Knucklingbone Press is a 12-million-year-old, pan-galactic, poly-functional action conglomerate that features countless employees and does more or less everything conceivable. The rest of the time, we are an independent designer of table-top games. That means Role-Playing Games and Miniatures Games. We are using the royal “we”: Whatever deity you fancy and me. That was also the name of our last album. It’s only going downhill the further this rambles, folks.
But seriously, Knucklingbone Press is the work of Casey Singer, comedian, musician, writer, ditchdigger, and game designer.
Below you may find a section to address Frequently Asked Questions, even though not every item is phrased in the form of a question.
Below that is some contact information. Well, one piece of contact information, at least.
Why are your works not pretty?
We have a lot of talents here at Knucklingbone Press, but among them is neither publishing layout nor illustration (nor, for that matter, web design, as you can tell). As such, we endeavored for quite some time to secure the services of individuals skilled in said areas to make prettier the environs in which our words are presented. As a consequence, several projects languished for multiple years in production limbo as it turns out that the money-for-work exchange is largely unrecognized in the modern economy. Also, and we relay this with neither joy nor prejudice, artsy-types are apparently all irremediably insane, or at least really flaky. Thus it was with much angst, and heaviness of body parts, and probably a bit of the old gnashing and rending, that we took up tools long since cast aside for their clumsiness in our hands, and like the little red hen before us, did it our damn selves. We are an individual that tends, in light of the blessings of nature, to value function well above form. So it ain’t pretty. The guts are top notch, though.
In any case, let that which offendeth thy eye forestall any imminent plucking with the consideration that if we generate revenue from these works, some of it can and almost certainly will be redirected to the effort to improve the aesthetics of our projects. Plainly, we’ll update the files with nicer stuff when we can. We know it only too well: Pretty goes a long goddamn way in this world.
In the meantime, you can say “its lo-fi, DIY aesthetic evokes a gritty, punk-rock ethos that reflects its no-frills, working-class roots” and impress all the other degenerates in the salon. No offense.
Pricing
We have opted for pay-what-you-want pricing on all projects. (The Sales & Marketing people are confoundedly persnickety about exactly how you phrase this concept, assuring us with many woeful shakes of the head that precious percentage points hang on whether we call it “pay-what-you-want” or “pay-what-you-like” or “name-your-own-price” or whatever. As these people maintain a cult that ritually propagates one of the most evil perversions of human progress conceivable, we are not in the business of giving a damn what they say. You understand what we mean however we say it.)
Why did we do this? First, different people place different values on things, and these values are relative to their personal means, which in turn are not necessarily distributed according to any manner of cosmic justice. In the gaming world, there are barriers to entry before would-be enthusiasts that range from the difficult to the prohibitive. We recognize that we are not producing much in the way of tangible goods, and do not intend that this be construed as a gesture that will change the shape of the business. We just want everyone to at least be able to get in the door.
Second, the fact that you can pay nothing means that you can try the game out in its entirety for free. If you like it, you can come on back and throw us some cash — as much as you think the game is worth to you. If not, you can walk away without having spent a dime. This also means that when a game is updated, or receives errata or even new art, anyone who bought it already can come back and pick up the new bits without having to buy it again, and without having to lug around multiple books and packets and binders for what is ostensibly one set of rules.
Contact
Questions? Comments? Passionate declarations of indifference? You can send electronic mail messages to our address for those, which is knucklingbone.press and is at a Googlemail address. They tell me writing it that way will keep the spies from stealing the brain secrets.