Another lulu sale (they are busy this year)

35% off your order to a max of $100, with the coupon code BLIZZARDS305.

I encourage all right-thinking (and left-thinking) individuals to go and spend shitloads* of money at my lulu store.

It's a reasonable request, right? :)

*In the absence of availability of an entire shitload of cash: fractional-shitloads and even metric pittances are also welcomed.

Black Monastery Censored!

...Well, kind of. And not for us, anyway. However, one of the illustrations of a statue in Black Monastery happens to be anatomically correct, which isn't allowable under the Pathfinder license. So in the Pathfinder version of Black Monastery, the statue's penis is going to be blacked out. The Swords & Wizardry license has no anti-penis provisions, especially on statues, so there won't be any change to the old-school edition of the module.

I don't have any problem with Paizo's license provisions; I can definitely see why they'd want to have a clear rule to prevent anything like the d20 Book of Erotic Fantasy being published with their trademark on it. Fortunately the books hadn't actually been printed yet, so the only loss was suffered by the statue.

Black Monastery information/purchase page.

Black Monastery Released

A while ago I wrote about an upcoming Frog God product that's now released. It's a dungeon from 1981 that was shut down before release due to TSR legal action, and which we're now publishing. This is the authentic stuff (well, the S&W version is, the Pathfinder one is obviously re-done for Pathfinder).

Bill has a description of the history of the Black Monastery on the Frog God site HERE. Note that part of the description is written for younger gamers who may not be familiar with what they're going to find in there. Old schoolers can get by with: "it works a lot like Tegel Manor does."

It's a stitched hardback, and I think it has one or more poster maps, but I can't remember exactly. I don't remember if it's a fold-out map, or separate, or what. The price tag is $34.99 for the book + pdf, or $15.99 for the pdf alone.

But the point being, this is basically a piece of lost D&D from the hidden cabinet of the past. Pretty cool stuff.

The Invisible Author

I'm in one of those phases where:
(1) I'm working on lots of projects: the OSRIC Monster Book text, Knockspell #7, monster illustrations, levels for Rappan Athuk, and editing Dennis Sustare's latest module, Tourist Traps.

(2) I am in a hypo-manic condition, which means not much sleep and obsessing on the projects; going to sleep dreaming about cross-hatching and shading, waking up thinking, "Here's a new idea, I've got to get it on paper nownownow!" It also means I keep thinking of new projects to work on, and having to smack those ideas away so that I can keep working away at the existing ones.

(3) All those projects are very long-term toward completion. I have a mix of illustrations from myself and other artists totaling maybe 30-35, and I need to have at least 80-100 in the book because the OSRIC book threatens to have 220 monsters in it. They are all new monsters, which means that illustrations are pretty key. I won't go into why I think illustrations are so key to a monster book, and several people would disagree with me, but from my perspective I want as many illustrations as possible.

(4) Which all told means that I'm barely posting on message boards, and have been neglecting the blog while all this is going on.

That's annoying, since the artist/author's garret is bustling with frenetic and often exhausting activity, but I know that I'm presenting an outer appearance of ... nothingness.

Fortunately I'm used to this, since hypomania is recurrent for me, and hopefully it's not actually damaging Swords & Wizardry, Mythmere Games, Frog God, or any of the other projects that require communication and face-time.

Soon enough. Or at least, as soon as possible. Hopefully some projects will start going into layout in late January, and appearing in March, maybe? Jeez.

Better get back to work...

New Monster Books - How to Organize Them?

Yes, it's been quite a while since I've had a chance to sit and blog: I've been dividing all the available free time between writing the new levels for Rappan Athuk, pulling together the next issue of Knockspell (#7), and drawing monsters.

Yep, drawing monsters. And not just for Swords & Wizardry; I'm planning on doing an OSRIC book as well. However, I've discovered that I need to think through how to organize what I'm doing in terms of what goes where.

It all starts with the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book, and the fact that I wanted to fix a flaw in it -- there simply isn't enough art. It's an awesome book in terms of its written content, but in terms of its artistic appeal and the added "oomph" that monsters get by being illustrated, the book is lacking. A monster book needs a certain quantity of illustration, and the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book just doesn't reach that level now that I look at it with the mental distance of more than a year.

So I began with a very simple project: get more illustrations, put them into the original book with whatever edits to typos might be necessary, and voila -- here's an improved version of it for them that wants.

However, as I started on this, something else started nagging at me. It's something that has nagged at a very low level ever since the publication of the SWMB (Swords & Wizardry Monster Book). It has always been fairly clear that there's a large group of people who do not cross over from one set of game rules to another in search of resources like monsters. That's completely understandable -- after all, the entire out-of-print gaming community sticks with our games because we like those rules. The entire retro-clone concept is rooted in the fact that we want publications for OUR GAMES. So even though there's a large community of people who are omnivorous in terms of resources, picking here, choosing there, adapting as necessary ... there's also a large contingent of people who don't cross different rules even within the old-school systems.

Which means, to make a long story short, that a bunch of AD&D/OSRIC players aren't interested in looking at the SWMB, even though it contains tons of completely new monsters. And that problem is exacerbated by the fact that the SWMB, because it's a supplement essentially for OD&D, contains lots of AD&D monsters that are utterly repetitious from the OSRIC/AD&D standpoint.

And thus was born a Plan B. What if I filled out the SWMB with illustrations of the new monsters, and then used those same illustrations to make an OSRIC book that contained only the NEW monsters from SWMB that hadn't ever been done for OSRIC? It would be a nice, solid resource for OSRIC/AD&D since it would have the stats done correctly for OSRIC and it wouldn't contain repeat versions of AD&D monsters. The effort on the illustrations would serve double duty, which is nice since illustrating takes lots and lots and lots of time.

And yet, this left something of a problem since this plan would create a real mishmash of resources. Nothing in the two books would be new, for one thing, and both books would have total overlap with each other. And yet ... the other side of the coin ... if there was a lot of new material it would (sort of) force people who already own SWMB to buy an entire new book if it had new monsters, but still pay for the full page count. It's one thing to revise a book's appearance with some nicer art, but it's something else to do a version that contains interesting new monsters that didn't appear in the first printing. It has been long enough since the book's original release that this isn't a problem of screwing over the early adopters, but it's still a lesser version of that same problem.

Which leads to a possible Plan C, that I was thinking about last night, which would involve even more splitting. I could conceivably do (1) a "basic SWMB" containing those old AD&D monsters and sell it basically at cost, (2) a S&W book that would include the old-new monsters (not-cloned new monsters that already appeared in SWMB) in addition to some new ones, and (3) an OSRIC version of #2.

This way, people who already own SWMB could simply ignore book #1 -- they already have all of those monsters -- and people who were coming new to S&W would at least have cheap (free in the case of the pdf) access to those AD&D monsters that have been retrofitted to OD&D/S&W.

OSRIC players who don't have the SWMB get new monsters without any AD&D retreads.

People who already own SWMB could then evaluate the value of a book that contains new-old monsters that they've seen, plus some new monsters.

The final possibility would be to illustrate the existing SWMB and add no new-new monsters anywhere -- not to the SWMB, not to the OSRIC version. The OSRIC version would have only the old-new monsters. This is probably the best commercial option, since no one gets pissed, but it really offends my hobbyist psyche to come out with books that contain absolutely nothing new, even if the OSRIC version is completely new to OSRIC players who haven't looked at SWMB because it's not specifically for OSRIC.

Anyway, those are the thoughts kicking around in my head at the moment while I'm not working on Rappan Athuk. I haven't reached any decision yet...