Jon Brazer Enterprises

Its official. I am going to be at That Game Convention just outside of Harrisburg, PA. I’ll be running 2 different Pathfinder adventures in three different time slots. The first is the Temple of Orcus and the second is Shadows of the Dusk Queen. Both of these are for the upcoming Shadowsfall setting. Come to the convention and to get a first look at these adventures and a sneak peak at the Shadowsfall.

Jon Brazer Enterprises is proud to announce that the Book of Beasts: Monsters of the River Nations and the Book of the River Nations: Complete Player’s Reference for Kingdom Building are up for Gaming Genius Awards in the categories of Best RPG Supplement and Most Innovative New Product. See all the award Nominees here.

We at Jon Brazer Enterprises are thrilled to be apart of this and would like to wish the best luck to all other nominees. To vote for our books or your favorite nominated books, send an email to the Gaming Genius Awards crew and tell them why you feel you are qualified to vote for the best games anywhere. Send them an email today since the awards ceremony is during the Montreal ComicCon on Sept 17-18! Show Your Love for Jon Brazer Enterprises by voting for us today!

About The International Gamers Guild and the Gamers Guild

The International Gamers Guild (IGG) and its parent organization (The Gamers Guild) are non-profit organizations dedicated to empowering participants in roleplaying games, miniatures, wargames, boardgames, LARPs, and related hobbies to promote such hobbies in the wider community and to increase their opportunities to enjoy the hobby as well. The Central Committee of the Gaming Genius Awards are an anonymous group of directors from the Gamer’s Guild.

We’re looking at getting a tentative convention schedule for the next year assembled, but a lot of cons have poorly maintained (or non-existant) websites. Many others we find their website by accident instead of a simple Google search. So we’re coming to you. What local gaming cons do you goto that we should be at. Realistically, we can only go anywhere inside the area of Columbus OH, Rochester, NY, Boston, MA, and Norfolk, VA. We’re really only looking at smaller gaming cons (as small as 50 to as large as 5,000-10,000 attendees). Anything larger (or any size non-gaming focused convention) and a small company like ours tends to get lost in the sea of vendors. We’re currently looking for either Pathfinder-focused cons or a general gaming con where Pathfinder is one of the games played. I’m more than happy to run some games.

So we’re asking you. What is your favorite gaming con? Tell us! We love small cons of 50-100 attendees. They’re really small and personal and we get to know all the gamers there. Tell us about your local con today.

This past weekend Jon Brazer Enterprises attended PaizoCon. We hd alot of fun and met some awesome gamers. Naturally we took alot of pictures. We thought we’d share a few of them with you.

Jeff, Cosmo and several others of the Paizo Crew rocking the registration table.

Ryan Dancey, James Sutter, and James Jacobs before the Future of the Adventure Path Seminar

Brian Lewis and Jennifer Page at the signing table.

Picture of the contents of the Pathfinder Beginner Box

Image of WAR artwork for one of the covers of the Pathfinder Jade Regent AP.

Jon Brazer Entrprises is going to be at PaizoCon in a big way. We are thrilled and are spending just about every waking moment planning for it. We’d love to meet you there.

Thursday Evening
The Meet and Eat at the Crab Pot-Bellevue (see this thread for details). Both myself and my wonderful girlfriend and editor, Janel, will be attending and can’t wait to scarf down some crab with our fellow gamers.

Friday
9am – 8 Kender Walk into a Bar game. I’ll be running a wacky game where the players play kender and are free to steal, pilfer and eat every shiny dodad in sight. Atleast until they get thrown out of the bar, if there is a bar left to get thrown out of.

1pm – The Savage Species of Kaer Maga game. When 8 heroes of wildly different races help stop a zombie attack. But can they save the missing children some seemingly intelligent zombies stole? Play a Fetchling Ranger or a Tengu sorcerer or one of a number of other races not from the core book.

Saturday
1pm – Secrets of a Small Press Publisher Join Wolfgang Baur, Stan! Brown, Owen Stephens, and myself as we discuss what being a small press publisher is like. Bring your questions and we’ll give you the straight answers into what its like publishing for your favorite Role Playing Game.

