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Post by Zipp on Aug 11, 2018 15:33:54 GMT
Wanted to start this thread to hopefully keep up with any news on republishing the newer versions of the books. I know this was mentioned quite a bit on Joe’s facebook page before he passed and continues to pop up now and again as an official “goal” of the current people involved with Lone Wolf. But as of yet, I have not heard any concrete news on the actual republishing. If anyone knows more about the situation or the barriers to republishing, let us know!
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Post by firestone on Aug 15, 2018 15:42:10 GMT
I agree that I would be interested in the reprints. Especially as the Mongoose editions are selling second-hand at extortionate prices on Amazon and are therefore out of my reach.
I suspect that there are untold factors we cannot know about affecting this: the estate of Joe Dever and the ability and finances of his family to deal with anything beyond their loss and perhaps ensuring the new book comes out. The copyrights and contracts and self publishing costs.
I have never been lucky enough to ever own a Collectors Edition and it is only NOW that I realise from reviews that they are utterly different and better creations. With an extra adventure much like Storms of Chai (my first experience of an extra adventure).
If it ever reaches a point where it is unlikely that the Collectors Editions will get republished, I hope that somehow the amazing work that ProjectAon has done means that they are gifted the ability to disseminate them. I for one would immediately volunteer to be part of the transcribing/testing process.
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Post by Nym90 on Aug 15, 2018 22:31:55 GMT
I agree that I would be interested in the reprints. Especially as the Mongoose editions are selling second-hand at extortionate prices on Amazon and are therefore out of my reach. I suspect that there are untold factors we cannot know about affecting this: the estate of Joe Dever and the ability and finances of his family to deal with anything beyond their loss and perhaps ensuring the new book comes out. The copyrights and contracts and self publishing costs. I have never been lucky enough to ever own a Collectors Edition and it is only NOW that I realise from reviews that they are utterly different and better creations. With an extra adventure much like Storms of Chai (my first experience of an extra adventure). If it ever reaches a point where it is unlikely that the Collectors Editions will get republished, I hope that somehow the amazing work that ProjectAon has done means that they are gifted the ability to disseminate them. I for one would immediately volunteer to be part of the transcribing/testing process. Completely agree. The fact that the prices are so high on Amazon shows that demand clearly exists for more books to be printed and sold. Failing that, I agree that putting them on Project Aon would be great. Even if they had to be behind a paywall, I would gladly pay to access these versions in electronic form. |
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Post by Ofecks on Aug 16, 2018 10:23:58 GMT
Did whoever picked up the license from Mongoose make it to book 28? If not, how many are left?
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Post by spartanroarke on Aug 16, 2018 12:43:03 GMT
The last books to be published were 22 and 29. The first Grey Star book also got a CE, and the second was on Kickstarter recently. LW 23 was offered as a preorder several years ago, but the company (Manticore? Maybe the company after Manticore?) dropped the LW license before it shipped. Supposedly there are plans to reprint the earlier CE’s and finish publishing 23-28, but who knows if we will ever see them. The only books possibly coming soon, that we know of, are Grey Star 2 and a non-english edition of LW30, both slated for holiday 2018.
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aggsol
Kai Lord
Thinking about gamebooks...
Posts: 53
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Post by aggsol on Aug 17, 2018 9:25:33 GMT
The last books to be published were 22 and 29. The first Grey Star book also got a CE, and the second was on Kickstarter recently. LW 23 was offered as a preorder several years ago, but the company (Manticore? Maybe the company after Manticore?) dropped the LW license before it shipped. Supposedly there are plans to reprint the earlier CE’s and finish publishing 23-28, but who knows if we will ever see them. The only books possibly coming soon, that we know of, are Grey Star 2 and a non-english edition of LW30, both slated for holiday 2018. Manitkor released in April 2018 a German edition of "Mydnight's Hero" as #3 of the New Order books. They got a new numbering and title design (I wish they had the style of the Swedish covers *sigh*). The German title translates to "The Crown of Siyen". I guess the German license for LW is still valid as the German edition of "Rune War" (New Order #4) is already dated for April 2019. Where is LW30 released? Btw the German edition of Greystar #3 is dated for July 2019 |
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Post by lorddarkstorm on Aug 18, 2018 7:30:11 GMT
