ABOUT:
Welcome to the website for Alternate Realities Publications. We specialize in the production of "Documentary Game Materials". In other words, rather than the vastly abridged materials presented in similar products, we provide you a product that is a bridge between simple gaming material on a subject and a dedicated coffeetable reference material like you might find in a book on the "airchair hobbyist" market. Currently, our products are predominantly available in PDF. However, we are making the move to bring our numerous offering to the print market via POD (Print-On-Demand) technology. Our preferred vendors in both categories are accessible via the links pertion of our menu.
Our flagship product line is Big Bang: The Mostly Ilustrated RPG Guide to Modern Weapons. Currently standing at more than fifty products available, this started as an open-ended series dedicated to detailing all the world's small arms developed since 1840. To date, we have published more than 800 pages of material, covering more than 1000 weapons and variants. Additionally, the product line goes well beyond just covering firearms. We have covered a wide range of material, including heavy support weapons like grenade launchers and RPGs, anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft guided missiles, land mines, and hand grenades. In 2004, we added military vehicle profiles to the line. Big Bang breaks down into three distinct product sub-lines. The main series provides larger volumes dealing with military small arms, the Mini-Bang series offers short, concise booklets covering specific topics, and the Ricochet series offers profiles of military vehicles and the heavier weapons they mount.
Our second line of "Documentary Game Materials" is Lost Destinations. With the first volume released just in time for Halloween in October 2004, this series will document for your games the many strange places of the real world; everything from haunted homes and towns to abandoned military facilities to strange regional legends. This series is expected to be produced at a rate of 3 volumes per year, and we are looking for regional authors to produce material for their local area.
Our third line is Modern Kyuujinjouhoushi. A Kyuujinjouhoushi is a job listing catalog in Japan, typically the size of your average phone book. We've taken that as a cue to develop enough character development material for D20 Modern to fill a phone book of our own. So far, we have produced 7 well received and truly innovative new character classes for the line, often introducing interesting new perspective and unusual ways of accomplishing goals.
A Bit of History
Alternate Realities Publications got its start in 1995 as a the outlet for publication efforts for The World of Barador Though a lot of hot air the first few years, the company bucked its way through a year's worth of product for a failed e-zine concept and finally, in 1998, published The World of Barador. Due to purely technical issues, the company closed its doors in early 2000. After several years in hiatus, the company returned to the market in March, 2003 with its new flagship product line, Big Bang, the Mostly Illustrated RPG Guide to Modern Weapons. For fiscal 2004, we ranked #30 of 287 vendors on RPGNow, with 10 products moving more than 100 units, including two moving more than 200, one moving more than 300 and one moving more than 500. For 2005, we are expanding the company. Not only are we are producing at least 25 products per year, with every intention of staying in business for the long run, but we are also delving once again into the print medium, putting five products to paper in the first month of 2005 alone.
Here is our original company logo. Even for something ten years old, it isn't a pretty sight, eh? But that was then and this is now. The only vestige remaining of that logo is the galaxy swirl we'll be putting on the spine of every book that goes to mass print.
ARP was also one of the pioneer publishers of PDF, being only the third company to make PDFs an option for our publications. Only Microtactix and BTRC managed to make PDFs available for sale online before us. With more than 10 years of experience in dealing with the trials and tribulations of PDFs, you can be assured that you'll have few problems viewing our products on your computer. Most of our PDFs are compliant with some of the oldest and most widely supported PDF standards, making them readable on PDF viewers as old as Acrobat Reader for DOS 2.0. Those utilizing internal programming are readable with Acrobat Reader 4.
Operations
Business operations here at ARP are in part conducted with an experimental basis. Since 2003, the premise has been to see how far and how fast the company can grow, starting with nothing more than $100 in capital. To that end, a number of somewhat unusual policies have been adopted for the company.
First is a paperless work environment. Paper can never be completely eliminated, as there will always be someone who holds onto a preference for paper and forces that preference upon you. However, aside from a box full of receipts and a few copies of contracts, we've done pretty well.
Operating on a shoestring budget requires minimized expenses. With our move to print, publication will rely on POD, even if the products enter the traditional distribution system. Print runs are getting smaller, pre-press fees are getting higher, paper is getting more expensive, and the overhead associated with storage is also increasing. Even now, we are moving in on a point where a 1500 unit print run doesn't cost but a few hundred dollars more via POD than it does the traditional way and our products are competitively priced. Within two to three years, even this slim margin will be weathered away to nothing, via overhead and storage costs generated by the unsold copies of a traditional print run. And while we're not making quite as much per unit sold as they guy who printed 1500 copies at once, we don't pay any storage fees, we don't need to engage in inventory control, we'll never absolutely have to list any product as out-of-print and most importantly, we don't have thousands of dollars of capital tied up in slow-moving product as we wait from a print run to sell through.
PDFs. Our business relies heavily on PDF sales. The PDF is the way of the future. Why suffer a bad back lugging around 30 lbs or more of the essential books, when a 10 lb laptop can not only hold everything you absolutely need, but all the material you might have use for and everything you're sure you won't touch but better bring to be on the safe side as well? Especially when a publisher keeps his products search-indexed for Acrobat? The only thing holding back this change is the cost of laptops, as most gamers haven't caught on to the fact that a $300 P2 500 MHz laptop is as capable of handling your PDFs as a $3000 P4 2.6 GHz laptop. But the day is coming and it will be here in just a few short years. There's a $100 laptop that is expected to enter production sometime in 2007, and Microsoft introduced Origami, a mini-computer somewhere between laptop and PDA, running Windows XP. So now is the time to start building up the marketplace and becoming an industry leader for the day the old laptops begin to rule the gaming world. Also, PDFs represent a significantly larger profit margin over books, and help offset the profit lost by using POD.
Gun Opera was designed as an alternative damage system for D20 modern, but rapidly spun out of control into a scientific analysis and quantification of the wound effects of many types of weapons, designed as a general drop-in combined wound and damage system for any roleplaying game. Gun Opera is due to soon spin out of control again, simplified and expanded into a stand-alone combat system that will truly reflect the movie genre from which it derives its name. Tentatively called Gun Opera: The Sequel, this expansion will also form the core of our long-awaited CyberThriller RPG.
Bargain Wheels is a line of papercraft miniature vehicles, scaled to 1/60 or 30mm scale, appropriate for use with most miniatures. Bargain Wheels differs from other similar products in that production is done via a CAD process rather than the expensive traditional process of manual trial and error, allowing for models that can rely on curves for contours, rather than folded corners and seams. However, many of the models are complex, making them inappropriate for those without the patience to build them. The line is soon evolving, moving off RPGNow to our own storefront, where the vehicles will be sold individually.
The World of Barador was the first game we published, way back in 1998, after three years in business and nearly five years of game development. The game was fairly well accepted, but never produced much support due to an extremely unfortunate (some say cursed) series of hard drive failures that destroyed over 70 different manuscripts for the line. The game is currently undergoing revision to use the same core system as CyberThriller.
We do publish a number of other odd and ends, as no business can move ahead without the experimentation needed to improve itself. We have produced numerous quirky products over the years, ranging from a variety of certificates for revenge by jilted women, a cookbook dedicated to cheaply feeding large groups of people, and a number of odd novels. These odd products pop up from time to time and typically don't fit into any other product line, thus ending up as part of our 5000-series odd'n'ends.
