Before I get to the meat of this update, I wanted to remind everyone to check their e-mail boxes and DriveThruRPG libraries to make sure that you have received and downloaded you Random Acts of Violet PDF content. These download links were sent back at the beginning of November. After posting my last update, I have heard from a handful of people that they had a problem with receipt of their digital content. Also, from looking at my DTRPG download counts, there are still a number of people who haven't accessed their RAoV content. Please reach out to me at [email protected] if you have any issues regarding your PDF's.
For this update I wanted to share a behind the scenes look at how the printing process works and how it was executed for my Random Acts of Violet campaign. As a total process geek, I find this stuff really interesting and I am sure there are others out there who will feel the same way. This post is for you. If your only interest is in the fun gaming content, that is cool too. If that is you, then the rest of this particular update may not be your cup of tea, so feel free to skip to the end.
First, I wanted to show you the final printed product, and what everyone who backed Random Acts of Violet at the physical content level will be getting. Your content will show up as a 48 page, saddle stitched (staple) book, along with a shrink wrapped package of 5 individual, full color, cardstock stretch goal adventures/content. All of this is in a full 8.5" x 11" format. One of the things I really enjoyed about this project was that my local printer let me come into their workshop to see the entire printing process, front to back. It was really cool to see how my digital files came to life on their printer machines. Here is the finished print job on a pallet, just before it was shipped to our fulfillment partners. For this project, the interior pages were printed on massive sheets, of 8 pages each, using a Heidelberg press. These pages were in black & white, so it was a fairly straightforward print job. Here is the actual press that printed these pages.
I was unaware of how many times the printer needed to make test runs, just to ensure everything was lined up and laid out correctly. This step was done using recycled scrap paper so as to minimize waste. As you can see in the picture below, the printer would run 3-4 test prints over the same sheets of paper, focusing on the print marks and margins to make sure everything was square and that all of the bleeds (pictures going off the edge of the page) were correct. Here are some of the finished print sheets for the interior pages before they were cut to size. For a size comparison, I placed one of the finished 8.5" x 11" books on top. The book's color cover was made with a completely different printer. This was due to the fact that it was a 4 color print job with a special coating and thicker stock of paper. Here is the printer that created the covers.
Overall, I had a ton of fun seeing how my books and content were physically produced. If you made it this far in the update, I hope that you found this peek behind the scenes interesting as well.
Thanks again for all of your support. I can't wait to hear that the fulfillment is complete so that I know everyone has received all of the awesome Purple Planet adventuring content created by Goodman Games and all of the Horde creators. I know I can't wait to start running players through the trials and tribulations found on this alien world.
