Books That Inspired Me

Hi, folks! I’ve been super-busy with a zillion Thule things, so I’ve been a little lazy about keeping the blog up to date. The good news is that we’re building something really special with Primeval Thule, and I think people are going to be really pleased when they see what we’ve put together. Anyway, now that we’re finally getting the upper hand on our savage and intense world, I’ve made it one of my small New Year’s resolutions to do a better job of keeping up with the blog.

Recently, some of my friends on Facebook posted their 10 most influential or inspirational books. I’ve found myself thinking about what books I would put on my list. I didn’t want to try to cram this into a Facebook post, so I decided to take a few minutes and reflect on the books that have really made an impression on me. These aren’t necessarily the *best* books I’ve ever read, or the most important ones—as much as I would like to tell you that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or For Whom the Bell Tolls made me a writer, well, sorry, it’s not so. These are the books that fired up my imagination and made me want to write adventure stories.

10. Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: The only nonfiction book on my list, this was actually a Reader’s Digest collection that introduced me to hundreds of legendary monsters, strange events, and unforgettable people—basically, an assortment of Forteana. I think my parents got it as a throw-in for subscribing to the Reader’s Digest condensed books. This is the book where I discovered things like Spring-Heeled Jack, the Mary Celeste, Tunguska, and a hundred other fascinating things. Back before the Internet and Ancient Aliens, this was where I learned about Weird Cool Things.

9. The Road to Science Fiction #2: A great collection of old sci-fi short stories and excerpts from early SF novels that introduced me to writers such as Olaf Stapledon, Jack Williamson, and A.E. van Vogt. My favorite in the collection was A.E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer,” although A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” is one of the creepiest stories I’ve ever read. I later tipped my cap to Merritt in my Last Mythal series when I sent my characters into the abyss of Lorosfyr.

8. Beau Geste: One of these things is not like the other, I know, I know. Beau Geste is just a great adventure story, and the narrative is masterfully presented through the framing device of Major Beaujolais’ story of the events at Fort Zinderneuf. I just learned that there were sequels—I guess I need to go find ‘em!

7. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: When I was only 6 or 7, I had a copy of 20,000 Leagues that I read over and over again. The story was hard for me at that age and I didn’t understand it all, but through sheer repetition I managed to soak up most of it.

6. A Wizard of Earthsea: Before Harry Potter, there was another story about a talented boy who went off to a wondrous school of wizardry and learned amazing things. I feel that Earthsea is one of the finest bits of fantasy worldbuilding ever done, second only to Middle Earth.

5. The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Tales: This was the first collection of HP Lovecraft stories I read. I came by it in high school, and went on to read just about every Lovecraft story I could track down. For Christmas my daughter gave me a complete collection of Lovecraft’s stories, so I can stop playing the crazy game of buying anthologies for that *one* story I don’t have anywhere else.

4. The Hunt for Red October: Tom Clancy’s first, and his best. I’ve always enjoyed a good thriller, and Red October is a great example of the genre—plus, the naval theme always had a special appeal to me. I really liked Red Storm Rising, too, one of the best WW3 books around, and still a damn fine read.

3. Starship Troopers: The best Robert Heinlein story in my opinion. First off, it’s a great action story. Second, this is the book that gave us our notions of powered armor and space marines. But more importantly, the thoughtful exploration of the rights and costs of citizenship and military service affected me deeply. I know people who seem to think that Heinlein was a fascist because of this book, which amazes me—that’s the same guy who wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, after all. What they don’t realize is that Heinlein was asking a very important question, one that we would all do well to consider from time to time: What do we have to do to earn our right to participate in our democracy? Throughout human history, the vast majority of people have *not* enjoyed the ability to have a say in how they are governed. Maybe we should appreciate it more.

2. Galactic Patrol: When I was 11 or 12, I found a copy of Galactic Patrol on the shelves of my local library. It didn’t take me long to tear through the adventures of Kimbal Kinnison, Lensman and commander of the Galactic Patrol cruiser Dauntless. I went and read through the rest of the series as fast as I could find them. No one has ever outdone E.E. “Doc” Smith in sheer scale: A war lasting billions of years, fleets of millions of ships, a cosmic confrontation against a galaxy-spanning anti-civilization. I don’t know if Doc Smith invented the idea of “the so-and-sos are working for the other guys who are a secret front for the Big Bad,” but boy did he do it better than anybody.

