I'm working on a new setting for Pathfinder with LPJ Design, the race previews for the setting Obsidian Twilight (a dark, dark, nasty but heroic fantasy world) will be trickling through, here's the first. You can follow Obsidian Twilight developments HERE.

NEWS

It's been an extremely busy month here at Postmortem Studios, two conventions in one month will take it out of the best of us and Indiecon and Dragonmeet were no exceptions. Both events were bedevilled by problems beyond anyone's control. Indiecon was located next to some of the hardest hit areas in the heaviest rain and worst flooding seen in many years in the UK but somehow survived - though we all got very wet and the third day of the con was held in Oz. Dragonmeet was similarly assaulted by weather issues as well as the vagueries of trainline maintenance and stoppages on the underground. Luckily I sold a boatload of stuff and didn't have to carry so much all the way home. All things considered a great success and - yet again - money and time willing I do hope to make more conventions in the coming years.

Indiecon saw successful playtesting of the FATE powered Agents of SWING as well as some new adventures for Blood! and '45 which should be appearing on RPGNOW in PDF form before too long.

***

NEW PRODUCTS

Because I've been doing so much freelancing for other companies there hasn't been a lot of activity with new products this month. However we do have a good selection of new Clipart Critters by the inestimable Brad McDevitt, including some new bundles so that you can pick up some very decent art on the cheap as props for your game table or for you to use in your own gaming publications. Don't forget to check out the work of our other artists as well.

***

STAY IN TOUCH

Over on our journal/website there's an ongoing poll game, like a choose your own adventure game with multiple participants, this one based around a zombie apocalypse using the Blood! system and with you playing a British teenager caught up in the events as they unfold. Participate there and also keep an eye on news, events, sales information, reviews, publishing partnerships and so on.

You can also find me on...

Twitter
Facebook
Roleplaymedia
RPGBomb
Myspace

Or you can drop me some feedback in the comments on the website, or by good old fashioned e-mail to grim@postmort.demon.co.uk

***

SECRET SALE

There will be a secret sale one day this month for 24 hours... keep your eyes peeled on the website and on Twitter for more information!

***

DIRECT MAIL ORDER

I have leftover product from the convention sales and I do, really, need to clear the decks ready for the new year so these are being offered for mail order direct from me. Contact me via e-mail, listing the products that you're interested in and we'll arrange payment (preferably Paypal) and delivery. Available products include:

Hentacle £8.00 / $12.00
Hentacle: Sloppy Seconds £3.00 /$4.50
Hentacle: Three's an Orgy £3.00 /$4.50
All three together - £12.00 / $18.00

These are the last hardcopies of Hentacle that are likely to be sold, at least in this form. Supplies of Three's an Orgy are extremely limited. Please keep in mind that Hentacle and its supplements are STRICTLY for those over 18.

Cthentacle £15.00 / $23.00
Cthentacle: The Dunbitch Horror £5.00 / $7.50
Both together £18.00 / $27.00

Please keep in mind that Cthentacle and its supplements are STRICTLY for those over 18.

100 Dark Places, 100 Fantasy Adventure Seeds, 100 Planets, 100 Kingdoms, 100 Horror Adventure Seeds. '45: Psychobilly Retropocalypse, Bloodsucker: The Angst - £12.00 / $18.00 each.
Buy three or more together and they're £10.00 / $15.00 each.

Bloodsucker: The Juice, @ctiv8 - £8.00 /$12.00 each.
Buy Bloodsucker: The Angst and Bloodsucker: The Juice together for £18.00 /$25.00

Blood! - £15.00 / $23.00

I also have limited numbers of copies of Origins of the Specious, the comedy book I did for Mongoose Publishing and these are available for £15.00 / $23.00 as well.

Postage is £2.00 to the UK and $5.00 international.

Have a lovely holiday season and be good enough to spread some of that festive cheer (and money!) in my direction,

Love

Grim
Postmortem Studios

Feeling a strange sense of unfairness and worry about how the little kid is being beaten raw and bloody you wade in, grabbing the fat kid by the hair and yanking him off the smaller kis, tearing a fistful of hair out of his scalp and causing him to scream like a stuck pig. The little kid - amazingly, gets up as you hold the fat kid by the hair and start beating on him, blood dripping from the back of his head as he launches himself back at the fat kid and, unbelievably, bites him. You stare in horror as the little kid, already badly beaten, takes a chunk out of the fat kid's forearm and his squeals get even louder. Out of nowhere Mr Higgins, the PE teacher, barges through the crowd and hauls the bloody mouthed kid away, holding his struggling form under one arm and stabbing a finger at you and the fat kid.

