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Dispatches:
News from Atlas Games
Long Has There Been Back-Stabbing ...
... in fantasy role-playing games. Never has there been a better reason for it.
Dynasties & Demagogues is
the guide to exploring the politics of your own fantasy campaigns. Thankfully, fantasy monsters and magic make politics even more exciting, and fiery in a whole new way. Put the wheels of the governing machine to work, steer the ship of state and face a dragon with your wits and your charm alone. Politics doesn't mean less action in your campaign, either; it means a better reason for taking action.
We're getting closed to finished with this one, so keep your eyes peeled. I'll be ripping something out of the book soon as a free preview. What do you want? A prestige class? A couple of feats? (
Dynasties has a whole new sort of feat.) Some spells?
Drop us a line with your request.
The Fire Sale Lives
You may not realize it, but the old Atlas Games "fire sale" -- our selection of dented, dinged and slightly damaged books from the warehouse, good enough to be useful but not so good that we can ship them to our distributors -- now
lives on at Warehouse 23. Click on the link to get a search page listing the current items available at a discount.
Eunuchs in the House!
Thorns of the Lotus has arrived from the printer! We're assembling orders from our distributors, and will be shipping to them tomorrow. Expect to see it on store shelves aroun the USA in about 1-2 weeks -- elsewhere, it depends more upon the vagaries of transnational shipping.
Shhhh! It's Secret!
Besides dealing with new releases, we're preparing for the GAMA Trade Show out in Las Vegas next month. Today we're sending a brochure/poster for our board and card games off to press; it should be a handy sales tool for retailers, and it features a new
Lunch Money poster in the middle.
It also looks like we'll have a big
Ars Magica announcement for the show...with a twist.
The Bully: Phil Reed's Lunch Money Variant
Some time back
the lovely and talented Phil Reed sent me a link to one of his web pages, on which he had written up a cool house rule for
Lunch Money:
http://www.philipjreed.com/lunchmoney.html
With these variant rules, one player is designated as the Bully -- bigger and tougher than the others, which in
Lunch Money is pretty much an invitation for unwanted pimp slapping from your peers. Check it out and give it a try!
The Con of the North Draws Near
Like a lumbering sasquatch, Con of the North comes stomping through the frozen winds of winter to-- Who am I kidding? It's 40 degrees here today! I'm driving around with the windows open, for crying out loud. Where am I driving to? Why
Con of the North, of course! It's tomorrow in St. Paul, so be sure to come by the Red Lion hotel and see what all the fuss is about.
I'll be running two sessions of
Dire Spirits, with prizes, and we're especially anxious to get some area GMs to show up and test the adventure before they run it with their own PCs. We'll even chat a bit about how to run a good
Nyambe game and what things a GM should keep in mind when playing
Dire Spirits specifically. Those games are on Friday night and Saturday afternoon.
I hope we'll see some of you there!
Attention Letter Headers!
The complete rules of the word-forming game that etymologists and bibliophiles love are back on-line.
Letter Head is a deck of letters useful for all manner of word games, from Word Poker to Crossword Solitaire. This is a perfect coffeehouse or hotel-room game; much more versatile than those little wooden tiles. If this game had been available back in 1992, these cards would've been used to decipher
SETEC ASTRONOMY in
Sneakers, I think.
Check out all the games that come in the
Letter Head rulebook and then think up a new one and email it to us with the link on your left.
Your word today is:
quidnunc.
Preview on Wizards.com
Check out
www.wizards.com/d20 for a new preview of the
Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary. This time it's the abroa ... a draconic parasite that adds another layer of danger to plundering that hidden hoard. Bugs with fire breath ... take a look!
How to Fix Warped Hardcovers
Warped hardcovers are a pain. It's particularly been a problem with
Blood and Sand. It really doesn't look great when those covers are bending out.
So I had a conversation with our printer about it yesterday, and learned some things. Moisture, and the lack thereof, is apparently the underlying issue. Different glues pull different amounts of moisture out of the cover boards, and environmental conditions in the plant (temperature, humidity, where in the building the books are sitting) plays a role. Apparently they recently switched materials -- probably because of problems with books at the time Blood and Sand was manufactured, since we haven't seen much warping on the more recent Splintered Peace.
