any other convention), we'd like to hear about it, so we can make sure other folks know to look for it as well. Comment here, and we can treat this post as a sort of "living bulletin board" of GenCon sessions of Evil Hat stuff.

Thanks!

Evil Hat now has a webstore of its own!

http://www.evilhat.com/store/

(Don't fret -- this isn't us breaking away from IPR at all. It was just time to have a store presence of our own, too.)

So, the 2009 Ennie Award Nominations are out this morning:

http://www.ennie-awards.com/nominations/nominees.asp

As someone on Twitter said, my fingerprints are all over 'em. This is good, because I like the Ennies, and it's really great when the Ennies like me back. I'm already a proud papa lately, but this magnifies the feeling, and for my other 'babies' to boot. :)

Evil Hat's Nominations

• Best Writing - Don't Lose Your Mind
  
• Best Setting - Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies
  
• Product of the Year - Don't Lose Your Mind
  
• Product of the Year - Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies

One Bad Egg's Nominations

• Best Electronic Book - The Death Mother
  
• Best Electronic Book - Hard Boiled Armies

I declare TRIUMPH with chadu at this point, since we went back and forth on the presentation of the Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies' setting so much, and lo and behold a BEST SETTING nomination. Yes, I'm jazzed as all hell for having two entries on Product of the Year (out of 10), but the setting nod is the real marker there as ultimate validation of the goal we had in producing S7S.

And Ben Baugh getting BEST WRITING for his work on Don't Lose Your Mind? Well, yeah. He did such wonderful things with language and vignettes and all that in DLYM, I would have been sorely disappointed if that hadn't gotten a specific nod, too.

The One Bad Egg stuff is a happy thing, finally, as that's the place where I actually wrote some stuff this year instead of doing higher-level production and layout stuff. I'm a little startled that Armies and Mother beat out Cultures (Cultures has been a consistent strong seller) for nomination, but they're both results from me working at the top of my game at OBE, so I'm pretty tickled.

It doesn't stop there, though, as I look towards the question of "What non-Fred IPR-carried products got the nod?"

IPR Nominations

• Best Cover Art - 3:16 (BoxNinja)
  
• Best Interior Art - HELLAS (Khepera)
  
• Best Interior Art - Mouse Guard (Archaia)
  
• Best Writing - Hot War (Contested Ground)
  
• Best Production Values - Mouse Guard (Archaia)
  
• Best Production Values - HELLAS (Khepera)
  
• Best Rules - Starblazer Adventures (Cubicle 7)
  
• Best Setting - Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor (Arc Dream)
  
• Best Setting - Hot War (Contested Ground)
  
• Best Podcast - Voice of the Revolution (IPR!)
  
• Best Game - Starblazer Adventures (Cubicle 7)
  
• Product of the Year - Mouse Guard (Archaia)
  
• Product of the Year - Starblazer Adventures (Cubicle 7)

I'm mixed, of course, in my feelings about Mouse Guard. Mouse Guard is a fine work, worth the nods it has gotten (and more that it curiously didn't). But Luke and I are on the outs (something I don't really want to talk about, but also don't want to pretend isn't true) after he decided that it was more important to spit in my face than accept an apology for a big goof-up I made earlier this year. As such, I am doubtful that I'll be continuing The Summer Revolution past this year, and am on the fence as to whether I'll use that promotional site this year at all, since it was based on a partnership with Luke, and Luke's temper makes him a poor partner for me. I might be giving Mouse Guard some vote love, but that love's all for Archaia at this point.

Anyway, enough of that drama.

Overall, that's a pretty good spread. It's a great spread from the Evil Hat perspective, too, given that Starblazer Adventures is based on the Spirit of the Century SRD, but I'm also intrigued that IPR's catalog includes three of the five Best Setting nods, given that I think there's a sort of general perception out there that "indie means setting light". I'm sad that Master Plan isn't on the Podcast list, but Ryan's influence is still strongly felt, as he's been doing the audio production on Voice of the Revolution, which has improved the show's quality in all sorts of subtle-but-palpable ways. Don't Lose Your Mind author Ben Baugh is getting some love for Candlewick, too, which is good & just; he's probably one of my top five setting authors these days anyway, and it's *hard* to get me to love setting writing.

In the end sum, it's important to realize that in one very big way, the Ennies are already done for us (speaking in the smaller EHP/OBE sense, and in the larger IPR sense). Nominations are hard-won and carefully considered by the judges each year, but the voting is in the hands of the general public. It's particularly hard getting actual wins from that everyone-in-the-world vote; our catalogs do their best work not in quantity, but in quality, so to some extent creating the product familiarity necessary to garner a vote is the biggest obstacle of all.