"Fuck off Corran you little shit, and you can be sure I'll be telling the police about you getting in a fight again, and you Jones, get to the nurse's office." He looks down at the writhing mass of blood and bruises tucked under his arm. "As for you Barton, you're coming with me." He starts hauling the protesting, struggling kid off.

What do you do?
	Go behind the CDT block for a smoke to settle your nerves.
	Follow Higgins and find out what's going on with Barton.
	Escort Jones to the nurse's office.
	Fuck this for a game of soldiers, head home.
pollcode.com free polls

Tomorrow I'll be at Dragonmeet in London, selling my stuff so if you're in The Smoke, drop by and give me some money. I'll be selling...

• Hentacle - £8.00
• Hentacle: Sloppy Seconds, Hentacle: Three's an Orgy, Hentacle: 4/Play £3.00
• Final Straw - £8.00
• Cthentacle - £15.00
• Cthentacle: The Dunbitch Horror - £5.00
• 100 Fantasy Adventure Seeds - £12.00
• 100 Fantasy Kingdoms - £12.00
• 100 Science Fiction Adventure Seeds - £12.00
• 100 Planets - £12.00
• 100 Horror Adventure Seeds - £12.00
• 100 Dark Places - £12.00
• 100 Conspiracies - £12.00
• Faith in the Future (comic) - £5.00
• Bloodsucker: The Angst - £12.00
• Bloodsucker: The Juice - £8.00
• '45: Psychobilly Retropocalypse - £12.00
• Invaderz - £8.00
• @ctiv8 - £8.00

There will be deals available as usual, three £12.00 books or more for £10.00 each and so on. I'm also open to haggling and offers from anyone, and product swaps with other companies. Make me an offer! :)

These are the last copies of Hentacle that will be printed in this way, the same for Final Straw. These are also the last copies of this version of 100 Science Fiction Adventure Seeds that will be sold as the snazzy new partnership version with Cubicle 7 will be out soon. If you like I'll also be doing the 'gamer rock star thing' (as it was once meanly and derisively called) and signing books if anyone wants me to and I'm happy to discuss upcoming projects and ideas with people as well as any prospective work anyone might have going! Same goes if you've got any ideas for projects or books you'd like to see me do.

Stock will also be available for direct mail order from me after Dragonmeet.

So, if I start a community participation poll game, what'd you like beloved audience?

What should I base a regular poll game on?
	Zombie Horror (Blood!)
	Spy-Fi (Agents of SWING)
	Crime Caper (Future project idea)
	B-Movie Weirdness ('45)
	Other - Leave a comment and I'll re-poll if something grabs me.
pollcode.com free polls

The dreaded has happened, I've become a gamer who - largely - doesn't game, which is something I really, really never wanted to happen, especially as a designer. There's not a lot that can really be done about that at the moment, though I might try a Google Wave game or a Poll game again - on this blog (as I started but never finished with Patient Zero on my personal blog) to keep my hand in, but I really need to game more somehow.

This came to me at Indiecon as I was setting up to run Agents of SWING and I felt this unfamiliar sensation which I eventually nailed down as being panic and nervousness. These are sensations I am normally abundantly familiar with, but not usually in the context of gaming where I'm usually confident and sure of myself. It's particularly worrying as a designer since it means I'm only keeping up with things at a remove, what I read, not what I experience in play. Indiecon was reassuring on that score, but it was also a bit of a wakeup call that I need to get back on top of things and get some proper gaming in somehow, whatever way I can manage.

I'll take any ideas from you guys out there on that or ways that you've gotten around the issues of isolation, separation and lack of spare moolah.

Keep an eye on the blog for some sort of poll-based game and if you have wave, come find me grimstales@googlewave.com

I can't give you a full and shiny report on Indiecon because I've written up a full-on report for Polymancer magazine and it'd be bad form to say too much about it here in a professional reporting capacity - and the same's likely to get in the way for Dragonmeet! Still I can talk about what I did and my experiences there as Postmortem.

Last year the weather was pretty rough but this year we were right there as some of the worst weather for many years struck England with flooding and gales and all sorts of warnings and threats of doom. It was pretty rough, but also - in a pervere way - a lot of fun.

We were at the con for the full span and with the cost split between all of us Indiecon represents a fantastic deal, Thursday night to Monday morning in an excellent chalet - that's actually warm, snug and clean - for what came to around £50 a head for six of us. Unlike a lot of cons the accomodation is excellent and you can actually get a decent night's sleep.

