Primeval Thule Kickstarter TOMORROW!

Hi, everybody! Welcome back. You may have noticed that I’ve been slow posting in the last few weeks, but  I can finally own up to the reason (drum roll please)…

The Primeval Thule Kickstarter launches Tuesday July 2^nd !

I’ll add the direct link when our Kickstarter page goes live, but for now, here’s a link to some info on the Sasquatch site. We’ve got some great concept art and some blog posts by yours truly posted there, and we’ll be adding to them throughout the campaign.

http://www.sasquatchgamestudio.com/news/

 Primeval Thule is the debut offering from Sasquatch Game Studio, my new company. Me and my fellow WotC expatriates Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert are teaming up to produce top-notch new game products for the D&D game under the aegis of the Pathfinder OGL and the 4^th Edition GSL. In addition, we’ve also received permission to produce a version compatible with the new 13^th Age RPG system. We’ve been working up to this day for almost three months, and it’s finally here!

So, why Primeval Thule, and why now? The answer is simple: I feel like the big shots in the RPG industry have gotten out of the business of world-building, and that strikes me as a damned shame. TSR published astonishingly creative worlds such as Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright, and Al-Qadim back when I was just beginning my career. Those wonderful flights of imagination inspired thousands of gamers and remain well-loved twenty years later… but the hard math of the contracting hobby game industry over the last ten years drove the big companies to turn to safe bets, such as rules-intensive sourcebooks aimed at a player-focused audience instead of the GM-focused setting material. There are four to five player for every GM, after all, and building worlds is an expensive gamble. The last comprehensive new world published by Wizards of the Coast was Eberron, and that was introduced ten years ago. If you started playing in the 4^th Edition era, you’ve never seen the debut of a new D&D world.

I spent years urging a return to world-building at Wizards of the Coast, but unfortunately, it just never came around again. But now that I’m my own man, I can finally do something about it—put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. Fortunately, my gaming buddies and former colleagues Dave and Steve share my belief that the D&D multiverse is just about ready for a new world or two. The Primeval Thule Campaign Setting is our offering, a sword-and-sandals lost-world setting of barbarians, thieves, scheming wizards, and Great Old Ones. It’s Conan vs. Cthulhu. It’s Hyperborea. It’s Pellucidar. It’s Dark Sun with jungles and glaciers. It’s every Frank Frazetta painting that graced the cover of a pulp fantasy adventure novel with a brawny swordsman, a fearsome monster, and a half-naked woman. (We’ll empower women a little more than that, of course—it’s the 21^st century and women are perfectly capable of saving themselves. But you know the kind of book covers I’m referring to!)

We mix up the standard tropes and expectations of the implied D&D world of elves, dwarves, demons, and dragons, blend it with barbarians and unspeakable Things from Beyond… and set the whole thing in a young, uncivilized world lost in the mists of prehistory. This is the world of Primeval Thule—and we think it’s long overdue in the family of D&D worlds.

So, that’s my pitch for what the world is and why it’s awesome. I don’t often say this to those of you who keep up with my blog, but… I’d sure appreciate it if you helped to spread the word. Tell the D&D players you know to pay a visit to Kickstarter.com sometime in the next few weeks, watch the video, check out the concept art and decide if they’d like to back us. We’re going to deliver a great setting full of ready-to-use adventure, savage new monsters, new character building tech, and the first really new world to come along in a long time. Check us out, and tell all the gamers you know!

Oh, and one more thing before I forget—you might want to get to Kickstarter early on Tuesday. We’ve got a couple of limited early-bird specials, and I think they might go fast!

See you in Thule!