In honor of giant spiders, dark elves, and old-school gaming by candlelight, our Spider Queen t-shirts are on sale between now and Halloween for $9.99!

Get one for your favorite grognard, and he can wear it while telling you what it was like back when elf, dwarf, and halfling were classes, not races; when every dungeon was filled with save-or-die traps; when demons were classified by number, not name; and when hiding a sphere of annihilation in the mouth of a devil’s-face sculpture was clever and original rather than tauntingly cruel, dammit!

I finally have the chance to do something I’ve been wanting to pursue for quite some time: Printing my own custom battle maps. Initial test prints look exceptional, so we’ve started producing our first design and added it to the store’s inventory.

Ultimately, I want to produce new maps with some regularity — most likely once a month, drawing from my own Saga Edition campaign to create exciting adventure locales.  This not only allows me to show off to my players (”Look! Brand new full-color maps!”) but also gives me a chance to take the map for an extensive test drive during the game, hopefully allowing me to spot any unexpected tactical quirks that might need adjustment.

This is still in its earliest stages and we’re evaluating paper and ink costs as we go, but at least for the time being we’re making these new 24″ x 36″ single-sided maps available at an introductory price of just $4.99.

In addition, we will very shortly be providing a map-printing service: You send us a full-scale, full-color 24″ x 36″ image, and we’ll print it up for the same introductory price of $4.99.  In you have an oversize map you need printed, we can do larger prints — for example, a 36″ x 48″ map (twice as big as normal) would cost $9.99. (We can print maps of up to several feet in length, but no more than 36″ wide.)

We’re still working out the final details (hence the introductory price, as we still need to see it in action to calculate our actual overhead), but I’m confident that this service will remain far less expensive than any print-on-demand alternative.  I’ve never seen a custom 23″ x 35″ poster for anything less than $15 to $20, and even offset printing requires you to print hundreds or thousands of posters to get a price this low.
Here’s the complete item description for our first custom map:

CUSTOM MAPS: Deep Space (Starship Battles) - $4.99 Original map: GMSarli Games exclusive! This single-sided map is printed on high-quality heavyweight matte paper (210 g/m^2, 10.2 mil) measuring 24 x 36 inches. It shows a stellar grid compatible with the Starship Battles set and the starship combat rules in Saga Edition. It represents deep space, with the distant glow of the galaxy in the background (much like the Milky Way in the Earth’s sky). Unlike most battle maps, it uses 2-inch squares in its grid, making it the same scale as that used in the Saga Edition rulebook as well as that used in the miniatures game. In addition, it is compatible with a 1-inch grid as well because the center of each square has hash marks to show where the edges of each 1-inch square would be. (A close-up is provided in the product image here.) Because of this, you can play at whatever scale is most convenient for any given encounter.

OK, so I finally got around to integrating some social networking — Facebook and twitter — into the online presence of GMSarli Games.  I’ve been using both for quite some time, but other than a brief experiment with using twitter at Gen Con for game announcements, I hadn’t created a business-oriented version of either.

Well, that’s finally changed, so go check out the GMSarli Games fan page on Facebook and my twitter feed.

You might be asking what the difference will be between the store’s RSS feed (i.e. where this post is located), the Facebook fan page, and the twitter feed.  Here’s the distinction between them that I’ll try to use:

• The RSS feed will henceforth be used exclusively for news updates about the store itself: sales, specials, convention appearances, new products or features, etc.
• The Facebook fan page will include a lot of stuff not directly related to the store’s day-to-day operations (e.g. photos from Gen Con), and I hope it can become a place for exploring and discussing new ideas for both the store and for gaming in general.  Because Facebook supports discussion boards as well as comments on individual items, it’s more conducive to a back-and-forth dialog with customers, Q&A posts, and the like.  (In addition, when I post an update to the Facebook page, I have it set up to send a copy to my twitter feed as well; however, this only includes updates to the “front page,” not comments and discussions.)
• The twitter feed is actually my personal twitter account, so you will find some day-to-day personal stuff there.  Though a lot of it is about the store and gaming, you’ll find my reactions to the news of the day and/or random thoughts.  (As noted above, Facebook updates are copied here, but the twitter feed has its own content; since the medium is more soliloquy than conversation, you’ll see a different type of content on twitter.)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!  You can make a comment on this post or go to Facebook and start a discussion topic — either way, I’ll see it and respond as soon as possible.