Cleric Art - Back to the Roots!

This one will be going on the Cleric spell list page in the Grindhouse edition. By Eric Lofgren. (more of his work here)

New Grindhouse Edition Referee Cover COMPLETED!

There will be all new covers for the interior booklets of the Grindhouse edition (the box cover itself will remain the same).The first of the new covers to be completed is the Referee cover. Here it is, by the one and only Peter Mullen!

Early Morning Musing

I've been accused lately of focusing too much on art.

Focusing a lot, yes. Too much? Never!

I'm thinking about this Guns & Renaissance type supplement I seem to want to do and I have visions of a big color piece of a dragon strafing an army's supply wagons... where the powder supply is kept. They needed tons of the stuff for every cannon brought to battle, you know.

BOOM.

Also, people continue to give me grief telling me that the book, as a technology, is on the way out. The future is digital I'm told. However, these history books about technology I've been reading all make the same point - the absolute best examples of a technology are produced only when that technology is in decline and "obsolete" technologies share the space with emergent and newly dominant technologies.

Not that I believe books are on the way out (merely going to share a significant proportion of the space they once mightily ruled), but even if the automobile is going to revolutionize the world I'm still going to make the best buggy whips I can make, because I like buggy whips and don't really care about cars in the least.

... and people do still make buggy whips in 2011. It's not the major industry it once was, obviously, but niche markets are still markets.

And games aren't technology like all that so the analogy is crap anyway. In a world of automobiles there are still bicycles and scooters and, oh, horse-drawn carriages can still be found in most cities, can't they? Maybe the analogy isn't all that awful...

Point is, we're all going to die, so some smartass telling me that I'm the walking dead (add and you don't even know it if the speaker is extra-strength douche) doesn't much phase me. Good times are still ahead for us all.

Sometimes I Post Just to Hear Myself Type (Out of Office Thu-Fri)

... but you didn't have any doubt about that, did you?

Anyway, I'm doing prelim layouts for Vornheim, which is taking ages, with the added fun of distractions.

One such distraction is TAX STUFF! Woohoo! One of the drawbacks of being an actual businessthing is the paperwork... and I've decided to not wait until the last minute before filing certain 2010 paperwork (due Jan 31! I have a week!) so I've been doing that.

But now I'm hoping Vornheim goes to press at the same time as the Grindhouse Edition... and hoping that press date is March 1 now, but who the hell knows. Just by naming a date I jinx it.

Art continues to be a slow going process. I don't have any of the completed booklet covers yet and a lot of key interior pieces are yet to be done. However, I had a few people make some "plop in anywhere" fillers so I'm good to go once these key pieces are done.

As the book covers for the box set are completed I'll post them here. Going to be some good stuff.

Isle of the Unknown seems to be at a very advanced stage of readiness. A very easy to handle format to the writing there, but anything more has to wait until April or so before that moves forward... and the print date will be at the mercy of the art.

Art direction for Carcosa is still up in the air though. We haven't totally settled on an art direction, but discussion and "tryouts" are ongoing.

My historical books are coming in at a brisk rate. Those Osprey books really do rock. I am completely in awe of the completely disorganized nature of arms and armor in early-to-mid 1600s warfare. Knights in full armor with pistols and wearing full helmets with baseball hat-like brims.

Several other history books are in the mix too, and I find Bert S. Hall's Weapons & Warfare in Renaissance Europe to be fascinating reading.

I think I know what I'm going to do with guns to make them guns. People are going to whine that they're underpowered but keep this in mind: A regular sword or axe or whatever does d8 damage. A regular human has d6hp, a man-at-arms probably should be around 5 or 6. Guns are not super-weapons (not during the time period in question, anyway), certainly no more so than longbows or crossbows. From everything I'm reading, crossbows really would be the superior weapon to a gun in an adventuring context because the advantage that guns have over bows or crossbows largely involve factors that our games don't deal with.

I'm stopping the local store games for awhile for the sake of my sanity, and am preparing a new sandbox to try out for a campaign.

Picked up a couple of Taschen's art books (Baroque and Gothic, but Renaissance wasn't there...) on sale cheap to get myself into the period mood.

I've come down with some sort of something that caused me to canceled tonight's Skype game.

Off to Tampere tomorrow so will be out of the office until sometime Friday.

Rich Longmore

Some more interior art for the Grindhouse Edition was just delivered. Among the goodness:


It's good to have a bit of slice of life atmospheric art in the set and not just a bunch of slice of flesh stuff.

