We are happy to announce the availability of a new book: Zone Stalkers, in print and PDF, the release of the PDF equivalent of the upcoming Fourth Printing of the Eclipse Phase core rulebook, and a re-aligning of our prices of electronic books.
Zone Stalkers
Zone Stalkers is a gamemaster-focused sourcebook for Eclipse Phase:
- Send players to the most perilous place on Mars—for Firewall, or for profit!
- Perimeter Security: How authorities keep the Zone quarantined – and how to get around it.
- Threats: New monsters, NPCs, and environmental hazards to challenge players.
- Locations: TITAN facilities, ruined habitats, and denizens' lairs.
- Plot Hooks: Reasons to visit the second most awful place in the solar system.
Zone Stalkers is a 19-page adventure presented via Print-on-Demand and as a layered PDF with hyperlinks.
Eclipse Phase, Fourth Printing
The Fourth Printing of Eclipse Phase is currently at the bindery, but the update to the PDF version is available now! If you have already bought it on DriveThruRPG, you will find the updated version in your library, and all new purchasers will have immediate access to the updated version. An errata file is also available.
Price Realignment
As of today, most Eclipse Phase PDFs and ePubs are now priced slightly higher than they used to be; we are re-aligning our prices to better match with the current market. We released Eclipse Phase in 2009 with an aggressive pricing strategy -- at that time, most RPG PDFs (ePubs weren't yet a thing) were priced at least 50% of the print cover price: it wasn't uncommon to see $25-35 as a price point for core book PDFs. At the time, before we were our own publisher, we promised our publisher that if our titles didn't gross the same in PDF as another more expensive title they were offering, we would pay the difference out of our royalties. We didn't end up owing them a thing; Eclipse Phase was very successful at $15.00.
In the years since, many publishers followed our lead, and the price of gaming PDFs has dropped as print prices have risen. However, PDF prices have hit an equilibrium that is slightly higher than the prices we were charging, and we now think that the benefits of our low pricing have paid off and it's no longer as beneficial to keep prices that low.
Specifically, we had been running into two problems over the last year:
* With such low prices to begin with, it is hard to price Eclipse Phase titles at sale prices. As the Eclipse Phase game line moves on, attracting new customers becomes harder, and sales are one tool to do so; a tool that we couldn't use very effectively.
* With our POD/PDF sourcebooks (typically under 32 pages) and our regular sourcebooks (176+ pages) priced at $5.00 and $10.00, respectively, we had little wiggle room for "in-between" books, those that may be 36 or 64 pages.
There's also the intangible factor that, in a crowd of core books that are typically priced at $19.99, would someone assume something is wrong with Eclipse Phase and pass it over based on price?
So, effective immediately, the price re-alignment leads us to these prices:
* Eclipse Phase core rulebook: $19.99
* Large releases like Sunward, Transhuman, and Gatecrashing: $14.99
* Medium releases (32 pages or larger): $9.99 (typically $14.99 for print; 18.98 for print + PDF bundle)
* Small releases (under 32 pages): $4.99 (typically $9.99 for print, 11.98 for print + PDF bundle)
* Hack Packs: $4.99
* Short Stories: $0.99
Now, what hasn't changed?
* If you buy one of our electronic books from DriveThruRPG, you get free updates whenever we revise the book -- and one of those updates happened today, to the Eclipse Phase core rulebook!
* All of our Eclipse Phase titles are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license, which means: you are free to copy, share, and remix the text and artwork within Eclipse Phase Books book under the following conditions: 1) you do so only for noncommercial purposes; 2) you attribute Posthuman Studios; 3) you license any derivatives under the same license.
We understand that nobody likes rising prices, but we trust that you respect the quality and value of our games and books, and we have some great stuff brewing for you in the near future!