Monkey the begining of the End!

Spent the last couple of days in a happy fug after finishing OpenQuest playing about with various projects, considering what to throw my seemingly the boundless energy into next  in a very real get it done and out the door sort of way. Finally after banishing various niggling fears with a big hearty Brian Blessed laugh, I’ve settled on Monkey.

The text is two thirds done, now all have to do is finish the rest. Art is in the bag courtesy of Jon Hodgson (Cover) and lots of lovely public domain pieces for the black and white (and possibly colour) internals.

So time to get it on and finish my own personal Journey to the West.

ETA September.

Progress!!!

Finally some movement on the getting things done and out front.

After what seems like an age, OpenQuest was finally finished at the weekend and has gone to proof 🙂 I’m well happy with the resulting layout and the way that the system is nicely polished to deliver a easy to understand fantasy D100 experience. Despite myself its a complete game, with rules, monsters, a setting and a beginning adventure.  It may not be perfect but I love it warts and all.  Best of all it should be with you mid-July 🙂  Kudos to Neil Ford, our chief OQ Evangelist who is running games at both Dragonmeet SW this coming weekend and Furnace 2009 in October.

A huge posistive is that this now frees me up to do some serious writting and get yet more stuff out 🙂

Monkey is a prime contender here and I opened my files up last night and mulled over what I need to do. I’m happy with the system, so its mainly getting that down in a form that other people understand and getting the background chapters, The Worlds of Monkey and 101 Immortals. Yes you heard it right I’m going to try and go for an Immortals list of 101 characters. Its a nice goal that will focus my efforts to get to grips with the expansive and vague world of Chinese Mythology. I reckon if I get my head down a Sept/Oct release is not unreasonable, although end of the year is more realistic.

Production of Hearts in Glorantha issue 3 will seriously kick off next month. Its a bumper issue and Sacha is manfully doing proofing at the moment and our team of artists are beavering away. If course its all a worrying Schrodinger cat scenario until we reach 1st July when all the art/proofing will magically turn up in my inbox. Then a brief bit of layout, with skills seriously bolstered by doing OpenQuest, and then its done sometime early August.

John Ossoway, renassiance man of Rpgs, continues to tidy up the text and bang out maps for our first D101 OpenQuest release the adventure book The Savage North. All this and he’s recently become a dad again!  Emphasis will soon move to me doing the setting and tying it all together with an overarching campaign plot with John doing the art.  Out Oct/Nov.

Other stuff that is being fiddled with at the moment:

Wordplay The Fury of the Vikings, a fantasy Viking setting with rules for raiding, invading countries and Ragnorok. Hoping to test out the characters side of things with an adventure I’m writing for the Wordplay core rulebook soon. I’ve got all the art sourced so its a case of when the muse really kicks me in the balls. Optimistically I would like it out end of this year, realistically it will probably be early next.

The Road Less Travelled, a Fantasy Genre Pack for HeroQuest 2. This is taking the art, adventure, setting, monsters and Adventure writing section from OpenQuest and converting it to HQ2.  It came about  because I wanted a fantasy setting to run games in with people who don’t like Glorantha and then realised that I had 75% of a setting that I had become rather fond of already written. Not just a straight conversion, it will have lots of HQ2 specific advice for how to run generic western style Fantasy full of Orcs, Knights and Wizards and expand upon the setting info presented in OpenQuest. Out ??? Again with all the time in the world within the first month of HeroQuest 2’s release, which would be sometime Aug, but I reckon more Sept/Oct even Nov. Moon Designs is putting together a Open HeroQuest Liscene which this Genre Pack will be released under. Basically this is an Open Gaming License which allows people to release non-Gloranthan HQ2 stuff without approval or interference from Moon Designs, who hope that having other companies put out supplements will increase sales of HeroQuest 2. If the Road Less Travelled does well I may release more HQ2 stuff, since I’m rather fond of the system now 🙂

Words can not express how much getting OpenQuest finished has bolstered my confidence on all things D101. I’m having a hard time keeping my feet on the ground, but the project has given me a ton of experience to pull on, not least that I shouldn’t set unrealistic deadlines!!  A big thanks to everyone who supported me on this one 😀