You can see more of Rich's work here.

Totally Crucial Opinion Poll!

Yesterday I received my first ever set of Gamescience dice!

Yes, I have gulped the Elitist Dice Marketing Kool-Aid!

I now have eight precision edge high impact dice - the standard 7-piece set plus an old-school 0-9 d20, all in opaque crimson.

... but what color should I ink the number with? I have no idea! Tell me!

(not red, smartass)

Quick Quiz II

Just making sure I wasn't being a hardass unfair Ref tonight.

Having a bit of fun with my "totally goofy" side rather than the "grimdark" or "standard dungeon" sides.

A Leprechaun appears to the party. "Do you want to take a magical test?"

Yes!

OK.

I hand each of the players a scrap of paper. Secret ballot, each must choose Earth Air Fire or Water.

Fire wins, and that's what the test is about.

So they are dumped into a pool of sparkling oil in the great outdoors.

Still saturated with oil, they come upon a cabin... inhabited by a man with licks of fire instead of hair, and fiery fingertips. He wants to touch them, he likes seeing things burn. He's terribly polite about the whole thing.

What do you do?

What one of the players at tonight's game did was volunteer to be touched. Flat out said "You can touch me!"

The player was a bit upset three rounds later when fire damage finally kills his character (giving him saving throws for all three rounds for the things he was trying to do to put the fire out, failed all the saves and damage rolls finally got to him).

Just checking that the "Hey Mr Fire Fingers, touch my drenched-in-oil self!" fatality wasn't just me being a cock.

An Awful Idea

So today I've been dealing with art issues, doing some prelim layouts, and doing research. Multi-tasking on a Friday. Because you care so much. :D

I was reading Handbook to Life in Renaissance Europe today (by Sandra Sider), and something struck me while getting to the chapters about European contact with indigenous people around the globe.

I don't use orcs or ogres or any of that stuff in my games these days (I have used "goblins" as a humanoid catch-all not too long ago, but my campaign is moving more and more to Earth 1600s)... but I'm reading these books and taking notes as to what the "guns (and other Renaissance things)" project would need to contain. But it's going to be a cross-clone supplement, and I do believe most people who follow my stuff go for a "fantasy standard" setting approach... that means orcs, kobolds, goblins, etc.

How to deal with that?

I could just ignore it. It's not necessary to deal with it, really, just like the core rules going back 40 years don't deal with them - humanoids are a series of entries in a monster book. Extraneous. This approach doesn't conflict with how I (don't) use humanoids, doesn't conflict with how I presume you use humanoids.

Or I could do something else with the whole humanoid thing.

See, wherever the Europeans went, they acted like the owned the place. Conquered and colonized and made slaves or slaughtered everywhere they could. Where they couldn't, only then did they actually trade. They were dicks. This is old news. But how to twist that to fit a fantasy game?

Remember that whole criticism about humanoid monsters just being stand-ins for ethnic minorities so it's OK to kill and rob them? I do believe that argument, with orcs etc as traditionally presented, is bullshit.

But what if you change the assumptions so they actually are?

What if the entire concept of "orc" and "hobgoblin" or whatever is a cultural construct of the campaign world, and these things aren't a different species at all, or "irredeemably evil" or whatever. What if they are actually human and it's just the PCs' racist cultural viewpoint that views their features as monstrous and treats them as subhuman vermin threats fit only for the sword?

What, you thought it was just coincidence that orcs and humans make half-orcs? Isn't awfully convenient that your Charm Person and Hold Person spells work on these guys just like they do those you recognize as human? Hmmmm?

Horrific, yes. But completely fitting in the mindset of the real-life Renaissance where all sorts of otherwise courageous and wise people thought nothing of slaughtering and enslaving their fellow human beings around the world (while slaughtering each other at home over minor theological differences within the same religion) just because they looked and lived differently than they...

Our heroic countrymen subdue a wicked orc from the southern jungles before it can do evil...

For best effect, reveal the truth to your players just after they finish Keep on the Borderlands.

... or not.

Isle of the Unknown and How it Will Define LotFP as a Publisher

The Grindhouse Edition of Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is in a holding pattern on my end as most of what I need to do to it now depends on the art that hasn't yet been delivered. (to the artists reading, this doesn't mean rush... better for it to be slow and good than quick and sloppy)

So I've finally had the chance to really start looking over and planning details about Vornheim, Isle of the Unknown, and Carcosa. Vornheim: The Complete City Kit's format is entirely functional - Zak and I will be taking advantage of the format of a physical book and using it to do things beyond just being the storage medium for information. We'll also be taking advantage of the Free-PDF-with-Physical-Purchase to make the combo do even more things (I am really struggling to not use lame business lingo here). I'm hoping it'll be considered innovative, but at worst it'll simply work.

