There’s a story idea here: Venezuala is losing time, literally. Brings to mind images of temporal thieves, syphoning off time to extend their own failing chronoverse…

Spending this weekend working on writing– the novel, FVLMINATA D20, notes for the Pulp game and the newly-retitled Hammer-horror game (new title: DIE, FIEND, DIE!). Hope to get a lot done.

The new website for Adamant Entertainment will be up and running soon, and the first product available will be the FVLMINATA D20 pdf. I’m shooting for a March release, but it might drag into April. I’ve actually been looking into several print-on-demand companies, so the strong possibility exists that DFD will be released as a hard-copy game. Not so sure about the Pulp game, due to the serialized format that we want to use—it’ll probably stay a pdf (maybe we’ll do a print version, collecting the entire set, at some point later. We’ll see.)

The prices on these print-on-demand services make it too affordable to ignore. I’m not sure if the distribution and retail system are stable enough to re-enter at this point, though…all signs are still pointing towards a major crash still in process for the industry…but with the low print-runs and re-orderability of print-on-demand, it makes fulfillment direct to the customer a viable alternative for a small-press publisher.

More later,

GMS

Curiouser and Curiouser…

Apparently, alleged terrorist Sami Al-Arian was a guest of Bush advisor Karl Rove at the White House, even though he supposedly had been under investigation by the FBI for six years at that point. This is from Friday’s Washington Post (and yes, there is the occasional, annoying “please give your gender and zip” market-survey thing to go through before you read)—but why hasn’t the rest of the media picked this up and run with it?

GMS

Irons in the Fire

Alrighty…a few of you have requested a run-down on what projects I’ve got underway. So, without further ado…

Apollyon Noir: Being developed with Jason Roberts, for Thyrsus. My RPG rules are actually a secondary part of the larger project. I would go into more detail, but Roberts has rightly suggested that we sit on this while we lay out the ground work. We’re planning something new here, and we don’t want to get scooped before we’re ready to launch. Suffice to say that we’re presenting a product that will concentrate on delivery of an entire Intellectual Property, rather than just a game.

Untitled Pulp Project: This is one of the pdf projects that I’m developing for Adamant (hence the development of a new corporate site, etc.). I’m working on this one with Storn Cook, spinning out of a discussion that we had on RPGnet. We’ve just started on this one, so more detail will be forthcoming. The only thing that we do know right now is that it will be an “UberPulpWorld” setting, rather than generic, and will also be presented in serialized format (the rules will be split into 4 seperate short pdfs, rather than 1 large one).

Fearless Monster Hunters: Currently the working title for my classic monster-hunting game inspired by the classic Hammer Horror Movies (three links there, check ’em all out). No angst. No “monster within.” See monster? Hunt monster. DESTROY monster. Save generic 19th-century random-european village, complete with pultritudinous young thing.

Daikaiju Eiga (Giant Monster Movie): Card-based RPG/battle game of theKaiju genre. The players create their own monsters and supporting cast, and play out battles (along with subplots).

Terminal Identity: My take on a literary-cyberpunk roleplaying game. An attempt to bring the actual cyberpunk genre to gaming, instead of the near-future-black-ops-merc-team weapons-fetish wankfests that have given gamers a flawed definition of the field. This one is probably one of the most back-burnered of all of the projects, simply because I’ve learned of a good handful of indie designers are working on similar topics.

FVLMINATA D20: The D20 translation of Thyrsus Games’ alt-history Romans-with-guns RPG. Currently trying to figure out a way to make it more than just a simple plug-in: D&D in Rome.

A few other things in the works, too….including more work on a novel that I suppose I could best describe as Luther Arkwright meets Perdido Street Station meets Doctor Who meets the Virconium stories.

…and so it goes.

GMS