Evening – Paizo Preview Banquet. Janel and I will be attending the preview banquet in full anticipation to find out what our favorite publisher is going to be doing for a while to come. We hope that you’ll be at our table.

Dealer’s Room
Meet Janel and myself at our table in the Dealer’s Room. We are bringing:
Book of the River Nations: Complete Player’s Reference for Kingdom Building (PFRPG) – Get all the rules you are looking for in one easy to reference tome, now in perfect bound
Book of Beasts: Monsters of the River Nations (PFRPG), Surprise your players with new and interesting monsters in their adventures through the River Nations.
d66 Compendium (Traveller), Find the perfect name or description for your sci-fi role playing game.
Mech Tech ‘n’ bot: Mech Squadrons (Traveller), Because the only thing more fun than driving a tank down main street is driving the mech that steps on the tank. Get vehicle and mass combat stats for these vehicles as tall as buildings for your Traveller game.
Each of these books comes with our PDF Guarantee!

While you’re at our table, enter our drawing to get all our Pathfinder PDFs for free.

We can’t wait to see you there!

Its official as of earlier this afternoon! Jon Brazer Enterprises is going to PaizoCon! We are so excited. Our current plan is for me to run some games/seminars while the worlds greatest girlfriend works the vendor’s table.

So we’d like your input as to what we should do. Here are a few ideas we have:

• Seminar – Designing your own Conquest Campaign: This seminar helps GMs to set up their own sandbox-style campaign,
• Seminar – Monster Designer: Never designed a monster before? Join us as we design a monster together.
• Game – River Kingdoms Diplomacy: Diplomatic actions can be tricky, but in the River Kingdoms they can be deadly. Your kingdom is frequently raided by thieves from across your border, in your neighboring country. How will you stop these invaders?
• Game – Surviving the Worldwound: You join a regiment in the 5th crusade. Now you are the last survivors of that regiment. Will you make it home with so many miles of corrupted land and viscous forces standing in your way.

Please share your thoughts.

Dale McCoy of Jon Brazer Enterprises is now a regular columnist over at the Robot Viking. In his first installment of the Brazer Bulletin he discusses what the GAMA Trade Show is really like. He went last year and shares his experiences of what it is like to go.

Future post to the column will discuss Third Party Pathfinder and Traveller Products, Pathfinder and Traveller News, and anything else going on in the industry. Be sure to read it every Wednesday.

The summer convention season is upon us. We don’t have all of our plans finalized yet, but we do have this firm: we are going to Origins 2010. What is Jon Brazer Enterprises doing at Origins? Well, we’re going to be selling Mech Tech ‘n’ bot: Mech Squadrons for Traveller in the dealer’s room, Booth #420 a mere two booths away from Mongoose Publishing’s booth. My booth is the GPA booth and it is shared by other small game designers, so you will have to look for or ask about Mech Squadrons. I myself will be hanging out at the booth much of the time the dealer’s room is open. Even if you have already picked up Mech Squadrons or are a Pathfinder player and are excited about Book of Beasts, stop by and say hi. I would love to go to know the many people I have gotten to know over the internet but have never met face to face.

What about when the dealer’s room is closed? I don’t have any firm plans yet, but I am probably going to be running some pickup games of Mech Military for Traveller and Hunters of the River Nations for Pathfinder. If you play in my Pathfinder game, you will be able to get an exclusive peak at some of the monsters in our upcoming book Book of Beasts: Monsters of the River Nations.

We can’t wait to go. We’re looking forward to our Origins and the fun we’re going to have. See you there.

Today is the last day of the Gama Trade Show 2010. I’ve learned alot, met alot of people and got a whole lot of business cards. But the single biggest thing I have learned, I am doing ok. I’ve learned about Chinese Manufacturing, but also learned that for the forseeable future it is better to print in America (or Europe, depending on where a particular book is going to sell better). I’ve learned about how I am doing well with branding my material, but I need to make a few tweeks in the future. I’ve met with Alliance and ACD Distributors and heard some interesting things about Pathfinder and Traveller (and how it is a smart idea to stick with those licenses for a while). Many other things as well, all lead me to believe that Jon Brazer Enterprises is on a good solid track for the future. There are some things we do need to do differently, but for the most part, we are doing well.

