My New Venture

This is it, the big announcement! Why has the blog been so silent lately? Well, because I've been spending a lot of my (very limited) free time creating this (and watching The Flash and Daredevil and reading good books like Andy Weir's The Martian).

So what is this? It's my new publishing venture for RPGs and RPG accessories. [I'll spare you the Hank Hill picture again], Hidden Treasure Books.

Yes, I'm now a vendor on DrivethruRPG.com and so far, I've got two products for sale, with #3 hopefully up by this time next week.

I'm initially starting out with some fold-up paper minis for gaming use.  Why paper minis? Well, I've got a fairly good sized collection of mostly plastic and some metal minis for gaming, but I rarely use them. Even a large number of plastic minis starts to get heavy, and they're bulky no matter what they're made of. If I were hosting games in my home (no space in our current apartment) it would be no problem. But when I go out to game, I tend to just leave them at home.

Paper minis solve those two issues. They're light and don't take up much space. And while they're not durable, it's easy enough to just print out more.

The first two offerings are one of Basic Adventurers - covering the BX/BECMI character classes, and a Free Sample with some PC types and a couple of monsters.

Basic Adventurers contains 28 figures.  There are four of each of the seven classes from Basic D&D or various retro-clones.  Half are male, half are female (and yes, it took some digital manipulation in a few cases to get more females since I'm working with public domain artwork instead of my own mediocre drawing skills here). I've also tried to use a variety of skin tones so it's not all whitey-white bog-standard pseudo-Euro fantasy. Although for the elves I went with Rankin-Bass/Magic: The Gathering blue instead of brown tones for the non-whites.

It's only $3. That's not bad for 28 minis, I'm guessing. Also, the PDF is layered, so you don't need to print all 10 figures on a page every time. Need just one replacement? Turn off all the layers except for the one you want and print. 

The Free Sample is just that. A small selection of minis (different from the ones in the paid book) just to get an idea what you're getting.  It has four PC types, one each of cleric, fighter, M-U and thief, plus a hill giant, carnivorous ape, and a riding horse. The horse even has markings to cut and reverse fold a section of the top edge to seat one of the character figures when riding.

Coming up next is the first of three books covering monsters in the Mentzer Basic Set. While I'm using that as my guide, the books will hopefully appeal to a broader audience than just the OSR. Most of these monsters could be used in any fantasy game.

In the future, I'm planning to add AD&D and up classes like barbarians, assassins, illusionists, monks, etc. And of course, a wuxia/samurai expansion. I'm also collecting images for the monsters in the Mentzer Expert set and others not present in the AD&D Monster Manual (probably stick to MM1 for now).

I've also got ideas for an NPC henchmen, hirelings, torchbearers, mercenaries set. And an undead pack, an orc warren pack (variety of orcs, related creatures like wolves, ogres, a troll, etc.), things like that.

Eventually, if the Ph.D dissertation process doesn't kill me, I'd like to move on to sci fi figures as well, with some public domain retro-futuristic figures.

And, I'll also be able to use my new Hidden Treasure Books vendor site to sell adventure modules and whole games (like Presidents of the Apocalypse, Chanbara and Flying Swordsmen: Wu Xing edition when I eventually get them finished).

 Here is a photo of a test printing I did as I was getting all this ready.

And here's a shot of a few of the figures in action on the battle mat that came with the 3.0 PHB to show scale.

Monsters coming soon, I promise!