The Big Announcement!

OK, I've been promising the 'big announcement' for a couple of days now, so here it is...

I am launching a new fanzine, to be called 'Unknown Sagas', that will cover Swords & Wizardry: White Box. I aim to publish this fanzine quarterly, at least for the moment, and it will be produced in the digest-sized format, to match the newest release of the White Box rules, which are impending. This magazine will be distributed for free in PDF format, and a hardcopy version will be available through Lulu at cost – this will be a free fanzine, just as in the earliest days of OD&DITIES.

Now, naturally, such a fanzine is nothing without submissions, so I'm calling for writers and artists! No submission restrictions on content, this fanzine is to be by the fans and for the fans; that's the whole idea of a fanzine. I'll take spells, monsters, adventures, house rules, classes, rants, poems, campaign write-ups, short stories, anything in fact that the readers wish to send in! The rules system used in any article should be 'White Box', naturally, and submissions, ideas, questions and comments should be in Word, Open Office or rtf format, to methuslah1@yahoo.co.uk.

'm still working on the novel at the same time, of course; having three new projects in the fire will make life interesting. The first book, 'The Forgotten Tomb', will be out in April-May, more details to follow in the coming months on this. All I will say right now is that it is intended as very much in the spirit of the OSR – my intent from moment one was to write a series of 'OSR' books, in this case especially inspired by White Box.

Another great day – and a nice surprise!

Well, I thought the session on Saturday was good. And so was the session on Sunday! I blew up the Enterprise, killed off Picard, and that was just in the first half hour! That's one Star Trek universe that will never be the same again. Star Trek: TNG desperately needs a reimagining, and if you get into its guts and reach in for the good stuff, there are some excellent possibilities for interesting storytelling and dramatic potential. Rather a pity that in the actual series they killed most of the drama with the three evil words, “No Character Conflict.” I mean, seriously. Imagine someone pitching a show today saying that this was the 'core concept'. They'd be laughed out of the Writer's Guild.

Seriously, though, a fantastic session. Looks like we're definitely going ahead with the 'gamer retreat' we have planned for April, soon as we get the actual days nailed down, so definitely something to look forward to there. And in even better news, that 'IRC' Swords & Wizardry game I was planning to run has materialised into a face-to-face game! I spoke to the two players in the weekend group who were interested, said something like, “Of course, it would be great if we could do this face-to-face”, and the response boiled down to, “Why not?” So a Thursday night campaign is born, and already three people are signed up to it! Fantastic.

Big post tomorrow. Really big. Watch this space.

Interesting day...

Well, yesterday was extremely interesting, one of the best sessions of D&D I've played for a couple of months. The campaign really seems to be shaping out nicely; the DM, Mark, opted to throw the party back five hundred years from what effectively was 'Armageddon' to give us time to gain in power and abilities to prevent it from happening. Of course, I died again, but I'm already getting rather attached to the new character, so that's not a problem. To anyone who says games like Swords & Wizardry are lethal, I am forced today to scoff. 3.5 is just as lethal!

Looks like I'm going to be starting my new campaign online, and in the not-to-distant future, maybe as little as a couple of weeks! More details to follow on that one within a couple of days, but I definitely will be posting for players all over the shop. It'll be interesting to see what sort of response I get! First choice would probably be a face-to-face game in all honesty, but the logistics of setting that up would be extremely difficult as things stand. IRC has worked well for me before, it will again, I feel.

Star Trek today, and what promises to be an excellent session. I should probably share the link to the wiki with you here: http://stdestiny.wikidot.com/. Running a campaign wiki has so far proven to be an excellent experience, I'm not sure whether I'll do anything like as extensive for the online campaign, but certainly keeping the character sheets on a wiki for easy access is probably a good idea! (Not to mention useful as a memorial to the many dead...)