Also we are highly considering going to the Games Industry Gathering in 2011. Any other publishers considering going there as well?

2009 is fast coming to a close and 2010 is upon us. And Jon Brazer Enterprises is still around. So far, so good. Eight months in active operations and we’re going strong. A total of 36 products released and I am pleased with how all of them are doing. We started off this year with a few ideas: specifickly an expanded character sheet and an attempt at making a book of monsters for Traveller. Since then, we have released a series of tech items and a lists of names. But the biggest surprise to us is how well our little test product has performed for Pathfinder.

So what can you expect from Jon Brazer Enterprises in 2010? Well, the big news is that you can expect to see us more places. Hopefully your local game store. Last week, we signed an agreement to get us into distribution and into game stores. We are so excited about this. But this does mean a major shift in our released products to date. Pretty much the minimum page count for such products is 32 pages. That’s roughly twice as long as our longest product to date. So yes, we are permanently moving away from our 1-3 page product size model. This also means that our price per page will be going down (finally). We have not been happy with neither Lulu’s prices nor CafePress’s prices, but we’ve been pretty much been forced to charge around $10 for 16 page books to simply make a profit. We’ll moving to a different model which will cut our costs alot, allowing us to have more material.

To do this well, however, we will need your help. We will show you how you can help us get into game stores and detailing the incentive for doing so as the time gets closer. In this current economy, many game stores have cut back on products from smaller, relatively unknown companies and have stocked up on titles that are big sellers. To get into stores, you (their customers) have to ask your game stores to special order our titles. We’ll have a PDF on our website for you to print out and give to your local stores will all the ordering information that they need to make both your life and their life as easy as possible.

One of the harder part of entering distribution is now I have to plan ahead what we’re going to be producing. But I also get to get excited about what’s going out sooner. I’ve been telling myself for a while that my first Traveller book that’s going to hit game stores from us is a book of Mechs. Mech Tech ‘n’ bot: Mechs and Mercs is its current working name. It is shaping up to be a 32 page book of 20-25 mech stats and a mercenary company/military outfit’s mass combat stats that uses an individual mech in mass numbers. I personally am really exciting as, well, I love mechs, but also it is the first Traveller supplement to use the mass combat statistics as presented in the Mercenary Core Book from Mongoose Publishing. Ever wanted to have lead a company of mechs through an enemy city and take over? I know I always have wanted to. Now here’s your chance. We’re hoping to have this hit store shelves in early-to-mid April timeframe.

What is planned for Pathfinder you ask? I don’t want to say to much yet, but we have a book of themed monsters planned. There were a few design philosophies that are going into this book. The first and most important is no “hit point bots,” monsters that do little more than can absorb tons of damage. Each monster has atleast one unique ability or something else to surprise players. The first batch of rough drafts came in only a few days ago and I am cannot help but laugh like an evil wizard planning to rule the world. I’ll be beginning teasers in the mid-Feb/early March time frame. You can expect to see this toward the end of April or early May.

April and May are a bit of a ways off yet. In the meantime we will be continuing the d66 lists for Traveller and another Book of the Faithful for Pathfinder. We know these few offerings will not be satisfying your desires much, but we want to focus on these first print offerings as much as possible so things will be rather quiet from us for a little while.

We have a few other titles we will definitely be doing in the new year and many more we are strongly considering. If you have any suggestions as to what you would like to see from us, please feel free to leave us a reply here or send us an email.

Lastly you can meet us at several conventions. We will definitely be at GenCon and Gama Trade Show and are strongly looking at Origins and TravellerCon. We’re also looking into several smaller conventions in and around New Jersey. If you are planning to attend, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know.

Happy New Year to you all and be safe.
Dale McCoy, Jr
President
Jon Brazer Enterprises.

“Traveller” and the Traveller logo are Trademarks owned by Far Future Enterprises, Inc. and are used with permission. The Traveller Main Rulebook is available from Mongoose Publishing.

Pathfinder and associated marks and logos are trademarks of Paizo Publishing, LLC, and are used under license. See paizo.com/pathfinderRPG for more information on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.