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Dispatches:
News from Atlas Games
Lest I Be Misunderstood
In truth I'm not the 'shroom-feasting lunatic I come across as online. Must be the beard. I just genuinely hoped that the celestial event which coincided with my birthday would bestow upon me some sort of supernatural might. Instead, I got tacos and the promise of a new bike (almost as sweet as the object itself). Aren't I allowed one public mention of it? Ray Bradbury (who is in all ways wonderful) got mentioned on NPR every hour, and his birthday was four days before the fateful planetary passing. Sure, he also wrote some book about Mars or something, and I didn't. Throw that in my face again.
Sensible Update
Blood of the Valiant is proceeding smoothly now, though it's had its setbacks. The book's new material by Keith Baker has come in right on schedule and looks good. I'm presently neck deep in layout, but expect the book will make it out to the printer early next week. I'm going to have an urgent need to see
Once Upon a Time in China III again right after that, though, for the White Lotus ceremony therein. Then it's on to the next big
Feng Shui project, which is still too secret for me to mention.
Don't Eat the Moldy Bread
I warned Will, but he ate it anyway, and the result was that hallucinatory blog of his yesterday. Consider yourself warned.
Menges Originals on eBay
I was scouring eBay for cheap laser toner cartridges, and noticed that Jeff Menges has
listed one of his original sketches from
On the Edge, from way back 9 years ago. Check it out, if you're an OnTE fan!
Jeff also sells beautiful prints of various artworks of his (including some of the fine work he's done for
Ars Magica over the years) on his
Skaircrow Graphics website.
The Prophecy is False
A quarter century ago yesterday, a child was born. Now, as the Planet of War spins farther and farther away we find that the prophecies were not correct. The elders told us that the coming of Mars would infuse the boy with untold powers or bring about a conflict between the two inhabited worlds in our star system. Instead, he ate tacos and got a new bike. The prophecy may not have been fulfilled, but the tacos were quite filling. That's something.
Free Trip Aboard the Blood Vessel
Our free PDF preview for
En Route II: By Land or By Sea is now available on the
Atlas Games website. It's the book's first self-contained encounter, presented in full so you can use it in your game tonight. Useful during any sea voyage for characters of about 2nd level, Keith Baker's "Blood Vessel" is seven pages of mysterious roleplaying and strangeness. (
Download "Blood Vessel" (1.8MB PDF))
Game Demo Exchange Goes Live
Gold Rush Games and Atlas Games are pleased to announce the creation of the Game Demo Exchange, a new forum designed to increase the incentive for demo team members across the hobby games industry. The Game Demo Exchange is a bulletin board hosted at www.game-demo-network.com , the informational web site featuring demo team contact information for RPG, card game, miniatures, and board game publishers. The Game Demo Exchange was conceived of and designed through a joint venture between Gold Rush Games and Atlas Games as a way to increase the productiveness of demo teams by cooperating with other publishers. By joining in the discussion, members of different demo teams can make private trades of game product that they've earned for their demo work. In this way, demo team members can receive other publishers' products without having to join another demo team.
Publishers who would like to support this forum can place a link to the www.game-demo-network.com site on their own demo team web page and encourage their demo team members to check it out. Publishers interested in becoming Premier Companies, having their logo placed on the www.game-demo-network.com web site and a special thread on www.game-demo-network.com/forums , can contact Mark Arsenault at mark@goldrushgames.com . The more publishers involved in the Game Demo Exchange, the more incentive it gives our demo people!
Quick news today:
Ancestral Vault, a sourcebook of equipment and magic items for Nyambe (or any other fantasy d20 world), is off to the printer today! It should be released to distributors, on time, sometime in September.
About the Weather
As Will says, ERII: By Land or By Sea is shipping today. In fact, our friendly UPS driver just came and picked it up.
I just wanted to swing through the blog and whine for a moment about the weather. It's 95 degrees, with a heat index of 105, and no A/C in the warehouse. Ugh! Not fun conditions for packing boxes. Ah well. Now I get to cool down a little and return some phone calls.
En Route 2 is En Route to Retailers
Happy day!
En Route 2: By Land or By Sea arrived in the warehouse today. It's swanky cover (by Lee Moyer) looks great and we can't wait to hear what you all think of it. The book should be reaching retailers in a few weeks. If you pre-ordered your copy through
Warehouse 23 (by clicking on the "Buy Now" button on our site, for exampe), then your copy should arrive around the time it reaches your local store. Since the book is shipping today, you still have time to place your order before Warehouse 23 receives the book and starts filling orders. So hurry!
