I’ve finally pulled my head out of the muck and mire of a million projects, so I thought I’d give you a quick post to update everyone on Silvervine news and happenings.

1. Conventions. We’ve been determining which conventions we want to hit this year, and we’d like to expand out to smaller conventions in various places. If you have a convention you’d like us to consider, drop a comment on our facebook or here on this post.

2.  Through Gamer Goggles did a video showing creating a character. They’re good people, so you should go check it out and check out their site as well.

http://gamer-goggles.com/blog/silvervine-character-creation-1917/

3. The website redesign we talked about is coming very soon. That, work on the Mechanomicon, the hectic holidays, actually taking breaks, saving the world from inter-dimensional raiding forces of the Utrom, etc. have kept us pretty silent. Our efforts right now are going into redoing the very old website and making it incredible. Below you can see a teaser of one of the early mockups that we did.

And that’s all for today. Here’s to a good 2012!

Aremis over at Through Game Goggles shares his thoughts on Silvervine Games and the game we ran for them. It’s a common story that I’ve seen across many gaming tables. It begins with incredulity and ends with…

Well, go check it out:

http://gamer-goggles.com/blog/first-impression-silvervine-system-1296/

Con On The Cob is just 11 days away and we wanted to give you a small preview of some of the great things we’ve got going on at this year’s CotC. This year’s Con On The Cob starts off the year of the Mechanomicon. Our next book is going to revolve around mechanical and steampunk aspects of Silvervine and the world of Cyrus.

Character Creations With Expanded Options – Character creation sessions will be expanded with focuses and skill options that will appear in the Mecahnomicon.

Mechanist Themed Games – All of our official games will be based around mechanist themes, exploring parts of the Cyrus and becoming the inspiration for events that might become canon within the world. The games will also be playtesting new rules we’ll be including in the Mechanomicon, so you’ll get your names in the books as official playtesters.

Airships!!! – One of our key focuses will be on airships. We’ve got Airship creation playtests that will let you create your own Airships. You can then use your airships in our giant airship combat on Saturday at 2pm. When we say giant, we mean giant. The game will eclipse 4 tables and ALL of the area between them…

New Worlds By Other People – Alana Smith will be running some games set in her own world, so check them out and see what others are making with the Silvervine System.

Pre-orders Of Something Special – The wrench has always been a symbol of Silvervine and we are working on a deal with Forged Foam (formerly EdHellen) to craft the SVG wrench as a boffer weapon. We’ve got a prototype that we’ll be carrying around, and we’ll be taking pre-orders for anyone who wants one. It’ll be the perfect compliment for any steampunk costume or just a great way to showcase your Silvervine habit. It’s also a great way to punish motivate players. The goblin is not included.

Our Schedule

SVG Games by SVG

Thursday the 13th, 6 PM – 2 Hours Character Creation
Friday the 14th, 10 AM - 2 Hours Airship Creation Playtest
Friday the 14th, 10 AM - 4 Hours The Great Tech Heist
Friday the 14th, 12 PM - 2 Hours Character Creation
Friday the 14th, 6 PM - 4 Hours Mine Mine Mine
Friday the 14th, 8 PM - 4 Hours Tick, Tock – The Tramp of Doom
Saturday the 15th, 10 AM - 2 Hours Character Creation
Saturday the 15th, 12 PM  - 2 Hours Airship Creation Playtest
Saturday the 15th, 2 PM – 4 Hours Airships Over Anacandra
Saturday the 15th, 4 PM - 4 Hours The Great Tech Heist
Sunday the 16th, 2 PM - 2 Hours Whose Game is it Anyways?

Plus pickups whenever possible.

SVG Games By Others

Friday the 14th, 2 PM - 4 Hours Zoot Suit Gang
Saturday the 15th, 2pm - 4 Hours Zoot Suit Gang 2

Drive Thru RPG is having their Christmas in July sale right now.  You know what’s on sale as part of that? The Silvervine main book. Go check it out! Share the news with anyone you know who might like Silvervine. It’s only $12.74.

 http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/rpg_xmas_in_july.php?manufacturers_id=3450&filters=0_0_0_0_31815#selectpub

With the new print run and a bit of leftover stock of penny dreadfuls and bandannas, we’ve set up an online store. You can buy the Core Rulebook/Cyrus Worldbook w/PDF, our 2 published Penny Dreadfuls, or get yourself a stylish and sexy SVG Bandanna. Go be a bold little consumer and help us fund new projects!

http://www.silvervinegames.com/purchase.html

Good News Everyone!

