Monster of the Month

It’s been a while, and just recently I realized I’d neglected to update the blog with the publication of my new series, Monster of the Month. Monster of the Month is a, well, monthly series of new bestiary entries for the tabletop roleplaying game RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. They’re all available in the Jonstown Compendium, Chaosium’s community content program at DriveThruRPG.com.

Thus far, January, February, and March are all available, and their covers are shown above. Click here to check them out!

• Spirits of Madness describes a new type of disease spirit, which inflicts a Madness Passion on adventurers if they fail to defeat it.
• Geiron, Lord of Elephants details a hu-freaking-mongous demi-god elephant which roams the barren wastes of Prax. This entry is completed with a new spirit cult allowing adventurers to worship the behemoth instead of (or in addition to) hunting him.
• Night of the Quacking Dead is a slightly silly—and deadly serious—description of some anthopomorphic ducks turned to zombies. It’s like if Donald or Daffy had a take done by George Romero. With extra puns.

I’ve currently got a good bit of writing done on April’s issue, and provided the stars remain aligned it should be available around the end of the month. It will be either Burning Engines or Hunters of the Sky. Then May’s issue shall be the other. I’m not certain what I’ll do for future issues, but I’m interested in providing a longer write-up on a Death Lord—a troll warlord which worships their war-god Zorak Zoran—and his ensemble. Additionally, I do have at least one more monster in mind which relates to some terrible terrific duck-related puns…

Treasures of Glorantha

In addition to Monster of the Month, I have a larger release coming soon. Treasures of Glorantha is also a work for RuneQuest. I’ve subtitled it “Volume One: Dragon Pass,” but I don’t anticipate creating a second volume for some time. I do want to do another Treasures volume, but at the very least it won’t be in 2020.

The first volume focuses on Dragon Pass, the main region games of RuneQuest take place in. It includes thirty magic items, as well as three longer articles suitable for use by players and gamemasters alike: “Treasure Among the Orlanthi,” “True Dragon’s Blood,” and “Medicine Bundles.”

I’m really excited for Treasures. It’s about 60 pages long, and includes quite a bit of illustration and writing by various members of the RuneQuest community. It’s my first venture into figuring out what the production and publishing process is, and I’m very proud of how it has come together.

I hope to publish Treasures around April 30th. I’m currently waiting on one piece of artwork. The layout is basically finished, and the completed work is currently being proofread. The cover is basically done, just finalizing logos. I’ll post again here when Treasures is released!

Other Writing

I’ve continued working on The City of Sylthi and the scenario, “A Murder in Sylthi” during the last several months, although work hasn’t been as comprehensive as I’d hoped. I do expect to continue work on both Sylthi and Dragon’s Rift going forward, but I can’t make any claims regarding when they’ll be finished.

As part of work on Sylthi, I’ve been digging into research on ancient cities and archaeology. This has been spurring my worldbuilder’s itch, and I’ve been dabbling again at Akhelas, the world of that novel buzzing in the background, The Fall of Jiharel (as well as being this blog’s namesake). I’m starting to suspect that part of my challenge in working on the piece is that I don’t have an image of the world fixed well enough in my mind.

Of course, this has a danger: I’m prone to digging deeply into worldbuilding, because I enjoy it. It can ultimately be a waste of time. I enjoy it, and I do think it helps me subjectively understand a work and understand a story’s shape and texture. But if I spend too much time on it, I end up fiddling too deeply and spending too much time researching, and never write anything.

Still need to figure out the balance on that.

That all said, I have started doing some further worldbuilding work on Akhelas/Jiharel. I’m trying to keep in mind a fictionalized framing, within which much or all of the worldbuilding bits I’ve written are set. I’m still working out how I want to organize information, and I’m just starting to sketch a longer history which culminates in Jiharel, and peeks its eyes a bit beyond the events of that book. The “nonfiction” is set written several centuries after Jiharel, in a period equivalent to Earth’s 1800s.

I also really need to sit down and figure out a large-scale cosmological picture sometime. Figure out how the stars move, how the weather works, those sorts of things, sufficient that the world will become real to my imagination.

Anyway, I’ll stop it there before I start rambling further. Until next time, then.