I was looking at Frog God's The Black Monastery last night and saw "The Blight."  Wondered why it started at $65, did a little research.  Other than finding out that it's damn near nine hundred pages (not counting supplementary material), it's apparently a nasty city.  Number of pages talking about the kickstarter, little that actually discusses the product.

How is it, what's in it, so on and so forth?

Shocking twist: this is not an instance of "I bought the product without research, and now seek positive reinforcement to quell the buyer's remorse within."

900 pages? Why do I get the impression most of FGG's stuff is just meant to be read, not played?

How the hell is the PF PDF as expensive as the print book. Is Frog God Games fucking high.

No, they just have enough fans who will blindly support them no matter what they charge or what crap they churn out.

Quote from: JeremyR;1067706No, they just have enough fans who will blindly support them no matter what they charge or what crap they churn out.

Is it that bad?

I've bought a lot of Necromancer/Frog God stuff over the years, and I've come to the conclusion that the stuff Frog God is putting out these days is aimed at a small and loyal group of collectors. In that respect, they remind me of a tabletop historical wargame company like GMT. People buy these massive and expensive products, read them at the kitchen table, dream about using them someday, and then stick on the shelf with dozens of other such products. Frog God is the same - they cater to an essentially aspirational niche of the market.

I just bought the 5E Rappan Athuk, and lord is it bloated. But when you have the sell the same dungeon to people who have already bought it two or three times, you're incentived to just keep shovelling more filler content into it, rather than improve it by making it more useable at the table.  But I suppose I'm an unusual customer, in that I bought the book with the intent to actually run it, not just read it and stick it back on the shelf.

Quote from: sureshot;1067695How the hell is the PF PDF as expensive as the print book. Is Frog God Games fucking high.

It appears you can't buy the hardcover without also buying the PDF.  Since the PDF is $65, and the bundle is $120 from FGG direct, the print book is actually $10 cheaper than the PDF.

Figure that one out.

Quote from: kythri;1067744It appears you can't buy the hardcover without also buying the PDF.  Since the PDF is $65, and the bundle is $120 from FGG direct, the print book is actually $10 cheaper than the PDF.

And you're getting a significant discount if you go with the 5E bundle at $120.  The Swords and Wizardry bundle is $160.

Gonna have to keep wondering on this one, I guess.

Quote from: HorusArisen;1067714Is it that bad?

No comment about The Blight as I haven't read it, but I did buy Sword of Air at Garycon this year because it was $10 or something due to FGG's "Pathfinder by the pound" sale. Okay, so that book specifically could be 1/10th the length; so much filler that does nothing except pad page count. It tries to be some sort of sandbox campaign, but falls flat. Contrast this with the Quests of Doom books which are packed with pithy adventure ideas. You can get 500X the play value out of Quests of Doom 3 than you can Sword of Air at like half the page count.

My opinion only, of course. Maybe some people like to use massive rpg tomes as coffee table books, but I'm not one of them.

Quote from: Thornhammer;1067785And you're getting a significant discount if you go with the 5E bundle at $120.  The Swords and Wizardry bundle is $160.

Gonna have to keep wondering on this one, I guess.

Ah, I was looking at the PF bundle for $120, myself.  Missed that the S&W was even more - $65 for the PDF, $95 for the hardcover.  Ouch.

I thought S&W was supposed to be less bloated than 3E/3.5/PF?

I'm all for an rpg company making money. With FGG its a fine line between making money and ripping off your fanbase. Unless Isee the Blught in a bundle of holding I'm not buying it. Probably not buy anything else from them.

As for SW being bloated it happens eventuslly to almost all if not all rpgs imo. Quitr frankly any rpg company really should have enough sense not to promise to cut back on it.

Quote from: sureshot;1067863I'm all for an rpg company making money. With FGG its a fine line between making money and ripping off your fanbase. Unless Isee the Blught in a bundle of holding I'm not buying it. Probably not buy anything else from them.

My guess is that they're charging what they are so the Kickstarter backers don't harumph-harumph-harumph about non-backers being able to get the product for a lot less than what they paid.  And if you're relying on repeat Kickstarter backers, I can see where you woudn't want to piss them off.