1. The Lord of the Rings: I suspect this is at the top of a lot of lists like this. I know Middle Earth better than some towns I’ve lived in. I could go on and on about what I love about LoTR, but I don’t think I need to convince anybody why it’s great. Not only is it a personal favorite, it’s been the foundation of my career for the last twenty-three years—modern fantasy and RPGs wouldn’t exist without Tolkien’s work. It’s hard to imagine what I would have done with my life if Bilbo hadn’t found the One Ring in the goblin tunnels. Strange to think that an imaginary place should exert such a real influence not only on myself, but on so many other people too!

I’m already thinking about great books I left off the list—Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, Tarzan of the Apes, and so on, and so on—but I guess I’ll leave it at that. If you haven’t read one or two of these, maybe my list will inspire you to try it out!

 

 

 

 

Leaving Las Goblinworks, and perceptive mammoths

This week, some professional news: I have given my notice at Goblinworks, and am soon to be an ex-Goblin. I leave Goblinworks and Pathfinder Online with no small regret; it’s a good crew, and I’m very enthusiastic about the game they’re putting together. My only complaint is the fact that my commute up to Redmond averages about 80 minutes one-way. It’s a pretty drive, but I am finding it harder and harder to give away 2-1/2 hours a day that I could be spending on my writing or on Sasquatch games. I have several big, exciting writing projects that I haven’t been able to find the time to start, so I’m going to make the time and give it my best shot.

So, just to reiterate: It’s my idea, we’re parting amicably, and mostly it’s about the really inconvenient commute. I’ve agreed to make myself available to Ryan and the gang if they need any writing or design support I can offer in a remote contracting role.

(Oh, and I’ll add that I am leaving the Emerald Spire superadventure in decent shape. Coordinating fifteen other authors, writing my section, developing the levels as they come in, and making sure the levels talk to each other has been a big part of my time over the last few months. I finished up my Emerald Spire work, and it’s now moving into the capable hands of the Paizo development and editing teams. I wanted to make sure I was happy with it before I hit the road.)

It’s definitely a little scary to step out of a paying gig in the hope that I’m going to light a rocket under my writing career or Sasquatch is going to take off and do big things. (Well, we already have, kind of. More bigger things, I guess.) So, stay tuned, and I’ll see what I can do!

Gaming: I’ve been building a lot of Pathfinder monsters lately. In general, I’m pretty happy with 3.5 era monster creation, especially with the very helpful target numbers Pathfinder presents in its Bestiary monster-building appendices. But man, I wish I wasn’t assigning skill points to dumb monsters with lots of Hit Dice. It’s my fault, at least in part, since I worked on the 3.5 Monster Manual and I standardized the feat and skill point rules to work off HD like they do for characters. But just yesterday evening I was building a mammoth for Primeval Thule, and shaking my head over the +20 Perception score it has compared to the eagle with a +6 Perception score. Yeah, you can cheat that with a hefty racial modifier, but still… should a mammoth really have a great Perception?

I mean, I feel like a 1^st-level ranger ought to be able to sneak up on a mammoth, because nothing about “mammoth” suggests that it should be any more perceptive than, say, a housecat. Or a flamingo. Or an alert iguana. The only reason a mammoth should have a high Perception score is because it’s a CR 10 monster, give or take, and to make the interaction with a PC of the appropriate level interesting, it needs a high score. But I guess I’m a simulationist at heart, because I’m OK with saying that a 10^th-level ranger *shouldn’t* be tested by sneaking around without being noticed by a mammoth. It would be OK in my D&D world if you could sneak up on mammoths all you want.

I don’t really have a good patch to suggest for this, other than not putting all the mammoth’s skill points into Perception. Maybe D&D Next can finally fix this.

Politics/Current Events: One observation… my personal Obamacare experience is that my insurance is going to get about $210 more expensive every month. That’s how much the cost of my family’s insurance plan increases as of January 1^st. Because I’m now a self-employed type, I have to buy individual insurance, and that’s where matters stand. Well, I guess I am keeping my doctor, and I guess I am keeping my insurance that I don’t actively dislike, so Obama got something right back when he was stumping for the ACA. But somehow my insurance got $2500 *more* expensive per year instead of *less* expensive.

Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that I am, in fact, not surprised. Anybody out there experiencing even a tiny little bit of buyer’s regret yet? I didn't vote for this turkey, so somebody who did owes me $200 a month.

The Finer Things: The Pirates made it to the postseason!  And even though the Cardinals handled them pretty easily in today’s Game 5, I was still happy to see the Pirates playing October baseball. It was really something else to see that beautiful park in downtown Pittsburgh filled with fans in black and gold. That franchise wandered in the wilderness for a very long time indeed—twenty straight years of losing seasons, which is almost Phillies-esque in its organizational futility. (I’m referring to the Phillies’ generally horrible ancient history, as opposed to the great stretch they enjoyed from 2003 to 2011.) Anyway, this isn’t the Pirates’ year to play deep into October… but it’s awesome to see the Pirates back. They paid their dues, and they deserve it.

