Hairfoot Jousting

Yesterday, I got together with some friends to try Hairfoot Jousting, a tactical (sort of) miniatures game. It was a lot of fun. My son Flynn and I were a team against Justin  Alan, and James. We lost, but our dog-riding hobbit lasted a heck of a long time after he should have beed out! 

Dice For Cheap!

I'm visiting Japan again, to celebrate my mother-in-law's 80th birthday. At a Seria 100-yen shop yesterday, I found sets of polyhedrals for 100 yen each! And a single d24! 

I restrained myself to only the three sets in the photo, but would have gotten all the d24s if they had had more. 

And considering, i DID buy all the d24s they had in stock.

The Big Reveal (Missions & Mayhem Core Rules Cover Art)

 I think I mentioned before how I met this artist, but if not, I'll repeat myself. A few months ago, my wife started taking classes to learn watercolor painting to supplement her calligraphy art. The teacher, Lee Hyunjung, has a studio about three blocks away from our apartment. While I was looking on Fiver for possible artists to contact for cover art, my wife suggested we talk to her art teacher. So we did.

I hired her, gave her the details of what I wanted and some reference pictures, and she would contact us at each step of the process to make sure she was executing my vision. 

She knocked it out of the park, in my opinion. 

Then, with some advice from various friends, including Jeremy Hart who has a background in graphic design and my son Flynn who's artistic among his many other talents, I decided on the layout for the title text. After quite a bit of experimentation.

And now, without further ado, I present the cover page for Missions & Mayhem's Core Rules book: 

 

I've commissioned Hyunjung to paint the cover for Cryptids & Conspiracy next. 

Is there anybody out there?

 Looks like, about a week ago, Blogger's feed system went down. My list of blogs I follow hasn't updated in that time, and the last two posts I've made still haven't cracked 100 views. So I assume no one is seeing the links to my blog, either. 

I don't know if this is just one of those technical glitch things that happens sometimes and will get resolved soon, or if Google's actively trying to kill off the blog scene to get everyone onto who knows what (probably some AI assisted bullshit that no one wants but everyone will end up adopting because Google makes it impossible to do otherwise). 

 For the meantime, I'll be using Old School RPG Planet to check other blogs.  It's up to date as of the time of me posting this blog. 

Missions & Mayhem Cover Art is Done

 My artist, Lee Hyunjung, has finished the cover art for the Missions & Mayhem core rulebook. I'm still playing around with fonts and layout for the title, so I'm not revealing the picture now, but I'll build a bit of anticipation. 

I've shown it to quite a few friends and family, and everyone is impressed by it. Solid details, vivid colors, and it fits the 70s through 90s action movie vibe that inspired the game. Actually, it's also a bit reminiscent of modern video game cover art as well. Not that games technically have covers anymore, since they're just digital downloads for the most part. But you know what I mean.  

And two hours ago, I commissioned Hyunjung to start work on a cover for Cryptids & Conspiracy. 

Now I need to secure some interior art. There's a guy up in Seoul, Jeff Witty, who's doing a lot of work for Dungeon Crawl Classics these days. He likes the general idea I pitched for interior pictures, but he's too busy. So maybe I'll see if Hyunjung could do some black & white interior art (yeah, I'm going old school RPG style with this one). I've also scouted out a few potential artists on Fiver that I plan to contact. 

Oh, and I've gotten some art from Jeremy of course (that's Jeremy Hart, or JHIllos) for monsters/aliens/mutants in the various campaign books. 

There's also some decent free to use (Creative Commons) character art I've found out there that I can use for a few filler illustrations. 

So, time to start re-writing the rules in a way that will be easy for folks besides me to understand and run. I've been trying to keep everything as brief as possible for the play test, so I don't need to reprint a huge document every time I make major changes. I'll revise things and not worry quite so much about the space they're taking up. Unlike Chanbara, this is NOT going to be a mere 64 pages. Although I also don't expect I'll go over the 128 pages of Flying Swordsmen. At least not for the core rules. 

