Another year gone by!

 It's my blogiversary yet again. Seems like not that long ago that I was posting last year's blogiversary. 

Well, I guess I didn't get all that many posts up in the past year. I've been a bit more productive in the past few months, but most of this year I just didn't have that much to talk about, game related, other than occasional posts about Flying Swordsmen 2E. 

Speaking of that, I still don't have anything ready for play testing. Lots of other stuff going on. And the urge to work on other projects is strong. The Chainmail/Gauntlet table top skirmish dungeon crawl game idea of mine is chief among them. And part of me wants to scrap my current TS&R Jade campaign to run Gamma World instead. That's not gonna happen, but I may put the Jade game on hold to play test FS2E. It may be the only way to force myself to prepare content for it. 

We should be planning the Busan Tabletop Gaming Con soon, too. Scott needs a bit of time to recover from the Online SummerCon, and Justin said he's got some stuff to take care of that is keeping him busy for a few weeks. But we should get to that in the near future.  

Oh, and I should check DriveThru to see if my last post actually did lead to some sales, or if all the extra hits I'm getting the past couple of weeks are just bots.  

The Appendix N Jam Results are In

 While the contest judges are still working their way through the entries for the 2025 Appendix N Jam adventure module contest, the community judging has completed. 

My entry, Mistborn of the Thorn Isles, rated 177/227. Pretty low. But overall, it looks like there were mostly good entries. My weighted score was 3.176 out of 5, but the raw score was 3.709 from 11 reviewers. 

Looking at the criteria, I ranked best in playability (#140), and while the lowest ranked criteria was how well my game would fit in Appendix N (#189), that was also the highest individual score (3.425 weighted, 4.000 raw score). So it looks like most people got the assignment. 

[I couldn't find what criteria was used to weight scores on the site, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.]

 Some people had trouble downloading the module during the review, but I contacted Itch and they say the file wasn't indexed properly but should be now. So feel free to hop over and download it!  If you're running a salt-box/wavecrawl game, or just want a spooky sorta Celtic themed island to drop in your campaign, it should be a good fit. 

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Rules Reference books are available!

 After way too long of a wait, I've finally got around to adding my Rules Reference books for Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins on DriveThruRPG. There's one for Ruby and one for Jade. 

These are meant to be table reference books, with just the rules, procedures, charts, etc. that the GM might need while running the game. If you don't need all the instruction of how to run the game or how to build your adventures and world, but need refreshers on the mechanical bits, this is the book for you! 

Ruby Rules Reference (standard Euro-style setting)

Jade Rules Reference (Asian inspired setting)

They're both Pay-What-You-Want titles, so you can go grab them for free and check them out. As always, if you like it and find it helpful, why not return and throw a few dollars my way? I reinvest the money I'm making from TS&R back into the gaming community. I'm not trying to make a million on this. But a few dollars here and there is nice. 

Oh, and in hopeful news, my younger son Steven is interested in maybe trying to DM his own game. He did some crazy free-form DMing when he was 5 or so. Now he's 10, and is thinking about maybe trying to learn how to DM the "right" way. I'm gonna order him a POD copy of Moldvay Basic to read through. This could be fun!

What a Horrible 15 Years to Have a Curse...

 Hey, I've been doing this for 15 years! 

And yes, I'm way behind on posting. I've got actual play reports, movie reviews (Alien: Romulus and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), and thoughts on Pendragon to write about. But it's the start of the semester so I've been kinda busy. 

I'll try to get some posts on gaming and gaming related media (or propane and propane accessories?) up soon. 

Thanks for putting up with my oddball posts for a decade and a half!

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Game Master Guidebook is Now Available!

 I have just completed uploading the GMG to my Hidden Treasure Books store on DriveThruRPG. 

Here's a link!

It's got advice and rules for running a game the way I do it (mostly), including what I feel a new GM should know about running a game, or advice for people trying out old school style gaming for the first time. 