Feats, Syria, Phillies Trade Proposal

Howdy! I’ve been working hard on some behind-the-scenes heavy lifting for Primeval Thule, namely finishing up the outline, the storyboard, and the art allocation. Now, before you wonder how the heck we ran a Kickstarter without an outline, let me remind you that we didn’t know until the close of the Kickstarter exactly how many pages we’d have to work with, and which authors would be involved. We had a working breakdown of the book very early on, and now we’ve refined that to fit the final numbers. Over the next week or two I’ll be firing off art orders to our various contributing artists, which is pretty exciting—I’ll see heaps of new Primeval Thule art soon!

Gaming: I’ve been following the D&D Next playtest with a good deal of interest, and I have to admit I’m of mixed opinion about the latest D&D Next approach to feats. I like capturing whole feat trees in one selection, but I feel bad that you can’t begin to choose feats until you hit 4^th level. That’s a long time before you can enjoy the character customization elements that feats provide. I don’t feel like the existing D&D audience has been anxious to reduce the number of decisions they have to make with a 1^st level character, and I worry that players will really miss the ability to add that point of differentiation right from the start. I understand that it’s daunting for beginners to have to select something from a list of a hundred somethings when they first start playing the game, but I can think of a lot of other ways to skin that cat: Starting packages for beginners, for example.

(I’ve always felt a little bit proprietory toward feats; they’re one of my biggest contributions to the game. Back in the design of 3^rd Edition, Monte, Skip, and I were looking at 2^nd Edition’s nonweapon proficiencies, and figuring out what they did and didn’t do. I made the observation that some NWPs were innately more valuable than others, and realized that what we really had were two different systems that were being purchased with the same currency. So, I suggested breaking skills into Type-A skills and Type-B skills, and providing different currencies to purchase them with. Then I built a sample selection of Type-A skills that really let you do cool and amazing things. My initial list included ideas like Born a Mongol, which became Mounted Archery, and Sucks to Be You, which you now know as Spring Attack. Fifteen years and 5,000 feats later, here we are.)

Politics/Current Events: Feel free to skip this part if you don't want to get a little serious in your online browsing. I just spent a full hour discussing the whole Syria situation with my oldest daughter, who’s actually pretty interested in politics and history. Answering her questions about Syria helped me figure out what I think we ought to do: I think the least-bad option is to come down hard on Bashar al-Assad. With an extensive campaign of airstrikes we can neutralize the Syrian air force and knock out a lot of the Baathists’ advantage in heavy firepower. From there, we swallow our distaste and do what we can to steer the rebel factions in the least extremist course we can manage.

I hate the idea of siding with Islamic extremists, but at this point, Syria is a proxy war between Shi’a Iran and the Sunni Gulf states. Arranging the defeat of al-Assad would deal a serious setback to Iran’s expanding influence throughout the Middle East. More to the point, we might find it vitally important in a year or two that the world (and very specifically Iran) believes us when we issue an ultimatum and draw a red line. The reason to strike isn’t that it’s going to make things any better in Syria, because it won’t. The reason to strike is to deter the next al-Assad from testing our resolve. Crummy, but there it is.

The Finer Things: My wife and I took in a Mariners game on Friday night. Boy, I love Safeco Field. It’s crazy expensive to take in a big-league ballgame, but at least Safeco is a great place to blow $100. The Mariners are a very intriguing young team with a lot of high-ceiling prospects. It depresses me a little as a Phillies fan; I realized that there is not a single organization in baseball I wouldn’t do a complete roster exchange with. By that I mean, if you were the GM of the Phillies and you had the ability to require another team to completely exchange its major- and minor-league rosters with you, is there any team that you wouldn’t rather have? I’m assuming you’re still playing in Citizens Bank Ballpark and you’ve got the payroll and upcoming TV deal the Phillies can work with. Can you make a case that every other organization in baseball has better top-to-bottom talent than the Phillies do now? I think so. The major-league teams that are worse than the Phils generally have much better minor-league systems, and much better potential to improve. Might be easier to sort out the Syria mess than to rebuild the Phillies organization at this point. Good luck with that, Ruben.

