A place wherein this Dwarven Cleric can share his love of maps, dice, miniatures, and all things involving gaming and general geekery--not to mention the occasional witty non-gaming observations--whilst escaping from the humdrum existence of his routine Terran existence.

Hail and Well Met, fellow traveler! May my Stronghold provide a place for enlightenment and amusement, and somewhere to keep your dice dry. Enter and rest awhile.

10 July 2013

Loads of New Magic and New Spells!

I'm kinda late coming to this particular Kickstarter party on this, but hey...every little bit helps, right? And this one has exploded. With a few more great stretch goals in the works.

There's less than 5 hours left, though. And they need another $2,000 to reach a stretch goal to include Dwarven magic. Reaver magic too.

But c'mon, people. DWARVEN MAGIC.

Head on over HERE. Get yourself a copy of Deep Magic: A Tome of New Spells for Pathfinder RPG. It's for a great cause. Just look at the contributors: Jason Bulmahn, Amber E. Scott, Richard Pett, Wolfgang Bauer, and Ed Greenwood. Yes, THAT Ed Greenwood.

Oh yeah, and Brom.

Look at the stretch goals: blood magic, new archetypes, fiendish Gnome magic, extreme battle magic, ioun stones, and curse magic.

Look at the add-ons: pdfs of divine magic; arcane symbol hand-outs; spell scroll hand-outs; maps; iPad, iPhone, and Android reference apps, and Hero Lab files for the spells.

It's some good stuff. Even if you don't play 3.x, there's stuff in this Kickstarter for you. C'mon. Jump on board.

Y'know you want to.

05 July 2013

Free RPG Day Loot Report!

Yeah, yeah. I realize that Free RPG Day was several weeks ago. Yeah, I'm a little late at getting my loot report done. Y'all who know me well know that there's some serious negative juju going on in my professional life right now. Unfortunately that has to take precedence sometimes.

So, without further ado, here's what MY haul looked like at 5:00 p.m. on Free RPG Day 2013: First off, I took my kids with me to ensure a "shotgun" approach to gathering loot. Our FLGS allows two items per person; even though I'm well known by the staff, I try not to take advantage of that...at least, an advantage obvious to other customers, that is. As in past years, many of the publishers provide PDF versions of the Free RPG Day offerings after the fact (where available, I've included links to legal PDF copies of the materials as well.); I still prefer to get hard copies of these where- and whenever possible. For one, I like holding and reading printed materials; for another, the post-Free RPG Day offerings are not always free after the fact.
Starting at the upper left, we have the Hall of Bones adventure from Frog God Games, for the Sword & Wizardry ruleset. I haven't had a chance to go through this one yet.

Next to that there's Paizo Publishing's follow-up to last year's We Be Goblins!, the cleverly-named We Be Goblins Too!. This was one of the titles that I was particularly excited to get. I enjoyed last year's offering and this one, at first glance, appears to be as fun and interesting as the first. Unfortunately, my gaming group has no interest in playing goblins...so, this seems destined for good NPC fodder. In fact, our current DM is running an orc/goblin-centric campaign right now. I may just have to pass this off to him for inspiration.

Finishing the top row, there's Goodman Games' RPG offering. Like last year, they have stuffed two good modules within these two covers. One is a DCC adventure for 1st-level characters. The other is a Pathfinder Xcrawl adventure. This one is going to be milked for inspiration for sure.

The second row has the Flying Buffalo T&T Adventure Fire Dwarves of Zorr and Troll Lord Games' C&C Adventure A Pot of Broken Bones and Halfling Broth. Both of these are destined to be mined for inspiration for 3.x. The next two items are also for inspiration...I just have to find the correct Sci-Fi/Space Opera game system. Fantasy Flight Games' Edge of the Empire and Catalyst Games' flipbook for Shadowrun and Battletech. (This one will be doubly useful, as one of my gaming buddies wants to start working on a Mech game of his own.)