We’ve just updated our process for the Player Picture Project and given it a permanent home on our website.

http://www.silvervinegames.com/playerpictureproject

If you aren’t familiar with the PPP, you should be. Since we love seeing the incredible and diverse characters that come from our players, we try to make use of them in our publications and games whenever we can. If you submit your character to the Player Picture Project using the PPP PDF form, we might turn it into a Pregen for use at convention games, include it as an NPC in a published adventure, or even showcase it on the chapter pages in an upcoming book (as seen to the left). Check out the new PPP page and the fully interactive submission PDF. Grab your best character, fill out the form, and then send it to  ppp@silvervinegames.com. We can’t use the character or commission art for it without the digitally signed form, so go fill one out and show us the awesome characters you can come up with!  http://www.silvervinegames.com/playerpictureproject

A few days ago we finished up a post publication proofing run on the Silvervine Games Core Rulebook & Cyrus Worldbook. See, we were pretty hard pressed against our deadline for printing the first run in order to make sales at Con On The Cob. It was hectic. We did some very late nights, we worked out plans and backup plans in case the printers couldn’t deliver, and we got it out on time and had completely unexpected levels of sales. It was great, but more typos than we were comfortable with crept in or weren’t picked up. There were also some printing errors that made for a much darker look than we wanted. Those kinds of things are going to happen with any book. Nothing is ever perfect, and even the big boys get typos and errors in their work; more often than you would expect actually.*

While most readers will gloss over a majority of the typos and errors, not even noticing them, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make the book as good as you possibly can. So, in preparation for the upcoming convention season, we decided to do a rigorous in house proofing. This will make for a cleaner book overall, and it helped us pickup some of the errata issues. Nothing too major as far as errata, and we’ll be putting up a list of errata by edition very very soon.  And you’ll be seeing the book available in print again very soon as well. We’ll also be working out a way to provide updated copies of the PDF to anyone who purchased one of the first print run. Not sure how, but we will.

- John Arcadian

*Every time I see a typo in someone else’s work, I get a little happy inside.

It’s March 4th again, GM’s day. A day to celebrate everything about being a Game Master. To reward those who run our games, putting in hours of hard work beforehand or improvising on the fly to give us really great play experiences. GM’s day is also traditionally a day to put gaming supplies on sale, and that is something we’d normally do, but we’ve got something different for you this GM’s day. Let me start by telling you a little story.

A few months back, I was running a one shot of an adventure that I was writing a review of for Gnome Stew. My printer was busted, and I wanted to print some of the maps out in color anyways. I swung into a print shop, handed them my thumb drive and asked them to print 4 pages. “I’m sorry sir, due to corporate policy, we can’t print this. It is copyrighted material and you need written permission.”  The company that made it neglected to put a print disclaimer on the pages for the printouts. Even though they were marked as printouts in big bold letters, and even though I could have called up the author and gotten the guy permission over the phone, the corporate policy required it in writing. That got me thinking. It’s easy to forget to include a print disclaimer on the pages that you should. There are also a lot of times when you might need to print out a section of the rules for quick reference. If you don’t have a printer, then you  might get stuck on the wrong end of a corporate policy. Since Silvervine is a small company, and understands what GMs go through, we got with our legal rep and worked up something nice.

Yup, in as plain English legalese as we could print it, we’ve got a blanket print disclaimer that covers our products.  Basically, it gives you the right to print one full backup copy of an electronic product from Silvervine games and you can print limited sections if we forgot to put a print disclaimer on the individual page. If you get stuck at a print shop trying to print something, just point them to this page. We’re going to make our print disclaimer live perpetually at http://www.silvervinegames.com/printdisclaimer.

If you think this is a nifty idea, and that more companies should try to provide common sense solutions like this, spread the word. Talk about it on Facebook, Spread it on Twitter, send the link to your favorite bloggers.

We hope this small step helps smooth out any situations you might have. While we’ve currently only got the one product that we sell (there are a bunch of free downloads at our Drive Thru RPG store), we’ve just started work on our first published adventure, so this might come in handy for you in the future.

Good Gaming and Happy GM’s day.

they’d be pretty spot on, unfortunately. The upside to long pauses between updates is that it usually means we are busy working on things to bring to you! We’ve got a lot that has kept us busy these two months. Some of those things are:

• Getting the book ready for a second printing. We released with a limited run at Con On The Cob this last October, and we sold out not soon after. Since we  had a pretty rushed end to the production cycle, we wanted to give the book a good going over again. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. Much of our time during the last few months has been spent in going through the book with a fine toothed comb and eliminating every typo demon we find. We’ll be producing an errata list soon, but there aren’t any major changes. Just clarifications. We’ll let you know as soon as the new version is out and available for purchase again.
• Preparing for the next convention season. We’ve just finished submitting our events for our big convention, Origins Games Fair June 22 – 26 in Columbus Ohio, and we are going to be hitting a few before and after that. We’ve been preparing to go to gaming stores in the Northern Ohio area and run games as well. So if you know of a local gaming store, have them contact us at contact@silvervinegames.com or arcadian@silvervinegames.com and we’ll see about scheduling something.
• The first published adventure in Cyrus. If you’ve read the Traveler’s Guide to Cyrus, you know it is interspersed with letters from the Cornelius brothers, the last one leaving readers with a mystery. The first published adventure will help solve that mystery, and it will put the entire Traveler’s Guide To Cyrus into your players hands as an in-game prop. Stay tuned for more on this.
• There are a few more things going on that I can’t talk about, but they’re kind of nifty. Two of these things I can’t talk about I’m incredibly excited for.
• Oh, and if you are a fan of our Facebook page, there might be a special Origins adventure going on Saturday night just for you… But that will be talked about closer to Origins.