Its been at the back of my head for a good six months that D101games.co.uk needs a good updating.  Being a Web Professional this should be a piece of cake. However there is a trade off between putting shiny new features on t’website and getting books out.

• An online store. So you can buy books/pdfs from me directly. This one is a no brainer, but how far this is all integrated with the rest of the site. In fact there is a case for the Online store to become the site.
• Continued support of the blogs. Personally I love blogging and some of the D101 authors have started to use their blogs too. I want to update/enhance this for the next iteration of the site.
• D101games.com.  I’ve already got this domain, type it in and you’ll get the homepage of the site, but I want it so it maps to all pages of the site. While I’m particularly fond of the .co.uk domain name due to pride in my country, the .com domain name makes a huge difference in a business sense.
• A shiny new theme for the website/blogs/sub domains. Some of the site is looking a bit tired and I’ve now got quite a large gallery of images that I can use around the site to perk it up a bit.
• Discussion/support forums. I know I closed down the previous forums saying I didn’t have a , but I think there’s a case of having at least a ‘Support’ forum for the rules and release date questions I get from time to time.
• Clean up of navigation. Direct links to main titles, titles I’m working on etc.

Any suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Hit the wall big time at the end of March. The big move back to D101 HQ from our rented accommodation, was as nasty as me and my wife had predicted it would be. Lots and lots of boxing up, shifting boxes up and down stairs, cleaning, then some more cleaning, dealing with unfinished bits and glitches in the house, adding to which  my Dad died after a brief but ugly battle with Lung Cancer.

Conpulsion at Edinburgh University Teviot House over the Easter weekend really lifted my spirits. I’ll make a fuller report of this awesome weekend later, but it really invigorated me and put my head in a bright and happy space.

With things sorting themselves out at home and my dad’s funeral next week, I’m finally coming back to life as a person and as

Coming at you down the pipe:

The Company – literally preparing this one today, should be out tomorrow.  The follow up adventure “Operation Camphor” should be out in the next month or so.

Empires Rising – Just about to go into final layout check

Crypts and Things: The Blood of the Dragon – about to be proofed and remaining art commissioned.

Here Be Dragons – in editorial with yours truly, for a summer release.

The Worlds of Wordplay – which is the new name of the reissued, revitalised and resized Wordplay The Big 5 + The Drowned Lands.

River of Heaven – John Ossoway’s D100 magnum opus.

…and a whole bunch of stuff for Glorantha, since Continuum ( a traditional hot bed of UK Gloranthaphiles is upcoming ), including Hearts in Gloratha issue 5.

Oh and not to mention a little thing called..OPENQUEST 2.

Man its great to be alive

Crypts and Things has been unleashed and in its first week it has sold as much as the pre-order did!  There’s a nice little buzz about the game, both on various blogs and via private emails.  Both my Games Designer and publisher side are happy   Lots of nice little bits for C&T in the pipeline. In the short term modules galore. More long term a Companion and a spinoff self-contained game that you can use along side C&T.

I’m especially glad that C&T has found a following esp since its joining an increasingly crowded area of Old school D&D Weird Fantasy/S&S games. After looking at the insane number of OSR adventures out there (75 + for OSRIC alone) I’m glad I gave C&T a branding  (which John Ossoway’s logo design helped great guns with) and feel all of its own.

If C&T was me reimagining D&D  and OpenQuest is me doing RQ my way, then the upcoming Project Darklight is me doing Cyberpunk.  I’ve settled on using Wordplay as my base system and its going to be my next serious writting project once I’ve finished off Blood of the Dragon for Crypts and Things.

Add to this my publishing commitments. Pre-orders for the Company have been ordered and once they’ve shipped, its time to press the button at Lulu/DriveThruRPG to make it a general release. Empires Rising is going to the next product out the tubes, all the pieces are in my hands.  Blood of the Dragon will be simultanous with ER and touch wood I’ll squeeze out Hearts in Glorantha #5. Then there will probably be a break of a couple of months.

As much as I don’t  want it D101 will go on a slight hiatus in April/May as I move back into our house and adjust to a new and extended life there.  The slowing down and focusing more on home maters actually starts now, as we prepare to move out, but I’m praying that it doesn’t have as big an impact on D101 as the move last August did.

2011 in review
2011 was a strange one in retrospect. I only managed to get a few releases out before a big house extension kicked in ( which is still on going ).