So when you hear folks on the above list say things like, "It's an honor just to be nominated" -- and it is! -- listen a little closer. That nomination they're talking about is a win all by itself.

Edit: Chad's post: http://chadu.livejournal.com/743514.html

Second Edit: Somehow I failed to mention I did the layout on Starblazer Adventures, so I have an actually-palpable connection to that product beyond contributing to the SRD on which it's based.

While Evil Hat itself is not making it to Origins this year (nor is IPR for that matter), Evil Hat products are still on sale there this year -- drop on by the Hero Games booth to find 'em, including the recently released A Penny For My Thoughts.

So, Evil Hat has its retailer PDF guarantee program that I've mentioned before (buy the book in a store, get the PDF from us, no problem): http://www.evilhat.com/home/pdf-guarantee/

From one perspective, our idea is pretty cracked. We're creating an incentive for the customer to buy the product in a context where we tend to get the least money (direct sales put more $ into our pockets with each copy sold; retailers need their cut, on the other hand, which is entirely reasonable). And more to the point we're giving away something we could sell, with that PDF -- especially when the Print+PDF bundle is the way most of our direct sales happen for any given product.

But that perspective only makes sense if your eye is on the ball, and not on the players. But it's the players that win this game. A retail store that stays in business and wants to order more of your products. A customer who's jazzed they don't have to make the increasingly tough choice between supporting their favorite local store and their favorite publisher. This is happiness capital, and happiness pays dividends over the long haul. Happiness turns into money, sure (you can't buy happiness with money perhaps, but you sure can buy money with happiness, as a publisher -- just add patience). But it also creates fans. It creates teamwork between the publisher, the store, and the customer. Everyone looks out for everyone else.

The marketplace is a competitive place. I think that's pretty much self evident. But what I think folks forget, so easily, is that it's also a cooperative place if you play it right. People and companies need to work *together* (as opposed to against one another) for things to run smoothly. Evil Hat's PDF guarantee is all about making sure that retailers see that we're keeping the gears greased.

So recently, Myriad Games in New Hampshire became aware of the Evil Hat PDF guarantee. And they've done something fantastic: they've sought out every single one of the customers they have who *already* bought an Evil Hat game, and let them know about the offer. Bit by bit over the past month they've been making that connection, then passing that connection on to Evil Hat so we can get the customer the PDF.

Joy is aggregated. And Myriad passes on customer reactions like this one:

I received the code for the PDF, and downloaded them. Very impressive, it was actually two PDFs; one in the traditional portrait format, as printed in the book, and one in landscape format so that it can be read easily on a screen.

Do you partner with other companies to do the same? I have been keeping an eye on the upcoming game Eclipse Phase (http://www.eclipsephase.com/), and they have mentioned the possibility of providing a PDF copy with the purchase of the main book via Drivethru RPG. The appeal of a digital copy is very strong, but I'd like to support brick-and-mortar store with my physical book purchase.

---

Absolutely, please do share my feedback. I know I'm not the only one in my gaming group that enjoys having the PDF version of the book to suppliment the hardcopy. I love having the paper book to flick through and read and keep on hand for reference, but the PDF makes printing character sheets/reference charts and finding obscure rules so much easier at game time. I wish more companies would provide the electronic version with the paper book (I understand that some may worry about piracy, etc, which is unfortunate).

+1 happy customer, right there. And if you read closely, you'll see how the customer is relieved to be able to have his cake (the PDF) and eat it too (support his brick and mortar local store).

In turn, Myriad's turning around and promoting Evil Hat's stuff more in their store. That means they'll be ordering more Evil Hat products too as time goes on.

That's the long play, right there. Happiness capital. Someone spends money, and they're a customer. Someone gets happy, and they're a *fan*.

We've started the Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies softcover preorder:

http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/product.php?productid=16862

This is the version we intend to have available "evergreen" from here on forward. It's priced at $30.

That said, there's still a chance to grab one of the twenty or so copies of the hardcover limited edition, priced at $42, while supplies last:

http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/product.php?productid=16850

PDF buying options can be found on the 7 Skies website, as always.

The mystery:

http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/440815.html

Has been revealed:

http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/214032.html

And yet new question remains... why is Jess Nevins (ratmmjess) the one to reveal the next stage of development?

Stay tuned.