I now have a lovely cover for Monkey, done by the ace Jon Hodgson.

Monkey cover by Jon Hodgson

Aiming for a July release.

I’ve updated my website.

The main reason was a migration to WordPress Mu (the multiuser version of WordPress) which will make it easier to update the site. The navigation should be easier now and there are some major content updates. In the next month or so you should be able buy pdf and print versions of our products directly from me via the website.

You can now read the d101 development blog over at http://blog.d101games.co.uk or carry on following it over at Live Journal since posts made there will be automatically shipped over.

New updates on the Website:

• Tales from the Firebird contents and cover preview.
• OpenQuest page updated, now with front cover.
• Details of the OpenQuest adventure packs, The Savage North and Life and Death
• Both our blogs, Development blog and Hearts in Glorantha blog are now hosted locally.

So there I’m looking at a pile of papers and thinking about OpenQuest, mixing liberally with the idea that time is marching on before Newtlet #2 and that I should really be ‘finishing’ rather than ‘starting’.

Then it occurs to me that all the Shattered Lands adventures I’ve written and played are written up with OQ stats ready to go. Just need some sort of Narrative structure to link the adventures together and then 80-100 page book ready to go!

So after its gone through art and editing you should see sometime this year a three adventure mini-campaign (or Saga as we call them in OpenQuest) entitled Life and Death.

Contains
A Travelers Guide to the Shattered Lands – A brief overview of the setting with Cults. Enough for a GM to use the setting without clipping the wings of inspiration.
Dead Pot Country – Enter the ancient ruins of the River Valley Civilization in search of a missing Merchant. (20 pages)
Life and Death – Journey to the tyrannical city of Miraz and stop the plague of Undeath that afflicts it (50 pages)
Tomb of the Last Emperor – Deep in the Badlands under a Meoter brought down by the Gods lies the last Lion Emperor and all his secrets. Dash through his buried palace to get to him before the Scarlet Riders.
+ Eight Pregen characters so you can pick up and play

More old skool D100 action for your gaming pleasure, to go along side John Ossoway’s Savage North adventure pack that is being worked on.

I now publically acknowledge that I’ve now moved away from being ‘Newt the Writer’ to ‘Newt the Publisher’. Its been a confusing transition and lately I’ve been feeling like Robert De Niro’s character in Brazil when he gets smothered by paper work, although in my case its drafts of varying completeness.  But some time off work and a mental step back has got my brain in gear.

The first step was to get all the printouts sorted. A couple of trips down to the University print shop saw the drafts of Wordplay, HQ2 and the behemoth that is the Sartar book nicely comb binded. .I’ve also got a nice neat filing system that is reasonably portable, which helps a lot and gets my not so silent business partner, Rachel my wife aka the boss, off my back about loose paper drifting round the house.  I’ve got a dedicated area in the garage to store excess stock.  So I’m organised in a practical way.

Virtually its not so complete a victory over disorganisation.  I’m using Dropbox (www.getdropbox.com) for document management, which has worked smoothly with various collaborators over recent months. Its also been a lifesaver recently as my main Vista machine (Godzilla) has died on me. Normally I’d be cursing that my latest draft was lost, but since the main repository is Dropbox’s servers, when I get Godzilla sorted out I’ll be back in the game. In the meantime I’m able to access and  work on the documents on my work and linux laptop. The D101 website is being slowly revamped. Currently Its in the state were the existing content has been migrated over to the new site and the navigation made clearer. I need to some how make the appearance more ‘sexy’ and also integrate a simple shopping cart so you can by pdfs and printed copies directly from me. The website will also see me gather up the two D101 blogs, this one and the  Hearts in Glorantha, and stick them under the d101games.co.uk domain, although you’ll still be able to read the d101 blog here as I’ll automatically ship over the posts. Its a slower process than I would like but its worth doing it right , before I really swing into gear publishing stuff.

Talking of which looking at the patterns it looks like my output can be easily described as ‘waves’.

Wave 1 is the Fanzines, specifically Hearts in Glorantha although the unpublished Tales of the Firebird and Gloranthan Adventures. Quick to do and engages with the audience.

Wave 2 is the games I’ve been working on for a couple of years now. OpenQuest and Monkey. Very much building on the experiences learnt in Wave 1 to produce good looking easy to read books. OpenQuest is nearly thorough edititorial, I’m going to be spending a lot of time leaning over InDesign in the coming weeks

Wave 3 is the stuff I’ve got planned with Wordplay, can’t say much about this at the moment because I want to focus on Wave 2, but lets say I and   are very excited about what D101 is going to be doing with his marvelous system.