Most of you veterans who read this blog probably won't find much use out of most of it, but I do have some home-brewed modifications to the BECMI domain and war machine rules, and a different system for creating artifacts. Also my own version of the planes of existence. 

So there are some nuggets that might be useful even to the old, jaded gamer who's seen and done it all. Or at least I hope so. 

It's fully compatible with both my Ruby (standard Euro-D&D) and Jade (Asian D&D) sets. Oh, and I've made a few updates based on the past year of gaming with these rules to both the Jade and Ruby Players Rules books and the Bestiary & Treasury books. 

If you've already downloaded them, you might want to get the updated versions. There aren't many changes, but some mistakes have been fixed and a few things have been modified.

When to Hang Up the Hat

One of the best play-by-post DMs I've played under, old school forum-goers will know him as "Jeffery St. Clair" (DMJSC), announced yesterday that he's got to shut down his games. He's been running his AD&D game over 17 years now, and I've been playing in it for exactly 13 years (my request to join was April 26, 2011, and today is April 25th, 2024). 

He's also shutting down a much shorter lived Mazes & Minotaurs game that I was in, that never quite found its footing. He also, over the years, ran a great Star Frontiers game until we ran out of his prepared adventures, and for a short time he ran a high level AD&D game. 

His main game, called Mines of Nemrac, was actually two campaigns, as he ran an Oriental Adventures game on the other side of his campaign world (there were connections/portals between the two game zones, but they were rare to stumble upon). This is the one I was in for 13 years, and I had four characters in it, two in each zone. 

Wehostan, Son of Bardolph (Halfling Fighter 4/Thief 6) was my main and longest running PC. He had some great adventures over the years and got to do many of the things players dream of when playing D&D. He helped slay a dragon, battled an evil wizard while his party was paralyzed, got the snot knocked out of him by an ogre-sized bullywug, and lots of other fun stuff. 

Gwire (Human Cleric 7) was my attempt to run a cleric not as a holy crusader but as a Van Helsing/Solomon Kane/Simon Belmont type monster hunter (which was the original impetus of the class in Arneson's campaign), and he also had a lot of great adventures over the years. Starting out penniless, his first two forays earned him no treasure, but in the end, he was slaying demons and whatnot. He amassed a huge pile of treasure and magic items. 

Chie Enokido (Human Kensei 5) was my main character in Pingbo Lake. She was the daughter of a disgraced landholding family, and specialized in naginata. She was racking up fame and honor in the campaign, and was trying to avenge her honor on an ogre-mage (or full oni?) who pretended to be a kensei but wasn't. She was very upset about that. 

Five Dragons Xiong (Human Sohei) was a fairly new addition, still first level. He managed to help his party overcome some bandits, and that was his career. 

I'm actually sad that I won't be able to continue the careers of these characters. Well, not so much Xiong, who I was just starting to get a feel for. But the other three were well developed and fun to play. And sure, I could maybe take these characters to another campaign if there's an opening, or remake then in a new campaign some day, but it won't be the same. A lot of the fun of the characters were the way they interacted with their parties. Especially for Wehostan, as his group, known as Gang Green after the green dragon they slew, were just the most rowdy, scruffy-looking scoundrels you could ever find, and a blast to game with. Especially in the OOC, when certain other players would get seemingly very offended that we were pretending to run a protection racket for new players in the game. 

Nemrac players, if any of you read this blog, feel free to memorialize your PCs in the comments!

And to get back to DMJSC, he's had some family issues, and some health problems recently, but he says he's actually in a good place these days. In fact, he's just too busy to keep the game up. And I don't blame him. Nemrac has 75 PCs (yes, 4 of those are mine, and other players also run multiple PCs, but not all!). I'm not sure how many players, exactly, there are. It's a lot to manage. It's impressive that he kept it going for so long and managed to grow the game as large as he did. Most of my attempts at PbP have ended abruptly in failure. [Fingers crossed, my current Gamma World game will keep going.]

