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Aracon
April 5th, 2010, 16:59
I'll post more in this thread as we play but wanted to display some CoC shots.

Foen
April 6th, 2010, 06:18
Nice maps of the Corbett House!

Aracon
April 7th, 2010, 04:21
Thanks... wouldn't have been possible without the cool CoC ruleset ;)

In ages past I was a cartographer and this was my first work in almost two decades. Dundjinni was a handy little program even though it was a royal pain to install... I prefer something a bit more sophisticated but it got a pretty good feel for the House in about an hour per map.

I'll have all of the maps from the ruleset done up in a week or two and had offered to touch them up to be a bit more professional (legends, scale, official Dundjinni stamp, credits, etc) and added as an offering here (either as an add on to the rulesets or a separate item) but there doesn't seem to be much of a demand for CoC maps.

drahkar
April 7th, 2010, 08:02
I'm a firm believer of 'Content drives the market'. I feel that the reason that Savage Worlds is the most popular ruleset is because it has the most content available to people. So by that understanding, if you want to bring in more CoC interest, give them the content. Once its there they will start coming more and more. :)

GunnarGreybeard
April 7th, 2010, 11:49
I'm a firm believer of 'Content drives the market'. I feel that the reason that Savage Worlds is the most popular ruleset is because it has the most content available to people. So by that understanding, if you want to bring in more CoC interest, give them the content. Once its there they will start coming more and more. :) I agree with that especially when it comes to adventure related content. Anything that helps the DM reduce their design time and gets him and his players into a game and using the FG interface only ramps up interest. I find the hardest part so far is getting my content into FG and getting PC's created. Its not the technical part thats difficult, its the time needed to get it all into the system and ready to go for me as a DM.

Aracon
April 7th, 2010, 15:02
I agree that setup time is a bit time consuming. It would be nice to have a customizable character generation tool for each ruleset that can import (or built in).

For Call of Cthulhu, I purchased several PDFs through Drivethrurpg to create a few modules for FG2, but the scans were absolutely horrible. When cut and pasting it picks up both columns, the text is tough to read so even re-typing it is difficult and in Secrets of New York, built in images interfere with text.

It's been two months since I spent the money and have heard nothing back from Chaosium either through Doug or my own inquiries.

While I like Call of Cthulhu, the current management of Chaosium appears to be absolutely unresponsive to someone who is both a customer and willing to put the time in for them to generate revenue and they don't have the professionalism to at least respond... "sucks to be you to buy one of our crappy scans. too bad... go find a better copy out on a torrent....or scan one yourself"

Peabody
April 21st, 2010, 03:15
So, were you tempted to also do a map for the burned out church that goes along with this classic scenario?

Aracon
April 21st, 2010, 17:00
I actually was planning on doing up all of the maps for the scenarios but haven't seen much interest either from Choasium or FG2. I have the Cooked Manse maps pretty much done (with a few changes).

If there is some interest and I have some time and could somehow package up the map set as a download I'd do it. We're doing some fundraising for Childrens Hospital so any proceeds would go to that.

Peabody
April 21st, 2010, 20:25
Take heart. I get the impression that Chaosium is ultimately a small shop run by a few people (some of whom aren't even in the same city!) and that significant steps require significant time for them to take.
It's been a few years since I felt I had any insight to the goings on there, so feel free to disabuse me of any mistaken belief regarding that fine company.

Drahkar is absolutely right, the content is key. At the same time, if you are putting sweat equity into developing content requires another party's approval or cooperation then I can certainly see why you would feel frustrated.

I represent a group of four potential FG2 customers. We shared a dynamic CoC gaming experience for many years and now distance makes that impossible. We are the target market for FG2 & the CoC license. We need content. We need H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham.

I hope you get the support you need to continue the work you are doing & I hope Chaosium & Fantasy Grounds continue to work together to grow the license & its potential.

