Back in January of 2021, I backed MORK BORG kickstarter for Heretic and IKHON. IKHON sounded especially cool to me. The gimmick, and it is a gimmick in the truest sense of the word, is that you would have a black box containing four small booklets. Each booklet was supposed to represent an "Old God." When a player called upon one of these Old Gods for aid, they were supposed to randomly pick one of the booklets, roll a die, and whatever the result was according to the booklet--that's what happened.
Unfortunately, the printer who made IKHON didn't understand the assignment; the booklets were each supposed to have a nondescript black cover so that picking one was truly random. Instead, they flipped the covers inside-out, which made it extremely obvious which Old God each booklet corresponded to. Which, of course, defeats the whole point of the gimmick.
Oh, dear.
As you can see from the picture below, the name of the Old God is spelled out at the top of the "cover" page of the booklet.
It was awful nice of Free League Publishing to offer to reprint the IKHON boxes and send out "corrected" copies to backers who got misprinted ones at no cost. Unfortunately it appears that if you live in the US you got send another misprint.
However, if you have a longarm stapler, you can fix them. I mean, I could wait to see if Free League will send me a another, actually correct box, but my experience contacting them has indicated that they might not be the most responsive company operating in the rpg space.
So, longarm it is.
The problem we're correcting is that the "cover" pages are supposed to be interior pages. The plain black pages are meant to be the cover. Simply take the staples out and reverse that page for each booklet, then re-staple with the longarm.
The problem we're correcting is that the "cover" pages are supposed to be interior pages. The plain black pages are meant to be the cover. Simply take the staples out and reverse that page for each booklet, then re-staple with the longarm.
The above is what each booklet should look like when you turn to the first page.
Note that this won't be a seamless process. For example, this one pictured below wasn't quite tough enough to be unstapled, refolded, and stapled again without the "spine" breaking down a bit.
I put some washi tape on the "spines" to reinforce them and make them uniform. I put a little craft glue down before adding the tape for extra adhesion. I also painted some glue overtop to prevent future "fraying."
Now they look identical enough that a player could choose one without knowing which Old God they'll be invoking. The gimmick is now functional.
Although IKHON came with a craft project I didn't really want, I can at least get some use out of them at the table. Hopefully, the above will give you some ideas on how to fix them yourself if you have a need for it.
