Wild Talents was conceived in 2002, not long after Godlike was released, when Dennis and I were still working with Hobgoblynn Press. It took nearly five years to go to print. Many of you were around all that time as we struggled to figure out just how we were going to afford manufacturing such a high-end book.

The solution was perfectly obvious, of course, in hindsight: Wild Talents had been inspired and in large part developed by the fans, and the fans were happy to help send it to the presses. We held a "pledge drive" to see just how many people would be willing to pre-order with the understanding that the pre-orders would fund printing the book. I set the pledge target a good bit higher than our actual monetary goal,to allow for people inevitably changing their minds when it came time to actually putting down money. I figured it would take weeks or months to collect enough pledges.

We hit the pledge goal in 36 hours.

Now, six months after its release, every last copy has sold.

Wow.

So: What's next?

Well, for the last few months I've been working hard on Delta Green: Eyes Only, which we're putting together and releasing on behalf of our friends at Pagan Publishing. If you'e not familiar with Delta Green, you're missing out on a treat. Unless you really hate mind-blowing modern-day horror and suspense, that is, in which case don't bother
with it.

The original Delta Green was widely hailed as one of the best RPG products ever written -- I'm not exaggerating; Dennis and crew did wonders -- and it was just a couple of months ago re-released by Pagan in partnership with Eos Press (formerly Hobgoblynn; the wheels goround).

The success of Wild Talents enabled us to take the long-dormant Eyes Only project into reality. Todd Shearer, who illustrated "White Knights, Black Hearts" in Wild Talents, is doing the interior art. You can see some stunning previews by clicking the link at www.delta-green.com/dgeo. Daniel Solis, the design genius behind Greg Stolze's "Reign," is doing page design and layout, and it looks fantastic.

Eyes Only, I'm happy to say, will go to press shortly.

Up next: More for Wild Talents. I've mentioned a few of these things before, but they're very fun projects so I'll talk them up again.

1. Ben Lee's "Monsters and Other Childish Things," an amazingly fun comedy-horror game built around Wild Talents, is getting an overhaul to make it a complete, standalone RPG rather than a WT supplement.
   
2. Ben is also now putting the final touches on "The Kerberos Club," a Wild Talents supplement set in mid-Victorian London.
3. Allan Goodall is writing "This Favored Land," a Wild Talents supplement that explores the rise of Talents in the American Civil War.
4. Kevin Pezzano is working on "The Talent Squad," a trilogy of Wild Talents adventures set in the "World Gone Mad" in the present day,which has Talent police officers dealing with the aftermath of --well, that would be telling.
5. Kevin has also expressed interest in expanding his "ORE Mecha" download. I've upped the ante to see if he wants to make a full-scale supplement out of it. I'm waiting now to see if he's going to call, raise or fold.
6. We're in talks about another Wild Talents setting book, but I've been so busy this summer that it's kind of fallen by the wayside. I'll need to get back in touch with that writer, with profuse apologies for the wait, in the next week or so.
7. Dennis is currently working hard to finish a Delta Green project called "Future/Perfect," which he's releasing in stages on his website with funding directly by Delta Green fans. When that's done, he's got two things planned for Arc Dream. One of them is "A World Gone Mad," a full sourcebook detailing the world of Godlike after World War II. The other project is still under wraps.
8. Oh, and he's got a little project for his day job at Radical Entertainment that's seeing the light of day after two or three years of work: "Prototype" for Xbox 360 and PS3. See the August Game Informer Magazine for a preview.
9. And I've got the free "Dark Tower" adaptation, based on Nemesis and Wild Talents, that'll get my attention again soon. And that project that's still under wraps.
   

Finally, what's next for the Wild Talents core book?

That's a very good question. I was approached by a number of retailers and distributors wanting Wild Talents, but we couldn't sell it at the usual wholesale discount with such a small print run. Only Leisure Games in London bought copies at our high (for retail) price -- and they did very, very well with it. Their final batch reach the store any day, now, in fact.

Still, for a small company like this it's not a comfortable thing to plan for a full retail print run of a book like Wild Talents. A direct-sale second edition, sure. But a retail print run is much larger and MUCH more costly, even before you factor in the higher marketing costs. So, sometime in the next few months we're going to hold another pledge drive, this time for the SECOND edition of Wild Talents.

If the pledges are large enough to make us confident that we can afford it, we'll print a big run and market it to retail distribution. If the pledges are more modest, we'll release it as a short-run, direct-sale book like the first edition.

Either way, Wild Talents second edition will be meant mainly for gamers who didn't get the first edition and for completists (we love completists!). It'll have tons of fantastic new Shearer art, excellent new material from Greg Stolze on creating and running Wild Talents games and characters, and it'll correct and update material that proved confusing in the first edition, but it will NOT make the first edition obsolete. You can run the same game with the same rules with either edition.

Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE it if everyone who bought the first edition also buys the second edition, but we're not quite dicks enough to make it mandatory. The corrections will go online as a free download so you can print them out and stick them in your first edition book if that's all you're after.

OK, I think that's quite enough from me. Sorry to be so wordy. Thank you all, again, for your support of Wild Talents over all these years.You're going to love what's coming up for the game. Wild Talents is just getting started.

Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.