Aracon
April 21st, 2010, 20:51
I purchased the PDFs for Arkham, NYC and Miskatonic U from Drive thru RPG to input them into FG2 as per what I thought was at a project for FG2. I invested a significant amount of money on the pdfs and found they do not cut and paste correctly and are poorly scanned. Over two months later I have heard nothing. If I cared to look I could likely find better scanned copies that I could cut and paste and finish up the three projects for free out on a torrent, but I tried to do the right thing and...

nothing.

I offered up maps and I have heard there was no target market for them. I am leary to offer them up elsewhere such as at Maptools or Battlegrounds due to IP issues.

I am currently running three large CoC groups on FG2 and am using this stuff and am working on cool props including library cards, real census data from the 20's etc. but when I hear nothing from either Chaosium or FG2 then none of that sees the light of day.

FG2 is aware of this as I have exchanged countless emails with Doug... its Chaosium who clearly is missing a golden sales opportunity to have Arkham, Miskatonic U, Secrets of NY, and dozens of maps done up where they reap in a % of the cash for doing nothing more than giving out professional copies of PDFs to paying customers and responding to FG2.

Tis a shame, but many a game company has gone and withered due to poor business skills.

As a clarification, my frustration is that I invested money and got a crappy pdf product from Chaosium. I could care less if they choose to pass up a revenue opportunity of my data entry into FG2, but bein g told to buy PDFs to do the project and then getting a pathetic product is, quite frankly, not indicative of a "fine company", so I would have to sternly agree to disagree with your praise of whomever currently runs Chaosium.

Aracon
April 21st, 2010, 23:32
I added another screen shot up top.

Peabody
April 22nd, 2010, 00:36
Hey, that looks mighty fine!

Aracon
April 22nd, 2010, 01:01
Thanks.

I'm working on quite a few more maps including sites in Arkham, NYC and the really neat supplements of historical/haunted houses from Miskatonic U press.

hal_mayne
May 6th, 2010, 10:21
nice looking maps, I'm jealous now :)

moonbeast
July 29th, 2010, 02:45
I agree that setup time is a bit time consuming. It would be nice to have a customizable character generation tool for each ruleset that can import (or built in).

For Call of Cthulhu, I purchased several PDFs through Drivethrurpg to create a few modules for FG2, but the scans were absolutely horrible. When cut and pasting it picks up both columns, the text is tough to read so even re-typing it is difficult and in Secrets of New York, built in images interfere with text.


Aracon,

I know it's not your fault for not knowing, BUT... please know that the CoC PDFs sold at the DriveThroughRPG website are of an inferior (crappy scan) quality compared to the better-rendered (hi-resolution) PDFs sold directly at the Chaosium Website itself. How do I know? I made the same mistake myself a couple years ago. First I started buying a few of the (crappy) CoC PDFs from DriveThroughRPG, and I thought I wasted my money. The quality was horrible, and barely printable. Then months later, I bought a couple directly from Chaosium's own PDF shop, and realized that the quality was 5 levels superior.

Of course, it's always a lesson of "you get what you pay for". The DriveThrough PDFs are cheaper (and thus lower quality). The ones sold at Chaosium direct are a bit more expensive (but the quality of the PDFs make them a good value).

My take on this? Chaosium SHOULD HAVE revoked DriveThroughRPG's license to distribute and sell (poorly-scanned) PDFs of the Call of Cthulhu line.

I have, by the way, months ago, purchased PDF and/or JPEG maps from Chaosium of things like the Arkham city map, and I can tell you that the Chaosium digital files are like what? Like 20 MEGABYTES huge? Right. Those are called "hi-quality" JPEG map files. Nothing crappy about that. Those are perfect for printing out, or even resizing for online digital map ("battlemap") usage for FantasyGrounds.