On the plus side Indiecon is great for running demo games and getting a good buzz for your games. People are game to try just about anything and I was very, very pleased to see two of my games from the previous year being played independently by people, Invaderz and Blood!. We ran another demo game of Blood! that went pretty well, but only ran it once this time, we also ran two playtest sessions of Agents of SWING and the feedback was invaluable, as was the fun I had in the couple of instances that I did get to play. It's unfortunate that I was - and usually am - stuck minding the stall and so can't run more demos or get involved in more games, something I'll have to work on correcting for 2010 because, oh yeah, we're going again.

On the downside - and this was the problem last year as well - it's not a very good, yet, from a commercial point of view. Both years I've barely broken even on sales and while there was higher attendence this year I think the combination of the economy and the weather drove off what was, essentially, my profit margin in both people's reticence to buy and the walk-through attendence that could have been there. Hopefully we'll be lifted out of that a bit by next year.

The organisation was much better this year and I think an event of this nature can only continue to grow and grow and deserves to, a great showcase for UK games development in general and UK indie games in general.

Fantasy

The fantasy genre is a hugely broad one, taking in many different themes and sprawling across time and space from cod-medieval mediocrity to modern worlds with fantasy elements lurking in the background and even taking in alternate histories, traditionally more the province of science fiction. The fantasy milieu is usually the one that gamers start with, growing familiar rather quickly with gaming’s take on elves, dwarves and the like, so much so that these things are a cliché and a shorthand for gaming as a whole.

 

High Fantasy

High or epic fantasy takes place within a world removed from our own where the rules are different, where magic is powerful and widespread, where fantastical monsters, creatures and races roam the land and it is a genre in which the stories are generally epic, sweeping and wide ranging and deal with grandiose and world-shaping plots of good against evil.

 

The classic example of the High Fantasy Epic is The Lord of the Rings.

 

High Fantasy is what a lot of RPGs aspire to be and there’s a lot in High Fantasy that lends itself to gaming well. The – relative – black and white of good and evil makes plotting easier and the physical and spiritual presence of evil makes for simpler way to introduce villains and to excuse their motivations. Fate and destiny can also be used to more explicitly manipulate characters in a way that might be inexcusable in other subgenres. High Fantasy is also very much suited to mid and long scale campaigns divided into significant sections or ‘chapters’ and where you have definite conditions of victory and an end to the plot.

 

On the downside expectations are high and the relatively slow rate of character advancement in many fantasy games can be frustrating when it comes to getting to the grand action. It’s also hard, given many fantasy RPG systems, to have truly mixed party levels of competence. Frodo and Aragorn in the same party can be hard to pull off well in many systems, especially those with mechanically heavy, encounter-oriented, carefully balanced systems. The nature of High Fantasy games doesn’t particularly lend itself to unending games, where you go on playing until things peter out, unless you play it generationally with new heroes rising in the same world time after time to face down the same evil, reincarnated or resurgent in each generation.

 

Running a successful High Fantasy game is a matter of managing to make every character shine in their own way – something that doesn’t happen so much in the genre fiction. Not everyone can be destined to be the High King but each character will need their moment to shine and their own great destiny, something tailored to the player and what they find inspiring and perfect for their character. The other big trick is to incorporate all the high-powered fantasy elements without slipping over into the land of cheese and pastiche. The secret of accomplishing that is to treat these elements with gravitas and seriousness and to ensure that they’re consistently treated within their own internal logic, even if you – as the Games Master – are the only one who knows or understands the rules you’ve made for yourself.

It's November and in England that means two things. Fireworks and conventions! (Hopefully not at the same time).

***

We'll be at Indiecon and Dragonmeet in November, running a few demo games and selling lots of hardcopies of our products just in time for Christmas. Leftover convention stock will be available for those who want to order it directly from me after these conventions and details will be forthcoming on our website. You'll also, soon, be able to get an updated and art-infested version of 100 Science Fiction Adventure Seeds, published in partnership with Cubicle 7 Entertainment. While you're checking out print products, be sure to look up Origins of the Specious, a gamer's humour book and compilation published under the Flaming Cobra imprint with Mongoose Publishing.

***

This last month was 'Schlocktoberfest' for Postmortem Studios and saw discounted PDF products across our horror and other 'gross out' and B-movie type products. We also released a number of new items including:

Several Freakshow products for Blood! OGL Modern and MRQ (BloodQuest) as well as the demo adventure from last year's Indiecon, Blood Tales: The End.

The Art of Hentacle (Adult product!)

The Art of Final Straw (Violent product!)

And some new ZelArt.

