Land of Phantoms

Don't thank me. Thank Deadstop. Here to add some treat to your holiday are some of Dr. Frankenstein's prized creations with a few tricks up their sleeve. This is the first entry in the monsters section of The Hanging Judge's Guide to Transylvania . Enjoy. And don't forget to leave the lights on when you go to sleep. Transylvanian Adventures' Abominations

Ugh. I suppose I could sum up the last few months with that classic scene from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining . The one where Shelley Duvall finds Jack Nicholson's manuscript... I haven't lost my mind or anything. But time devoted to anything outside of paying the bills has been hard to come by. The Good +Doug Kovacs . Just Doug Kovacs. He was the sole representation of Transylvanian Adventures at GenCon and continues to be an amazing supporter even through this relatively dark period in my productivity. Thank you, Doug. +Joseph Goodman gave me a very generous opportunity to put an ad in the GenCon program. Much thanks to him. I appreciate that he hasn't given up on me. I've finished re-writing the Monsters section. I still have about 18 or so new monsters to add in. But progress has been made. 5e. I've had the opportunity to play and peruse the latest edition of The World's Most Popular Fantasy Roleplaying Game. It's good and is the fi...

Well, that went by quickly. It's been a couple of very challenging months here. I've been able to dive into TA sporadically. But it's not uncommon at this point for my work hours to be 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. or later. So time has been at a premium the last few months. Here's a brief update to remind everybody that I am still, in fact, working on this. NTRPG I did not make it. I was on a plane with my 7-year-old and 5-year-old to fly them to the grandparents. I was optimistic that this would free up some time for the book but it didn't work out that way. As far as the book, here's where it stands. The Good I'm about a third of the way through re-writing the monsters. The new format works fairly well for me and exists in some strange place in between DCC RPG , 13th Age, and Dungeon World . As part of the Monsters section, I'm working on the Advanced Rule Options as well. This where the infamous "cleavage rule" joins us. The prima...

I finished my last blogpost by saying "Here's hoping time is on my side over the next few month". Insert maniacal laughter here. Work and staging my house to sell (and then moving across town) are the big blockers for me right now. I haven't been completely dead to the world, however. Here's a few things that've been going on in the "Coming Soon" column of Transylvanian Adventures.   NTRPG I will be there. Hoping to be there all of Friday and Saturday. I've signed up for a couple of games but was unable to get a slot to run games. I'll be there, though. So if anyone wants to play TA, just grab me. Next year, I'm hoping to have an official spot in which I can demo TA. The NTRPG guys have explained the ins and outs of getting a table there, so I'm fairly sure I can nail that down.   The S&S Game Yup, it happened. Here's some notes. The Good The DCC Wizard hack that makes the Wizard a playable TA class works very...

It's been a while. Usually, that's a good thing when it comes to progress with Transylvanian Adventures . At this point, I can't say it's a good or great thing. It just kind of is. But I felt we were way past due a status update. Here's what I've been up to lately. I finished a Sword & Sorcery Hack for  Transylvanian Adventures earlier in the year. It's slated to appear in D.A.M.N. #2. This is a full chapter from the upcoming (third) book,  The Transylvanian Grimoire . But it isn't just trading in your tophats for loincloths. It includes a conversion that makes the DCC RPG Wizard a fully playable class in  Transylvanian Adventures. It also covers a metric cluckton of ways to twist and mold the Halfbreed, Exotic, and Reaver classes to create demi-humans in a S&S-themed game of  Transylvanian Adventures  or to spice up your 19th century game with something really, really weird. As an add-on, there's rules to use the S&S hack for a Laser...

I'll begin this post with a quote that is so good it deserved to lead off the post... The rules shouldn't be the game -- playing the game should be the game. (Ben Lathrop)  Ben's comment  to my last post  was well said. It resonated with a couple of questions that have come up over the past few weeks: Why are there so many tables in Transylvanian Adventures? 100 pages??? Why Ruin? It may not be clear at first. But the answer to both of those questions is Ben's quote right up there. Playing the game should be the game. Why So Many Tables? I thought there was a good chance that Transylvanian Adventures  would fail to find an audience. There was a possibility that this would be the only book. Ever. That sobering realization forced my hand to put the items that I felt were necessary to play these types of games (Gothic Ass-Kicking Horror) into the first (and possibly only) book. Some of the best playtests we had were from the In-Between Adven...

The print-on-demand version of Transylvanian Adventures  is now available. Sorry for the long wait. Those who purchased a PDF copy have been sent a coupon directing them to a $14.99 discount. This means that, for a limited time, they can purchase the hardcover for $20 + shipping. There is a Print + PDF bundle version available on RPGNow. I will continue to offer free PDFs for those who purchase the hardcover through Lulu. Of the two printings, I prefer the Lulu hardcover. But it is nice to have options for sure. Thanks to everyone for the continued support.

When I first began writing Transylvanian Adventures , it was at an awkward nexus of playing the fourth edition of the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game and, by comparison, my favorite edition(s) of said game -- Basic, OD&D, AD&D -- as well as numerous independent games I'd played the decade plus prior to the Fourth's release. It didn't take a statistician to gauge where some things had gone right and other things had gone wrong. And still more things had been kicked off the boat needlessly, even thoughtlessly. Most of my musings circled, like a hungry vulture, over the topic of Character Mortality. It's Important To Be Able To Die One of the recent trends I've noticed is the exclusion of one of the key NPCs in a roleplaying game: the Angel of Death. I've read many roleplaying games where death is eliminated from the game altogether. Here is what I found. Removal of the threat of death did not lead to more risk-taking among players. It d...

2013 in Review First off, thanks to everyone who has purchased a copy of Transylvanian Adventures . My hope was to create a game that would become a new way of roleplaying in the Victorian/Gothic Horror era -- a way that relied heavily on emergent play, the familiarity of OSR gaming, and the foundation established by DCC RPG. Time will tell if I have hit that mark or not. Transylvanian Adventures has done well. I'm projecting breaking even on the project by the end of March. Breaking even means I've paid myself back for the art and other expenses I've incurred specifically in putting the book together. These expenses do not include the time I spent writing it or that Jenn spent laying it out. So it's a very lean "break even". At the beginning, I'd hoped to break even on the book. I wasn't at all sure that would be possible. As a stretch goal I'd hoped to make enough money to bring on another writer and buy even more art for the second and ...