Again, your accusation should be towards DriveThroughRPG, because they sold you crappy quality PDFs, blurry, poorly scanned, not very hi-res. My advice: stop buying from them.

moonbeast,
a YSDC veteran

https://catalog.chaosium.com/product_info.php?cPath=70&products_id=2428
Click above link to see what I'm talking about. The Arkham Town Map PDF alone (digital download bundled when you purchase the Arkham PDF book) is a 34 megabyte file. Very very very very very very FREAKING HI-quality resolution. Seriously, you could print this out on a poster-sized paper. Your gripe about low-quality PDFs.... is due to DriveThroughPDF's crappy digital files they sell.

Aracon
July 29th, 2010, 05:33
Moonbeast,

FYI Chaosium had crappy scans as well. I purchased one from them. Apparenty they are well aware of the issue because at one point (after I posted here but no longer on the site for me to reference) I saw a "crappy scan" disclaimer, probably due to so many complaints.

In any event, if a dealer sells a defective item under agreement from the manufacturer, both are responsible.

If Choasium remotely cared about their customers they would not only get the better scans to locations they are making money from but also ensure anyone who had purchased the crap ones get a good scan.

Our email records are on file and it should be a simple mass email to clean up their mess.

Aracon
July 29th, 2010, 05:36
Moonbeast,

For example, Secrets of New York was updated on 6/10/2010 prior to that date the scan was garbage.

Source:

Requires Purchase Secrets of New York PDF 06/10/2010 11

Link:
https://catalog.chaosium.com/fdm_folder_files.php?fPath=19_29

StuartW
July 29th, 2010, 06:03
Interestingly, and quite helpfully, Choasium now site the source of their PDFs as either 'Scanned from printed boooks' or 'Created from electronic files', which helps the buyer understand the likely reproduction quality.

I bought Superworld a good while back, and it is scanned from out-of-print hardcopy books: Chaosium no longer had any original electronic media (if there ever were any, as it was printed in 1984).

Stuart

Arnuphis
July 29th, 2010, 07:20
Late to the party I know, but I loved those maps!

moonbeast
July 29th, 2010, 07:39
Moonbeast,

FYI Chaosium had crappy scans as well. I purchased one from them. Apparenty they are well aware of the issue because at one point (after I posted here but no longer on the site for me to reference) I saw a "crappy scan" disclaimer, probably due to so many complaints.

Aracon, I don't doubt that you also were disappointed with Chaosium's earlier scanned PDFs. However, as Stuart noted (his post is below yours that I am quoting), Stuart noted that Chaosium (only in the past year I think) have distinguished on their website what type of PDF you are buying from them.

1) The "scanned" books are most likely the ones we think are "crappy" quality.

2) The ones copied from electronic files are going to be the ones with somewhat better quality. In fact, I have several of them, and they are what a decent Adobe PDF file should be. They are higher resolution, and the text (inside the PDF) are searchable! Most likely they used some professional-grade OCR program to accomplish this translation from paper books to digital book.

Anyways, I'm not here to debate you, simply trying to make a distinction (and inform other CoC Keepers) that not all Call of Cthulhu commercial PDFs are created equal. I apologize if my earlier post was not clear.

Regarding Chaosium's unresponsiveness: Yeah, I totally agree with you. Chaosium is generally an unresponsive company, it feels like they take forever to respond, and even longer to listen to the thousands of requests/wish-lists of their customers. Sadly, most of us have known this for years, as Chaosium had been on the brink of bankruptcy/insolvency at least once or twice, and they always hint that cash flow at Chaosium does not come easy (hence projects are delayed for months or years). You know... this is one of those things that we simply cannot do anything about. It's probably a blessing (or pure luck) that Chaosium still exists as a company. You know why I don't gripe about this? Because I have lowered my expectations of Chaosium long ago. Venting at Chaosium won't do anything to make them a more successful company. Sending them 'suggestions' will not help much, because you are likely the 100th person to suggest to them the same thing, which they have ignored the same suggestions for years.

I truly believe that the staffers at Chaosium would *LOVE* to listen and follow our suggestions, but somehow they are in no shape or situation to go that route. According to some of Dustin's blogs, Chaosium often struggles just to keep its head above water.