Just came back from the mighty Continuum. Now that I’m back in the land of the living here’s a full run down of what ‘we’ did this con.

Next weekend I’ll be having a ton of fun with Room D101 at Continuum. Room D101 this time out is actually a room and I’ve got Ginger Matt and 

neilf

helping me out by running games of Monkey and SimpleQuest respectively. All in all were running eight games between us.

Continnum also see the debut of Hearts in Glorantha.  The box of the magazine came back from the printers yesterday, a proud moment tinged with a bit of self doubt about how I’m going to take this on the train with me. Fortunatly its a very light box so its more bulk. Oh well we’ll get there

The creative forge that is InDesign has been hot this week, since I’m throwing together SimpleQuest Zero Edition, effectively the final game without the creature, setting and adventure chapters and a basic layout which I may stick with for the final book. Plan is here to print of copies for me, 

neilf

and our players and then do a very small run of about five for sale at a very low cost (say £5) for those people who are very interested for sale at Continuum then make the Pdf available through the website. After Continuum I’ll finish off the book for a Sept/Oct release. By releasing a Zero Edition, I hopefully trap allot more typos and reduce the errata in the final edition as well as giveing interested parties something to work with.  On the adventure front Dead Pot Country and Life and Death have both been finished off in first draft form for Continuum This means that very quickly after SQ core is released, I’ll be able to put both the Shattered Lands setting book (which DPC is the adventure for) and Life and Death together.

Monkey which has been cuckooed out of the development nest since HiG & SQ turned up on the scene, got a look in this week as I preped characters and finished off a write up of Ministry of Thunder for Ginger Matt. Through the wonders of Skype I’ll be running through the game with him today/tommorrow, but I have no worries. the system is pretty straight forward and GM is a veteran Feng Shui gamesmaster.

The plan is to get all the final bits of writing done this weekend. A plan that may not go as smoothly since the sun is shining and there’s a jungle in my back gardern. But I reckon even with this, I should have everything printed off and packed up by Wednesday latest.  Which should give time for some fun stuff like T-shirts and posters.:)  My only problem now is keeping a track of money and resisting the urge to splash out on large posters that I don’t need.

The final thing I need to do, which I can do in a quiet moment at work, before Continnum is set up the D101games forums, if only for feedback/discussion about Hearts in Glorantha.

Simon Bray, the artist for SimpleQuest, came up with the goods today as he submitted this lovely vivid cover that I think sums up the tone of the game nicely.

I’ve also posted the Introductory chapter of the game on the SimpleQuest page of my website, so you can check out what its all about.

Not long to go now.

This weekend I finsh off the layout for the first issue of Heart’s in Glorantha.

darransims

   has come up with the goods cover wise.

Its a extremely suitable ‘wrapper’ for all the high quality articles and art . Oh yes we have art, some of it jaw droppingly good -cheers Darran for sourcing.

There’s more about the first issue in a preview up on the D101 Games website

I’m chuffed to bits with the first issue, which has been very much thrown together very quickly. Its a credit to the people who have submitted articles. 

15 months after I started work on it the first draft of Life and Death is now complete.  60 pages of text, including eight pregenerated characters lovingly typed up to run at Continuum by both myself and Neil Ford. The fact that Neil volunteered to run it was the big push to get it finished. So cheers Neil!

It has slightly reduced in scope from the first very ambitious content’s list I posted yonks ago. Of the four proposed parts only two of them have made it in (the City of Miraz and the Iron Mines) mainly due to the need to keep the book manageable and tight. I’m quite happy that although the adventure is quite freeform, there’s a good story underpinning it all.

So next up will be revision, playtesting, procuring art and editing, which I’ll do post Continuum for a release in October to coincide with Furnace (18th-19th October).

I’m having fun doing them….when small family let me get away. Had the nasty one of my main machine finally dying over the weekend, which put a spanner in the works, but resolueltly I march on.  Missus going back to work should set increased writing time, and gaming group is on hiatus until June. So May is offically ‘get stuff done’ month.

SimpleQuest -

gspearing

 is doing a grand job of editing the chapters, leading to me doing my rewrite this week, with layout at the end of the month. Simon’s delivered the goods on the art front with some nicely evocative pieces. Fingers crossed will be out in July (as in you can order a book from Lulu out).

Shattered Lands & Life and Death. Currently on hiatus, but will see some development work since I’m running L&D and Dead Pot County, the Scenario that will be part of Shattered Lands, at Continuum. Big news for Shattered Lands is that its going back to being its own book and will not be released under the OGL.  After Continuum I’ll be getting both these books finished for probably a winter release. I say probably since I don’t want to rush either of them.

