D101 HQ

My gosh after the flurry of activity that was Continuum, my aren’t we quiet round here.

Well there’s a reason for that Continuum and attendant nonsense burnt us out, oh yes it did our precious.  It hurts our eyes with all its loudness and beating of chests about RPG releases and running of games. Nasty little hobbits.

Joking aside Autumn/Winter of this year is me consolidating D101 Games, finishing off stuff, getting some of the practicalities sorted out (like sorting out a bank account for the swag I earnt at Continuum) and generally pulling all the disperate threads that make up the d101 tapestry together so I’m not streatched thin.

So here’s a brief update on what I’m working at.

Monkey – Had a good round of playtesting recently, lots of small changes to add into a revised playtest document that will be out for Furnace (18-19th Oct).  Early next year I’ll work in earnest on the background and settings chapter – which I plan to be immersive and rich and well worth the purchase of the book even if you don’t like the system.

SimpleQuest – Finally cracked the Monster’s chapter (which is about 25% of the book) today so well on for SQ Zero Revised for Furnace. This is what it says on the tin, the rules updated to take in a ton of feedback from the good folks at Basic roleplaying Central and Sceaptune Games and of course my lovely editor Graham Spearing.  After it Furnace I’ll finish off the example setting (about 10 pages worth of a Dark Ages Europe type setting) and adventure, both of which are already 75% done.  Hopefully out by XMAS if not very soon afterwards.

The Shattered Lands  & Life and Death – Kinda on the self until SQ Core is out. But the good news is L&D is written and SL is about 50% done. After SQ core is out I’ll finish off the writing do the revisons and get an Artist on board. Already have an artist for the interior and have a good idea of who I’d like to do the covers.

Hearts in Glorantha– Well on the way to getting issue 2 done before XMAS. Tons of stuff submitted and I face the uneasy one of do I split the content across two issues or go for a bumper issue 2?  Its all good though.  Issue 1 has done modestly well the two months its been out. Sales wise its sold about 100 copies, with it being an even split between Pdf and Print sales. I need to do more to push it is my main lession though, so you should eventually see the Pdf in the usual places (RPGnow etc) and perhaps availble via shops or some mail order outlet like IPR or Leisure games. Need to nail my distribution. But its going well so far.

The premier issue of Hearts in Glorantha is now available via Lulu.com in both print (£5) and pdf (£2) versions

Get a copy directly from our Lulu storefront

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1049551

In this issue

Godfall- an encounter and mysterious cult in The Wastes with RQ3 stats by John Ossoway

Prologue Method of Character Generation for HeroQuest by Newt Newport

Aweke – Flora Glorantha by Stuart Mousir-Harrison

Homeland: Kralori for HeroQuest by Mark Galeotti

Karia, Gazetteer, Mythology and History for this land in the Eastern Wilds of Ralios by Newt Newport

Rymes and Ribbold Royale, two Kings and One Queen of the Durlurz by Stewart Stansfield

Fixing the Wrong, a HeroQuest Scenario by Newt Newport

Using a Charm, a Kolat shaman speaks by Greg Stafford.

Mythology and Glorantha Feature including
Two very useful and unique ways of creating myths on the fly
Tale Theft by David Durham
Location Mythlets by Jane Williams

Backed up by two pieces of fiction that show myth in play.
Lookout Hill by Jane Williams
The Seduction of Tarahelela by Jeff Richard

Hearts in Glorantha is a licensed fanzine for Glorantha, which covers both the 2nd Age and 3rd Age of Glorantha. Both d100 (RQ2/RQ3, Mongoose RuneQuest, BRP) and HeroQuest systems are supported. It aims to produce a diverse set of articles in each issue, written by fans old and new of the setting. The emphasis being on material that is usable in your games. Two issues every year, Summer and Winter.

I am aiming to have the next issue out by Dragonmeet UK in early December.

Submissions, both articles and art, to newt@d101games.com

Just came back from the mighty Continuum. Now that I’m back in the land of the living here’s a full run down of what ‘we’ did this con.

Next weekend I’ll be having a ton of fun with Room D101 at Continuum. Room D101 this time out is actually a room and I’ve got Ginger Matt and 

helping me out by running games of Monkey and SimpleQuest respectively. All in all were running eight games between us.