There's a fix you can do yourself if you have a warped hardcover, though. I just tried it overnight, and the results are perfect. It's really simple: you need to get moisture back into the boards, so they can regain a nice flat shape.
What I did (following Kay the Printer's advice) was to take a very slightly damp sponge and wipe it across the inside of the covers, over the endsheets. I did this on the front and back endsheets, and put a piece of cheap cardboard (such as the chipboard on the back of a writing pad) between the endsheet and the paper of the book's text, one each in front and back. Then I stuck it under a heavy box and went home for the night.
This morning it's flat as a pancake. No warping at all, and the book looks great.
Our printer is going to pick up the copies we have left in the warehouse, to give them all this treatment and then return them. This should help copies that go out into the field in the future. If you already have a book (ours or any other publisher's) that is giving you this problem, though, give the fix I describe above a try.
Land of Fire and Ice Artwork
Land of Fire and Ice is ready for the printer. It's going to be one of our prettiest Ars Magica books, with interior illustrations from Grey Thornberry and Eric hotz and a cover illustration by the ridiculously talented Thomas Denmark. You can see a larger version of the
Land of Fire and Ice cover by clicking on the image below.
If you're not familiar with Eric, Grey or Thomas, take a look at their on-line portfolios:
Thomas Denmark:
www.denmarkstudio.com
Eric Hotz:
www.erichotz.com
Grey Thornberry:
www.greystudio.com
Crime and Campaign
We've just finalized plans to have the cover of our upcoming Sacred Ground book of holy sites, which is in the vein of Seven Strongholds and Seven Cities, appear as the cover illo of Campaign Magazine #8 (March/April). The piece is the work of Steven Sanders and features the floating island called Gabriel's Aerie, hovering high above the ground with priests dedicated to the Four Winds taking to the air on fabricated wings. Also in that issue will be an article from Chris Jones' chapter on Gabriel's Aerie, which gives D20 rules for flying via these "airframes."
In other news, I'm just finishing my first read of Keith Baker's Crime & Punishment, the companion to Chris Aylott's Dynasties & Demagogues. I must say that I think this is probably Keith's best work ever ... it's loaded with crunchy bits aimed at making players into formidable bounty hunters or more cunning criminals, and has nifty stuff like forensic magic that will really add to a investigation-themed campaign. Good stuff!
Little Fixes
A lot of little changes all throughout the site today. More wonderfully,
Dynasties & Demagogues is being proofread and should be moving on towards the printer before long. You can check out a peek of that book's rough cover by our own artmeister, Scott, in the Pipeline at the bottom of
atlas-games.com. Soon, we'll also be showing off the splendid new cover for
Land of Fire and Ice, our next
Ars Magica title, which was painted by
Thomas Denmark, soon to be of
Dungeoneer fame. That book is almost on its way to the printer, or so say the whispers winding through the office.
In other news, while it's February and snowing here, it's almost summertime and sweltering in the land of forward-thinking management-types. That is, folks are already talking about
Origins and
GenCon. Yowzah.
Back at Work
Michelle and I made it back alive from Plattecon and Madison, in spite of the driving snow we hit along a stretch of Interstate 94 near Eau Claire. The convention was good, though smaller than in recent years. Due to a scheduling snafu, they wound up having it about a month earlier than usual, and the word didn't get out to everyone. Still, we had fun; Michelle did some gaming with some of her college pals (including giving HeroClix a try), and I enjoyed a game of
Dungeoneer. We sold a few games, and I also finished proofreading
Land of Fire and Ice.
Speaking of which, that's what I'm in the office tonight working on. Scott's working on the last map (the big full-page map of Iceland), and all of the artwork is now in. I'm making my corrections to the text, dropping in the last of the artwork, and printing out a final laser copy. If all goes according to plan, it will be off to the printer tomorrow. We may yet have some copies to show off at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas next month!
PlatteCon This Weekend!