To thanks to Jeffery St. Clair/DMJSC, for all the years of gaming. And to all the players in the game as well!

Fortune and Glory? Nah, just play some Elfgames.

I had a discussion last night with my older boy about gaming, marketing, and all that. He's got some game ideas (card games, board games, computer games) and was wondering about how successful he might be. 

Interestingly, I'd just finished reading the recent (now pulled) article on how toxic the RPG online community is, and that definitely influenced the direction of our conversation. 

We talked about how easy it is to promote games on DriveThru, how easy it is to run a Kickstarter or other crowdfunding campaign, and so on. 

Want some numbers? Flynn did. In the past six years since I released Chanbara, I've sold just shy of 300 copies, and made $1600 from those sales. I've made less than that from the paper minis and TS&R. 

All told, since 2015 when I uploaded my first printable paper minis file, including pay-what-you-want downloads that didn't pay anything, I've sold 2413 products on DriveThru, and made $2338.11. Not exactly the big bucks. 

But then the bigger names in the TTRPG circles (many of them named in that article for being toxic presences in the community) regularly have crowdfunding campaigns that make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. A few have topped the million mark. 

Now, I'm not trying to cast any aspersions on the "big names." And this is not sour grapes. I was just being realistic to my son. Yes, it's possible to make good money by publishing games online, but to do so you really need to work on promotion, really need to get out there and get known, and need other big names to support and promote your work. But the bigger you get, the more of a target you can become. 

So I'm happy to stay a little fish in a small pond. I really do appreciate all of you who read this blog, review and promote my offerings, and everyone who's purchased something I've put out there. But I'm also never going to put in the effort needed to become one of the luminaries of the hobby, because I don't need to. That $2000+ I've made over the past nearly a decade has helped me to buy other gaming goods, and every now and then a birthday or Christmas present. I don't need gaming money to support my family. I'm happy to do this just for the joy of creating stuff, putting it out there, and seeing positive reactions to it. 

That's why TS&R is PWYW and I'll probably never get around to making the second edition of Flying Swordsmen, with actual new art from paid artists rather than public domain and donated art. 

I'm happy with my place in the hobby. 

But hey, if my son can create some board or card games that become a hit, I'll do my best to support him in his efforts. 

And also, if Zak S. is reading this, my apologies. I don't think I jumped on the anti-Zak bandwagon, but I wasn't a big fan of his and took the words of others at face value when I shouldn't have. Looking back at some of my old blog posts, I was pretty much just dismissive of him at the time Mandy was accusing him of some pretty horrible (and not completely believable) stuff. I hope that the word gets out and he gets a chance to make a come-back. 

I never had a negative interaction with him personally, and I should have been more critical of others claiming that they had had negative interactions with him rather than letting those claims color my opinion of him.

14 Years

Yeah, it's blog-versary day again. I started the blog 14 years ago. Recently, my posting has been erratic. Life is just too busy, and sometimes I feel like I've pretty much discussed all I need to discuss. But I want to keep plugging my games, and talking about my process for developing them. And I enjoy talking about my campaigns. And every once in a while, I think of something that might actually be useful to my readers. 

So I'm going to keep at it. But no promises about consistent posting. 

Yesterday, my TS&R Jade campaign had a session. It went well. The party realized they could follow up a rumor and also get close to an area of the map where one PC could try to achieve a personal goal, so they did both. They followed up the rumor and got some information about how to deal with a problem, and the player got part of what they wanted for their personal vanity project. So I think the players were happy. And with the "quest" lined up for next session, I think there will be some anticipation for it. But we've got to wait maybe 3 weeks for the next session. 

My PbP Gamma World game also started over the weekend. One or two players are much more frequent posters than others, and the slow posters took a while to get their characters created. But now we're off and running...well, it's PbP so not really running. But we're off. 