If you're looking for images to spice up your games or to publish your own, be sure and check out our extensive library of stock art by Industry Veteran Brad McDevitt and by newcomers Zel and Toby.

This month will be concentrated largely on freelancing and preparation for the two conventions, but we hope to start work on Agents of SWING, a FATE powered mash-up of 1960s and 1970s spy TV and films. If there's time a rough draft and a demo adventure may be ready for Indiecon and - if so - will be turned into a special preview product that you'll be able to download in Christmas or the new year. Otherwise you can expect more Freakshows, more stock art and - perhaps - the companion volume to 100 Conspiracies, 100 Conspirators.

***

We appreciate feedback and friendship here at Postmortem Studios, so if you want to follow us or communicate here are some of the many ways you can do so:

E-mail
Website
Twitter
Myspace
Facebook
Moblog
Roleplaymedia

***

Lastly I'd like to make you aware of a couple of opportunities we have going. These are strictly volunteer positions but we're looking for people to help with raising awareness of our products online and with running demo games at conventions. There's no money, unfortunately, but there would be free products, PDF and print, and possibly t-shirts once a helper-monkey design has been settled upon. Please e-mail to above link if you're interested in helping out in either capacity. We're particularly interested in talking to people about running games at US, Australian and Irish conventions.

Thanks for your patronage in the past and hopefully more of it going into the future. Let us know what YOU want to see more of or what you'd like to see us develop. You never know, it might actually happen!

Today is the last day of Schlocktoberfest where you can get many of our PDF products half price! If you want to grab yourself a bargain before things go back to normal on Novermber the 1st then hurry along to our RPGNOW store and buy up everything you can, including this month's new releases, card game art books and new Freakshow monsters statted for Blood! Modern OGL and MRQ.

Spend your moneys HERE

So, now you’ve got a group and a place to play you just need something to play. Quite a lot of people, surprisingly, are system monogamous (or bigamous), while that means you’re not going to have this challenge, per se, it can still be a problem all of its own in a group that includes people that like other games and you still need to keep these things in mind in deciding what spin to give your game. If your players are all over the place on their favourite systems, games and themes then you’re going to get a clash that needs to be resolved somehow.

How to Choose
There’s a few different ways you can settle the argument of what game to play, none of them are entirely satisfactory but they should let you come to an acceptable compromise, or at least to shut the whiners up one way or the other.

GM Fiat
You’re the one running the bloody game; you’re the one that gets to choose. If the Games Master isn’t happy then nobody’s happy and if they want to play a game at all, then they’re going to have to do what you say and play what you want and tough titty if they want to do otherwise. One the plus side this establishes the Games Master’s authority right from the start and sorts out what you’re going to play with no quibbling. On the minus side, people who really, genuinely, don’t want to play a game are going to pout and possibly spoil it for everyone else.

Votes
Work out what all the different games are that people might want to play, each list them on a different piece of paper and then give each of them a score based on how much you want to play them, 1-5 or 1-10 works well. The Games Master then tots up all the scores and the one with the highest score is the one that you play. This only works if everyone’s honest and it tends to mean the same games dominate session to session unless something new really takes everyone’s fancy, but it does also tend to mean that everyone can at least tolerate whatever game it is you do end up playing.

Lucky Dip
Everyone writes down one game that they want to play and drops it into a ‘hat’ (or a dice bag, or a box or whatever). Then the Games Master draws one of the notes out of the hat and that’s what you’re going to play. This puts everyone on equal footing, gives everyone an equal chance but it can result in very unpopular choices that one person likes and everyone else doesn’t, a group predominantly of gritty horror fans playing Furry Pirates or something. Not good.

Round Robin
Use one of the methods above but only to determine what order each of the games should be played in. That gives people more time to get used to the less popular choices and makes sure that everyone gets their crack of the whip. On the downside the unpopular choice may loom over all the other games like a black cloud and motivate people to keep these other games going on longer than they should, simply to hold off the inevitable terror of Bunnies and Burrows.

Gauging the Mood
The easiest way to work out what mood people are in and what sort of game they want to play is to ask them. People aren’t always honest though and don’t always answer truthfully about how they feel or what they’re really in the mood for, plus you need to somehow collectivise everyone’s mood together and figure out a game that either makes the best of the overall mood or that hits several different emotional notes as you’re going along. That’s also difficult.

This isn’t really the sort of thing you can be advised on, empathy is something you have or you don’t have and you don’t always have the option to shift the feel of a game session from comedy to tragedy or vice versa. Just be aware of the cues going on as you play, the way people react, how ‘intense’ or ‘shallow’ they’re playing as you go along, be responsive and don’t try to force something that isn’t really working.