Hello everyone, End Transmission Games’ Art Director here. I rarely make any blog posts but I wanted to pop in and let everyone know what’s been boiling on our end!

• Today is our first in-store demo at Fantasy Games and Hobbies in Mahwah, NJ! We’re gonna be bringing SPLINTER to the masses at this awesome FLGS. Everyone in the area should check them out, this store rocks.

• Very soon we’re going to be re-releasing two of our already-released tabletop games, Phantasm 2010 and Anathema. We’re most likely going to be putting them out as a PDF/Dead Tree bundle in the “dirt cheap” category, with all the requisite touchups to formatting and layout (less so in the case of Anathema, which already looks pretty).

• Two more full-length books are also on their way out the door, one based in the same system as Phantasm. Neither are anything like SPLINTER so be prepared.

• As we bolster our product line we’re going to start sending out press releases about our upcoming SPLINTER demo at Gen Con this summer. We’ll be at the con and available for interviews with RPG blogs, so if you want to schedule one, email us ASAP!

This was just a tiny update. Hopefully more soon :)

-Mik

For followers in the NYC tri-state area, we will be running a demo event of Splinter (8 player slots available, with copies of the game for sale) at Fantasy Games & Hobbies in Mahwah New Jersey. The demo will happen on Saturday, May 19th, exact time to be announced. If any of our followers are in the local area, we’d love to see you there.

In other news, other game projects are in various stages of completion, and I should probably blog about them soon.

Check it out. Hopefully a longer blog post later!

SPLINTER AT THE UN-STORE

Hey guys! Now you can own your very own copy of SPLINTER, the first tabletop RPG by End Transmission Games LLC! Hold it, touch it, taste it if you want. 

Don’t worry, both links are for the same product. The second one is just…in case you missed the first one.

We’d prefer you buy it from here (Lulu); besides running into us as at a convention, this is the closest you can get to buying the game directly from us, and as a small startup publisher we need the most generous margins possible, which we won’t get selling the book elsewhere online.

One word to describe ICON: exhausting. As some of the few reading this may know, I have major surgery coming up in just over a week. Distal ileoresectomy, my first intestional resection after thirteen years of suffering from Crohn’s. So I decided to spend a good chunk of the scant time before I get cut open not resting at home, spending time with loved ones, or quietly meditating on the fragile nature of life but…hawking my first-ever published roleplaying game at game-room demos and poached dealer’s room space and pretty much trying to sell it to anyone who would stop to listen to me ramble about it.  

From a business perspective, we sold more books than I feared, but less than I hoped. This is a marathon, though, not a sprint.

The weekend was full of memorable experiences, and while I’m too exhausted to properly recap them now, I know that if I wait and do it later it’ll never happen, so here goes in one glorious/hideous run-on sentence, and please excuse me if I met you and forgot your name; in spite constant sobriety, the entire weekend was a blur.

Highlights include: attending a “So You Want To Be A Game Designer” panel on Friday with every intention and of jumping up and screaming “I already am, ye jackals, now buy my book” only to realize that the woman on the right side of the panel was in fact M. Baker (as in that Baker) and I should probably shut up and listen; the team (average age: 15 y.o.) I ran our first demo for inexplicably falling on each other like a pack of wolves, team-killing one another in what was already a team-based PvP game, until only one of them was left, giggling with pure unadulterated joy the whole while, the sole survivor of that self-destructive team actually surviving to defeat the other team; I later made my first ever sale of the game to him; various delightful-yet-unknowing teenagers getting me to sign my hideous scrawl in their books, as though I was famous or mattered; having a mini-meltdown out in the hallway outside the gaming room while my second demo spiraled into unmitigated disaster from circumstances beyond my control and getting an unexpected impromptu pep talk from this guy; selling a book to one of the players of said demo and anyway and hearing what I needed to hear, that he understood it was not the game’s fault; running into Meguey Baker again and trading a copy of Splinter for a copy of Psi*Run (which I fully intend to play, given a spare moment) and ten U.S. dollars; and lastly, the crowning jewel, sitting down to playtest Broken Sky (thoughts later!) with the enthusiastic crew of Ember Games with whom we’d awkwardly jockeyed for position (and players) the previous day, a company in the exact same place that we are, alongside a first-generation gamer who regaled us with stories of when he “first sat down with Gary to play Dungeons & Dragons on photocopied sheets of paper, and Elf was a class” and how he playtested first edition Shadowrun, playing as the character “Iceman” who later became a frequent Shadowland poster and contributor; how my personal hero Tom Dowd was “a funny motherfucker” and often “bombed off his ass” while GMing.

Simply. Freaking. Awesome. 

- D. T. O. (4/2/2012) 

Here’s a nice clean PDF of our character sheet, so you can actually, you know, play the game!

Houston, we have books and they look…awesome.

Assuming that the wild winds of self-publishing blow our way (and I’ve heard no small amount of horror stories) Splinter will have its first ever (very small) print run available for sale at I-Con, in just one week! We’ll be running demo games there.
More importantly, we’ll have the book for sale!

***

***

 You are the Player

 Earth, 2471 AD. The only thing that matters is The Game. Whether you are a trained Professional—part A-list actor, part Major League athlete—or an unlucky Amateur, a conscripted gladiator, sentenced by an unjust totalitarian government—you are a Player. With an audience of millions watching your every move, you must Port into The Splinter, an emergent Virtual Reality mega-dungeon of nearly infinite size. There you will struggle in conflicts dire, for your very life, and for the entertainment of the masses.

 You are the Avatar

 The Splinter. Known to its natives—oblivious to the fact it’s a game—as the Realm. The Splinter is an ever-expanding, ever-changing megastructure that takes the form of a labyrinthine series of dungeon levels. At any given moment, a passage, a wall, or an entire level of the Splinter can transform, move, or disappear entirely. The inhabitants of the Splinter—taken on by Players as their Avatars—are equally strange; powerful shapeshifters gifted with the innate ability to alter reality through will alone. As one such posthuman demigod, you will make your mark.

 On dystopian Earth, only the rich and famous can afford personal freedoms. And the only way to get famous is to put on the best show you can… or die trying.

 In the Splinter, everything is out to kill you. Even fellow Avatars. And when you die in the Splinter, you die on Earth.

 Will you kill your way to wealth and fame, or fight the losing battle for freedom against a corrupt dictatorship?

 Will you become a star, or a smear on someone else’s highlight reel?

Here’s the new logo for our tabletop RPG, S.P.L.I.N.T.E.R.! More information about the game can be found below :)

Just got back from running Splinter at RPI’s Genericon. I think we got the word out to a small chunk of the roleplaying world, a lot of players had a lot of fun and seemed interested in buying the game (if only we had a game ready to sell!) and perhaps most importantly we got some in-depth feedback from some of our playtesters, some of whom were amateur/hobbyist game designers themselves and had combined gaming experience of a lot. In the next few days I’ll be trying to make what changes to the core rules I can in response to all the feedback and suggestions I received before we need to be into the art and layout process.

The second public playtest in particular was an experience—we were blown away when we got a full house of 12 players and things were certainly hectic and at times a bit heated. I might blog about the experience and my key take-aways from it in some more depth over at Tarot American some time in the next few weeks.

I-Con is Friday, March 30th to Sunday, April 1st 2012. We will have a table (presumably in the RPGs room? not sure yet) for most of the day (10AM-9PM) on Saturday, March 31st. We’ll be running one or possibly two live demos of the game in that time slot and we’ll try as hard as humanly possible to actually have the game for sale, too.