And my boys and I are enjoying Star Wars: Ahsoka, so that will likely get me to work on the Star Wars campaign soon. But real life is not giving me much time for that.

Airplane Simulation!

 This is not a typical post for the blog, and it's not about RPGs, but it is about gaming and building the gamer community. 

Last week, I was away for a few days at an academic conference (my presentation went over time but better than anticipated, with lots of interesting questions from the audience after). While I was in Daejeon, my sons realized that my older boy's computer isn't quite good enough to suit the ambitions he has to create his own free-to-play yet high quality airplane simulator. So, they decided to start a GoFundMe! 

Here's the link. You can listen to Flynn & Steven explaining why they're doing this in their video, and read the description for even more details. 

Why am I posting it here? Well, obviously, I'm hoping some of my readers may be interested in airplane simulators, and/or interested in helping support the next generation of game designers. They've got an ambitious project, but they aren't asking for a crazy amount of money. Their goal is $5000 which they'll use to upgrade Flynn's computer and then spend a bit to pay for some assistance with coding and 3D modeling so they don't have to do it all themselves. 

It's not an RPG, but they are hoping to make an open world style game, where people can role play as pilots of commercial, cargo, private, military, and eventually historical aircraft. And if they manage to pull this off, they've also got ideas for more open world style games, possibly fantasy or sci fi themed, which would probably be of more interest to my blog audience. But I still bet there are plenty of aircraft aficionados reading this.

So, if you've got a few minutes, please click on the link and check out their pitch, and if you feel interested, pitch in a few dollars! Thanks!

TS&R Ruby Bestiary & Treasury now available!

 It took me longer than I thought to finally proof and edit the TS&R Ruby Bestiary & Treasury, but I got it done last night. This morning (just now), I uploaded the file to DriveThru, so you can go grab it! 

The book has most of the Classic D&D monsters you know and love, plus some creatures from other editions converted to Classic style stats, and some originals as well. Those of you who remember my old Monster of the Week feature from many years ago may recognize some of the creatures (the Sauron didn't make the final cut, but some others did), but there are some completely new ones, as well. Not only that, I've got some different takes on some of the classic creatures as well. Oh, and a few name swaps to avoid WotC lawyers and Pinkertons bothering me. 

Oh, and there are also the treasure tables, magic item lists (some new things here, too!), and the reference tables, wandering monster tables, etc. 

As with the other TS&R titles, it's pay-what-you-want so go grab it. Feel free to take it for free, but if you like it and appreciate my work, I'll always be thankful to those who decide to pay me for it. 

Treasures, Serpents & Ruins Ruby Bestiary & Treasury

This is the Way

Yes, we watched the first episode of season 3 of The Mandalorian a couple of hours ago. It was a good start for the season. Interpersonal conflicts, a giant monster, space pirates, a bit more of Mandalorian culture shown to us... The Bad Batch season 2 episode 11 came out, too, which also features a giant monster. Go figure! Anyway, I was already planning this, but all the Star Wars excitement has got me ready to run some WEG d6 Star Wars again after a fairly good sized break. 

In other news, I've been slowly making a final editing pass of my Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins Jade Bestiary and Treasury. It's got all the monsters, treasures, and magic items you might want for an Asian fantasy themed Classic D&D style game. I'll probably get it up on DriveThru next week or the week after, depending on how busy I am with the start of the spring semester tomorrow. The final edit is almost done. 

Like the Players Rules, it will be Pay-What-You-Want. Already, in the two weeks the Players Rules have been out, over 120 people have downloaded it, and a handful have actually sent a few dollars my way. Much appreciated! Once it's out, I'll go through the Ruby (standard D&D tropes) Players Rules and Bestiary and Treasury books one more time, then get them up. 

Once that's done, I'll have to finally decide on how much detail to put into the GM book, finish writing it, and get it out. Or maybe a genre neutral "Rules Reference" book, and then GM books specific to running Jade or Ruby campaigns. 

