{"id":4790,"date":"2024-10-07T12:35:04","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T17:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/?p=4790"},"modified":"2024-10-07T12:35:04","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T17:35:04","slug":"the-road-to-qags-part-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/the-road-to-qags-part-6\/","title":{"rendered":"The Road to QAGS, part 6"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re at part 6 and don&#8217;t even have a book yet, so I&#8217;m going to bullet point through some things to keep this from being an 4 million part article. So, after doing Ukon:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There was some kind of issue with the printing. I don&#8217;t really remember the details, but we ended up with a situation where we got some of the books but couldn&#8217;t get the rest until we paid Bob more money than we&#8217;d originally planned.<\/li>\n<li>The book looked like this:<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/6b513fde7a2208d5e4e51f8196949bb1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-4789 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/6b513fde7a2208d5e4e51f8196949bb1-198x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/6b513fde7a2208d5e4e51f8196949bb1-198x300.png 198w, https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/6b513fde7a2208d5e4e51f8196949bb1-675x1024.png 675w, https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/6b513fde7a2208d5e4e51f8196949bb1-768x1165.png 768w, https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/6b513fde7a2208d5e4e51f8196949bb1.png 820w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n<li>Other than UKon and one or two other Lexington conventions, the books were only available at Red Rock (the store where I worked) and our website (which was hosted on my mindspring account under a long URL that inluded a ~). I don&#8217;t think we sold a single copy online until we moved to the <a href=\"https:\/\/hexgames.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">hexgames.com<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0domain a few years later.<\/li>\n<li>Remember that Yahoo! map we&#8217;d included? We figured out that was covered under copyright (again, the internet was young and nobody knew how it worked), so we ended up having to buy the long stapler, print a bunch of copies of the map page, and then pull books apart and staple them back together with a page that had a map we could legally use. A few years later, when we got the <a href=\"https:\/\/hexgame.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">hexgame.com<\/a>\u00a0domain, preparing a copy of QAGS for sale also involved putting a sticker with the new website over my old Mindspring URL.<\/li>\n<li>When we first started the company, Leighton and I had made it clear that we were hoping to publish things by other people, especially (at first, at least) supplements for QAGS. A bunch of people said they wanted to write things. Most of them stopped as soon as they realized that writing a game is work. We did get our first two releases, though: Ray Forsythe and Skaught Bowden wrote Stuff (and equipment guide) and Leighton wrote Mars &amp; Venus at War (the first Herrick Agency adventure). I think I also started Paradise (my personal least favorite book we&#8217;ve every published) around the same time, but it wouldn&#8217;t be finished until later.<\/li>\n<li>Both Stuff and Mars &amp; Venus at War went through multiple covers. The first Stuff cover was a drawing of a catheralpult that I think Robert (the art teacher, not the Walking Dead guy) did. For a later printing, Ray did an architectural-type drawing of the cathedralpult. Mars &amp; Venus had one truly awful cover and one pretty bad cover before getting the only kinda bad cover (designed by me and Ray) that we use today.<\/li>\n<li>In case you&#8217;re wondering, a cathedralpult is an enormous catapult that throws churches.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Remember how Leighton and I bought that E-Z Legal Kit and became a corporation? All during this time, we kept getting things from the state about taxes and employee holdout and stuff like that. Since we didn&#8217;t have employees or taxable sales, we just ignored them. Turns out you&#8217;re supposed to send them in, even if they&#8217;re filled with zero. Eventually we got a letter from the state tax board informing us that we owed thousands of dollars in penalties.<\/p>\n<p>Leighton and I went to the tax office in Frankfort in hopes of working out some kind of payment plan or something. That&#8217;s where we found out for certain that the E-Z Legal Kit is not the best choice for setting up a corporation. Fortunately, the tax people were very nice and treated us like we were the morons we were rather than hardened tax criminals. In fact, I&#8217;m pretty sure they called people in from other offices just to laugh at our incompetence. In any case, we ended up getting everything fixed for a few hundred bucks instead of a few thousand.<\/p>\n<p>After that, we decided our best bet was to stop being a corporation and just try to sell the books without all the paperwork that we didn&#8217;t have the time or patience to create. We called all the stockholders together for a meeting to let them know about our near-miss with thousands of dollars in debt and our plan to shut down the company. We still planned on making games, we just didn&#8217;t have the bandwidth to deal with doing it as a legally recognized entity.<\/p>\n<p>We ended remaining a company thanks to a guy we knew from college (we&#8217;ll call him SupaGenius)&#8211;who had previously had nothing to do with nor expressed any interest in Hex&#8211;had a plan to turn things around. We stupidly listened to him, which began The Age of the Monster Box. I&#8217;ll talk about that next time, but it will also be very brief and glossed over both for legal reasons and my own sanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re at part 6 and don&#8217;t even have a book yet, so I&#8217;m going to bullet point through some things to keep this from being an 4 million part article. So, after doing Ukon: There was some kind of issue with the printing. I don&#8217;t really remember the details, but we ended up with a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2060,1990,2005],"tags":[225,263,373,1563,2001,2515,3588,3686,3687,3690,3693,3700,3701,3702,3703],"class_list":["post-4790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games","category-hex-games","category-qags-corner","tag-walking-dead","tag-stuff","tag-mars-and-venus-at-war","tag-leighton-connor","tag-herrick-agency","tag-skaught","tag-ukon","tag-qags3e","tag-qags-third-edition","tag-qags-1e","tag-ray-forsythe","tag-supagenius","tag-cathedralpult","tag-e-z-legal-kit","tag-monster-box"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4790"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4797,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790\/revisions\/4797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}