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I.O.U. 1 WFRP Monster
Monster? What’s this about? Click here to find out!
I’m a little busy right now starting a new job, but I hope to get to it over the weekend. If there’s something particular you’d like to see, drop its name in the comments along with the edition(s) of WFRP for which you’d like stats. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.
While you’re here, though, I’d like to tell you about Rookery Publications, a new rpg studio that I’ve founded along with four other WFRP veterans: Writer, cartographer, and developer extraordinaire Andy Law; art legend Mark Gibbons; editor, proofreader, and business expert Lindsay Law, and prolific writer Andy Leask.
We are working on a dark fantasy setting with a series of sourcebooks and a campaign. Everything is designed to be modular so you can take it as written or kitbash it to fit your own campaign. It is system-agnostic, and the first few products have tested well with WFRP as well as an array of other games. Our first two titles are five-star products on DriveThruRPG, and you can find them here.
We also produce weekly “Inside the Rookery” live streams with guests from across the games industry. Past guests have included Bob Naismith, who ran the GEW miniatures department in the late 80s and created the first Space Marines, WFRP artist Ralph Horsley, ex-GW designer and novelist Gav Thorpe, former Hogshead Publishing chief James Wallis, Marc Gascoigne of Black Library and now Aconyte Books, and many more. The live streams go out on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook, and are archived on our YouTube channel. Inside the Rookery is supported by our Patreon campaign (https://www.patreon.com/InsideTheRookery).
You can find Rookery Publications at:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RookeryPublications
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheRookery
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/rookerypublications
Twitter: @RookeryP
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rookerypublications/
and we have a very active community on Discord.
All I Want for Christmas
Compliments of the season, whatever you celebrate at this time of year.
It’s been a good year for me: the final volumes in The Enemy Within Director’s Cut have been published, at least in electronic form, and just a few days ago the Kickstarter campaign for the Vaesen Britain and Ireland Sourcebook topped $700,000, making almost 65 times its funding goal.
Another thing I’m proud of this year is my involvement with Rookery Publications. For those who haven’t heard, this is a new indie tabletop RPG studio that I have co-founded along with Andy Law, Mark Gibbons, Lindsay Law, and Andy Leask. We are completely self-funded so this is a spare-time venture for most of us, but we confidently expect to release the first few system-agnostic* fantasy roleplaying supplements in our Coiled Crown product line early in 2022.
*That’s right. We are designing everything so that it can be used with any rules system. It sounds like a tall order, but playtest results have been very positive. In fact, some testers successfully adapted our first adventure for various SF and horror games, as well as a wide range of fantasy roleplaying games.
While we were working on those plans, we also started doing a regular weekly stream called Inside the Rookery, where we chat with guests from all across the industry about all manner of things. We’ve had a fantastic array of guests so far, and we plan to keep on going in 2022. We also have an occasional series called Beside the Rookery, which takes a deeper look at a specific topic. You can find past streams on our YouTube channel.
The streams are supported by a Patreon campaign, which you can find here. Starting at just GBP 1.50 (USD 2.00 or EUR 1.77 at the time of posting), you can become a Rook and enjoy Patreon-exclusive blog posts as well as monthly masterclasses on various aspects of RPG design. So far I’ve shown how to create multi-plot adventures like those in the Rough Nights and Hard Days collection for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and Andy Law has shared some of the secrets of his multiple award-winning cartography.
So if you want to give us a gift this holiday season, please check out the Rookery’s Patreon page. It’s a gift to yourself, as well.
Come to our Birthday Party!
Rookery Publications was founded one year ago as an indie rpg studio composed of legendary writer and cartographer Andy Law, GW and Blizzard artist Mark Gibbons, indefatigable writer Andy Leask, and laser-sharp editor/proofreader and awesome business brain Lindsay Law. And me, Graeme Davis.
We’ll be celebrating LIVE tomorrow (Saturday Nov. 6th) at 7 pm UK time (3 pm Eastern, noon Pacific). Come and join us! Meet the team, ask questions, and hear the latest news on our upcoming products!
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/rookerypublications
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheRookery
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RookeryPublications
See you then!
And join our Discord community at https://discord.gg/7uxKJxfW!
Developing WFRP
Ever wondered what the collective noun for a grim and perilous gathering of WFRP developers is?
The answer to that question and more can be yours when, for the first time ever, WFRP developers from all four editions of the game – Graeme Davis, James Wallis, Chris Pramas, Jay Little, and Andy Law – gather to answer your questions.
So, mark this date in your calendars: Wednesday 27th October at 21:30 UK time.
If you want to pre-submit questions, head over to the Rookery Discord: https://discord.gg/KGzxJw7Taw
Or, turn up on the day and comment on Facebook, Twitch, or YouTube. Our host, WFRP writer and editor Lindsay Law, will take your questions live and put them to the panel.
If you want to see our previous streams, head over to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheRookery
If you want to know more about Inside the Rookery, head over to our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/InsideTheRookery
Even Rougher Nights
My WFRP 4 adventure collection Rough Nights and Hard Days uses a multi-plot format that I first developed at Games Workshop more than 30 years ago. It’s been widely discussed online, though to my surprise I never heard of anyone using the same style in their own adventures – until quite recently.
A little while ago, I got a very complimentary email from Arjen Poutsma in the Netherlands, thanking me for all the enjoyment that WFRP had given him and sharing a copy of a multi-plot Call of Cthulhu adventure he had written called Night of the Rising Sun. It is now available on DriveThruRPG.
As the title suggests, the adventure is set in Japan – 1830s Japan, to be exact, which makes it something of a niche product. Still, I think it is worth your time. It was designed to be run as a one-off, and would make a different and interesting con adventure. With a little work, it can be adapted to be run with 80s-era games like Bushido, GURPS Japan, AD&D Oriental Adventures, or Land of the Rising Sun, which will shortly be available in a new 5th edition. With a little more work and a little imagination, it can be set in any version of Japan from the 1920s of Call of Cthulhu to that of cyberpunk settings.
Thinking of Night of the Rising Sun reminded me that I had written one other multi-plot adventure beside those in Rough Nights and Hard Days. Called ‘The Last Resort’, it was written for the d20/3.5 rules and appeared in Green Ronin’s 2003 adventure collection Tales of Freeport.
The adventure has eight plots, which I won’t spoil by describing them here. It is set in a grand hotel and features a wide and diverse cast of characters, and while it fits right into the Freeport setting, it could easily be moved to Altdorf or another large city in WFRP’s Old World, or to 1920s New York, London, Paris, Berlin, San Francisco or somewhere similar for Call of Cthulhu.
‘The Last Resort’ completes the catalogue of multi-plot adventures that I have currently in print, but I’ll add a little teaser: there’s another one coming from Rookery Publications. If you don’t already know about this new indie publisher (which consists of WFRP veterans Andy Law, Lindsay Law, Andy Leask, and Mark Gibbons as well as me, and was described by one poster as ‘a roleplaying supergroup’), you can find out more here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1044080065964332/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RookeryP
Discord: https://discord.gg/mMeRpPgY
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxVxRCPYv–_w9xFjW5fdOA
So are there any other multi-plot adventures on the market? Has anyone tried to create one for their own campaign? How did it go? Let me know in the comments section!
Graeme Davis 