I really hope we do end up getting the reprints. It does stick in my craw a bit having "Maters of Darkness", and how low quality the early mongoose books were. Of course, the most important thing is getting 30-32 and the expanded Hunger of Sejanoz. But I would buy all the reprints that come out. Hopefully all the errata in those books are fixed too. The last books to be published were 22 and 29. The first Grey Star book also got a CE, and the second was on Kickstarter recently. LW 23 was offered as a preorder several years ago, but the company (Manticore? Maybe the company after Manticore?) dropped the LW license before it shipped. Supposedly there are plans to reprint the earlier CE’s and finish publishing 23-28, but who knows if we will ever see them. The only books possibly coming soon, that we know of, are Grey Star 2 and a non-english edition of LW30, both slated for holiday 2018. Manitkor released in April 2018 a German edition of "Mydnight's Hero" as #3 of the New Order books. They got a new numbering and title design (I wish they had the style of the Swedish covers *sigh*). The German title translates to "The Crown of Siyen". I guess the German license for LW is still valid as the German edition of "Rune War" (New Order #4) is already dated for April 2019. Where is LW30 released? Btw the German edition of Greystar #3 is dated for July 2019 LW30 is being released in Italy, the script is pretty much finished (in proofreading right now), and it's currently being translated. Apparently it's a Maakengorge focused book. Maybe we'll finally see a flesh and blood Vashna! Here's the clean cover art:  |
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Post by Black Cat on Aug 22, 2018 20:00:47 GMT
A little history of the republication of the gamebooks:
-Book 1 to 17: Mongoose Publishing (2007-2013)
-Book 18 to 22: Mantikore Verlag (2013-2015)
-Cubicle 7 got the rights in December 2015, but in April 2016, they dropped them.
-Book 29: Holmgard Press (2016)
Currently, the books are being printed in Swedish, French, German and Italian (the French and Italian publishers have even published book 29. I don't know for the other languages).
As for book 30, the Italian publisher will make it available this fall, at the Lucca Comics & Games (31st of October to 4th of November). As for the English version, on the official Lone Wolf Facebook page, we can read this: "The English edition will be made available. How, where and when is something we are busy arranging. Have faith."
We still have no info on the republication of book 23 to 28 in English.
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Post by Zipp on Aug 25, 2018 5:28:51 GMT
I'm no longer on Facebook, but if they release any info about Book 30, let me know and I'll preorder one. A Maakengorge adventure sounds fantastic. I love that Vashna keeps returning...
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Post by Lucy Van Pelt on Aug 28, 2018 13:32:27 GMT
A little history of the republication of the gamebooks: -Book 1 to 17: Mongoose Publishing (2007-2013) -Book 18 to 22: Mantikore Verlag (2013-2015) -Cubicle 7 got the rights in December 2015, but in April 2016, they dropped them. -Book 29: Holmgard Press (2016) Currently, the books are being printed in Swedish, French, German and Italian (the French and Italian publishers have even published book 29. I don't know for the other languages). As for book 30, the Italian publisher will make it available this fall, at the Lucca Comics & Games (31st of October to 4th of November). As for the English version, on the official Lone Wolf Facebook page, we can read this: "The English edition will be made available. How, where and when is something we are busy arranging. Have faith." We still have no info on the republication of book 23 to 28 in English. Thanks for the info. |
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Post by rhygar on Apr 14, 2022 20:03:23 GMT
A little history of the republication of the gamebooks: -Book 1 to 17: Mongoose Publishing (2007-2013) -Book 18 to 22: Mantikore Verlag (2013-2015) -Cubicle 7 got the rights in December 2015, but in April 2016, they dropped them. -Book 29: Holmgard Press (2016) Can someone explain fully and plainly why this happened? I'm referring to the books going from one publisher to the other like this, with nothing ever finished. There are various snippets of information scattered around the Internet and Project Aon but making sense of it is not easy, and the information feels incomplete. The Wikipedia Page Lone Wolf (gamebooks) is too vague and doesn't answer my questions which usually start with the word ' why?' Can someone here fill in the gaps? Like why did Mongoose Publishing stop printing the books? Why the same thing with Mantikore Verlag? And especially why did Cubicle 7 not print them? I'm not looking for people to start chucking accusations at others I just want to know what had been going on. |
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Post by Black Cat on Apr 14, 2022 22:00:29 GMT