Monkey. Unfortunately wont’ be out for Continuum. Watching the final editing process of SimpleQuest has really made me realise how much work needs doing and how I don’t want to rush it. But what I hope to do before Continuum is a revision of the rules, implementing some of the ideas that came out in the last playtest and feedback from the Mighty Monkey Army, and make that available as a plain Pdf for testing, comment and buzz.  The ‘serious’ work starts after Continuum, so brace your self for more meaningful updates then.

Hearts in Glorantha. End of May is the deadline for submissions. As well as my Karia stuff, Greg Stafford already submitted a piece as has Jeff Richards and John Ottoway (author of Cthulhu Rising). Got about 10 others beavering away as we speak so we’ll see what happens at the end of the month when stuff starts hitting my intray.  Still open to submissions

Other than that my final thing at the moment is egging

gspearing

 on in the development of Wordplay, which seems to be coming on tidily.

In the meantime I promise on the life of my first born that I shall not take on board any more projects.

I have become a Gloranthan Fanzine editor.

Looking at my hard  drive the other day I realized that even with the stuff I’m doing for  Moon Designs (Red Sun Rising) and Continuum (a compilation of my Molad scenarios humbly called ‘Liber Newtus’) I’ve still got a variety of Gloranthan bits sitting there.  This was also coupled with the realisation that despite there being other fantasy worlds out there , and working on one my self for self publication (see d101games.co.uk ) my heart and regular gaming is still very much in Glorantha.  Also add into the mix the desire to show idiots like Angry Argrath over on Rpg.net (see http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=181101 if you’ve missed out) that Gloranthan fandom has survived the Fan Publication Policy and perhaps provide something that acts as a rallying call to Gloranthan fandom itself.

Thus the idea of a fanzine ‘Hearts in Glorantha’ jumped out like Athena out of Zeus’s head fully formed and ready to rock!
 
The fanzine will be run on a not for profit basis and will feature contributions from Gloranthan fandom. The idea behind it is to have a vibrant magazine which comes out bi-yearly, that shows Glorantha is alive and well. Obviously the majority of the articles will be HeroQuest, but I will accept articles for other games systems. The liscence I have covers Mongoose RuneQuest as well.

The fanzine will complement not compete with existing fan publications, such as Unspoken Word and Tradetalk, and of course the official material published by Moon Designs. I think there is a gap in the market for a  fun fanzine which is made up of individual articles on a variety of subjects, rather than the ‘theme’ issues that UW and Tradetalk does. Think the non-themed issues of Tales of the Reaching Moon and with its eclectic collection of articles.  Also I think that having one more fanzine won’t hurt the party and will actually help fill in the gaps between releases of the existing fanzines.

I’ve got the green light from Greg, and I’m looking to have an issue out by Continuum (early August) with another one out by XMAS.

Distribution wise I’m going for a duel pdf/dead tree model, with the pdf available via places like RPGNow and a hardcopy available direct from Lulu.com

If you would like to contribute content or help in any way please please get in touch (mrnewt@gmail.com). Payment will be the usual satisfaction of seeing your art/article in cold hard print and a copy of the issue your work appears in.

Aha the wonders of playtesting! Ran Monkey for a group of five at GoPlayManchester which was an absolute tonic for all the writing and introspection that I’ve been doing about SQ/Monkey recently. In short it was good to take it out for a spin.

We played ‘The Ministry of Thunder’, an idea ruthlessly nicked from the lovely

timgray

  whose original idea was much more eloquent than the action packed comedy that ensued at the gaming table using Monkey. Here’s the quick pitch I used;

Your errant immortals finds themselves in trouble with the Heavenly Authorities. Fully expecting to be cast out of Heaven for your crimes, instead you find yourselves drafted into the celestial Ministry of Thunder. Run by the God of Thunder, Lei Gong, it takes on the role of punishing those crimes that mortal law can’t or won’t reach

The game went swimmingly once we started playing, but there were some areas where the rules didn’t work as well;

The Good
The Bickering rules worked a treat, two of my players from my first successful playtest (the lovely Rob and Mr C) who inspired me writing them gave me a text book example of good implementation, which will make it in the rewrite.

Having a ‘Three strikes and your out’ rule for major character, two strikes for supporting characters and one strike for mooks worked much better for tracking combat and drawn out conflicts and will replace the existing Dramatic Action rules.

The Bad
Character gen dragged again like it did at Furnace. Need more examples for magic powers, cheat sheets, visual aids (?) to make the experience easier and less brain melting.

The Ugly
Grafted in some ‘attacking multiple opponents’ & ‘assisting other character’ rules in game, which worked overall but need some polishing out of game. Still a win though since the current rules didn’t have these areas and the players at the table really wanted them.

