Eberk
Release Date: 2010
Set Size: 1 Button
Publisher: Wandering Geek Podcast
Designers: Curtis Arndt
Artist: Unknown
Eberk is a promotional button issued in 2010 for the Wandering Geek podcast. Approximately 200 buttons were produced. His official stats are (2) (3) (6) (7) (10/16).
According to WGP Creator and Personality Curtis Arndt:
The Wandering Geek Podcast was a show that I started to fill what I saw as a gap in the gaming podcast genre at the time, gaming on the go. I was a truck driver at the time and realized that gamers that traveled for a living could have a hard time finding games and accessories that fit into that lifestyle.(Remember, this is the age before Smartphones were ubiquitous.) Since I did the show by myself, recording on my laptop in the cab of my truck, I made-up character voices to do various skits, promos and intros just so my voice wouldn’t be the only thing that they would hear.
Eberk was one of the later additions, had a vaguely Scottish accent and was our own resident Dwarven Truck Driver. He was named by a fan of the show in a contest we had for that purpose, before that he appeared in skits but had no name. I’m sorry, but I don’t recall who actually named him. The character only appeared in 3 or 4 skits total, but was the “Official” mascot of the show since he appeared on the logo driving his D20 bobtail tractor.
The button itself was spawned from the need to have a promotional item to launch the second volume of the show at Gen Con. The Wandering Geek went on hiatus for a period of time and was resurrected with the help of former fan-turned-co-host Scott Langston. Since I was a big fan of Button Men and it fit our target audience to a tee, we decided to contact James Ernst and see if we could make an addition to the game. I have to admit, even though I’d had reviewed several Cheapass games and met James at a few conventions, I didn’t think that the odds were very high that we’d get permission to make the button. Particularly since we didn’t have any budget for licensing. However, we got the green light pretty quickly as I recall with the only requirement being that we needed to put the game’s web address on the front of the finished button and send him a copy of the art to make sure it was up to standard.
Next came the design and production of the physical buttons, to which we owe everything to our fan base. I wish I still had all those emails, but it’s been nearly a decade and the names of those responsible have been lost to the mists of time. We had someone that took the logo and extracted Eberk and the truck, then put the other Buttonmen elements on it. They were extremely patient as we went through 5 or 6 iterations refining it and making it look as good as we could. The numbers were chosen because they are all unusual, but available, die types with the exception of the d6 which we also had as a promotional item for the run of the show. I had all those different dice (d2, d3, d7 and d16) in my collection and wanted to give others that had them a use for them. The generally low numbers make Eberk more of a “Skills” character in the “Button-verse”. Another fan who had a button making machine as part of their business was kind enough to make us over 200 copies of it as long as he could make a few extra for himself and promote his business with a sticker on the back.
Needless to say, we had no issues with that at all. When all was said and done, we had a fairly amazing promotional item that cost next to nothing thanks to a generous game designer and a few awesome fans that cared about the show and wanted to share it with more people. The finished Eberk Button Men were included in the Swag Bags for the 2010 Gen Con Stink, a pre-convention event where many “Alpha Gamers” go to get their Geek On the Wednesday Night before the convention opens, and during the convention randomly.
Rediscovery[edit | edit source]
TheOrgg will occasionally will Google image search for variations of "Button Men" in order to find either original artwork or missing artwork for the wiki.
This can also mean finding large pictures of Button Men and expanding them, spotting missing button art and trying to email the people behind the pictures. This is what happened to rediscover Eberk, an official button that was not even listed at Buttonweavers. A group photo was found on Flickr, an account was made and contact attempted.[1] A day or so later, I had an email with the rusty picture to the right. I dug some more via archive.org and emailed the people behind the Wandering Geek podcast, and Mr. Arndt sent the above paragraphs (and a few more omitted for brevity) and the original button art. Contact is how many of the stories on this wiki originate, and I always look forward to finding out more about the sets before their origins become lost).