View from the Pelgrane’s Nest: February

This month’s Page XX sees a big change of staff at Pelgrane,  more 13th Age material and an update from Ken Hite. Unusually we have no new releases this month (they are backing up) as this was intended to be a mini Page XX to introduce new employee Cat Tobin to the webzine. But do feel free to pre-order the Esoterrorists 2nd Edition or pick up a Dying Earth or Skulduggery PDF at half price over at dtrpg.com

Cat Amongst the Pelgranes

Beth Lewis is leaving Pelgrane Press next week, and new employee Cat Tobin is in the office learning the ropes. Cat was the pick of a bunch of applicants of a gratifyingly high calibre. Beth has put together a two million page Word document describing what she does, and that’s only 25% of what I’ve taught her, which is only 12.3% of what I know about publishing.* Cat also had the dubious pleasure of playing with the Clapham Massive game group to try out Night’s Black Agents, where she performed admirably in her undercover role despite too much helpful advice from the others.

*Some statistics not strictly accurate

13th Age

We are on target to get the layout done by the end of the month, and we’ve got another chapter or three for preorders up in the next couple of days.

The Bestiary now has a final monster list assigned to our stellar freelance imaginators ready for delivery in April. Ken is wielding the cat ‘o nine tail (no relation) over our team of freelancers and Rob Heinsoo is playing the benign grizzled mentor over the process. Rich Longmore, artist, is looking at the work of Aaron and Lee, but we won’t be following their look slavishly; just making sure things don’t clash too much.

My game group played our first game of 13th Age without Rob Heinsoo last week, with Unique Things including:

• A rogue whose face was reconstructed by the Prince of Shadows
• A female high elf magician who awoke one day with the body of a male half orc
• The person who killed the last Emperor
• A cleric who is the avatar of his god

Rob Heinsoo is stretched a bit thin, so he is concentrating on 13 True Ways, and Shards of the Broken Sky, the 13th Age starter campaign will be up afterwards.

Trail of Cthulhu

Mythos Expeditions: Outlined, commissioned; we have one expedition back so far.

The Purist collection of Graham Walmsley’s adventures, The Final Revelation, with framing device by Scott Dorward is now being rewritten in response to playtest feedback. One group said of the collection:

It’s depressing tone, the growing sense of dread, discomfort and fatalist conclusion comes together very neatly – making this possibly the closest anyone has yet come to a complete purist Lovecraftian adventure… And therein lies the problem. Given the time and effort committed by the group, the eventual outcome left everyone feeling depressed and questioning why we (or indeed anyone else) would want to give up their spare time to experience something so utterly unpleasant.

The layout for Eternal Lies will be finished by the end of March, and we’ve now got Jerome’s cover in.

We’d like more playtesters for Cthulhu Apocalypse: Slaves of the Green Man, and Dead Horse Corner, Adam Gauntlett’s new First World War adventure.

Night’s Black Agents

The Double Tap expansion book manuscripts are beginning to come in from the writers.

Dracula Dossier and Dracula Unredacted are underway.

Ashen Stars

I’m expecting the Justice Trade back from Bill White in early March, and we’ll be doing a print compilation of this, Tartarus and Terra Nova shortly afterwards