Western USR 3rd Edition Full Color PDF Available for Review!

 Here is a link to the new 3rd edition of USR. This is the second of my publications to utilize AI-generated art. What I like about AI-generated art is it allows me to move forward with full-color publications without costing me my monthly mortgage. 

I would love to pay real people to make real things for my books but my stuff has limited appeal and limited revenue potential so throwing serious cash at artwork is not feasible for the VTP. Not that I haven't done it. I truly enjoy satisfaction from paying other DIY'ers cash  money for their contributions to my game books. Feeling connected to a greater hobby world through cash transactions is intention made manifest. But I still want to get books out and I want them to look as good as I can with the time available to me. 

So please download for FREE my finished PDF copy of Western USR. This is the same copy which will be available on Drivethrurpg.com, so yeah, a back door to free product. But please try and play it. Please shoot someone in the face utilizing the RAW, and tell me how it plays. Better yet, write a full on review of actual gameplay and I will send you a free softcover copy of the book with the actual full-color cover!

Shrine of the Keepers Now Available Full Color Hardback

Yes, I have created my first full color publication. Shrine of the Keepers is now available as its own stand alone adventure module. I took the plunge and played around with AI to generate the full color illustrations for the adventure module. Here are some photos of the final product. 

It is 33 pages and by this time the adventure has been vetted for all typos, it is a clean manuscript. Hey, it is even complete with a 5e conversion guide so you can play the adventure with the world's most popular roleplaying game. 

This 33 page adventure is available as a POD publication from Drivethrurpg.com. Get your blood-soaked copy today!

First Professional Writing Gig Now Available: Treasure Island!

Night Owl Workshop has just released the PDF version of Treasure Island Adventure for your old-school roleplaying game. Ostensibly written for their game Freebooters!, the adventure is compatible with all the usual suspects.

What do you get? The Admiral Benbow, breakdowns on all the principle characters found in the novel, city crawling rules and tables for the busy shipping port of Bristol, England, and the complete environs of the island itself. Best of all, you get a solid structure in which to work the novel as a true ttrpg adventure opportunity!  

This is my first "professional" writing gig and I acquired the contract from Thomas Denmark because I responded to his open call for a writer for this project. That's how it rolls in the ttrpg industry. Just force yourself in the room and say you want at it! I'm glad he took a chance on an unknown person because the subject matter is one I hold a great fondness for. I have read Treasure Island numerous times since a kid, so the material I was to write about was very familiar. I have also held up the novel as a master class in pace. The story moves with such a heart-pounding pace I find it a true marvel of excellent adventure writing. I chuckled the first time I learned Robert Louis Stevenson was fond of cocaine. I wonder how much this influenced the "pace" of his writing?

Any-who, I think I nailed it. If you are looking for an old-school adventure on the Spanish Main you may not do better than this obscure output from the Vanishing Tower Press! 

Full disclosure; I tried to complete a second writing assignment for Night Owl and failed miserably. So, first important freelance writing tip I can offer is don't take an assignment that you can't immediately see a "great" idea forming up worthy of a published adventure. I tried to force myself just to "produce" and I don't have it in me. I need to write on something I am passionate about achieving, or I won't get very far. Fortunately, the public is only going to see this output,  buy a great adventure book, and when compared to my other adventure and gaming products find I can consistently put out fun, and useable stuff.

And not all I wrote for Night Owl Workshop made it into this book. I wrote up two cool-ass adventures based on my Renaissance campaign I ran in the Clockwork & Chivalry  setting from Cakebread & Walton. The cartography needed for these two adventures was holding up release of the book so it will be released as a separate adventure package. I'm okay with that. It actually creates two more products I can list to the accomplishments of the Vanishing Tower Press.

Game Master Advice I Never See

Surprisingly, to me, given the sheer amount of threads started by folks on this topic, I never see much reference to the source material of the genre being suggested as something essential. I mean being steeped in the genre being run. Not just a cursory read of a few books or watching a couple of movies. I mean a deep dive as if one were taking a course study in college. 

To be an effective, to be a "good", "great" Dungeon Master, Game Master, Keeper, Star Master and what not, you need to be extremely versed in the genre being run. If you are planning on running a supers game you should be reading comic books all the time. If you have never read comic books much you should go back in time and work your way back up to the present. The grand sweep of the comic tradition should be a topic you can nimbly navigate, process and use at the table. Many folks today seem to be asking how to run a cyberpunk game. Much product is being suggested as the platform of use, but rarely is their an insistence on the asking individual to read a fuck-ton of cyberpunk novels. I would even go so far as recommending extensive reading of the latest technology publications available to the laymen drafting out the latest developments in technology. Climate crisis, political efforts of social constructs, and corporate bloat, basically a master of current events with a bedrock knowledge of cyberpunk literature since William Gibson jump-started the genre. The catalogue of horror literature is incredibly vast. How many Keepers are knowledgeable of Mary Shelly's masterpiece, all of Lovecraft's work into your King and Barker? The horror Game Master also has the task of diving into the incredibly vast library of horror films. 

Why? Why would one need to become a scholar of a particular genre to be a good Game Master? It is the underpinning, scaffold, colossal structure supporting every decision the game's referee will make at the table. Creating your mind into a rolodex of genre tropes transcends mechanics and system 

in such a degree to almost make game of choice irrelevant. When a Game Master becomes pitch-perfect in breadth and scope of genre, when what they speak has absolute fidelity with the genre being run experiences such as "immersion" and "living world" are a matter of course, not something all at the table are struggling to achieve.  Only through extensive reading of source material will a Game Master ever hope to achieve greatness. The benefits of scholarly-level pursuits in the genre being run are so transformative it will take much more than this simple blog post has time to dive into (or more accurately, my time). I, for one, have too much reading on my plate to attend to this task. But my direct experience has shown the more knowledgeable of a genre and its tropes I have the better the game and the better my skill at running. My mind becomes a tea kettle constantly steaming at high heat, always needing additional water to be added. The experience becomes... scalding. 

The benefits of being a studied master of the genre blow all other considerations being debated on the subject away. Random encounter tables write themselves, adventure ideas come unbidden, thorny knots of character interaction become organic growth under good sun and good soil.