Little Dreams
Today, I got to join the great minds represented on the
Lunch Money page of
Frequently Asked Questions. This is one of the real perks of my job. Now, when I begin to lose pathetically at conventions, I can change rules on the fly with confidence and then justify myself in the FAQ weeks later. Hooray!
Meanwhile, I'm worried about John. He just keeps standing in the warehouse door gazing at the horizon like it was the sea. He can't be waiting for his lost love, because Michelle's just a few feet away in her office. No, he's waiting for
En Route II.
All Things Feng Shui
I'm rather busy this week with a combination of boring out-going mailings (which means free copies of books for our selected reviewers, many of which I was delighted to meet at GenCon) and fun
Feng Shui-related tasks. I'm very close to settling on a title for a forthcoming
Feng Shui book, wrangling text for
Blood of the Valiant, working on some convention goodies which will debut soon, and setting up a new
Feng Shui web feature which I expect to go on-line next week. It's all very exciting.
Feng Shui is making a golden comeback.
You Can Buy Crime & Punishment Now
You can now place your order with
Warehouse 23 for
Crime & Punishment,
En Route II, and
Sanctuary of Ice directly through our website. Follow these links and click the "Buy Now" button. These much-anticipated and dependable titles will then be delivered to you as soon as they're released. Cut down on your time spent waiting and handling all that filthy cash. How great is that?
New Product Announcement...
Faerie Stories
An Ars Magica Supplement
by Neil Taylor and Phil Masters
Inspired by the legends of Brittany, Faerie Stories is a collection of ideas and detailed supporting information for Ars Magica(tm), with a common theme: encounters and dealings with faeries. It is a simple but useful tool for storyguides and their troupes; a source of tales and ideas, ready to use when the storyguide needs an incident to fill a gap in the flow of play, or is looking for some fresh inspiration. While nominally set in northwestern France, it can easily be moved elsewhere in Mythic Europe.
Description: 112 pages, perfect bound
Stock Number: AG0271
ISBN: 1-58978-045-0
Suggested Retail Price: $22.95 (US)
Shipping to Distributors in November 2003
Atlas Games Distributor Update
August 8, 2003
This Coming Week: En Route II: By Land or By Sea
We need numbers for next week's new release! This is En Route II: By Land or By Sea, sequel to the very popular original En Route collection from about two years ago. En Route books feature quick mini-adventures and encounters, perfect for dropping between longer scenarios. They've proven useful and very popular among DMs. This collection features a lot of nautical encounters, perfect to go with the many sea-oriented D20 settings, sourcebooks and adventures that are available today.
Orders for En Route II need to be in our hands by the morning of Wednesday, August 13th. We hope to ship out the books that same day.
At Press: C&P, SOI
Two books went to press this past week. First was Crime and Punishment (AG3223, $29.95), the D20 Player's sourcebook of the Law, in the Penumbra line. This is a sequel to Dynasties and Demagogues, which has been a very popular sourcebook this year. Where Dynasties focused on politics, C&P helps players run characters and campaigns based on law enforcement -- players may be bounty hunters, inquisitors, or rogues who need to know what their up against when they need to bust out of a high-magic jail. It's loaded with crunchy bits and new options that enhance existing features of the game (for example, new ways to use skills that characters may already have, to investigate crimes or track criminals).
Second is the long-awaited Sanctuary of Ice, the Ars Magica sourcebook on the Tribunal of the Greater Alps. Fans have been waiting for this for more than two years, so we expect it to do quite well.
We don't yet have estimated ship dates for these books. Our printer has indicated that they are running behind schedule in general, so we may be facing a 6-7 week production time, putting our release dates well into September.
Now Out of Print
Several titles recently ran out of print:
AG0265 The Mysteries
AG3020 The Sorcerer's Slave
AG5055 Greenwar
There are no current plans to reprint or revise these titles.
More War Than Love, Really...
The Gold ENnie Award-winning sourcebook
Dynasties and Demagogues continues to fly off the shelves; the next book in the series,
Crime and Punishment, is now at press...and so it's time to announce the third book in this line of D20 player's guides:
Love and War, the guide to chivalry and knighthood!