Now Zak's a obviously not just a writer - he's also the artist and his mind works in many more directions than mine does. In other words, he has a lot of ideas that seem very strange to me, but for the most part we're going with his direction. I'm the publisher but he's the guy on Vornheim. The mandate from Zak is to do all this while keeping the book as affordable as possible. None of the fancy bits of the book are unnecessary - they all have a game-play function. Our format and page count was set very early on and we're going to deliver all this to you with a lower-than-$20 price tag (exchange rates willing).

Impressed you will be. But this is all very specific to Vornheim and not to LotFP productions going forward.

Carcosa already had a low-budget version released a couple years back and my vision for the re-release is big. It's going to be a fancy hardcover, on the outside resembling a forbidden magical tome. One idea we're looking at is keep the cover itself clear of any publishing gobbledygook or sales stuff and include that info on a OBI strip type of thing.

Again, very project-specific as Carcosa is entirely its own thing with a history.

Isle of the Unknown is something else altogether. No particular physical format is suggested by the concept. So what to do?

If we keep the font that previous LotFP adventures have used (Times New Roman 8pt), we could condense it down, have a bit of artwork to fill out the page count, put the map on the reverse of a detachable cover and have the package resemble Hammers of the God. Module-as-Usual.

However, if we increase the font size a bit and make the thing a little more readable, this is no longer an option. We're looking at perfect-bound, with questions about where the map goes. Not insurmountable, but not module-as-usual. Then I get this email from McKinney the other day:

James,

As I was falling asleep last night (in that half-awake half-asleep state) the following idea occurred to me. Then at 4:30 this morning I woke-up and couldn't fall back to sleep because of this idea. As I type this sentence it's 5:09 in the morning.

More than anything else, art in an RPG product needs to be useful. I think back to my early RPG days, and what "sold" me on a product more than anything else? Monster Manual-style art. The day I bought my Holmes Basic set, I also purchased the Monster Manual. It was a no-brainer purchase rather than the PHB or the DMG. Why? Because of the multitude of monster illustrations.

Some months thereafter I went to the store, money in hand, to buy the PHB. Ha! The Deities & Demigods book was sitting there, brand new on the shelf. One look at it (with its MM-style art) and there was no debate: I bought the DDG instead. I could sit for hours looking at the pictures in the MM and the DDG (and, in the next year, the Fiend Folio). The PHB and the DMG? Not so much. Sure, drawings of adventurers are cool, but how can they compare to the compendia of drawings of monsters in the MM, DDG, and FF?

Consider two monsters from the MM that nobody ever uses: the masher and the slithering tracker. (Hell, I literally never even noticed the very existence of the masher for about 20 years!) Why does nobody ever use them? What do they have in common?

No picture.

What if the interior art of Isle of the Unknown is devoted solely to Monster Manual-style (by that I mean relatively small drawings of just the monster itself) drawings of the 108 or so monsters in the book? That's a lot of drawings, but they'd be relatively small. The drawings would make the monsters come alive, unlike the poor masher and slithering tracker.

Plus, the drawings overall would be cooler than the drawings in MM, DDG, or FF. After all, how cool can a drawing of an orc or a brownie be? In contrast, all the monsters in Isle of the Unknown are weird and relatively hard to picture.

My first thought was "Oh fuck that. It'll cost a fortune to have someone draw all those things. And that'll double the size of the book." I'm not going to have all these illustrations done and then make them teensy tiny, after all. Basically, Isle of the Unknown goes from being a module ("small project") to being a setting ("big project") on just the weight of visuals, with the same written content.

... and not that it would be solely the monster art in there - this would be going into offset printing territory for sure and at A5 size we need multiples of 32 pages, and as there's little chance that it'll magically end up being the exact number of needed pages I'll also need enough art to fill out that page count. I want readable fonts but not exaggerated giant lettering, and blank pages sitting at the end of a gaming supplement are lame. Plus there's still the cover that needs to be gorgeous (I agree with this and if I didn't need to keep up good relations with people I'd name some names of recent OSR cover art that isn't just "kinda bad" or "understandable given the budget," but art so bad it makes me feel embarrassed for all involved). And the map needs to look professional.

