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Dispatches:
News from Atlas Games
Memmorial Day Mispellings
Ars Magica line developer David Chart has just put together the newest errata for Ars Magica 5th Edition, Broken Covenant of Calebais, and Covenants.
View the updated errata now!
More Mythic Places in PDF
Looking for something to read this weekend? Your options just grew a little, if you like electronic books:
More Mythic Places is now available from RPGNow, for a modest price.
Ars Magica 5th Edition - Sold Out
A distributor order that came in this morning is taking the last of our stock of
Ars Magica 5th Edition, first printing.
If all goes according to plan, I'm hoping we'll have a reprint in our warehouse in July. In the meantime, many of our
distributors and
retailers will continue to have stock of the game (though we won't be able to restock them when they sell out, until our reprint arrives), including
Warehouse 23.
Mythic Places in PDF
Our latest addition to the selection of RPG books for sale online is
Mythic Places, an old-time
Ars Magica sourcebook. This book went recently out of print, so you can probably still find it available on paper in numerous venues (including
Warehouse 23).
Metacreator: Covenants is a Go!
Peggy Kvam of
Alter Ego Software writes to fans of their incredibly useful Metacreator software for
Ars Magica: "You said there was demand for a Metacreator supplement for
Ars Magica's
Covenants, and you proved it. Today we received our 50th pre-order for
Covenants. Thank you!
"We've started working on the datasheet. It's too early to estimate when it will be ready, but it's our top priority now. Stay tuned."
If you'll be wanting a copy of
Covenants for Metacreator, and have not yet pre-ordered, let me encourage you to do so. The 50 sales threshold was really the bare minimum to make the development of the software worthwhile...it would be nice (and good for the prospective future of software supplements for future ArM5 sourcebooks) if Alter Ego can sell a lot more!
If you're wondering what all the fuss is about Metacreator, why not try out the
free demo version and give it a try? It requires Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, or Windows 2000 -- but I've heard of folks getting it to work under Linux using
WINE on x86 machines, and I imagine it works for those using
Boot Camp with WinXP on today's newfangled Intel-based Macs. (Have any experience running it with unusual hardware/software configurations? Leave a comment to brag about your computer-fu. :))
Deadly Legacy in PDF
On
RPGNow.com, you can now buy
Deadly Legacy, an Ars Magica adventure published some 14 years or so ago. This book is still available from
Warehouse 23, while supplies last. (Our warehouse is sold out, so we won't be able to restock them when their copies on hand are gone.)
A Midsummer Night's Dream in PDF
The latest addition to the menu at RPGNow.com is
A Midsummer Night's Dream, another out-of-print
Ars Magica book from the White Wolf era. This also means that the entire "Four Seasons Tetralogy" is now available in PDF. The other adventures in this group are
Twelfth Night,
A Winter's Tale, and
The Tempest.
Pieces of Eight
Atlas Games is happy to announce
Pieces of Eight, an innovative new combat game coming in August ...
Adventure and glory await you in Pieces of Eight, the rousing combat game of rival buccaneer ships on the high seas. You play the game with a
stack of metal pirate coins held in one hand that represents your ship. The coins you choose and the order in which you place them determine your ship's strengths, and you use the special abilities of your coins to destroy your opponent's coins one by one. Your goal is to expose the Captain coin buried deep in the middle of your adversary's ship, then take him out!
Dare to enter the age of blood and gold with either The Blade or The Maiden's Vengeance ship set. Each set includes all the coins needed for one player to construct his own ship. Your opponents will each need their own ship set to play, but there's no other limit to the number of players who can join in. The coins in each set are not randomized; you can combine ship sets to gain a wider selection of coins and the advantage over your foes.
... cover art and rules will be posted in the next few weeks, so check back often!
EPIC Art!
Preview the card art of Epic Dungeoneer!
Call of the Lich Lord is the first Epic set for Dungeoneer, which lets you advance your favorite heroes from previous sets to higher levels, or play just with the new characters from this set who begin at 4th level! Images from Call of the Lich Lord are now up. As always, right click and choose "show image in new window" to see the larger versions.
Black Death in PDF
Today's new PDF offering:
Ars Magica adventure
Black Death, by Thomas M. Kane,
available now on RPGNow.
Lion Rampant's Covenants
In my continuing effort to play the part of Felix Necromius (remember him?), I have resurrected another
Ars Magica products from the misty past. Today's resurrected offering is the original Lion Rampant edition of
Covenants, available now on
RPGNow.com.
While they share a title, this is a very different book from the recently released 5th Edition
Covenants. The Lion Rampant version was written for 2nd Edition rules, and released a few months after 2nd edition, in the autumn of 1989 if my memory serves. (I remember a huge stack of boxes of it filling the three-season front porch of House Rampant.) The rules part may not be of that much use to current-edition players, but the four example covenants -- one for each season -- are fun to read, what with the original write-up of Doissetep and whatnot.
The Boat from China
Some good news to report today: Our Chinese printer phoned early today to confirm that they have delivered the shipping container which holds
Grand Tribunal and
Recess to our freight company. The ship our container is booked on, the "mv MSL Knud," is scheduled to depart from the
port of Yantian on Thursday, May 18th, and arrive in
Tacoma, Washington, on June 5th. From Tacoma our container travels by rail to St. Paul, where it is expected to arrive on June 12th. Mind you, this supposes that nothing goes wrong along the way -- we have no idea what surprises
Homeland Security might have for us in Tacoma (in the past their decision to inspect a container has sometimes meant it gets set aside for two weeks to wait for the inspection), or at Customs in St. Paul -- but I'm cautiously hopeful that we'll have the games before Origins.