Overall it went very well. Even though it was tarnished for me by the fact the rules aren’t as smooth as I hoped, self criticing often brings me down, the game was greatly enjoyable with some fantastic Roleplaying from the players. The Ministry of Thunder is now going to become my stock demo game and I’m keen to play it with other players

I’ve made the decision to start wrapping up the writing on SimpleQuest and Monkey.  This has more of an impact on SQ, since it’s been a largely unplanned fun project where I’ve largely been going with instinct rather than plan. By giving myself the focus of getting the writing done by a definite date, means that I can no longer meander or waffle about. It also means that there will be material left on the cutting floor and some bits of the project (SQ especially) aren’t going to happen at all, or be deferred to a latter date.

So wittering aside what does this mean for everybody’s favourite unreleased games.

SimpleQuest – End of writing Feb. Means that some of the additional rules – Mastery and Ritual magic – will be terser and less explanatory/example ridden as a result. Also the Creatures section will be less colourful than I would like. There will be shorter creature descriptions and less detail about making pcs out of creatures.  Herodotus as a setting is being dropped, possibly be made into a separate release later in a year Instead the Shattered Lands, in a slightly expanded form than the current preview on the website, with the adventure ‘Dead Pot County’ will be SimpleQuest’s example setting. This is an easy decision since Shattered Lands is nearly finished while Herodotus is almost at zero.  Cutting floor: some rules for Political/Social combat, possibly rules for Shamans.

Monkey – End of writing March. Looked at the Furnace edition the other day and was quietly impressed. Actually in a much better shape and closer to being a full game than SQ. The character generation chapter needs rounding out with more examples of magical powers, but on the writing front all that it needs are a ‘Narrators advice’ chapter and the Big Guide to Immortals and Locations in Monkey’s world. The ‘Big Guide’ could become a bit where I languish and ponder to much, but I’ve got a definite list of locations and people from the book I want to cover, and the Antony Yu translation (4 vol, just about to finish vol 1 YAY!) is nicely giving me the colourful detail that this section needs. Another longer adventure, since the Bag of Wind only lasts a couple of hours (three with character gen), would be nice, but not essential.

This means that I’ll be able to finally publish these games by Continuum, and give my long suffering play testers a full game to play with.

Other news

On the Monkey front Mark Galeotti is signed up as Editor and Simon Bray is going to be doing the art. Mark has been a long time support of the game and has invaluable experience form his work as HeroQuest line editor and Mythic Russia publisher. Simon’s style is a perfect match to the more traditional B&W line art feel that I want evoking for the book. It also helps that both Simon & Mark are long time friends and allies from the Gloranthan community. In fact they are currently working on publishing some of my Gloranthan scenarios for their Unspoken Word magazine. So we already have a comfortable working relationship.

Another self-publisher is looking at using SQ under the OGL to get his game out this year. More when this is further down the line, but it is a very exciting prospect and when I can say more I will gush excitedly about it.

So finally in the first half of this year you will see D101 Games move out of being a company in development to a company in reality.
Its going to be a big and pleasing leap, to see the stuff I’ve been working on for a good part of a year and more finally available, all nicely presented and illustrated.  Continuum in August is going to be the close of this first phase, and I’m intending to celebrate like a mutha!

Beyond this I’ll be promoting and developing SimpleQuest and Monkey.

SimpleQuest in the short term has the Shattered Lands series of adventures, which I’m going to throw myself into and have fun writing. Herodotus is still on the cards as is possibly some sort of Tang China supplement (a spin off from all that research I’ve been doing for Monkey). Though it is likely these will see the light of day more 2009.  There’s also SQ powered games, such as Blood and Sand , on the horizon. Plus I’m planning on supporting the game by doing some quick free scenarios, in the same way I used to write adventures and publish them via the web for HeroQuest

Monkey is going to be more of a promotional job, since I’m taking great pride in that its a complete standalone game. Perhaps a cheap adventure book may come out of my playtesting campaign, but other than that its going to be a case of getting out there and demoing the game to people.

The website has been a useful promotional tool, and is due a quick refresh soon. Mainly in the form of cleaned up Game pages but also switching on the news feed that comes with the Content Management System (CMS) I use for the site, to start pumping out announcements and release dates   I’m going to keep the ‘purple monster’ look for the time being, but at some point its going to get a complete work over and a fresh template. Also at this stage musing about whether or not to make the site the focus for the games communities that will hopefully spring up around SQ and Monkey, or whether to develop links with communities that already have an interest and merely link to them. 

I’ve got a few ideas for games beyond SQ and Monkey. I’ve got a satirical Sci-fi/Cyberpunk game, that will probably use the Mongoose Traveller SRD if that is in a half decent shape, and a short fun game roughly based around the classic Troma Series Class of Nukem High and DR & Quinch.

I’m also looking at using

gspearing

‘s upcoming Wordplay as out of the box system for story telling/narrative rules light games.  Again this is more 2009 territory, but one or two ideas might slip out as convention games.