Gen Con 2013

As you might guess, it’s been a very busy summer. Between the Primeval Thule Kickstarter campaign, a short vacation on the Oregon coast, preparations to send my oldest daughter off to college, and Gen Con, I’ve been on one deadline or another for months. Next up is the writing and design work for Thule, which is shaping up to 60,000 words or so over the next couple of months—but that’s the sort of deadline I have a lot of experience with, and I’m looking forward to snuggling up with this savage continent this fall.

(Speaking of Primeval Thule… you still have one last chance to get in on the Kickstarter if you haven’t already. We can take pledges at sasquatchgamestudio.com, and we’ll count those with the support we raised during the actual Kickstarter campaign. Your “late backer” pledge gets you the same books, packages, or PDFs that similar pledges during the actual campaign received.)

Anyway, for today’s blog, I thought I’d say a few words about things I saw at Gen Con. I didn’t go in 2012 or 2011, so it’s been a few years for me.

No Big Software Outfits

Throughout the late ‘90s and the early ‘00s, GenCon’s exhibit hall was increasingly taken over by big PC game and console game outfits. They brought in gigantic booths, deafening soundtracks, and huge screens showing off their games. This year, I didn’t see those guys in the dealer hall. I understand there were a couple who had rooms of their own elsewhere in the convention center. My guess is that most of these companies have decided to focus on other shows, like PAX. I’ll be honest: I don’t really miss them in the Gen Con exhibitor’s hall. I spent a lot of Gen Cons past shouting to make myself heard over super-loud digital games located in booths near the WotC or TSR booth where I was working.

RPGs

With Wizards of the Coast holding off on D&D Next, it was a relatively quiet year for RPGs at the show. Paizo had a great show with a whole slew of great new Pathfinder material and a gigantic ballroom dedicated to Pathfinder gaming; pretty clearly Pathfinder is THE game people are playing these days. The new Shadowrun Fifth Edition book looks FANTASTIC, and I really can’t wait to roll up a gunslinger adept or a street samurai and play. Pelgrane was sporting their excellent new 13^th Age book. Finally, Monte Cook brought his new game Numenera to the show, and that is also a fine-looking book. I haven’t had a chance to play yet, but I look forward to trying it out.

While WotC didn’t bother with a big booth in the exhibitor’s hall this year, they did draw plenty of people to their D&D Next Q&A sessions and special events like their Thursday night Forgotten Realms celebration in the Indiana Rooftop Ballroom. I think a lot of RPG fans are waiting to see what Wizards is going to do with D&D Next, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do a huge relaunch of D&D at next year’s show.

Dave, Steve, and I ran game sessions of Primeval Thule at the show, so I had a chance to GM some Pathfinder Thule on Friday. I managed to kill one of our big-shot backers by tearing his ranger to pieces with a saber-tooth tiger. That's Sasquatch, service with a smile!

Boardgames

If I didn’t know better, I would say that Gen Con is a boardgame show these days, with RPGs something of an afterthought. The sprawling booths for Mayfair, Fantasy Flight, Asmodee, and Catalyst were really the most prominent landmarks in the dealers’ hall. I had a chance to demo Flying Frog’s Fortune and Glory boardgame, checked out the Cthulhu Wars demo (boy, those game pieces are awesomely cool), played Monolith and Dungeon Roll, and bought the new Spyrium game from Asmodee. Asmodee is quickly becoming my favorite board game publisher, by the way; a few years ago I bought the excellent Mission: Red Planet game at Gen Con, and it’s one of my favorites.

Other Gen Con Observations

Cosplay is bigger than ever at Gen Con; I guess it’s just part of the con-going experience these days. The coolest outfits I saw belonged to a group of folks dressed as Steampunk-era Ghostbusters, complete with a colossal StayPuft Marshmallow Man. An important safety tip to Future Rich: Wear better shoes next year, dummy. I walked out my shoes on the first day of the show, blistered my feet badly, and had to spend the next three days limping around in severe pain. Finally, I was reminded that Gen Con is the place to be if you’re in the gaming biz; I saw and talked to scores of old friends, professional colleagues, and other interesting people during the show. My fellow Sasquatches and I are already talking about what we’re going to do for next year’s show.

Finally, I got a chance to play some Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures on Friday night, when I dropped in on the Battle for the Mediterranean tournament. I failed to bring tournament-legal fleets (that's what I get for not reading the whole event description), but I did have a chance to play a side game with longtime Forumini personality Weeds. My air-heavy Italian fleet was not particularly effective thanks to a twilight scenario, but my cleverly placed heavy shore battery caused Weeds no end of trouble, and late in the game I managed to vital the Nelson with a point-blank attack from the battleship Roma. Weeds defeated me in a real squeaker that came down to my last gunnery attack from the shore battery--it was a ton of fun!

