The Black Hack Review
Among the several anniversaries I somehow neglected to celebrate on the blog this year was the fortieth of my first encounter with Dungeons and Dragons, back when it came in three tiny booklets in a white box. I bring it up now because reading The Black Hack takes me right back to my student days of late night dungeoneering sessions and permadeath treks across hexcrawl wildernesses. And I mean that in a good way. The Black Hack describes itself as an OSR First Edition Hack. It’s named after its author, David Black. The game reads like the distilled essence of Read more…
Writing Illidan Part Three
It was time to set about outlining *Illidan*. I knew who the main point of view characters of the book were going to be. The story of the Burning Crusade and Black Temple pretty much dictated three of them: Illidan, Maiev and Akama. Read more…
Writing Illidan Part Two
So there I was back in Europe, trying to figure out how to proceed. I had a long document full of ideas from the folks at Blizzard and the somewhat confused and incoherent notes I had taken myself in Irvine. Now all I had to do was make a book out of them, and with a fairly tight deadline too. Read more…
Shadow of the Demon Lord
Not only have I backed this tremendous looking Kickstarter RPG Project, I have agreed to write a short story for it. If you interested in dark fantasy and, guess what, I am, I recommend you take a look at it. Here are some more details lifted directly from the Kickstarter page. Shadow of the Demon Lord is a roleplaying game of dark fantasy—a genre that weaves elements of horror into a fantasy world. In the game, you create and play characters struggling to survive in a land sliding toward oblivion, a place infested by demons, roaming mobs of undead, strange Read more…
The Joys of Kickstarter
Yesterday the nice man from DHL brought me a package. It contained a copy of Monte Cook’s new book Numenera, a role-playing game that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. I’ve had the PDF for awhile but there’s nothing quite like holding a physical book to make something real, as I know from my own experiments with producing a print version of Stealer of Flesh. I don’t want to do a review of Numenera right here, right now. Free time has been in short supply this year and I’ve just skimmed through it. It’s a good Read more…
Stuff!
So that was Gamesday then. As ever it was an enjoyable and, as I was sitting at a signing table between Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill, somewhat humbling experience. I got to see the newly released Bane of Malekith but during the chaos of departure yet again forgot to pick up an author copy. Never mind. I’ll do that at the upcoming Weekender. It was a pleasure to meet and chat with readers. It was also a pleasure to be able to catch up with Black Library writing and editing folks I’ve known for a long time and meet other folks Read more…
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