Infernal Cover
The cover image for
The Infernal for
Ars Magica 5th Edition is now up on our website. Enjoy!
Out of Print Titles
The following titles are now out of print. We do not expect ever to reprint them.
Many game wholesalers and retailers still have copies of these items, but when they sell out we have none with which to restock them. Some of them are already available as PDFs, and eventually they all should be.
Twelfth Night on RPGNow
Another title has emerged from the mists of the ancient past of
Ars Magica to find new life as a download on RPGNow.com:
Twelfth Night, one of the adventures in the Four Seasons tetralogy.
Newly Digital Ars Magica Adventures
Two more out-of-print
Ars Magica from the ancient days are now available for download from RPGNow:
A Winter's Tale and
Pact of Pasaquine.
Advice from Atlas Designers
Two Atlas board game designers are featured in Tom Vasel's
"Advice to a Game Designer" article on boardgamegeek.com . Morgan Dontanville -- designer of
Recess -- is about 3/5 of the way down the page, and Ted Alpach -- designer of
Seismic -- has a section just four entries later, about 3/4 of the way down the page. Some good advice for future designers!
PDF Prices in Review
Next week I'm going to be reviewing our pricing across the board on PDFs. To be frank, our prices are too low relative to the rest of the PDF field on most of our electronic products.
Until I get those new prices set up, though, you'll be able to buy at the current prices. If you've been wanting to pick up one of our PDF titles, now's a good time to
head over to RPGNow!
Production Updates
Production Status: Board GamesThe new printer we're using in China for our board games has been taking a lot longer than we were originally led to expect. However, it looks like our first two board games are finally approaching completion.
AG1280 Grand Tribunal and
AG1290 Recess are scheduled to be ready to load on the container ship on May 10th. Surface shipping should take at least a month to get to our warehouse, so we're hoping we'll have these games available for sale in mid to late June.
Our other board game,
AG1300 Seismic, is actually proceeding on schedule. We're been told it should be completed and ready to ship from China in early June, which should get it to our warehouse sometime in July, the original month of release that we announced.
Production Status: DungeoneerThe exciting new Epic level game for Dungeoneer,
AG1247 Call of the Lich Lord, is off to press! This game's printer is in the USA, so we expect the usual turnaround of about 6 weeks, which should mean we'll have the game available for sale on time in mid to late June.
As usual, for all of these titles, keep in mind that you can expect that it will take a week or more between when we start shipping a new game and when it will be on the shelf in your local game store.
Glimpse of the Abyss
After a year and a half of waiting for the working files promised by the project's former developer, and with no such files in sight, we've decided to officially remove
AG4014 Glimpse of the Abyss (for the
Feng Shui RPG) from our schedule and cancel any outstanding pre-orders. Staff editor Jeff Tidball will be returning to the original drafts submitted by the book's authors, to start over on the editorial process. Jeff needs to evaluate the materials to figure out what needs to be done and how long it will take. It's possible that the new book will have different specs than what we originally announced, because the original developer was going to write a substantial contribution to the book. We will resolicit the book when we have nailed down all the details.
We're very sorry for the inconvenience to
Feng Shui's fans, our customers, and the authors and artists who did their excellent work for this project long ago, all of whom have to wait yet longer for the finished product.
Metacreator: Covenants Pre-Order Program
If you play
Ars Magica and own a PC, there's a really useful software tool available to you:
Metacreator from Alter Ego Software. Besides the 5th Edition core rules, there's an expansion available that adds material from True Lineages and Guardians of the Forests; plus there's the data for the 4th Edition rules and many supplements (if you're still playing the old version).
To continue developing additional material for Metacreator, as Atlas releases additional sourcebooks for the game, Alter Ego is setting up a pre-order program. Basically, they want to make sure there is sufficient demand to justify the investment in programming/development of further add-ons. The first expansion under the pre-order program would be Covenants, a sourcebook that would really enhance the value of Metacreator for covenant creation and tracking.
Peggy Kvam writes to explain more:
After much enthusiasm and encouragement from the Metacreator user community, we are pleased to announce a Pre-order program for the Covenants supplement to Ars Magica 5th Edition. If we receive 50 preorders over the next 50 days, we will develop the Covenants datasheet. You can place your pre-order at our webstore at www.alteregosoftware.com
June 20, 2006 is the deadline for our pre-order target. If we do not meet our goal, your payment will be refunded in full (via Paypal). Since orders have already started coming in, I'm optimistic that we'll meet it.
If you've found Metacreator to be useful for your game, I hope you'll consider pre-ordering; and if you haven't looked into Metacreator yet, you should really check it out!
Epic Dungeoneer Downloads!
I'm getting Epic Dungeoneer: Call of the Lich Lord ready to go to press today (yay!), and so in between waiting for CDs to write, I've posted the cardlist and the PDF of the newest rules (v 2.2). You can find the cardlist on the
Call of the Lich Lord product page, and the rules on the
Dungeoneer product line page. We hope to have the game back from the printer in time for Origins.
Shamans on RPGNow
Later today, you should be able to purchase
The Hidden Paths: Shamans, a long-out-of-print White Wolf era
Ars Magica supplement, from RPGNow.
This is one of many PDFs I need to get prepped and uploaded for digital sales. I hope I'll get more done soon, but I've been overloaded with other things (such as logistics from China -- boy have ocean freight containers gotten expensive with the fuel prices today).
Noon Update: It's now activated and available for sale!
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