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In other M&M news, Sunday was another play test. Bughunts & Bedlam, we tried out giving everyone power armor and a lot of big guns, and throwing a bunch of bugs at them as they defend a colony complex. Getting everyone's power armor loadout/setup took longer than expected, so the colony defense will continue next session. And it showed me that I need to make a special character sheet addition for power armor management. 

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In other other news, print copies of the Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Ruby Players Rules book arrived on Friday. On Saturday, I ordered small print runs (10 copies each) of the rest of the line, so I will have copies to sell at the upcoming book fair at Gwangan Beach (next month). The Korean PoD service I found is cheap and quick, so I expect to have the books this Saturday, or next Monday at the latest. 

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Oh, and one final note back to Missions & Mayhem: I'm working on the Urban Fantasy supplement, Hellspawn & Horror. Unlike d20 Modern's Urban Arcana, which had the conceit of D&D monsters living among us, this is more like Stephen King/Clive Barker/Jim Butcher/Anne Rice, Blade, Ultraviolet, Friday the 13th The Series (anyone else remember that one?), From Dusk til Dawn, or whatever modern monster-hunter (horror) fantasy you want to play out. So no bugbears working the register at 7-11. Just vampires, werewolves, fae, nasty demons, and the occasional dragon that you need to track down and shoot with your M-16 or battle with a holy sword you recovered from a ruin in Antioch. 

Another trip 'round the Sun

 Another blog-versary is here. Nothing big to say at the moment. I'm too busy. The semester has stared, I'm working on another academic paper, painting minis, working on the Hellspawn & Horror module for Missions & Mayhem (modern urban fantasy/horror), the artist is finishing up the cover art for M&M, and Justin and I are considering doing a board game/war games focused event this fall rather than an RPG one. 

Oh, yeah. And my son is working on a short film (comedic zombie apocalypse story) and wants me to play the redneck bartender. Should be fun. 

Anyway, I'll try to knock out posts here on the blog when I can. For at least one more year. Hopefully more. 

Selling Physical Books

 Because of the SummerCon and the start of the semester, I've been pretty busy the past two weeks. I was going to post about a recent YouTube video from the Mystic Arts channel where he seemed to not quite get what OSR is (or, as I was thinking, maybe OSR has moved on from what it once was and he's right and I'm stuck in the past). But Ben from Questing Beast made a response video with Dađi that addressed most of what I was thinking of writing about. 

So we move on. A few days ago, Richard was asking if I was ever planning to release a PoD version of Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins. Honestly, formatting Chanbara for DriveThru was a bit of a chore, and the books are just Pay-What-You-Want anyway, so I never planned to. But he said he'd like copies if I ever did. 

A little earlier, Justin had mentioned that he's going to be involved in a book fair again in October.  He asked if I wanted to sell some copies of Chanbara or some adventures or whatnot. I ordered some copies of Chanbara from DriveThru. They arrived two days ago. 

Anyway, Justin and Richard got me thinking again about Korean PoD options. I looked at a couple of sites, and found one that looked simple and easy. Especially since they said they could accept PDFs created in Word, not just ones made InDesign or Scribus or whatever.  I'm using LibreOffice, but that should work, right? We'll see!

As implied there, I have re-formatted the TS&R line (well, not the rules reference books, but very few people download those anyway). I still have a little work do do on the covers for some of the books, but I'm almost there. Last night, I ordered copies of the Ruby Players Rules. 

The service can print 2 copies, or multiples of 10 only. I should have played it safe and ordered two, but went ahead and ordered 10. I know Richard will buy one. If Justin can sell two more at his book fair, that will reimburse me for the printing costs. It was 50,000 won (40 page softback, with single-side cover printing) including shipping (3,500 won), which at the current exchange rate is about $37. 

The website estimated they'd ship on Wednesday so I should have them by the end of the week. If they're good enough quality, I'll order the other TS&R line of books to be printed. I know Justin won't sell them all, but I can sell one set to Richard, keep one set for myself, and what Justin can't sell this time I can try to sell at a future book fair or game event. Some of my regular players might be interested in getting their own copies as well.