Here's the skinny. Color copies of the book are no longer available.
The reason for this is because the press that the 'Goose purchased wasn't able to perform as advertised. This lead to the hard decision for Mongoose to stop printing in house and go back to outsourced printing. The good news there is that the printing issues are a thing of the past. The bad news is that financially, color is just way to expensive to produce and turn a profit.
We (WildFire) were only making enough money to pay for production on CthulhuTech. After putting in thousands of hours of work into just the core book alone, there was no financial reward to coincide. WildFire consists of 3 guys that did the lions share of work on the book and we all do it as an escape from our day jobs. i.e. I designed all the mechs, tagers, uniforms, and art directed the book while I was still on active duty in the US Navy. So we're not living large somewhere and just have money to burn. We love this industry, and we want to produce a product that looks as good as the big guys.
On the financial reasons; to print 1 copy of CthulhuTech it cost over $40. That price doesn't include shipping at international rates. Also keep in mind that Mongoose gets a cut of the profits for their services through printing, marketing, and distribution. With an MSRP of $49.95 you can make an educated guess as to what our (WildFire's) first check for selling 1,000 copies in December was. All our money is going out the door to pay for production on books in progress and we (the partners at WildFire) would like to turn a profit and get paid for our hard work. We are still producing books, and will continue to do so. However, if we continued the full color runs, we'd be closing up shop by years end.
We love playing RPG's and now, designing them! Our idealistic goal by printing in color and putting allot of love into producing CTech was that the industry would take notice and turn up their production values. I also secretly hoped that we'd be a run away hit and sell a few thousand copies in the first month. We did really well as a new comer although, not having product on the shelves due to printing issues have left us profit free over the last 3 1/2 months. Because of the way that CTech looked in color, an inside source at a major company has told me that they are starting a full color line because of CTech! That in itself is a great victory!
We will still be developing all the major books i.e. Core and 'Vade Mecum' in full color, they'll just be printed in B&W. So if you want the color version of the Core Book or Vade Mecum, the pdf's will fulfill that demand. We're hoping that someday we'll be making enough to afford color runs and as such, we'll continue to layout and design books in full color to prepare for the day that we can.
Cheers,
Mike
I agree with you Strom that every RPG needs prewritten adventures and in particular a play out of the box demo up front. So I wrote my own and it can be found here if you are interested:
