Kickstarter

No, not more sourcebooks. Just some cool news. 

• The Road to Hell on Earth anthology is coming along. I'm in the process of editing the stories, and then Michelle will edit them again, and then on to layout and so on! But the cool thing I wanted to share is that Aaron Acevedo is doing the cover art for the anthology! 
• The curse the darkness Companion is now officially going to include hacks for Savage Worlds (written by me), the Storytelling system (also me), and Our Last Best Hope (written by me; this was originally included for backers of both OLBH and ctd, and we're excited to give both games some greater exposure). Also, of course, we're going to polish up and include the ghost rules, and probably some more scenarios, maybe some other special rules, too. 
• But also, it will have ahack using the Apocalypse World rules, written by David Hill! David currently has his own Kickstarter running, for his game about giant robots, and it's nearing the end of its run. Go check it out! 
• And also also, the Companion gets a Fate hack written by Rob Wieland! Rob's been bouncing ideas off me (this morning, in fact) on how to make curse the darkness work in the Fate system, and I think it's gonna be pretty cool. 

So, all in all, both books are going to be pretty damned cool. I'm still looking at having them both out by GenCon (the anthology by Origins, if I can manage it), and I'll still be offering print copies to backers at a discount, and sending you all the pdfs free of charge. 

Anything else...oh, sure. A Tragedy in Five Acts is now available for sale in pdf over at Drive Thru RPG, and print copies will be for sale soon (as soon as they get shipped to backers from the Kickstarter, which DTRPG informs me should be within a week or two). 

Sounds like a cool title, right? Here's why.

The curse the darkness Companion is going to provide rules for the setting in Savage Worlds, Fate, and (here's the big news I was waiting to firm up) the Storytelling system from White Wolf. 

Obviously, all of these systems work very differently from each other and from the standard curse the darkness game engine, and so using the same setting with the Savage Worlds mechanics is going to change the game considerably. That's fine. I'm looking forward to the challenge of reinterpreting my game in several different ways and providing the players with, effectively, three new games to play with.

This is why, of course, the Companion is going to be our summer release - it's going to be a larger book than I was initially expecting, and it's going to take more time to write than I originally planned (plus new art!). And you all get it for free! Perks of being a backer! :)

By the way, if you have requests for other open-source game systems that you think might fit the Companion, let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'm considering Apocalypse World, I'm just not as familiar with it and if I did it, I'd want to get it right. 

I'll be making this announcement on playattentiongames.com later on today, but I wanted you, the backers, to get it first. Please feel free to spread this around, though, and as always, thank you for your support. 

Hi! Happy holidays (for those that celebrate)! Isn't it nice that, if you choose to, you can celebrate Christmas, religiously or otherwise, and monsters don't come out of the shadows and kill you? Good times all 'round.

So, it occurs to me that while things are very much in motion behind the scenes on the fiction anthology and the curse the darkness Companion, it's been a while since I updated. So let's do that.

The stories for the anthology are written, and they're really awesome. They need editing and revision (as stories always do), and I'm really behind schedule in getting those revisions to the authors. My plan had been to have the book done by Xmas - obviously that didn't happen. The reason for that is, well, life. End of semester craziness combined with a lot of extra development work on the God-Machine Chronicle for Onyx Path, and I just got buried. 

So, here's the plan going forward. I have one task to do for Onyx Path (outlining Demon: The ???). Once that's done, I'm going to get revisions on the anthology (which, by the way, is titled The Road to Hell on Earth) and get them back to authors. Once the authors finish the changes, it should be a relatively quick process to lay the book out (it's just text, after all) and get it uploaded, and then you all get the pdf. I would really, really like to be able to offer free copies of the book to backers, but I don't think I can afford it. What I can do, though, is offer some kind of discounted rate, and I'll work that out with Drive-Thru just as soon as I have some hard numbers to throw around. 

Now, the Companion. I have a really, really awesome announcement about that...but I can't make it yet, because I'm firming up one last point. Sorry. What I can say is that it's going to be Play Attention's main release this summer (we were going to do M0arpigz, our crazy satirical Savage Worlds sci-fi game, but that's going to slip to fall or or next winter because I want the time to finish the Companion), and, again, backers get the pdf free and the hard copy at a discounted rate. 

So that's where we're at. Any questions, hit the comment button. As my little boy would say, Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Easter!

I feel like a bum; I really wanted to have ghost rules done and out to you by this point. However, I trust you all to know the difference between an excuse and a reason, so here's the reason:

GenCon was busy as hell for us, and it butted right up against the beginning of school. I went from having lots of free time to work on gamestuff to having none, and that delayed things. And then I started working on a project for Onyx Path, which, had it been finished on time, would have left me ample time to get the ghost rules done. It wasn't; I got sick, which didn't throw things off by much, but "much" is a pretty narrow margin around here.

Long story short: The ghost rules aren't quite done. I'm finishing redlines tonight for the aforementioned Onyx Path project (The God-Machine Chronicle, if you're interested) and then I'm making final selections for The Road to Hell on Earth, which is, you may recall, the curse the darkness fiction anthology. That means that I should be able to have the text of the ghost rules done by Halloween, and all backers will have it. I'm planning on including a new piece of art with the ghost rules (in the same style as the photographs in the curse the darkness book), but I need to coordinate with my photographer and then get the picture manipulated, so I don't know when that will be done.

So, to sum up:

• Ghost rules: Text done and a link sent to you wonderful folks by 10/31/12.
• Anthology: Final selection of stories next week, should be on target for a December release. All backers definitely get the pdf for nothing, and I will at least discount the hard copy.
• curse the darkness Companion: Probably going to wind up being released in spring; I'm thinking March. Again, all backers get the pdf, and at least a discount on the hard copy.
• In unrelated (to curse the darkness) news, the A Tragedy in Five Acts Kickstarter is still going, and will be until 11/5/12. You may be wondering if that will push back the timetable on any curse the darkness stuff - it won't. Michelle is writing that game, while Matt (me) is writing all of the curse-related material. 
• M0arpigz teasers will start in December or so. What's M0arpigz? Hell, what isn't?

Any questions, please comment or message me! Thanks again for your support!