Alright, let's dive in the past: 1-Mongoose PublishingFebruary 27th 2013, here's what Joe mentionned: linkAbout the same time, here's what Matthew Sprange had to say: So, nothing has been said officially about why the line has been stopped at Mongoose, but we can deduce a few things based on certain elements. Mongoose had just started their own printing facility when they launched the first few CE books. At that time, printing their own books was a good way to cut down on the price of the books, which allowed Mongoose to offer the Mega-Deals (£299/599 USD for all 32 gamebooks + the two trilogies of novels). I remember that Matthew Sprange did say that the response to the Mega-Deals was so great that there was nothing to fear for the LW line. And then, after the first few books were out, we discovered numerous printing issues and that some of the books were falling apart. It cost a lot to Mongoose to fix these errors at the printing facility and with the customers (I myself got a spare copy of book 8 because 2 sections were omitted in the bonus adventure). So they abandonned printing the books themselves and went on with a printer outside Mongoose, which raised the production cost but lower the financial risk for Mongoose (if there had been a missing section in a future book, it would had been the responsibility of the new printer to replace the books, not Mongoose). We then noticed a price hike on the books and people started to reconsider buying them. With less people buying books, the price to produce them was higher, hence more price hikes. Of course, Mongoose still had to give the books to the Mega-Deal buyers who, at the time, had paid for books that were supposed to be cheaper to produce. It was good for the next few books, but then, at the end of book 12, I got the feeling that they got rid of the two illustrators (Alberto Dal Lago and Richard Longmore) to go with other ones which were less expensive (but were still very good). And at the same time, we started to see long delays between publication of the books: while we had 3 books published in 2007, 5 both in 2008 and 2009, it then slowed to only 1 in 2010, 2 in 2011 and 1 in 2012. I have the feeling that in the end, Mongoose didn't have the money to spend regularly for producing the books. I think that when we were seeing a scheduled release date on the Mongoose website, that was when they thought they had collected enough money to send the book to the printer. Book 18 was supposed to be printed in January 2012: they suddenly had pushed back the date to May. Shortly after that, I think Joe decided to end the partnership with Mongoose because I believe he thought the publisher wasn't in a good financial situation to produce the books regularly, which I think is the main reason to explain the sudden end of this business relationship. 2-Mantikore-VerlagMarch 2013, Joe made this announcement: Mantikore was already publishing the CE in German, so it was easy for Joe to just allow them to print them in English too. However, you can notice that he gave the rights only for books 18 to 28. This made me believe that he was publishing the books with Mantikore only as a temporary measure, until he found a publisher that was willing to print all the books. I think I was not wrong when you see what happened next. 3-Cubicle 7November 2015, Joe made this announcement: I don't remember that there had been an official announcement regarding the end of the partnership with Mantikore for the English version of the CE. It was just this announcement, a switch of publisher. It made sense: as Joe mentionned, Cubicle 7 was already making the LWAG, just like Mongoose was doing the LWRPG when they got the rights to make the gamebooks, so putting all the LW line at the same place was the ideal solution: buying the LWAG, you fall in love with it, you want to buy other stuff related to this world, oh look, there are gamebooks too! However, two months later, this message from Dominic McDowall, CEO of Cubicle 7: I think Dom wanted to avoid the same situation that happened to Mongoose: starting the publication but then facing a financial burden. After that, Joe started Holmgard Press in April 2016 with the publication of The Storms of Chai. There, you have it: nothing official each time as to why the publication stopped (or why it didn't even started in the case of Cubicle 7), but we got some clues each time that gave us part of an explanation. |
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Post by rhygar on Apr 14, 2022 22:40:06 GMT
Thank-you for taking the time to explain things Black Cat. I really do appreciate it.
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Post by palarran on Apr 15, 2022 10:51:43 GMT
A little history of the republication of the gamebooks: -Book 1 to 17: Mongoose Publishing (2007-2013) -Book 18 to 22: Mantikore Verlag (2013-2015) -Cubicle 7 got the rights in December 2015, but in April 2016, they dropped them. -Book 29: Holmgard Press (2016) Note that Mantikore Verlag has published books 23 to 26 in the meantime. 26 came in 2021, 27 and 28 have been announced for 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Plus, they published the four Greystar books between 2017 and 2020.
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Post by Black Cat on Apr 15, 2022 12:48:54 GMT
A little history of the republication of the gamebooks: -Book 1 to 17: Mongoose Publishing (2007-2013) -Book 18 to 22: Mantikore Verlag (2013-2015) -Cubicle 7 got the rights in December 2015, but in April 2016, they dropped them. -Book 29: Holmgard Press (2016) Note that Mantikore Verlag has published books 23 to 26 in the meantime. 26 came in 2021, 27 and 28 have been announced for 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Plus, they published the four Greystar books between 2017 and 2020.
The discussion was more about the English version of the CE. Like I said in my previous post, the end of the partnership with Mantikore was only for the English version of the CE. It's great though that the Germans still have a publisher for the series in that language (I love the fact that they considered the NO series as a different series than the main LW one, just like the Grey Star one). |
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