Ye Little Book of HeroQuest Fantasy – the print version of Ye Little Book of HeroQuest Monsters and the very popular Ye Little Book of HeroQuest Dungeoneering (the subject matter and low price point seems to have been the win here).

Wordplay the Big Five (Revised) + Adventures in Wordplay: The Drowned Lands. Unfortunately both these titles were pulled after a month of release, due to me wanting to consolidate my efforts (but Wordplay fans read on for some good news).

The Book of Glorious Joy – Jamie “Trotsky” Revell’s guide to the Gloranthan West, focusing on the Kingdom of Loskalm. A big Gloranthan release for me, that tested me to my limits. This is why there was no issues of Hearts in Glorantha in 2011 Our first hardcover, which paves the way for similar releases (read on)

Then I moved out of my house, while it is being extended, which put the breaks on. However development work carried on which is why you’ll see a rush of releases in the next couple of months.

Marching on into 2012!!

Crypts and Things – Did very well when it went up for pre-order at indiegogo.com in the last quarter of 2011. We surpassed the $2000 target, eventually reaching $3,435, which means every pre-order will also get the first adventure module The Blood of the Dragon. It also means that the game is firmly established in the area of my brain marked “Profitable and worth doing” as well as “A ton of fun, so I’m doing it anyway” . Follow up adventures in the work, and ideas for Supplements spinning around in my head. ETA of the main rule book end of this month, with Blood of The Dragon coming in March/April.

The Company – Ready to launch this one. Well pleased with what started off as an idle “lets do OQ modern” conversation. One of the pleasurable things about commissioning other people to do work for you is that you end up with one of your favourite RPGs Eta end of this month.

Empires Rising – Back on track after being neglected while the house move was going on. Working on the final layout reminds me why I’ve stuck with what is essentially someone else’s Fantasy house campaign. There’s enough depth in the setting for you HeroQuest narrators to get stuck in, with four excellent scenarios to get you started.

Hearts in Glorantha #5 – Back on track after some of the best Gloranthan fan writers and artists rallied round. Expect previews soon, out April.

Gloranthan Adventures #2 Red Sun Rising & #3 Karia – My book of Lunar adventures and home campaign setting respectively. Both need rewrites. RSR further along with cover and some internal art, so May/June release (Eternal Con?) with Karia up for a July (Continuum) release.

River of Heaven – Just about to hand over to the proof reader after an through edit. Art has been commissioned. Expectations are high over this one and I know John Ossoway has delivered. Now its down to me to get it out so people can enjoy this jem

D101 remastered
Now that we are in our fourth year, time and money allow me to revisit some of our eariler releases and give some care and attendtion.

OpenQuest 2nd Edition – Not so much an extensive rewrite, more an expandsion and clarification.

Savage North – This was one of the first things that I put out and it was a bit lacking in the proofing dept. Dom Mooney and John Holmes independently sent me very detailed feedback on the shortcomings of this book that will form the basis of the ’2nd printing’.

Wordplay the Big Six – Working on Project Darklight (see below) made me realise that I still have a great love of Wordplay. So I’ve decided to republish the Big Five, with Dr Mitch’s The Drowned Lands theme (hence the new title), new art to replace the clip art and a revised cover by Jon Hodgeson, all in a story gamer friendly size of 6″ x 9″ (US tradepaper back) in both Hard and Softcover.

In development coming to a gaming table near you this year

Wombat – 2011 was not the Year of the Wombat, but 2012 is ! Expect the free version by easter and the “Little Book of Big Adventure” an expanded version with mini-settings and adventures in October.

Project Darklight – Wordplay Cyberpunk – more on its Blog.

The Book of Madness and Mystery – HeroQuest Lovecraft. Not a HQ conversion of Call of Cthulhu, but a complete relook at how you would present Lovecraft’s stories in the HeroQuest framework. I’m sorting out the rulesy bits while Rik Kershaw Moore and John Ossoway are writing adventures/settings for it.

Outlaws of the Water Margin – adapting the Monkey rules for this Chinese Classic of 108 Heroes versus a tryanical minister.

D101 Games Convention Scedule

Convention wise I and the D101 demoers are definitely confirmed for

Conplusion, Edinburgh Easter weekend
Continuum, Leicester July
Furnace, Sheffield October

So that’s 2012, busy, busy, fun, fun, fun!