The last two are two others that were the reason for my foray into the shop: Lamentations of the Flame Princess' Better Than Any Man and James Porter Jr.'s NeoExodus Temple of the Forbidden God. I have plenty of lizardmen just waiting to come out of hibernation. I even recommended Better Than Any Man to a teenager who was struggling over what to pick out; his mother was standing there looking lost. Her advice was "Pick something that you think looks like something Dad didn't pick out himself." He had this one in his hand and I told him that Raggi's products were all pretty sound and quality. It wasn't until I was on my way home myself that I noticed the "18+" tag on the module.

Oops.

Still, though, it's impressive and amazing that Raggi puts out a book--yes, a literal BOOK--of this size for a Free RPG offering. Usually you can count on a dozen pages. This thing FAR exceeds it at 96 pages. NINETY-SIX. That's EIGHT DOZEN pages. Plus the cover is removable and contains a map on the inside.

Hopefully the kids' mom will forgive that anonymous "dirty old man" in the FLGS....

About an hour after leaving the FLGS, I received a phone call to inform me of the results of the in-store prize drawing: my oldest daughter's entry won the collapsible dice tower from Blue Panther. She, of course, gifted it to me out of the goodness of her heart. Then the manager laughed and told me I'd won the grand prize: the massive hardcover DCC RPG. Needless to say I was pretty psyched. (Of course, I may have to look at selling or re-gifting, because I'm not sure how much re-purposing I can do with this, and my game group isn't too OSR-friendly nowadays.

Finally, as some of you may know, I have an addition to dice. Dice. That's right I said: dice. Ahh, the mere word sends my heart racing and my hands shaking. Dice. DICE.

Did I tell you I like dice?

Well, the managers also know of my love of dice and when I went in to pick up our family's my winnings, he slipped me these little beauties. I really liked last year's offerings--a complete set (or nearly complete in my case)--mostly because I don't have a lot of uses for d6s. But they're pretty. And he even slipped me a second Q-Workshop for my daughter, who loves yellow. She "squeeed" just a bit at the gift.

Whew. All in all, a pretty successful Free RPG Day this year. I'm not sure I can match it. I was constantly reminded, throughout the day, of the generosity I felt from my fellow gamers last year, all those who were able to grab up extras at their respective FLGS for my library.

01 July 2013

ANNOUNCEMENT! CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!

Do you ever find yourself wandering through your local Big&Name bookstore, looking at the rows and rows of so-called fantasy books? Do you find yourself waxing nostalgic for a good, old-fashioned Frank Frazetta-like cover on your fantasy? Do you miss swordsmen on distant planets, amazing heroes with massive thews, truly evil magic-users trying to bring about the End Of All? Do you miss terrifyingly powerful monsters threatening barely-clad damsels? What about santity-threatening entities? Do you wonder if we have modern-day Bradburys, Lovecrafts, Burroghs, and Liebers? Do you miss undead that don't sparkle and wizards that aren't still in High School?

If you can say "yes" to any of the above, then you're in luck.

Even better, if you can say you like to write about any of the above, you're in luck, and you're exactly who we're looking for

I am pleased to announce the formation of Pulp Mill Press! Pulp Mill Press is dedicated to provide those things we all miss, things which have seemingly vanished from our bookstore shelves. Tim Shorts (Gothridge Manor), Ken Harrison (The Rusty Battleaxe), Sean Robson (Tales from the Flaming Faggot), and I have banded together to form Pulp Mill Press in an attempt to offer an outlet and a source for those who share the same literary loves that we do.

We're all excited about this new venture. At first, it'll be a labor of love; ultimately we hope to make it a going concern. We hope to take this from e-copies to print, eventually. Sean said it best on his blog: "There are few venues for speculative short fiction these days, and even fewer of them are receptive to heroic fantasy and weird fiction.... We want to publish the sorts of stories that we love to read."

We're hoping there are some writers, artists, and gamers out there who share in that love and who want to share their talents with the larger world. We've opened submissions for our first anthology: Libram Mysterium. We hope to do well enough through this first effort that we can offer financial remuneration for future volumes.

If you're interested in joining the effort and throwing some artistic or literary work product our way, please visit the Pulp Mill Press home page and submission guidelines for more information. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at pulpmillpress4@gmail.com.
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