Maybe, somewhere down the road, I'll put out other TS&R sets, with things like Middle-Eastern/Mediterranean/North and East African theme, Sub-Saharan Africa theme, pre-colonial Americas theme, pre-colonial Australia theme...who knows? Of course, I'll need to do lots of research and reading for those, as my knowledge of the history, myths and legends of those areas is not as deep as my knowledge of East Asian history, myths and legends. 

That would be nice, anyway. Probably won't happen. But you never know!

Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins: Jade Players Handbook

I went ahead and put my TS&R Jade Players Handbook up as a pay-what-you-want title on DriveThru. 

It's got rules for character creation, with six races and nine classes. It has spells from level 1 to 6 (classes top out at 15). It has equipment. It has adventuring, exploration, combat, and spell/magic item research rules. It has a character sheet. 

Feel free to download it, and if you like it, think about maybe pitching a few bucks my way as a thank you!

I'll be putting the Jade Bestiary & Treasury up soon, and the Ruby Players Handbook and Bestiary & Treasury (standard Euro/D&D fantasy stuff, with my house rules) as well. Soon, of course, is a relative term. They might not be soon after all, but I'll try to get them up soon.  

Why pay-what-you-want? Because no one needs another fantasy heartbreaker, but I'd like to put this out anyway. And I don't need the money, but a bit of extra income never hurts. 

Thousands of copies of Flying Swordsmen have been downloaded for free, but I've only sold 250 copies of Chanbara. I'd rather that this gets out and people use it, or at least get some ideas from it that they might want to borrow or modify for their own games.

This is my gift to the RPG community.

Good Press

I was curious about why my Chanbara sales have suddenly been much stronger than before, and I think it may have something to do with Ynas Midgard's post here (and John Higgins' comment). Thanks guys!

Before I stumbled on Ynas's post (I somehow missed it back in July when he posted it) this evening, I found this Reddit thread from a year or so ago. I'm not on Reddit, but occasionally follow a link to info there. Maybe I should sign up as a Redditor so I could comment when things like this pop up in the future. 

First of all, the OP used my cover right under the question, which sorta implies that this is in fact the answer to that question. Nice! 

In the actual post, I'm only third of four options, but still, I'll take it as the OP seems positive towards my little game.

This poster, derkrieger, gives a very nice review of Chanbara. Thanks, derkrieger, if you ever read this. They give L5R a good review as well, but that didn't fit on one screenshot. Also why I had to call them out by handle here. 

Aaaaaannnnnnddddd...it wouldn't be the internet without someone trying to drop a turd in the punch bowl. Granted, I am just some "Western dude" and my game of Japanese fantasy is filtered through my Western cultural perceptions. That criticism is spot on.

But Airk here has obviously not actually perused Chanbara, because I would love to challenge him to show me what in Chanbara is Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Nepalese, etc. Sure, there are some monsters that are pan-East Asian (fox fairies, dragons, and so on), but the version in Chanbara is the Japanese form and name. Also, how it would not be good for the OP's desired "samurai vs yokai" version of something like The Witcher, when one of the three campaign modes I even suggest is "ghostbusting" (page 39).

I don't mean to get my hackles up, especially for something someone posted in the past and will likely never see my response to. But it's hard when the original OA gets panned for claiming to be pan-Asian when it was very highly based on Japanese historical and fantasy tropes, and something like L5R is commonly considered to be Japanese when actually quite a bit of the Rokugan setting (as far as I've looked into it) pulls from other Asian cultures. And then there's my little OSR game which is 100% based on Japanese period and fantasy films/TV, some games & comics influence, my study of Japanese history (casual as it may be), and my experience of living in the country for some time. 

Good Sales

September was the best month for Chanbara sales that I've had since 2018 (the year it was released). I guess talking about my East Marches project a lot has been good for that. Which is a good reminder to me that I should promote my stuff more. 