Exciting as these waves of creativity are I’m also aware that earlier waves are still hitting the shore as the later ones are coming in. Which leads me onto the subject of….

I’ve learnt how to say NO. Mainly to myself and the crazy ideas I come up and then put to other people. I’ve got enough on my plate, time to get it published!

Ok so its time for the monthly update and peak behind the scenes.

OpenQuest is grinding to a conclusion. Hope was lost, Hope was refound:)    remains patient as ever during the final edit, the first part of which finished yesterday. Now a review of the document as a whole and production of the plain text version that will go on the website for developers and interested folk to download and use for free under the Open Gaming License. Of the course the first developer to use it will be me to produce the fully laid out version with Simon Bray’s charming artwork (which I’ll put together as a preview soon). 

The best news ever is that the game is going to be supported by Adventures/Campaigns a couple of months after its release   John Ossoway, author of Cthulhu Rising and fellow Mancunian Oxford Road Games Designer, previously ran a seven adventure RQ3 Conan adventure for his group earlier in the decade. The mad nutter actually wrote up all the adventures and recently submitted one of them for Hearts in Glorantha. The cogs in my mind started whirling in my mind and I realised that converted to OQ (a simple mater) and with the Conan IP filed off it would make an ideal OQ Adventure book. So the Savage North a 100 page book of adventures written and illustrated by John is on my release scedule, either late this year or early next. I’m going to be writing a mini setting for it, portions of which will be availiable for free under the OGL since its part of the setting that’s going to be in the core rule book.  John’s currently sending me adventures/maps as he finds them on his hard drive, were currently upto Adventure 3, and its all good old skool Sword and Sorcery action. Neil F will be especially pleased since I can extract one section from the lastest adventure I’ve been sent to form a demo adventures for cons. So look out for ‘Headless in the Mist’ at a con near you :)

I’m going to be pimping OQ and cheering it more that I’ve done in recent months. I guess part of my lack of joy was the release of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying last year, a very fine and well written game which pushes so many of my d100 buttons. I even went as far as making some quiet inquiries about getting a license to publish, but have found its well out of my reach and would be the worst kind of vanity publishing. After a short sulk I got my head sorted and realised in OQ I have the BRP I want and for FREE. No licensing fee for either myself or anyone else   So this puts a couple of projects back on the table, which was one of the objectives for OQ from the beginning, that it forms the basis for more D100 nonsense if I want to.  I also know of a couple of small publishers who are interested in using OQ so I’ll be putting more effort into supporting their efforts from now on.  In short OQ is the WIN and its time for me to tell you the great gaming public that and stop being bashful to the point of despondency.

I get to play the game this weekend with my regular Sunday Group. A bit of last miniute playtesting of the adventure ‘The Road less travelled’ that will be included with the core book.  Will be very interesting to play since its a very different and streamlined beast since I last run it.  It will also be nice to play a trad game after all the narratist nonsense we’ve been running latly (HeroQuest, Otherworlds, Wordplay and even Cortex which powers Battlestar Galactica to an extent)

One bad bit of news is that since the editing has been longer than expected, though no fault of the valiant  this probably pushes the games’ full release to May/June. It will be all the better for it for it will be a complete game, core rules, setting and adventure.

More concreate news soon. My excitement over OpenQuest is back

OPEN QUEST IS DONE!!!!

Off to  for final editing and then layout by me. Should be out first couple of weeks of April

My plans for SQ have altered slightly in the last couple of days so as I’ve been working on the final draft.

Its been a hard slog getting SQ done and while I still like D100 games I realise that its more for nostalgia sakes, and that I don’t really want to support it with as much vigour as I did a year ago. I could go all emo here, lets just say its not the sort of game I want to run or write for on a regular basis.

So the plan is to get SQ out and make it completely OGL. Once again the adventure and setting will switch away from the Shattered Lands back to Gatan. This way other people can take the rules in its entirety and create their own versions of SQ or simply make compatible supplements. For my part I’ve got a couple of Free adventures half done which I am happy to finish off and release for free under the OGL. There probably wouldn’t be an official SQ Companion, but I’d be happy to set up a wiki to support any additional rules/spells/monsters etc.

Neil Ford who regularly champions SQ at cons has recently been mentioning SQ in the same breath as Retro Gaming recently, and I think actually this is a good way to go. I’ve read what the Retro Gaming community has been up to and there isn’t a good RuneQuest retro clone. One of the nicest complements I’ve had, which came from Keary (so its likely to faint praise) is that I’ve recreated RQ2

One last thing about SQ. I’m renaming it ‘OpenQuest’ . Some people are already calling it this and SimpleQuest as a name has caused some confusion with people new to BRP, are surprised its not a simple straight forward fantasy system, when in fact its merely a cut down and simpler version of BRP.