That said, in the recent kerfluffle about the burning of the LotFP books, warehouse storage area was discussed - I bet these things take up a significant amount of useful storage space, and I further bet somebody would really, really like for those books to get sold instead of pulped.  Only selling it with the PDF isn't going to move a lot of product.  Could be that they only have a handful of copies sitting around, I'm just speculating.

Quote from: Thornhammer;1067868...warehouse storage area was discussed - I bet these things take up a significant amount of useful storage space, and I further bet somebody would really, really like for those books to get sold instead of pulped.  Only selling it with the PDF isn't going to move a lot of product.  Could be that they only have a handful of copies sitting around, I'm just speculating.

My experience with FGG is that they maintain stock of all their stuff, and they have a decent amount of storage space.

It's highly likely they'll deep discount remaining stock after a year or three to clear some of that storage.

As an example:

Tome of Horrors Complete hardcover & PDF (Pathfinder) - $29.99 (down from $59.99)
Tome of Horrors 4 hardcover & PDF (Pathfinder) - $9.99 (down from $29.99)
The Slumbering Tsar Saga hardcover & PDF (Pathfinder) - $39.99 (down from $100.00)

Even those unmarked down prices are lower than what they were - I did a search for email receipts, and I paid $89.99 for ToH Complete when it came out, and $44.95 for ToH 4.

I paid $149.99 for Slumbering Tsar (which is autographed, "limited numbered out of 500"), the PDF and a "subscription" to future PDF stuffs in that line.

I'm pretty sure The Blight will still be around, and significantly cheaper, in a year or two, so I'm not in a rush to pick that up tomorrow.

Full disclosure: I am one of the owners at Frog God Games so I am both biased and someone who can definitively respond. I was also a customer before they bought out my one man company. My last book as a backer was the Blight for context.

I find most of the opinions in this thread to be accurate, thoughtful and, now, a bit outdated. In the last 18 months we have shifted our focus internally away from the large books that were close to a gimmick on a couple of them. We do have a loyal fan base that has come to expect large books and get very annoyed with the incremental drift toward titles that are both focused, with more emphasis on production quality than hard to carry, harder to efficiently use.

The truth is most of these have  already completed or will fund in Q1 using Kickstarter. We are shifting to books on the 200 to 350 page range. The books like Blight and Tsar solved a 2010 problem of Adventure Path focused customers asking for low cost, high quality softcover shorts which give feeling of epic story paid for a very modest price, over a 12 month cycle. Word to word or price to price comparisons are more apt when compared to a wide release episodic AP. Kickstarter and crowdfunding created a compromise that would produce similar experiences but the cost was upfront. The price made it look like the equivalent of a luxury good, the print runs made the per unit price high just to make a very thin profit in distribution channels. But the size and scope was visually impressive and that sells a larger number of books than I expected and I was a buyer who wasn't very price sensitive.

Swords and Wizardry has good sized audience that have strong opinions involving everything making a fragmenting an already limited market which is only now growing in sales and not only in players so the books there are always a projection risk but we love the game and the art and layout are shared between the versions.

Basically making books is expensive for small companies. Making PDFs only is almost as expensive. I saw that the impression was we combined PDFs with the hardcovers to charge more for a bundle. Not we began giving them with book as an attempt to avoid exasperation and dismissiveness toward releases which were at minimum a year long effort with strained resources. Hearing that is no fun.

The high retail cost of our books is coming down now. Deliberate planning, the decline of PF sales and the explosive popularity of fifth edition are letting us shift into more mainstream MSRP ranges.

We work very hard and are by no means getting more than 'ok' compensation. Regardless I am proud of our direction and improved releases. I hope you revisit your impressions of us as a company even if you ultimately do not change your mind.

Thanks.

Zach Glazar, Frog God Games.

How is making the PDF version of a book almost as expensive.

An rpg company does not have to pay for shipping the PDF to consumers. Nor shipping the book from say China to North America. Nor  storage fees to pay a company to hold the books until they are needed. Almost no distribution fees beyond Drivethrurp and maybe rpgnow.

I'm not saying give away tbe PDF and I understand the need to keep a book and PDF bundle sold at the same price. Don't try and tell me that one format of a book that has less expenses attached to publishing it will cost as much as the format with more expenses attached.

Again make money as an rpg company. I would the same but don't mark up the cheaper version to be as much as the expensive version then think the fans won't notice. We do.