I gotta say: Pelgrane Press has excellent customer service. I had ordered WORLDBREAKER a while back, but I guess it was supposed to get fulfilled by a third party at the time and never got shipped. I noticed the problem recently (I had gotten the PDF, too, which is why it didn’t register to me that the print copy hadn’t been shipped) and when I brought it up they resolved the issue right away. No fuss, no muss, no nonsense. It’s one of the many reasons why I buy their products.
Pelgrane Press accidentally overcharged me ten bucks for a copy of The Esoterrorists‘ Worldbreaker, so they gave me fifteen bucks in store credit to make up for it. Well, they also offered to just refund my money, but they know their customer base: I cheerfully said Feel free to make that mistake again, friends to the computer screen and then promptly ordered that copy of The Gaean Reach that I had been eyeing. And that’s because six bucks net is a lot easier for me to scrounge up than twenty-odd for what is basically an impulse buy of a game I probably won’t get around to playing.
All in all, that is how you handle a customer problem: own up to it, show remorse, offer meaningful restitution – and you can end up keeping your customers happy and even make another sale.
OK, real quick: The Esoterrorists is Pelgrane Press’s and Robin Laws’ relentlessly excellent investigative horror-conspiracy RPG (noteworthy in that the conspiracy running counter-occult actions is neither sociopathic, nor stupid); and Worldbreaker is an upcoming sourcebook for running a globe-trotting, full-bore stop-the-Apocalypse campaign. Apparently it’s almost ready for the printers. Which means that it should hopefully drop before the end of the year.
Pelgrane Press likes to do these mega-campaign books, and I have a bunch of them: Eternal Lies for Trail of Cthulhu springs to mind, and of course The Dracula Dossier for Night’s Black Agents. I like ’em: they’re typically stuffed to the gills with useful or interesting stuff, and even if you don’t use one as a campaign frame you can still mine the book for ideas. So you’re going to pay out some cash for this one – I’m assuming a fifty buck price tag – but they’re not going to stint on the portions. Worth the price, in other words.