Life is a bit up and down at the moment. We’ve moved house into a rented property, getting reconnected to the digital age (t’internet and telly) pretty painlessly within the first five days. Meanwhile D101 HQ looked like the D-Day landings, which the demolition team in full flow, with a huge hole in the ground where our Garage used to be that stretches into the Garden. Saying that I’m smug that we moved out is an understatement. However its had a huge impact in slowing the impetus of D101. Notice the words ‘slowing’ not ‘stopped’ Even though time is even more tight than before I’m still getting D101 stuff worked on, usually at crazy o’clock at night!

Milestones this month

River of Heaven first draft complete and cover completed!  Congrats to Jon

Empires Rising – half way through layout, on for a Oct release (Furnace woohoo!)

The Company – Final check in progress, early Oct release.

Crypts and Things -Final stages of production entered

Monkey and OpenQuest are now available in print over at DriveThruRpg.com – Much better quality than Lulu ever produced, and better shipping costs and times.  Moving d101′s catalogue over will continue over the next couple of months, but all new books will be via DriveThruRpg.com.

Book of Glorious Joy is done and dusted, release any second now

My overaim is to have all the D101 developers in a big group shoot with big grins clutching their books at Dragonmeet, where you will be able to buy these new books.

This batch of releases is quite significant for D101. It should effectively double or even treble the steady baseline of sales that we get from our current crop of games.  Which means the dream of me going full time with this (there’s a D101 office in the new extension ) takes one huge step forward.

As Real life hits me soundly round the head, with impending house extension, I’ve been consolidating here at D101.

Moving Print versions over to DriveThruRpg.com. This is a slow process, first I have to do some tweaking to the files (Drive thru are a bit more demanding than Lulu), regenerate the cover (different format) and then patiently wait during the approval process that takes a week or so. Monkey and OpenQuest have been done, I’m awaiting proofs, and the rest of this month should see all the supplements and Gloranthan Magazines get done. It make sense to have all my print titles in one place, and Drive thru is a much much better deal for both you and me. This time next month I should be moved totally and will be closing down my Lulu store.

OpenQuest for the win! I’ve more or less sorted the OQ release schedule for the next year. The powered by OQ games The Company & River of Heaven are the first priority.  Look out for very special pre-orders soon Then we are back on track with OQ Fantasy releases, which I’ll post more details when the fuss over RQ6 is over.

RuneQuest 6. Talking of which I’ve got plans for a RQ6 supplement, since producing standalone supplements will have some form of free license, in a format that is fast, fun and gets you playing as quickly as possible making the best use of the rules systems. As a long time RQ fan its too exciting a prospect to overlook, but I am tempering it with the caution that the rest of the D101 catalog doesn’t get overlooked while we (it will be a collaborative effort) swan off to do our dream RQ project

Forum. The current forum is going to die and probably not be replaced.  For a small outfit like me it doesn’t make sense for me to have my own forum. I check all the major rpg forums, and have a google alert set up so if you talk about one of my games I get an email about it, so over the next couple of days the forum will get closed.

Before I sit down and get my mojo together to finish off the Book of Glorious Joy (which has its final corrections and an index to throw together -SQEEE! ), its time to quickly reflect on where I’m at with my publishing endevears.

Wordplay. If you pay attendtion to my main news feed/twitter/farcebook page for d101 you would have seen that yesterday after a quick chat with the games’ author Graham Spearing i decided to call it a day on publishing Wordplay.I confessed to him that Wordplay is probably my least priority of all the games I publish and then showed him the great pile of stuff I’ve got planned. He then stepped in as an outside evaluator and pointed out that I should stop doing Wordplay now completely. This means stopping publishing even the stuff I’ve put out. I agreed with him. I’ve had my fun with Wordplay, but my heart has not really been in it since Christmas. In retrospect I should have just printed Wordplay the Big Five as a one off and left it at that. Stopping completely frees up allot of energy, not to mention art assets (WPB5 had a lot of cracking art which I can now build other supplements/games around), but at the moment I feel kinda like I’ve just split up with a major Girlfriend. But its the right decision. I’ve already started looking at what I had planned for Wordplay, Project Darklight (or CyberPlay as Graham was calling it) immediately comes to mind, and working out the best things to do with it.