This weekend (on Saturday, Feb. 8th, to be specific), Michelle and I will be at PlatteCon, at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. We like going to this little convention each year. Besides giving us a chance to visit Michelle's family and various mutual friends in Madison, it's special to us because UW-Platteville is Michelle's alma mater, and this is the convention where we first met. (I was trying to peddle her a copy of Once Upon A Time...and it somehow turned into a real-life fairy tale for us both!)
Stop on by if you get the chance. We should have a little table, as usual, near Pam and Bob from
Chimera Hobby. Michelle will probably run off to play in some game with her college buddies, leaving me to man the booth, gossip with fellow vendors, catch up on my proof-reading, and lure passers-by into demo games. Like PlatteCons past, these games won't necessarily be from Atlas (like that time of playing 4 hours straight of
Drakon, a highly addictive game from our neighbors at
Fantasy Flight Games...). In fact, we should have a special treat: a copy of the hot-off-the-presses card game
Dungeoneer, published by
Citizen Games. Rob Stone of Citizen has promised us a copy to be delivered tomorrow. Michelle and I enjoyed playing the prototype, and we're looking forward to seeing the finished goods!
Thorns of the Lotus
A brief update for
Feng Shui fans and all hobbyists generally enthusiastic about castrated warlocks and Imperial China: We've just approved the proofs for
Thorns of the Lotus, the Eaters of the Lotus sourcebook, so it is one step closer to its final printing, distributors, retailers and you.
Be In Dire Spirits Up North
Those of you who will be attending
Con of the North in St. Paul, MN this year will have a chance to play in the
Nyambe adventure
Dire Spirits. I, Will, am running two sessions of this suspenseful and dangerous adventure over the course of the show, first on Friday night and then on Saturday afternoon. This event has just recently been scheduled, so you'll have to check the convention's on-site program book for all of the sign-up data.
We're especially interested in having GMs with current campaigns (in any setting) come and play with us, so you'll have a chance to sample the adventure, see a bit of
Nyambe and talk with other GMs. This way, the most folks get a chance to enjoy the adventure without spoiling it for use in your games at home.
I hope to see a lot of you there!
The Bestiary and d20v3.5
The Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary is laid out and has been in proofreading -- but as we learn more about the upcoming "version 3.5" of the d20 system, to be released this summer, we have some concerns about the impact that rules changes may have on this enormous monster book. Needless to say, we'd like to avoid releasing a book that could have problems with rules changes just a few months later.
We've applied for early access to the version 3.5 materials, so that we can evaluate whether or not there will be an impact on the Bestiary. In the meantime, we're holding off on sending the book to press. We're sorry to do this to fans, and the book's many contributors, but we think it's important to have a book that will stand the test of time.
Terrific News For Keith Baker and His Cow
Atlas Games is very happy to applaude
Keith Baker's recent victory over 11,000 other gamers in
Wizards of the Coast's campaign setting search and competition. Wizards
announced Keith's success today. Like the rest of the world, we're looking forward to seeing what strange and wonderful land Keith has created for us gamers to visit. This summer, we'll find out.
Keith Baker (
Ebon Mirror,
Occult Lore) has written or co-written numerous roleplaying game products for several companies, including Atlas. His
Hellcow (from
En Route) is a favorite of ours and is
reprinted here for your enjoyment. It is also evidence that Keith has some special love of cows that impose.
Congratulations, Keith!
Welcome!
Hi there, I'm Will Hindmarch, the webjack here at Atlas Games. First of all, pardon our dust as we reformat, clean and augment our website. On the one hand, it's been a long time coming. On the other hand, that's because the site has so many great little features that it was hard to wrangle them all. Check out some of the PDFs you might have missed on
the Penumbra downloads page, or read our
new article from
Nyambe creator Chris Dolunt.
We've also got a new front page feature: the Pipeline. Keep your eyes on that to see what we're up to and what's on the way. Keep in mind, too, that the Pipeline isn't a strict schedule, it's just a look ahead.
Finally, there's the new feature you're looking at right now. The look of this little page will change in the future, but in the meantime the nice folks at BlogSpot are letting us use this space for free. The Atlas Dispatches (name stolen from
John Tynes) are the place to get late-breaking news and little updates from us in the office. Check in here to see what's what.
Thanks for stopping by! Now, go
find a game store, pick out
a game and get playing!
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