Well, I finally got the rest of the money from my retirement account. I cut a certified check for over twenty-four thousand bucks this morning to bring with me to settlement on Friday. Looks like I actually bought a house!

But who cares about that? I am also pleased to reveal (to the six people that read this blog) the [Secret Project] I have been working on for some time. Announcing…

BitzBox.com is a trading site for gamers, which will allow them to buy, sell or trade their gaming related stuff easily with anyone. Weather across the country or in your very own neighborhood, using BitzBox.com lets you facilitate trades with ease.

So that is the quick over-view. What I want are a few pairs of “new eyes” to take a look at the site and let me know what you like, what you don’t like and any general advice. Would you use this site? If not, why not? Please go to the site, poke around, post a few test ads (please no ‘real’ ads until the site goes live) and give me some feedback. Just email me with your comments and let me know what you think.

As a ‘Thank You’ for anyone providing feedback, I will be happy to hand out some free PDF’s from our catalog or give you some free banner ads on the site. Once I have beta tested the site for a week or two, I’ll go “live” with it.

Thanks!

Chris Field is starting his own imprint for PDF releases in partnership with Skortched urf’ Studios.  He has several releases on deck, and the first one will be out by weeks end.

The Otherverse Games Logo:

A staff review posted at RPGNow gives the dept. 7 Advanced Class Update: The Unbound Soul a FIVE STAR review!  Found HERE.

Skortched Urf’ Studios joins Your Games Now, a PDF publisher Co-Op created in response the merger of RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. We join many leading PDF publishers to offer our customers more choices as to where and how they enjoy our products. We’re glad to be on board and look foreward to lending our support and becoming a valuable member of the Co-Op.
Your Games Now - Straight From The Source!

We just updated our Writers Guidelines. Read them HERE. If you are interested in freelancing for Skortched Urf’ Studios then we would like to hear from you!

From the ENWorld front page:

“You may have heard rumours of some major impending changes in the PDF Retail market.

EN World GameStore is closing, effective immediately. In its place will be an affiliate store owned an operated by RPGNow and DTRPG under their new merged company, OneBookShelf.”

I received an email from the new company just prior to this, but didn’t want to say anything before it became “officially” public…and since ENWorld is announcing it then I am sure the three people who check this site (Hi Mom &Dad!) will not be privy to info they shouldn’t.

After reading the email, my initial impression of the merger is good for the industry and good for Skortched Urf‘ Studios. We have been striving to move from the EDGE site for small/new publishers on to the main RPGNow site, since that is where the majority of the PDF market shops. As a result of this merger the EDGE site will go away and we will now be swimming with the big boys! (That could be good or bad obviously, but we’re optimists so we think its a good thing.) More details to be released in the next few days, with the RPGNow and DriveThruRPG rolling out some of the changes as early as tomorrow (10/27/2006).

In the end we are still focused on producing quality products gamers will enjoy using in the games they already love, so we will let the market forces shift and correct as the whole industry matures while we keep producing new products.

While RPGNow, ENWorld and DriveThruRPG are the “Big Three” for PDF publishers in the RPG arena, there are other outlets where we feel our products can gain some more exposure. One of those outlets is LuLu.com. Not only do they offer PDF downloads, they are also a Print On Demand (POD) publisher as well. (So look for print versions of some skortched Urf’ Studios products and bundles of short PDF’s in the future.)

Skortched Urf’ Studios has also taken a cue from Louis Porter Jr. Designs and signed with Fantasy-Download.eu to offer our products to the EU market. Our products should show up in their store-front some time today.

So now you have two more places to find our products!

*UPDATE*

Some BIG NEWS coming shortly relating to where our products will be offered.  Stay tuned!!

We just completed the registration process to begin offering our products through the DriveThruRPG website! Look for our products to begin showing up there with a day or two.