Continnum also see the debut of Hearts in Glorantha.  The box of the magazine came back from the printers yesterday, a proud moment tinged with a bit of self doubt about how I’m going to take this on the train with me. Fortunatly its a very light box so its more bulk. Oh well we’ll get there 🙂

The creative forge that is InDesign has been hot this week, since I’m throwing together SimpleQuest Zero Edition, effectively the final game without the creature, setting and adventure chapters and a basic layout which I may stick with for the final book. Plan is here to print of copies for me, 

and our players and then do a very small run of about five for sale at a very low cost (say £5) for those people who are very interested for sale at Continuum then make the Pdf available through the website. After Continuum I’ll finish off the book for a Sept/Oct release. By releasing a Zero Edition, I hopefully trap allot more typos and reduce the errata in the final edition as well as giveing interested parties something to work with.  On the adventure front Dead Pot Country and Life and Death have both been finished off in first draft form for Continuum This means that very quickly after SQ core is released, I’ll be able to put both the Shattered Lands setting book (which DPC is the adventure for) and Life and Death together.

Monkey which has been cuckooed out of the development nest since HiG & SQ turned up on the scene, got a look in this week as I preped characters and finished off a write up of Ministry of Thunder for Ginger Matt. Through the wonders of Skype I’ll be running through the game with him today/tommorrow, but I have no worries. the system is pretty straight forward and GM is a veteran Feng Shui gamesmaster.

The plan is to get all the final bits of writing done this weekend. A plan that may not go as smoothly since the sun is shining and there’s a jungle in my back gardern. But I reckon even with this, I should have everything printed off and packed up by Wednesday latest.  Which should give time for some fun stuff like T-shirts and posters.:)  My only problem now is keeping a track of money and resisting the urge to splash out on large posters that I don’t need.

The final thing I need to do, which I can do in a quiet moment at work, before Continnum is set up the D101games forums, if only for feedback/discussion about Hearts in Glorantha.

Simon Bray, the artist for SimpleQuest, came up with the goods today as he submitted this lovely vivid cover that I think sums up the tone of the game nicely.

I’ve also posted the Introductory chapter of the game on the SimpleQuest page of my website, so you can check out what its all about.

Not long to go now.

This weekend I finsh off the layout for the first issue of Heart’s in Glorantha.

   has come up with the goods cover wise.

Its a extremely suitable ‘wrapper’ for all the high quality articles and art . Oh yes we have art, some of it jaw droppingly good -cheers Darran for sourcing.

There’s more about the first issue in a preview up on the D101 Games website

I’m chuffed to bits with the first issue, which has been very much thrown together very quickly. Its a credit to the people who have submitted articles. 

15 months after I started work on it the first draft of Life and Death is now complete.  60 pages of text, including eight pregenerated characters lovingly typed up to run at Continuum by both myself and Neil Ford. The fact that Neil volunteered to run it was the big push to get it finished. So cheers Neil!

It has slightly reduced in scope from the first very ambitious content’s list I posted yonks ago. Of the four proposed parts only two of them have made it in (the City of Miraz and the Iron Mines) mainly due to the need to keep the book manageable and tight. I’m quite happy that although the adventure is quite freeform, there’s a good story underpinning it all.

So next up will be revision, playtesting, procuring art and editing, which I’ll do post Continuum for a release in October to coincide with Furnace (18th-19th October).

I’m having fun doing them….when small family let me get away. Had the nasty one of my main machine finally dying over the weekend, which put a spanner in the works, but resolueltly I march on.  Missus going back to work should set increased writing time, and gaming group is on hiatus until June. So May is offically ‘get stuff done’ month.

SimpleQuest –

 is doing a grand job of editing the chapters, leading to me doing my rewrite this week, with layout at the end of the month. Simon’s delivered the goods on the art front with some nicely evocative pieces. Fingers crossed will be out in July (as in you can order a book from Lulu out).

Shattered Lands & Life and Death. Currently on hiatus, but will see some development work since I’m running L&D and Dead Pot County, the Scenario that will be part of Shattered Lands, at Continuum. Big news for Shattered Lands is that its going back to being its own book and will not be released under the OGL.  After Continuum I’ll be getting both these books finished for probably a winter release. I say probably since I don’t want to rush either of them.

Monkey. Unfortunately wont’ be out for Continuum. Watching the final editing process of SimpleQuest has really made me realise how much work needs doing and how I don’t want to rush it. But what I hope to do before Continuum is a revision of the rules, implementing some of the ideas that came out in the last playtest and feedback from the Mighty Monkey Army, and make that available as a plain Pdf for testing, comment and buzz.  The ‘serious’ work starts after Continuum, so brace your self for more meaningful updates then.