Worry. I’ve been quietly stressed about D101 for the last couple of months. I’ve got two very large books in production that vampire like are sucking my creative mojo out.  The thing is that its been a fun ride doing both The Company & The Book of Glorious Joy. However I’m at the end of both books, and the end of my tether. While I’ve been finishing off these books, there was also the fun and games over whether OpenQuest is still legal, with Mongoose loosing the RuneQuest license. In the end Jeff Richard who sorts out the legal side of RuneQuest on behalf of its owner Greg Stafford told me that Greg said OpenQuest is ok with him

Wombat. Its been a while since I did a public update about Wombat. I’ve hammered out two alpha versions already and I’m planning a third and final before I go public with it, and plan to do a final alpha before moving quickly onto a Beta. I reckon I’m still on track to the Free version for Furnace (where it will be distributed as a free leaflet) and the extended version “The Little Book of Big Adventure” by early Dec. Once it goes beta I’ll start making more noises about it.  Wombat for me kinda takes over from where Wordplay leaves off (which is why Wordplay should leave my hands and go back to Graham). Its a big little thing for me and D101.

Win. HeroQuest is win, Empires Rising is win, OpenQuest wave 2 games , River of Heaven & The Company, Crypts and Things is the win, Wombat is win and Monkey is win (you’ll see how much Monkey is win soon ).  So its not all doom and gloom

Been a while since I rambled on about the inner workings of D101 and what I was working on. I forgot how much it used to fire me up.

So gradually bringing it back online over the next couple of days

So Furnace is coming up and its time to organise the D101 stall for the con, or not as the case may turn out.

This year I’ve popped my cheery well and truly on the selling front, from two cons.

Con-Quest (Derby May)
On the surface this looks like Dragonmeet in the Midlands, in fact it was originally going to be DM-Midlands. A one day con. There’s a mini-trade area where Mongoose and House Attitides were set up and then the main hall where trade stalls of various types not all rpg (we were in-between a CCG stall and a stall selling Pagan items) where there was also Leisure Games and a bring and buy stall.

Here’s me Steve (behind the stall) and Gary “Evil Gaz” Bowerbank one of the organisers in a picture taken by Darran Sims (another of the organisers) from the balcony behind the stall.

Short story here is that the gamers, despite the abundance of trade stalls, were there to game. Even Mongoose left early. I felt like a total lemon, while the D101 Demo team ran full games and had a grand time, I made two sales (fortunately enough to cover the cost of the stall) all day and went home will practically all the stock as a result.

Despite all our attempts to trap what little passing trade there was, interest in the stall was virtually zero

It should be noted none of this is down to the very fine efforts of the organisers, who put on a very well attended excellent first con, but more from the fact that I was physically distanced from the customers who were busy gaming in the centre of room. I realised I would have been better off running games and having a selection of them in my bag with a cash tin if people wanted to buy…which lead

Continuum (Leicester July)
Very different set up here. Although Continuum has a similar foot fall (about 200), its a 2 day residential con. Learning from the mistakes made at ConQuest, I put the stall firmly in the room that we had for gaming, we had 2-3 tables on the go in all slots. I called the stall the ‘Magic Stall’ because it magically appeared in-between slots, and was ‘closed’ while I was running games. Initially the stock was packed up when it was closed, but by the end I left stuff out for people to browse.  As you can see from the photo, the Magic stall is less of a barrier but more of an open feature.

Here’s the Magic stall front on:

and here’s it side on with customers browsing it

This worked great guns, contact with the customer was easily made. The only change I would make for next time would also to have a ‘breakfast’ Magic Stall that appeared at the edge of the Dining hall, after I had my breakfast (I’m an early riser). This is what Leisure games did on Saturday and they where doing great trade at 8:30-9 as people had just finished breakfast.

Another thing I did was try out the man with games in his bag approach – Monkey you see fits in my man bag along with the cash box – and this worked very well since people know me well enough at Continuum to wander up and ask for a copy. This ease of access also led to sales of books that were upstairs on the Magic Stall in the Games Room as well. Because I had copies with me at all times as soon as someone asked me about the game I had something to show and sell. As a result I literally was selling Monkey up until the moment I left the con!

So for Furnace I’ll definitely be repeating the Continuum set up of the Magic Stall and Man-with-a-game-in-his-bag , with some tweaks.

So what gentle reader is happening with Monkey, one of the games that has been in ‘production’ forever here at D101 games?

Well its not vapourware, I have the complete draft and Dr Mitch is finishing off the editing, taking over from the overly busy Proff Galeotti, as I type. Simultaneously I’m putting it into layout – since I already have the art

This means that the game should be out mid June beginning of July latest.

To celebrate I’ve posted a new preview of the game, its introductory chapter.

• Monkey preview [Pdf, 1Mb]

Pedants take note this is a work in progress, but I thought it time to show something of the game so people could get excited about it