If you're one of the people who has purchased Chanbara recently, thank you very much. It is appreciated.

12 Years of Blogging

Another blog anniversary passed. Why I decided to start this blog on 9/11 I still don't know. I know it wasn't a conscious decision to do so. And obviously, I'm a couple days late posting this this year. 

Well, real life is a big downer. And it's really not covid life. Or not much. I've pretty much gotten used to teaching via Zoom, gaming via Roll20 and Google Meet (formerly Hangouts), mask wearing, occasional upticks in cases that make us hesitate to visit restaurants, all that. I've gotten my first shot of Pfizer, and will get the second soon. Korea's vaccination rates are chugging along, with about 1,000,000 shots given (first and second doses) on a good day. About 2/3 of the population have had at least one shot. 

The downer is pretty personal. My father-in-law's lung cancer has finally caught up with him. He went six years from diagnosis to today, but his condition is deteriorating. And my wife is pretty busy helping her mother take care of him (he doesn't want hospice care, long story). So our family is under extra pressure right now. But we're managing. 

I'm still gaming, and tinkering with my rules. I'm also starting to develop the locations for East Marches, something that a year ago I thought I'd never get around to doing. But here we are. I'm firmly on the way back to race-as-class for my house rules, with the TSR-East Marches rules (better name than simple TSR-East) using that paradigm. I bet I'll be modifying my more "standard" TSR rules to suit that as well. I've pretty much decided I don't like the plethora of dual-class classes that I made, and most aren't getting any play anyway. I still want to give TSR-East Marches another simplification pass, but pretty much I think it's good to go. And with the PC options, spells, monsters, and treasure stuff done, I'm able to work on East Marches the (mega)module. 

My West Marches campaign and Star Wars campaign are still ongoing. We just had a pretty good session of West Marches this past weekend. The party managed to take out Onyx/Khisanth, the dragon of Xak Tsaroth, with a potion of luck and an arrow of teleportation (and a failed save on the arrow). The treasure was looted, and the dragon, if they ever encounter it again, is gonna be pissed! 

I made an adventure for Star Wars that I thought would be cool and different (and fast) but it's taken two sessions and at least one more. But I'm going to try and get that done this upcoming holiday week (Chuseok, lunar thanksgiving) so we can move back to more traditional bounty hunter/criminal underworld shenanigans with occasional Imperial incursions. The one good thing I did with this kinda boring adventure is set the PCs up to potentially be in conflict with the Pyke species. And that's most likely to be the case at the end of this thing. So that's something fun to work with. 

As for blogging, I've actually got quite a few topics I'd like to discuss, but honestly it's hard to find the time. Several are reactions or reflections based on other bloggers' recent(ish) works, but the more I put them off, the longer it's been since the original posts, the more I think I should just forget them. Still, I expect at least one or two of them to eventually find their way into pixels. 

Anyway, hoping the end of the year picks up. I've got Dune, The Eternals, and Spider-Man to look forward to in the theater, The Book of Boba Fett on TV, and plenty of gaming.

Another anniversary for the blog!

 What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... keeps chugging along. I'm not nearly as active this year as I was last year, but most of last year my family was in the USA and I was in Korea. So plenty of time to write stuff up. This year, not so much.

I'm tinkering with ideas for Chainmail Arena. 

I'm in the middle of writing up the next adventure for d6 Star Wars. 

I'm filling in more of my West Marches map. Stocked seven or eight hexes this afternoon. Over three years into the campaign, and I still have only stocked around half of the map's hexes. But only around a quarter to a third have been explored, so I'm still ahead of my players. 

East Marches is stalled, and may become vaporware. Not sure. I did a lot of preliminary work for it, but actually starting in on describing the locations on the map, building up the home town, etc. seems daunting. Maybe I should draw a new, smaller map and expand it later? Or break things up by zones. 

