Thoughts and mussings

I’ll be moving the more official announcements over to the D101games website and more specifically the forums. I’ll be using this blog as more of a place where I think out loud, perhaps giving a bit more commentry and behind the scenes.

Couple of relevant posts on the forums, that you might find interesting.

Broadly speaking I’ve started 2009 on a real high. After a brief period of feeling a tad down, I’ve really come up and at ’em.

Hearts in glorantha issue 2 is out, and by all accounts is being received well. Its paid for itself and its proved it self to be self sustaining. Already got some submissions promissed and really looking forward to seeing issue 3 come together by June/July. Its very satisfying seeing the improvement from Issue 1, which I still love dearly, and holding the two issues side by side.

Bolstered on by this I’ve announced another Fanzine, Tales from the Firebird for Mythic Russia, Mark Galeotti’s game of Medieval Russia powered by HeroQuest (version 1.5 if you are wanting to be pedantic). I had a great time supporting its release and playtesting it using a couple of scenarios based round the Crusades of the Teutonic Knights in Lithuania, so my write ups along with another scenario and a homeland write up for the Hanseatic League (German Merchants in medieval Prussia) by CJ Bowser are going to provide a solid 60pages. Plus as well as some awesome public domain artwork to pull on we’ve got Pete Town , one of the artists from the Mythic Russia rulebook on board as well. Its mainly an excuse to get stuff off my hard drive, but I’m hoping that its release will fire up the embryonic Mythic Russia fan scene to create more stuff to support this fine game.

SimpleQuest
is now at the stage were its a big 200 page monster which needs me to do a big internal edit, before darkening  ‘s door again. Its almost there but it needs a consistancy check and some of the rules holes filling in.  Its the end of a very long haul and to be honest there’s been times when I’ve nearly called it a day. Thankfully I’ve had some awesome support on this one which has kept me going.

Monkey is firmly in playtest, I’ve got two external groups playing it and one actively feeding back. The rules are going to get a full top to bottom revision, with an aim of making the English clearer and the rules more consistant and robust. I’ve got a definite plan for Monkey and a definite goal for getting it done for May, even if it means other projects have to be put on the back burner.

Some of my blues skies stuff is coming out of the testing dept into the full light of day.

I’ve got the green light from Greg Stafford to publish a back log of six years of HeroQuest adventures as an another irregular publication called ‘Gloranthan Adventures’. This is immensely satisfying after serveral Gloranthan publishers have dropped the ball on these over the years. Finally I’m going to get them out there in the way I want to do them. Its a real vindication of what I’m doing and a massive releif that I finally ‘own’ and have the right to publish works that I’ve worked hard to create.

Been talking to   about doing supplements for Wordplay in the second half of the year. Not going to say any more than that yet (MUST GET MONKEY DONE FIRST!!) but its all going to be Mega Gaming Fun stuff 🙂

In business stuff I’ve looked at getting out the ghetto that is Lulu.com, and into retail and perhaps distribution but for the time being I’m happy with the modest distribution that I’m getting via Lulu. Its paying the costs and making me a small amount which will pay for art and production costs of future d101 books. I don’t need d101 as an income stream, but the golden rule is that it shouldn’t lose money. Which happily it isn’t 😀