Weekly Store Update: 29 August

The year continues to move along quite rapidly, is it moving fast for you? Hard to believe it's the end of August already! Even though fast paced, we've had a great week here at SVG! We've added some great new games, as well as restocks and preorders. We also have some news to share, like the date of the eminent Old School Essentials restock, so check it out!

INTRO

We're definitely staying busy this year, and that whole 'a rolling Stone gathers no moss' is quite the appropriate saying around here! I'm Eric, and Wendy and I own and operate Stone Valley Games. If this is your first time, welcome to our newsletter! This top portion contains our shop news, and if you want to skip all that and get to the new stuff you can jump down to the bottom the post to see the restocks, new items, and preorders we laid in last week. We also detail our giveaways in here... and we're getting close to announcing our next one... but not yet! So let's get on with the news. 

EMINENT OLD-SCHOOL ESSENTIALS RESTOCK

For those who may not know, Old-School Essentials is a roleplaying game, kind of a clone of the very first rules ever printed. However, unlike other clones, Old-School Essentials uses modern formatting and editing to really streamline the game, while also using retro art techniques. It's absolutely fabulous. Additionally, almost all of the books have a complimentary PDF included! We've been following the creator Gavin of Necrotic Gnome since his first Kickstarter, and we check in with him from time to time. 

In any case, we anticipate a full restock of all titles, including the brand new Carcass Crawler Issue 1, on 1 September. Just a few days away!

Also, for our long-time Old-School Essentials customers, there's going to be a change in PDF distribution. Previously the PDFs were delivered automatically with the order and could then be seen in the SVG Account area. On the request of Gavin we will now process all new Old-School Essentials products differently. Beginning with Carcass Crawler we will be emailing the PDF link. We'll take care of that email as we process the order. Initially it'll be an email we produce, but soon we'll signing into Bits and Mortar and using that wonderful service to send the PDF email. The plan is to keep all of the currently automated PDFs the same, but PDFs for any new products, again beginning with Carcass Crawler, will no longer be connected to the SVG Account. 

The best thing is at the end of the day everyone will still get their PDF. Gavin is going in this direction as there are far too many retailers for him to keep up with anymore, so blanket rules simplify it at the top. Hey, I can appreciate that, but this is going to cause us extra work. No worries though, this roleplaying system is worth the extra effort!

PLANNING TO PLAN

As you may recall, last week I highlighted our appointment to meet with the architect to discuss the plans for our new store. Well, we held the meeting! In that first face-to-face we discussed the high-level requirements and they sketched out a few ideas. The baseline is generally open concept, 9 foot ceilings, and 1500 square foot with a hearty, industrial-strength bathroom.

The only current wrinkle is that the store will be located on a bit of a hill, and connecting it to the road will be interesting. They assured me it should be fine. At the end of the extremely productive meeting they collected all of the photographs, details and sketches and told me they were going to work on an estimate and plans development timeline. We expect to see that invoice early next week. That's one more step down, 43,542 steps left to go!! (but who's counting?!) Stay tuned, we will continue to update you as this story progresses!

MINI'S ON THE MENU

Here's kind of an interesting event that happened last week. One of our customers reached out and asked us if we knew anything about the miniatures for the DIE in the Dungeon board game. They really like miniatures in general, and would love a set of them for the game.

At that point we didn't know anything about the miniatures, but we told them we'd look into it. I researched and discovered thru the publisher that the miniatures were not available for purchase from them, but had been developed into STL files - for 3D printing. A quick transaction later and I had the files.

Now, we don't have the capability to make anything here, but my building partner at PMW does. So, I reached out to him with the STL files and asked what his workload was like. After a look at the files he told me he couldn't do it that day, but he did squeeze us in the next day. So they were cured and washed, and I went out there, secured them, and whisked them back to the store.