Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Update: The Deluge to Come

Okay, here's where I stand on projects and what you guys and gals can expect from me.

1. Sent along a good solid draft of Slaughterhouse Earth to Reality Deviants. Dave liked it, and I should be seeing the payment for it sometime this month, which means it should be up in a few months.

By the way, congratulations to Dave for snagging the license to produce Call of Cthullu for D20. I just want to say I would love to play with crazy old H. P.'s squidlike uber-gods, and if you would too, drop the folks at Reality Deviants an email saying that you'd love to see what kind of insanity the creator of the tentacle-riffic Black Tokyo can come up with playing with Lovecraft's toys.

2. The Wizard of Shadowfall should be out pretty soon, which is a fun little D20 Fantasy (3.5 version) take on the Wizard. Skortched Urf will be putting this one out, and I've got a few more releases on deck- two new advanced classes: The S.L.A.M. Soldier and the Voidsparrow, both inspired by 80s cartoons. Who knows when they're coming out, but buy 'em when they do, you'll enjoy it.

3. I just bought a metric shit ton of superhero stock art, mostly from Louis Porter's Image Portfolio line, and am colorizing it myself. It looks great- very strong Image style art, and very bright, shiny and glossy colors. After I get the commissioned art I'm paying for from Amanda, I'll send the whole package over to Mark at Skortched Urf, where he'll add some additional art from Anthony and lay this puppy out. Hopefully that whole process will take less time than Black Tokyo did, and reach an even wider audience.

4. Speaking of Louis Porter, I'm doing some more work for him. He's planning what he calls a Player's Idea Factory, a free or low cost subscription based column where each week I produce about 1000 words detailing cool new content for D20 Fantasy, things a player would like. I'm including new prestige classes, feats, spells, magic items by the gross, and a few new player races. I'm having a great time working on this project, since like many freelancers, I've got more ideas than I've found a home for. This project gives me a chance to just throw content at the reader, like confetti at a wedding, without worrying about a single cohesive theme or logical collection of content. This is just random D&D goodness, which I hope you'll love.

5. On the Otherverse Front, I'll probally release a revamped Guide to the Known Galaxy in a couple of months. I'll probally take the 'one man band' approach to the Otherverse stuff, writing, illustrating and laying it out myself. Right now, I want to tighten up the draft of the Guide, arrange the information in a more interesting way , and add some new content- mostly more space monsters.

I've got the cover art done (thanks to the manipulation of some really cool stock art I picked up from Stock Exchange) for the Choicer faction book, and I'll post the raw image here. I want to find a similar set of good photos to illustrate the Lifer faction book.

6. And at some point, while I'm doing all this, I'll be working on D20 Decade: the 1960s, a follow up to the award winning (yeah, right) D20 Decade: Eighties. Like Eighties, Sixties will be another one man band project, illustrated with my own work, as well as a goodly selection of historical photos in the public domain. The research is going well, and I've got an idea of how I want to play the concept, as well as an idea about which classes to include.

And on a personal note, I just got back from seeing Iron Man and that movie totally and completely kicked my ass. I realized that I've been reading Iron Man for more than 20 years now, and that Tony Stark is my favorite Marvel hero. This is a movie that did him justice, and is easily the best of the Marvel movies so far. I really, really want to see a sequel.