As winter comes to a close we find D101Games in good shape and me in positive mood.

Hearts in Glorantha issue 2 is selling steadily which is nice. Costs have been covered by sales and a new sponsorship deal that I’ve made with Patriot Games of Sheffield   Issue 3 is shaping up nicely, cover done, artists are getting assignments and 40 pages have already been submitted.  Best of all because I’ve now reached the confidence level that HiG pays its ways I’m letting it out into the shops – Leisure Games and Patriot will both have Issue 1 & 2 on sale at the end of this week!!!

SimpleQuest is on its way to Graham for a final no holds bared editing session. Simon Bray has delivered the last of the art. All that’s left for me is to bash into shape the introductory adventure and setting next week.  Fingers crossed should be done the end of the month

Work has finally started on the final draft of Monkey aka The Metal Monkey Edition (because it will be polished and robust).

This happens in three stages

1. The Bronze  Monkey – an internal version of the complete that goes to the Mighty Monkey Army for comments, and then off to Mark Galeotti for final edit.
2. The Silver Monkey – the laid out version, which will go tot the MMA for comment and after tweaking magically becomes….
3. The Gold Monkey – The final version of the game.

Other stuff continues to bubble away under the surface, but this is the stuff I’m focusing at the moment.

I’ll be moving the more official announcements over to the D101games website and more specifically the forums. I’ll be using this blog as more of a place where I think out loud, perhaps giving a bit more commentry and behind the scenes.

Couple of relevant posts on the forums, that you might find interesting.

• State of D101 games 2009
• Gloranthan Adventures announcement
• Tales from the Firebird call for contributors

Broadly speaking I’ve started 2009 on a real high. After a brief period of feeling a tad down, I’ve really come up and at ‘em.

Hearts in glorantha issue 2 is out, and by all accounts is being received well. Its paid for itself and its proved it self to be self sustaining. Already got some submissions promissed and really looking forward to seeing issue 3 come together by June/July. Its very satisfying seeing the improvement from Issue 1, which I still love dearly, and holding the two issues side by side.

Bolstered on by this I’ve announced another Fanzine, Tales from the Firebird for Mythic Russia, Mark Galeotti’s game of Medieval Russia powered by HeroQuest (version 1.5 if you are wanting to be pedantic). I had a great time supporting its release and playtesting it using a couple of scenarios based round the Crusades of the Teutonic Knights in Lithuania, so my write ups along with another scenario and a homeland write up for the Hanseatic League (German Merchants in medieval Prussia) by CJ Bowser are going to provide a solid 60pages. Plus as well as some awesome public domain artwork to pull on we’ve got Pete Town , one of the artists from the Mythic Russia rulebook on board as well. Its mainly an excuse to get stuff off my hard drive, but I’m hoping that its release will fire up the embryonic Mythic Russia fan scene to create more stuff to support this fine game.

SimpleQuest is now at the stage were its a big 200 page monster which needs me to do a big internal edit, before darkening  ’s door again. Its almost there but it needs a consistancy check and some of the rules holes filling in.  Its the end of a very long haul and to be honest there’s been times when I’ve nearly called it a day. Thankfully I’ve had some awesome support on this one which has kept me going.

Monkey is firmly in playtest, I’ve got two external groups playing it and one actively feeding back. The rules are going to get a full top to bottom revision, with an aim of making the English clearer and the rules more consistant and robust. I’ve got a definite plan for Monkey and a definite goal for getting it done for May, even if it means other projects have to be put on the back burner.

Some of my blues skies stuff is coming out of the testing dept into the full light of day.

I’ve got the green light from Greg Stafford to publish a back log of six years of HeroQuest adventures as an another irregular publication called ‘Gloranthan Adventures’. This is immensely satisfying after serveral Gloranthan publishers have dropped the ball on these over the years. Finally I’m going to get them out there in the way I want to do them. Its a real vindication of what I’m doing and a massive releif that I finally ‘own’ and have the right to publish works that I’ve worked hard to create.

Been talking to   about doing supplements for Wordplay in the second half of the year. Not going to say any more than that yet (MUST GET MONKEY DONE FIRST!!) but its all going to be Mega Gaming Fun stuff

In business stuff I’ve looked at getting out the ghetto that is Lulu.com, and into retail and perhaps distribution but for the time being I’m happy with the modest distribution that I’m getting via Lulu. Its paying the costs and making me a small amount which will pay for art and production costs of future d101 books. I don’t need d101 as an income stream, but the golden rule is that it shouldn’t lose money. Which happily it isn’t