On the plus side, I have decided that I'm fine with my current house rules. No converting back to race-as-class, although I might revise how multiclassing works based on my recent revision ideas. Basically, multiclass characters will get a set hit die and set XP track and advance both classes on a level up (the way BX/BECMI Elves do). It simplifies things. No more splitting XP, no worries about energy drains, no trying to remember if hit points get rounded up or down or just halves are recorded. 

Nothing going on (in my head space) at the moment with Flying Swordsmen or Chanbara, and no more paper minis projects in the works. Sales are sluggish, but then they usually are at this time of year. Maybe I need to come up with something new to revitalize them? 

Anyway, that's the state of things right now. If you were curious. Thanks as always to my readers! Expect more silliness, random thoughts on gaming, and occasionally insightful pieces in the coming year.

Giving Credit to Robert Fisher

Recently I've been going back to Robert Fisher's old posts on his Classic D&D (or was it OD&D) campaign from many years ago. Reading these was a big part of what got me back into older editions of D&D.

Looking at them again now, I realized that my "big idea" for energy drain the other day was actually just Robert's idea from a dozen years ago or so.

So thanks (again) for the idea Robert! It obviously stuck with me somewhere in the back of my mind.

10th Blogversary: A Decade of WaHNtHaC...

Ten years ago today, I wrote my first post on this blog.

It's been a fun decade. The OSR has gone from a major force among blogs to the big draw of G+ to a diaspora of varying social media/blog outlets. We've gone from nearly 100% hobbyist to having a significant professional presence. We've had all kinds of wacky adventures, battles over minutiae, the "death of the OSR" more times than I can count, friends have been made, and all in all I'm glad to continue to be a part of it.

I've posted a lot of musings, created a lot of monsters, written two OSR games (and made a little money), written a popular series going through Mentzer Basic cover to cover, written a not-so-popular series about how to approach a Megadungeon as a player, and evolved my house rules for Classic D&D along the way. I've even got two or three posts on the Links to Wisdom page. So I guess I'm doing something right. :D

Thanks to all of you Constant Readers.* If no one was reading and commenting, I would have quit a long time ago. As it is, I'm starting to get back into blogging, and hope to have more regular posts going forward.





*Stephen King, please don't sue me for using that phrase!

Pleased to Announce: Chanbara is for Sale in Print!

That's right, folks! I just toggled Chanbara as live to print! You can get it in hard copy and PDF for only $20 on DrivethruRPG.com by following this link!

I'm sure there are still a few typos and other small errors in the document, but I went through it with fresh eyes for the final update, and spotted a lot of little things.

I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I did during my play test phase. And hopefully I'll have some companion content (a module called Ghost Castle Hasegawa, a gazetteer of my homebrew setting, and a book of more monsters called Kaibutsu Hyakkaten are my current plans) out soon (as in, maybe one of them will be ready later this year, fingers crossed!).

For everyone who's been following my development of the game over the past few years, thank you for your patience. I understand completely why so many game developers fail to complete their kickstarters and gofundmes. Game development often has to take a back seat to family matters and earning a paycheck 9-5. But I stuck through it, and many of you stuck through it with me so I want to say thank you. The occasional comment saying how much you're looking forward to the game, or asking how it's coming helped keep me from abandoning the idea somewhere along the way.

Very Cool Stuff

Last Friday, Greg Gorgonmilk posted this image from the most recent Knights of the Dinner Table comic -- an article talking about the OSR.

Now, there's only one page, and as some people mentioned, a few big name games (Labyrinth Lord in particular) were left out. But among those that made the cut?

Flying Swordsmen.

Yeah, baby! Yeah! Yeah! I am the Evil Midnight Gamer, What Games at Midnight!

Thanks to Kenneth Newquist, author of this piece, for including my little contribution to the OSR! Also, thanks to Greg G. and Jens D. (The Disoriented Ranger) for bringing it to my attention.