Meeting Notes
- V20 Companion Kickstarter doing really well — almost halfway funded already!
- New reward tiers coming.
- First drafts of W20 are rolling in. There should be some open development posts next month.
- Starting to discuss translation rights for V20 with publishing companies that want to print translated versions. (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, maybe Portugal, maybe Brazil)
- Werewolf Translation Guide is still coming along, but Photoshop keeps crashing.
- Sketches for Victorian Lost are rolling in, and I should have final edits in from Genevieve tomorrow to get them to layout.
- Haven’t heard much on Mummy, but Colin’s chugging along on the project.
- Masters of Jade is selling well, and Shards is going along fine.
Today’s Reason to Drink: Today is the World Day of Social Justice, which was approved by the UN in 2009.
Haven’t seen a Blogcast in forever. Are those done, or will we be seeing another one in the future?
It’s on hiatus for now, until I figure out what’s best to do with it.
“Starting to discuss translation rights for V20 with publishing companies that want to print translated versions. (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, maybe Portugal, maybe Brazil)”
Portugal?! That would be really cool as we never had a local edition 🙂 I guess you’re going the motions through Devir who has the rights for the worldwide portuguese translation, right?
No one has rights built in for V20 translations, but part of what we did was reach out to any of our old translation partners still in business. So we’ll see.
Oh, my mistake, really. What I meant to say was “had the rights”.
Unfortunately our RPG market is quite small nowadays so the chance that Devir would gamble on a portuguese edition of V20 seems very remote. But hey, I guess that a kind of arrangement like you guys have with Chat de Jade for Exalted 2nd Edition could work. 🙂
Portugal may have a small market, but if you add Brazil that should fix that little problem, right? Or is Brazilian-Portugues different from your ‘Iberian’-Portugues?
Yes, brazilian portuguese is a bit different from european portuguese although ortography is being normalized between the two countries as of this year. It’s more a question of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions, really. Personally I don’t mind the difference.
But the problem is bigger that it seems. It is like, for example, having only one spanish language edition of the book, and ship it accross the atlantic ocean from Mexico to Spain. It will make the product more expensive and hard to find for such a small market as ours (as it already happens nowadays with the NWoD products).
And although most of Vampire’s fans around here are a bit of a language purists (prefering to read gaming stuff in the original version rather than the translated one even if it’s in brazilian portuguese) it would be cool to expose potential new players to a local edition given that english proficiency among the new generations is decreasing substantially. Oh, and having “a” RPG game in european portuguese (we don’t have any) would be great!
Re: Werewolf Translation Guide: I guess the layout you’ve made for it is simply too Wyld for anything Weaverish to handle it. 🙂
Joking aside, can please you tell us how close it is to being published in terms of percentage of work already done?
It’s at first proofing for the interior, which is the bulk of it, now we fine-tune. Then approvals, printer proofs, more approvals. I’d say March at this point, but early March.
Does a new German translation mean that Feder & Schwert is back in touch with you guys? (Do they even still exist?) I would to see new material for the English version of the Engel RPG… Still a favorite in my collection. Does your new business model (POD) allow for such niche-products?
F&S has been contacted, nothing further to report there. As far as I know they retained all rights to Engel, not WW, so anything new would come from them.
How close is Geist 1.1 to print on demand? I’ve been excited since I first heard about it, and I’m chomping at the bit to order it as soon as it becomes available.
I’ve seen a proof of the new version, we just have to get it OK’d.
Who are the writers working on Victorian Lost, and what are their previous experiences with the World of Darkness in general, and Changeling in particular?
Joseph D. Carriker, Jr., Jess Hartley, Andrew Peregrine, John Snead, and Travis Stout. All but Andrew are experienced WoD and Changeling hands, and Andrew is the line developer for Victoriana and a fan of Changeling.
Sounds like an excellent lineup.
Has the possibility of switching up translation models come up? Given that everything is moving to a more flexible PDF and PoD model, the previous one which was language and region based strikes me as being somewhat… well, archaic.
Sorry, I don’t understand your question. If people speak a particular language in a given country and a book is translated into that language and sold in that country, then where does that process become archaic?
Well if you need a translator I can Help to portuguese, french and even Japanese ( although it might take a little longer to translate to Japanese)
Please, for publication of V20 translation in Italy, don’t ask only to 25edition, since they stopped translating White Wolf’s material back in 2009, they have problems even selling D&D4e, and, said sincerely, their translations aren’t even that good. Just for an example in Werewolf: the forsaken they translated “crescent moon” with “luna crescente”, with the LITTLE misunderstanding that “crescente” in Italian means “rising”, not crescent and is not the geometrical shape. The result is that for any Italian storyteller that doesn’t know English well there isn’t an auspice for the wolves born under the declining moon (in Italian “decrescente”).
However… This leads me to a suggestion. Since you are now going to bring a lot of your business on the PoD standard… You could hire your own translators, and print by yourselves the translated copies that will be shipped in any country you desire. Actually, it is still more convenient for me to buy a book from DriveThruRPG and let it be shipped to Italy than buy it from my local reseller. For example to buy the Brujah Clanbook I would spend in total around 15 euros to receive my copy at home, but if I go to the local shop I would buy it for no less than 20 euros.
I presume that translating a book for you is not so expensive, if you actually don’t print but the copies that are sold. What happens with others localized companies is that maybe (as the 25 edition) they realize the books are not worth to be print, so they decide not to translate them, because the buyers are not so many. This is true, I think in Italy WW games are not a big buisness, but this doesn’t mean that for me, one among few (but existing) customers, more books translated wouldn’t be something great. So, why don’t you just translate all (or most of) your books so that we can buy them in our countries? I surely don’t know how much a translation of an already published book would cost you, but I’m sure that even if the copies of those translated books wouldn’t sustain a lone company (as 25edition) they could refund you of the translating costs =) And we’ll be sure that the translation is well made, as it could be granted by White Wolf itself.
*Please* I do beg: could you provide us with a hardcover option for POD, particularly Victorian Lost, Mummy & Geist 1.1??
that would be super!
Why is there nothing about the V20 companion kickstarter on the White Wolf main page? Or on http://www.vampirethemasquerade.com/ ? Or in the Products link for “Classic World of Darkness”? Or through the development blog? The only place I can see that mentions it is the forums.
Maybe spreading the news a little could help.
They’ve been unable to update vampirethemasquerade.com since June of last year, and the database issues they have may also have affected WW’s site. White Wolf’s web team was all let go at the end of October, so they have to rely on the CCP web team in Reykjavik.
They’ve been plugging it all over the forums, Twitter, Facebook, and the devblog.
…That’s a joke, right?
The flagship game of the company and they…
Geez, that’s awful. Why would…?
Never mind. Nothing I can say here would help; I’m just flabbergasted.
Any news about the V20 in Spanish… who owns the rigths?. La Factoria/Distrimagen or any other..
Thanks
Hi,
I’m trying to contact White Wolf by email about translation rights for V20. I sent a Facebook message to White Wolf – any chance to get a reply, please please please? 🙂
Thank you
Facebook is a poor place to send messages. Try questions@white-wolf.com.
I sent a message for questions@white-wolf.com days ago without reply, but I’ll send a new mail, ok?
Thank you
I’ve you’ve already sent it, it’s been passed on to the appropriate parties. These things sometimes take a long time to respond to, so please be patient!
Ok, thank you