[Announcement] Your Best Game Ever Will Happen!

Your Best Game Ever Cover Art

Your Best Game Ever is not your typical RPG sourcebook. It’s not a book with adventures, spells, creatures, or magic items. It’s not a book for characters at all, but a book for players! If you play or run roleplaying games, this book is for you. Inside this gorgeous hardcover book, suitable for your coffee table or your gaming table, you will find advice and suggestions for enhancing your RPG experience at the table and away from it. This is an insider’s look at everything that goes into the hobby—finding a group, making a character, running a game, creating adventures, finding all the right ideas, hosting a game…and that’s just for starters.

If You’re an Experienced Gamer

You’ve been gaming for a while now. Maybe even years. You get the concepts, and you understand the rules. No one needs to explain the dice to you. Your Best Game Ever embraces the hobby you love, and provides real tips, immediately usable advice, and hands-on pointers you can use at your game table. You’ll find everything here from enhancing immersion, tips for running games online, creating characters with depth, worldbuilding, designing rules, dealing with personality conflicts that arise at the table, and more!

If You’re Fairly New to Gaming

Your friends play RPGs. You’ve maybe watched some streaming games, or given it a try a few times. You get the general idea, but where do you go from there? How do you really get into this hobby the way so many others have? This book will give you everything you need to learn how to choose the right game, how to fit into your game group or start your own group, and get you going on the fast track to being a great gamer.

I am pleased to announce that I am one of several consultants on this 2019 project. The Your Best Game Ever! Kickstarter has already funded, and we’re on to stretch goals.

Monte Cook is the primary writer on the book. He’s joined by a wealth of talented contributors that includes: Eric Campbell, Matt Colville, Luke Crane, Stacy Dellorfano, Tanya DePass, Ajit George, Jennell Jaquays, Eloy Lasanta, Tom Lommel, Matthew Mercer, Susan J. Morris, Alina Pete, and yours truly.

July 24, 2018
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[New Release] Cabal RPG

Cabal RPG

You have an agenda.

Together, you control a powerful organisation; it might be a company, a conspiracy, cult or corporation. You control vast resources over a global powerbase. You employ teams of specialists with very particular skill-sets to protect your secrets.

Your agenda might be anything, world domination, the defence of the planet, vast wealth or just unlimited rice pudding.

What you are willing to do to achieve those ends, well, that’s up to you…

Cabal is a stand alone RPG, designed by Andrew Peregrine, where the players control a single character together,and set out to advance its goals and power. Funded by Kickstarter, the Cabal RPG is now available on DriveThruRPG.com. This collaborative project includes art and factions by several designers, including myself. Hope you enjoy the conspiracy!

May 8, 2017
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[New Release] Conan RPG: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of

Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of takes you into the world of Conan the Barbarian, where heroes raise blood-spattered swords against dire sorcery, exotic lands beckon to the daring, danger and treasure lurks in forgotten ruins, and where loathsome creatures haunt the spaces beneath the earth… as well as in the throne-rooms of mighty kingdoms!

I worked on the game in its early stages, and contributed to the gazetteer section. Here are some of the game’s highlights:

  • Create your own legend in this decadent and violent world.
  • Complete 2d20 game system, including combat, skills, talents, sorcery, and equipment suitable for adventuring in the age before history.
  • An extensive gazetteer covering the whole of Conan’s world: featuring fair Aquilonia, gloomy Cimmeria, magic-haunted Stygia, all the way to the far-off steaming jungles of Khitai.
  • Fearsome foes, ranging from bandits to sorcerers, apes to giant serpents, Children of Set to frost giants, forest devils, and characters of renown such as Conan or his most deadly foe, Thoth-Amon.

Excited to play in the Hyborian Age? You can download the Conan RPG at the FlamesRising.com shop.

February 1, 2017
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New Release: Dark Eras and Hunter’s “Doubting Souls” set in Salem

Dark Eras

I am pleased to announce that Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras, a book that spans multiple eras for the Chronicles of Darkness game lines, is now available. As the Kickstarter text explained, the Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras starts out presenting a chapter for each of nine historical eras. The sections were written for the currently available edition of the game line, but they are designed to be usable with any edition. Each terrifying time period and location is examined through the supernatural creatures that dwell there, and my section is:

Hunter: The Vigil — Doubting Souls (1690-1695): Immigrants and tribes struggle to co-exist on the eastern seaboard. Violent clashes, supernatural beliefs, and demonic influences spell disaster for Salem Village and its surrounding towns, while other hunters fight werewolves and vampires on the frontier. With so much at risk, only god-fearing men and women are deemed innocent — and those are few indeed. Monica Valentinelli writer & Matt McElroy developer.

“Doubting Souls” is, in many ways, my commentary on the Salem Witch Trials; the chapter primarily focuses on the gut-wrenching decisions hunters have to make and how they are caught up in the hysteria. It also, however, offers possibilities for other styles of play and expands the setting a bit so we’d hit as many notes as possible within the confines of this tightly-woven section. There are opportunities to explore multiple locations, including Boston and Ipswich, and new compacts are offered as well. Since offering the first draft to fans, there have been some additions and expansions to the chapter, and we added additional reference materials to highlight our research, too.

Though this Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras chapter, in no way shape or form, could ever replace a set of modern history books on the time period, I feel very strongly about the necessity of research; I hope that you will notice this effort reflected in how we put together this alternate history perspective. “Doubting Souls” is a depiction of a world in the 1690s that’s slightly different from this reality–but much, much darker…especially for hunters of all types.

I hope that fans will enjoy “Doubting Souls” for Hunter: The Vigil, and I encourage you to check out the other chapters, too! Huzzah!

May 25, 2016
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New Cover for the Firefly RPG

Popping in quick today to share with you the new Firefly RPG cover. The illustrated cover we posted previously will be a full page title piece. We’ll be making an announcement next week to clarify the release date. The text has been approved; we’re now zeroing in on the art. Time-stamping this update: March 27, 2014. Otherwise, if you’re reading this far into the future, you may not realize this news is time-sensitive!

We are still taking pre-orders, by the way. Here’s the link!

Firefly RPG Front Cover

And here’s the back. What do you think? Is over 30 pre-generated characters and 75+ NPCs enough? Hee.

Firefly RPG Back Cover

March 27, 2014
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