Hearts in Glorantha. End of May is the deadline for submissions. As well as my Karia stuff, Greg Stafford already submitted a piece as has Jeff Richards and John Ottoway (author of Cthulhu Rising). Got about 10 others beavering away as we speak so we’ll see what happens at the end of the month when stuff starts hitting my intray.  Still open to submissions

Other than that my final thing at the moment is egging

 on in the development of Wordplay, which seems to be coming on tidily.

In the meantime I promise on the life of my first born that I shall not take on board any more projects.

I have become a Gloranthan Fanzine editor.

Looking at my hard  drive the other day I realized that even with the stuff I’m doing for  Moon Designs (Red Sun Rising) and Continuum (a compilation of my Molad scenarios humbly called ‘Liber Newtus’) I’ve still got a variety of Gloranthan bits sitting there.  This was also coupled with the realisation that despite there being other fantasy worlds out there , and working on one my self for self publication (see d101games.com ) my heart and regular gaming is still very much in Glorantha.  Also add into the mix the desire to show idiots like Angry Argrath over on Rpg.net (see http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=181101 if you’ve missed out) that Gloranthan fandom has survived the Fan Publication Policy and perhaps provide something that acts as a rallying call to Gloranthan fandom itself.

Thus the idea of a fanzine ‘Hearts in Glorantha’ jumped out like Athena out of Zeus’s head fully formed and ready to rock!
 
The fanzine will be run on a not for profit basis and will feature contributions from Gloranthan fandom. The idea behind it is to have a vibrant magazine which comes out bi-yearly, that shows Glorantha is alive and well. Obviously the majority of the articles will be HeroQuest, but I will accept articles for other games systems. The liscence I have covers Mongoose RuneQuest as well.

The fanzine will complement not compete with existing fan publications, such as Unspoken Word and Tradetalk, and of course the official material published by Moon Designs. I think there is a gap in the market for a  fun fanzine which is made up of individual articles on a variety of subjects, rather than the ‘theme’ issues that UW and Tradetalk does. Think the non-themed issues of Tales of the Reaching Moon and with its eclectic collection of articles.  Also I think that having one more fanzine won’t hurt the party and will actually help fill in the gaps between releases of the existing fanzines.

I’ve got the green light from Greg, and I’m looking to have an issue out by Continuum (early August) with another one out by XMAS.

Distribution wise I’m going for a duel pdf/dead tree model, with the pdf available via places like RPGNow and a hardcopy available direct from Lulu.com

If you would like to contribute content or help in any way please please get in touch (mrnewt@gmail.com). Payment will be the usual satisfaction of seeing your art/article in cold hard print and a copy of the issue your work appears in.

Aha the wonders of playtesting! Ran Monkey for a group of five at GoPlayManchester which was an absolute tonic for all the writing and introspection that I’ve been doing about SQ/Monkey recently. In short it was good to take it out for a spin.

We played ‘The Ministry of Thunder’, an idea ruthlessly nicked from the lovely

  whose original idea was much more eloquent than the action packed comedy that ensued at the gaming table using Monkey. Here’s the quick pitch I used;

Your errant immortals finds themselves in trouble with the Heavenly Authorities. Fully expecting to be cast out of Heaven for your crimes, instead you find yourselves drafted into the celestial Ministry of Thunder. Run by the God of Thunder, Lei Gong, it takes on the role of punishing those crimes that mortal law can’t or won’t reach

The game went swimmingly once we started playing, but there were some areas where the rules didn’t work as well;

The Good
The Bickering rules worked a treat, two of my players from my first successful playtest (the lovely Rob and Mr C) who inspired me writing them gave me a text book example of good implementation, which will make it in the rewrite.

Having a ‘Three strikes and your out’ rule for major character, two strikes for supporting characters and one strike for mooks worked much better for tracking combat and drawn out conflicts and will replace the existing Dramatic Action rules.

The Bad
Character gen dragged again like it did at Furnace. Need more examples for magic powers, cheat sheets, visual aids (?) to make the experience easier and less brain melting.

The Ugly
Grafted in some ‘attacking multiple opponents’ & ‘assisting other character’ rules in game, which worked overall but need some polishing out of game. Still a win though since the current rules didn’t have these areas and the players at the table really wanted them.

Overall it went very well. Even though it was tarnished for me by the fact the rules aren’t as smooth as I hoped, self criticing often brings me down, the game was greatly enjoyable with some fantastic Roleplaying from the players. The Ministry of Thunder is now going to become my stock demo game and I’m keen to play it with other players 😉