Land of Phantoms

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 ...