Do I want to take that step? It's nice that he's got all these ideas but it's easy to have ideas when someone else is bankrolling them.

But wanting to make sure McKinney is happy with the final product, I checked around. It turns out I could do this, although the art budget would be through the roof. Yes, that cost gets passed on to you, the buyer, but with the new page count that would be required, I think the price wouldn't be outrageous for what you'd get.

Then I did my first close reading of the entire book. Holy balls, all these monster descriptions talk about color! Hmmm. HMMMMM. Not that color is necessary for the illustrations, but one should check into all the options. All-color monster illustrations not only increases the price of each piece of art individually, but a different type of paper than planned will be required for the book, and printing in color is more expensive as well, and any extra pics would also have to be in color or it won't seem like a cohesive product. Geoffrey's island is described so vibrantly that I can't say that the color would be an unnecessary luxury - color is integral to the imagery McKinney uses.

But going all-color moves us into strange territory - the risk becomes not only large but dangerous, and while I believe people will pay a quality price for a quality product, there does come a point where too much is too much.

(disregard POD pricing models - with offset if you're going all color it's the price of commissioning color vs black and white that jacks up the cost of the book more than paper or printing costs)

Isle of the Unknown is (or was until now) a smaller release on the schedule, so really what I decide for it will set a standard for what a "run of the mill" (horrible way to put it) LotFP release looks like going forward. I have a little while before I'll start commissioning any of this stuff, but that just means I'll have more time to agonize over the decision.

So what to do?

Keep in mind that Isle of the Unknown is a sandbox. Not a setpiece module that you'll run for 1 - 3 sessions and then be done with it. It can form the skeleton of an entire campaign which never leaves the Isle.

I want every release to be special and as high-quality, inside and out, as I can make it.

I believe that the perception of OSR products as "cheap" hurts us more than helps us (remember that the classic TSR products were extremely high-end for their time and not cheap on release) on a variety of levels. In an age of freely available PDFs, legitimate or otherwise, competing on price seems utterly daft. Sparse production values in a book designed to spark the imagination hardly make the book more worth owning.

But how much is too much?

A Look (Far) Ahead

I'll have a post later on today about the more near-term projects LotFP will be releasing, but just a word about a down-the-line goal.

One thing I am a fan of is a more modern assumed culture for my games. That caused a bit of concern when No Dignity in Death was released and it had printing presses and ladies pictured in 19th century dresses. The cover of Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is specifically planned to be not- medieval, and Tower of the Stargazer certainly isn't your everyday medieval setup.

One thing I am most interested in is moving my focus to making everything about the assumed setting of Weird Fantasy Role-Playing into the late 16th and early 17th centuries. That means guns.

Two things prevent me from including that kind of thing in the Weird Fantasy game proper - it's widely considered to be a genre clash to have guns in a fantasy game. Yeah, 2e had the arquebus and there is Warhammer, but the average fantasy gamer doesn't use them. I don't want Weird Fantasy Role-Playing to be completely divorced from familiar modes. The other thing is, well, it's very easy to use game books as sources for how these things should be, and that's crap. I wanted to research and build a firearm system from scratch from a knowledgeable base, not just do a clone version of what A Mighty Fortress did or whatever. I want to give it a proper amount of time. This isn't just an adventure, it's a whole new way of looking at a setting.

When I was in England I stocked up on a lot of history books about the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War and other books on the time period. I've recently placed a more substantial order of books (about 20) , a good deal specifically about the arms and armies of that time period.

Not to say Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is going to become a historical game. I don't have near the eye for detail to make that work, I'd want things like The Three Musketeers to be just as important a reference as any historical record, and I'd want to mix and match elements of, say, 1450 - 1640 without worrying much about it.

But many people associate that time period with all sorts of derring-do and swashbucklery and incredible advances in art and science, but it was also a time of intense religious bloodshed, colonial exploitation and genocide around the world. It marked the beginning of chattel slavery. It was a brutal, brutal time. Which suits me just fine.

The idea is to come up with a handy set of rules to introduce into my home games and see how they work. Get them to where they're comfortable, come up with a good variety of new spells to accompany a late Renaissance setting, and have a good mass combat system that takes into account the time period. Put a book together with this all-original material and release it as a cross-clone supplement (not LotFP-specific).

Or maybe it'll be a mess and I'll get real tired real quick of PCs trying to be Guy Fawkes as a solution to every problem and I'll scrap the whole idea.

Anyway, the first batch of my new books came in today.