Returning from a Long Absence

Hi, folks –

I know, I know, it’s been a long time. Over the last four months or so I have been as busy as I have been in many years, and things like keeping up with a casual blog just haven’t been on my radar lately. On the bright side, I am now emerging from the worst of my crunch, and I can maybe start to catch up with the many things I’ve been putting to the side since April.

So, what’s been keeping me busy? The first thing was the Primeval Thule Campaign Setting, which debuted at GenCon. As you might know, last year I started up Sasquatch Game Studio, a small game publishing company, with my friends (and former WotC colleagues) Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert. After many months of nonstop effort, we managed to get Thule printed in time to bring copies of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game version to GenCon. Other versions of the book will follow in a few months; the main print run is on the presses in China, and it will take a while for the books to find their way back here to the States. Primeval Thule looks terrific, and I couldn’t be happier with how the book has turned out. If you’re interested in a copy, PDFs should be available on DriveThruRPG quite soon (they could go live at any time), and we’ll have a small number of books available for distribution shortly.

The second big project was prepping a decent prototype for a new boardgame I’m working on. It’s called Ultimate Scheme, and it should be appearing on Kickstarter around the end of the year (we need to make sure we fulfill all the Thule Kickstarter promises first). Ultimate Scheme is a game of world domination in which you play the part of a mad scientist, evil genius, or sinister society and do your best to pull off a string of nefarious plots such as hijacking a nuclear submarine, building a freeze ray, stealing the crown jewels, marketing evil soda, or creating a dance craze. We brought our prototype to GenCon and showed it off in the First Exposure Playtest Hall, and we also hosted a few games for our excellent Thule backers. So far, it seems like it’s working and it seems like it’s fun, so me and the other Sasquatches are looking to publish Ultimate Scheme next year. It should be a blast!

 
Finally, the third big project was going to GenCon as an exhibitor for the first time. I went as part of the big TSR and WotC contingents many times over the years, but this time, the Sasquatches and I had a booth of our own. (Well, we shared a booth with Wolfgang Baur and the excellent crew at Kobold Press.)  We learned a lot about what we’ll need to do to make a bigger splash next year, when we’ll have half a dozen different products to sell and a booth of our own.
 
I’ve got a couple of other secret projects I can’t say much about right now. More on those as soon as I can say something! For now, suffice it to say that I wrote a *lot* of words over the last four months, which made the rollout of Thule and Ultimate Scheme  and the preps for GenCon as challenging a stretch as I can recall in my professional career. Now it’s time to get back to some of the writing I shelved for the last few months and finish up some important projects I just couldn’t find time for. It’s good to be busy, but this spring and summer were just nuts!

The Finer Things: I confess, I bought the Awesome Mix from Guardians of the Galaxy. There is some good stuff on that old cassette tape. Come and Get Your Love is so freaking stuck in my head, it hurts.