All my direct work on the new Cybernetics supplement has been completed. It now goes to my partner who will give it a final proof-read before shipping it out, late next week (though you can read it now on 6d6 Online).
You may notice that I’ve changed the cover. Myself and Kieran Kowalski had struggled to find a cover image we liked and I eventually knocked up the Vitruvian man cover. It wasn’t the greatest piece of graphic design ever done but sometimes you have to just make do with what you’ve got.
Then, on Monday, I was looking for art for the redesign on the website and stumbled on the work of Christopher Dombres on Flickr including the hand. At first I resisted, I already had a cover design and did not need more work, but the hand was to good to waste, so I put together an alternate cover. Yesterday’s test to see which cover people preferred was mostly checking that I wasn’t being misled because the hand was ‘new and shiny’ compared to the existing design we have used for the last three months.
The most telling thing about yesterday’s test is that no one really picked the old cover because it was better. It was always that they did not like the hand so chose the vitruvian man by default.
But the best thing about test was the number of people who found the hand creepy or disturbing in someway. This is the sort of emotional reaction a good cover needs, even if that emotion is negative and puts some people off. Unless there is that emotive response, it won’t grab people’s attention. The new cover might not generate more sales than the old but it will make people remember 6d6.
Cybernetics will be released next week, on both 6d6RPG.com and on RPGNow.com, in a bundle with the 6d6 Core and the Quantum Flux adventure.