Details are going out to distributors today, and are as follows:
The PENUMBRA Line Presents
LOVE AND WAR
The D20 (v3.5) Player's Sourcebook of Knighthood and Chivalry
by David Chart
Valorous and loyal, serving his god, his lord, and his lady, the knight is the archetypal hero. Not for him cunning words or tricks, nor disguises and ambushes. The knight faces his enemies boldly on the field of combat. The knight's life is one of quests, tournaments, and epic battles recounted in poems for the pleasure of his lady-love.
The classic image of a knight is a paladin in shining plate armor, mounted on a warhorse. But knights can range far from this stereotype; members of any character class, social class, race, or sex can follow the path of chivalry. This sourcebook investigates chivalry in detail, giving knightly options for PCs and ideas for the GMs to use in designing adventures.
Love and War features:
• Discussions of the four knightly virtues - Valor, Loyalty, Piety, and Love - including prestige classes, orders of chivalry, and specialized feats and magic items for each. Become a valorous Dragonbane Knight dedicated to battling monsters, a loyal Knight of the Fountain who serves the king-in-exile, a pious knight of the Sun Goddess, or an amorous knight devotee of the lady Iphigenia, who lived two hundred years ago and was abducted by a powerful outsider.
• Sections on knighthood and race that discuss how you can become a member of the dwarven Granite Wall order that defends a mountain kingdom, the halfling Order of the Sun that spreads the fame of its members’ deeds, or the Order of the Nightingale that protects the elven queen.
• Exceptional examples of knighthood, such as arcane spellcasters, female knights, lover pairs, and dark knights who twist and pervert the chivalric virtues.
• Guidelines for creating your own knightly prestige class and order of chivalry, as well as rules for tournaments, quests, tracking renown, and courtly battles of wit.
Stock Number: AG3226 • ISBN 1-58978-044-2 • SRP $29.95 (US)
Description: 160 pages, hardcover
Shipping to Distributors in November 2003
Pretty Pictures
This week has be happily filled with handsome new art for our forthcoming reprint of Chris Pramas's
Blood of the Valiant, for
Feng Shui. Calm down, the book is entering layout and won't be available, I don't think, until October. Fortunately, that's right on schedule!
I've been receiving art from the talented Conley Philpott and the most-impressive
Kagan McLeod, and it's been a delight on both fronts. What's that? You haven't seen Kagan's sketch for the
Blood of the Valiant cover? Well, why not? It's appearing in the Pipeline on the front page of
our website. Scroll all the way down.
Oh, nevermind. Here it is:
Atlas Wins 2 Gold ENnies!Atlas Games was proud to receive two Gold ENnies at GenCon this year!
Unknown Armies 2nd Edition, by John Tynes and Greg Stolze, received an ENnie for Non-Open Gaming Product. Unknown Armies is a roleplaying game of modern occult intrigue, in which players use magic based on obsession and paradox to shape the next incarnation of reality. Dipsomancers find truth at the bottom of a liquor bottle, and Narco-Alchemists know that when you're high you can see for miles. Meanwhile, avatars strive to so embody an archetype of the collective unconscious that they ascend into the Invisible Clergy. When the number of archetypes reaches 333, the world ends the and the new world is born in their image. See www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG6020.html for more info on Unknown Armies.
Chris Aylott was on hand to accept the ENnie for Best Rules Supplement for his Dynasties & Demagogues. This sourcebook is a toolkit for running and playing in political adventures in any D20 System campaign setting. Designed for both players and GMs, it provides an in-depth look at the hidden rules of political intrigue and power brokering. Players are challenged to unravel the schemes of duplicitous enemies and allies alike as part of their characters' own rise to power. For GMs, Dynasties and Demagogues affords a close look at the nitty-gritty of political campaigns fraught with plots and counter-plots, assassinations, duels, and changing allegiances, all tied together in an intricate web of power relations. See www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3220.html for more info on Dynasties and Demagogues.
We couldn't be happier for Chris, John, and Greg, or more pleased to be working with them. Congratulations to them and to all of this year's winners!
The Vanishing MysteriesJust a quick newsbit:
The Mysteries is now sold out, just this week. Since we published it almost 3 years ago, that actually works out pretty well -- seems like we printed just about the right quantity. Copies are still out there in the hands of stores and distributors (and I believe that our friends at
Warehouse 23 still have a handful), but they're going to become increasingly hard to find, as this has proven to be a popular book among fans. We do not plan to reprint the book, though I will probably turn it into a pay-download PDF, to join other
out of print Ars Magica titles on RPGNow.
The Sorcerer's Slave is also recently out of print, I should mention.
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