View from the Pelgrane’s Nest – October 2018

It’s October, and my social media feeds have turned into an endless display of pumpkins, interspersed with occasional #Inktober images from some of Pelgrane’s talented artists. There’s little sign of Hallowe’en-related activity on there yet, which is disappointing. Hallowe’en is my second-favourite holiday (after St. Patrick’s Day, of course), and I’m looking forward to the all the DIY “ghost” and “vampire” videos of the season.

Here in the Nest, our company accountants have been getting into the spirit of it, horrifying me with tales of official deadlines, so getting them the figures they need before they kill me has taken up most of my time this month.

NEW! Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos

One of the first things I worked on at Pelgrane was Ken Hite’s then-new “Ken Writes About Stuff” subscription, which taught me everything I know about layout, die Glocke, and the Starry Wisdom sect. There’s an incredible wealth of information in those three collections, and we’ve wanted to bring that knowledge to a wider audience since we reluctantly finished the last series.

Enter Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos, on pre-order now just in time for Hallowe’en. This 352-page hardback book collects the original fifteen Hideous Creatures, rounds out the nine Foul Congeries sketches into full Hideous Creature write-ups, and adds seven new horrible beasts to the collection. The original Hideous Creatures have been scrubbed up in parts, with some having new art and adventure seeds, and all 31 – 31!! – creatures have been given brand new in-world documents by the brilliant Dean Engelhardt (of Dracula Dossier: Hawkins Papers fame).

To thank those of you who helped make this fantastic bestiary happen, we’ve emailed a voucher code for a discount to all KWAS subscribers – contact us at our support address if you haven’t got it!

Now in PDF!

We release PDFs of new products three months after publication, so we’ve got The Fall of DELTA GREEN (one of Geek & Sundry’s best Table Top Games of 2018 so far). and the PDF of the Book of Demons available now.

13th Age

In 13th Age news, the Loot Harder and Book of Ages books have finally arrived with our US shipper; we’ve passed on the details of the pre-orders, and those should start shipping this week. We’ve also released the pre-orders of 13th Age Glorantha, and our colleagues at Chaosium have released this to stores now.

The good people over at the Iconic Podcast interviewed me a few weeks ago. You can listen to it here. I mentioned in that interview that work is continuing on Shards of the Broken Sky; Rob is polishing off the text, Simon is commissioning the cartography, and I’m commissioning the art. It’s been a long process to get to this point, but we’re finally into the home straight on it, and that’ll be our next 13th Age release. Here’s one of Rich Longmore’s finished pieces, a tower collapse, for it.

Rob’s also working on a book called Icon Followers, which will be similar to the 13th Age Bestiary, but for NPCs and organizations devoted to the icons. Rob’s commissioned a couple of authors to work on this, and will be heavily involved in the development of it himself.

We’re also looking at another few 13th Age pitches; Simon and Gareth are both keen to do another epic campaign, with a working title of “Dragons of the Pyre”. Your One Unique Thing is that you have the soul of a dragon, and you invent the unique dragon. We’ve also been pitched “Gangs of Drakkenhall”, a short book of street level gang fun in the Blue’s bloody city of monsters, which we liked the sound of.

Other Works In Progress

Speaking of October and all things spooky, The Persephone Extraction is, I believe, cursed, continuing on the fine tradition of the Conspiracy not wanting us to release Night’s Black Agents campaign information. After a lot of blood, sweat and tears, it’s now a Table of Contents and cover away from completion.

Even Death Can Die, a collection of three adventures each for the three Cthulhu Confidential protagonist characters, is in layout, and should be ready for pre-order next month. The rough layout is suggesting the hardback book will be somewhere in the region of 360 pages.

And this month sees more details of the long-rumoured GUMSHOE swords & sorcery fantasy game, Swords of the Serpentine. This is being written by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, and allows you to track down foul sorcerers in a corrupt and decadent city (inspired by Lankhmar and Ankh-Morpork), clamber through underground ruins to sneak into an enemy’s home and rob them blind, or wage a secret war against a rival political faction. Jérôme Huguenin is very excited about it, and delightedly working on a cover for it.

Mutant City Blues 2nd Edition is out with a number of playtesting groups at the moment, and initial feedback suggests that the changes we’ve made to it are being well received.