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.

Monday Maps #13: A Quick Tutorial on Caves

Happy Monday! I hope you and yours are all staying safe.

 

I haven’t posted a Monday Map in a little while, but I came across this YouTube tutorial that is worth seeing. If you’re like me and the only things you can draw are a breath, a bath, and a conclusion, invest 1 minute and 14 seconds of your time and take a look.

 

 

Hammers and Dragons has a Facebook page here with links to a free downloadable maps, including this one. Of interest to Warhammer and WFRP fans will be the Skaven temple posted on May 7th. Here’s a small-scale preview:

 

 

One of the things I especially like about Hammers and Dragons is that artist Tomasz Ratajczak is teaching himself to draw, so he’s not presenting some lofty masterclass that makes the rest of us feel like idiots. And yet, his simple techniques produce results that would not look out of place in a professional publication. He’s only just getting started, but I’m looking forward to seeing more from him.

 

Links

Hammers and Dragons YouTube Channel
Hammers and Dragons Facebook page