Just a brief message to let you all know where I am with the update of the Desperation Morale "World of ASL" compendium.
With the exception of Critical Hit, discussed below, I have finished, and posted, the write-ups of all the ASL products released since April 2017 except for LFT's Fight for Seoul module and BFP's Corregidor. (if you notice something else missing, let me know!) Of course, the new Croix De Guerre, the new combined edition of Sof/HH (DASL) from MMP, a new Bonus Pack, and Koenigsberg 1945 are all due to come out soon, so I will have more work on my hands with those write-ups as well.
Still, the bulk of the write-ups are finished.
These write-ups are all without photos, except for a couple where people kindly sent me photos, who are duly credited in those entries. I can't thank them enough, nor emphasize how much I encourage you to send me photos. I suspect I will be taking some photos of my own this coming month, but not as many as I had been, because the whole process of taking and processing those photos is a real paint point for me.
That leaves Critical Hit. I have about 11-12 Critical Hit products from the first months of 2017 that I will be doing write-ups for.
How many other Critical Hit items have come out in the past 2 1/2 years? I requested a list of releases from RT but he just sent me a smarmy response, which I expected. So I began laboriously going through the CH website, looking at every release or announced release (it gets complicated because RT, possibly deliberately, often doesn't distinguish between upcoming and already-produced products on his site). I began incorporating these into a spreadsheet.
As of this morning, this CH spreadsheet has 242 rows to it. Does that mean 242 new items in the past 2.5 years? I wish. Because of variant maps, etc., many of those rows actually contain links to as many as 5 different CH items (but typically 3). This means that, to update the website, I will have to make somewhere between 240 and 1200 new entries or changes to existing entries (I think it may be around 700). These range from what would be an entire write-up for a new product to a small update to an existing entry, so the amount of work would vary. But it's a lot.
One of the reasons there are so many entries is, I believe, that RT has acquired a printing press capable of print on demand, at least for his map panels, scenario cards and rules and charts if not necessarily for die-cut counters. With print on demand he need not worry about warehouse/storage costs, nor put overhead into printing items that may or may not sell well. He can print exactly as needed, without the great loss in time and effort that would be required to do that on old non-POD presses. As a result, it is very easy for him to make many variations of a single HASL map--larger hex or even larger hex or winterized terrain or rubbled, etc.--and offer them as standalone releases or upgrades to the main product. If someone is actually stupid enough to pay him $100 for an extra extra large version of a HASL map that nobody would have space for, great, he's made some money. If they don't, well, all he lost was an afternoon, or less, working on Illustrator.
It is clear that this will be standard operating practice for CH going forward. I noticed several other apparent newish practices, too.
So, am I going to purchase all of these things? No. That would cost me thousands and thousands of dollars. Even if I didn't purchase any of the map variants, etc., he now prices his products so very high that I would be giving him an exorbitant amount of money--still thousands--just buying "baseline" products.
What I plan to do, then, is to
document all these items, with the information I can find (which is difficult, because CH provides extremely little information about its individual products, what it does say about them is filtered through RT's bizarre stream of consciousness ramblings, and the few facts that it does offer (such as contents) are often incomplete or inaccurate. And of course, since he renames and repackages old content constantly, there's also the matter of figuring out pedigree.
I will also purchase, through a retailer, not directly, to limit the amount of $$, CH would get, a small number of these CH products that might be good to examine personally, and do a full write-up for those few.
There are ways you can help me with this. I am not asking anybody to donate to the site for the purpose of obtaining CH products, nor am I asking people to purchase CH products to send to em. BUT, if you ALREADY HAVE purchased a CH product that came out in the past 2.5 years, I WOULD APPRECIATE it if you could send me a detailed list/description of the contents of said products. I can give you credit for that in the entry for those products, or--if you prefer--keep you anonymous. I can understand why some might prefer confidentiality. And I will not judge your purchase habits.
Anyway, you kind of have in a nutshell why I stopped updating my site for 2.5 years--the frustration of taking photos and especially of documenting Critical Hit (for consumer awareness/protection reasons). I wish RT would retire and move to Hawaii and disappear from my ASL consciousness.
So that's where things stand now. Just thought some might be interested.