That’s all for this time—I’ll be back in a couple of weeks!

Kickstarter, GenCon, the Oregon Coast

Greetings, everybody!

My apologies for the long gap; most of my blog writing over the last couple of months has gone toward knocking out design and overview essays about the Primeval Thule Campaign Setting. I was working furiously throughout the Kickstarter campaign to keep delivering new and interesting glimpses of Thule, and naturally I didn’t spend as much time on my own personal reflections here. So, consider this a catch-up session!

Hey, Our Kickstarter Succeeded! In case you haven’t been keeping up, my Primeval Thule project successfully funded back on August 1^st. In fact, we ended up reaching a total of $75k on a $60k target. Me and my fellow Sasquatches (Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert) took a couple of days to recuperate and evaluate, but we’re already hard at work revising our estimates and business model to reflect the actual amount of backing we received, designing our backer survey, and laying the groundwork to go into serious development and production mode. GenCon throws a week-long hitch in our plans, but we expect to come back from Indianapolis and hit the ground running.

(If you missed out on the Kickstarter, it’s not too late – we have a PayPal-based pledge system online at www.sasquatchgamestudio.com just for late backers. Most of the options available during the Kickstarter campaign are still available even if you’re coming in late.)

See Me at GenCon: As I mentioned above, I’ll be heading off to GenCon in just a couple of days with my partners Dave and Steve. We’re running Primeval Thule playtests each day of the show (sorry, they’re all sold out), and we’ll be hosting a seminar on Saturday to talk about all things Thule. In fact, let me run down a few things that are on my schedule so you can track me down if you’re so inclined.

·        Thursday, I plan to drop in at the “A Night of Dungeons & Dragons” event Wizards of the Coast is hosting.

·        Friday, I’m busy running my Primeval Thule session. But later on I intend to don a disguise and sneak into the War at Sea: Battle for the Mediterranean event at 7 pm. I designed the darned game, and I hardly ever get a chance to play it!

·        Saturday, I’ll be hosting the Primeval Thule seminar, at noon in the Westin Hotel Grand Ballroom III. I will then scurry over to join the Emerald Spire All-Stars panel in progress at 1 pm. You’ll also be able to find me at the Inside Pathfinder Online seminar at 5 pm in room 231.

·        Sunday, I may try to sneak into another game or two, but I’ll probably be roaming the dealer hall trying to decide which game or games I just have to bring home.

I hope to catch up with many rarely-seen friends at various lunch hours and dinners, but we’ll see how it goes. I have a number of Sasquatch-oriented business discussions I’m hoping to knock out over the course of the show, so I’m not exactly sure when and where I’m going to do my socializing. I will try to Facebook my whereabouts and plans as they come up!

The Finer Things: The Oregon Coast. I took my family down for a long weekend in Lincoln City over the past few days. The weather was not great—dense fog just about every day—so it wasn’t really a fun in the sun kind of beach vacation. But the scenery of the coast is just spectacular, and we had lots of fun beachcombing, looking at tidepools, and enjoying the views (when we could see them). The highlight of the trip for me was finally getting a chance to hike out onto Cascade Head, which is a 1200-foot tall headland jutting out into the ocean. I’ve wanted to do that hike for ten years, and we’ve driven by it three or four times without ever being able to make it work. This time it all came together. The fog parted long enough for us to enjoy a twenty-mile view south along the coastline, while being able to look out at shining blue ocean and, weirdly enough, the *top* of the impenetrable barrier of clouds that was then hovering about five miles out to sea. It was like being on an airplane that was flying over a dense cloud cover. Kim and I just love it down there; might be my favorite place on Earth.

Beastmen of Thule!

Hi all!

We're coming up on the halfway point of our Primeval Thule Campaign Setting Kickstarter, so as you can imagine, I have a lot of Thule on the brain these days. By the way, in case you're curious, it turns out it's supposed to be pronounced something like TOO-lay. Just about everybody I know just calls the place THOOL, and that sounds OK to me, so I'm not going to correct 'em!

If you've backed the Kickstarter already, then thanks! We're very excited to bring you this world and we think it's going to be a ton of fun. Please, please, please spread the word -- post our link on your social media, tell your friends, let folks know what we're doing! Fighting the awareness battle is harder than I thought it was going to be.

If you haven't backed the Kickstarter, then I invite you to go take a look at Rich's Secret Project of the last few months. Here's a link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809579963/primeval-thule?ref=live


Anyway, here's a little bonus for you Pathfinder/3rd Edition fans out there: The beastman monster stats. I used these in my PaizoCon playtest/demo of the game. We don't have 4e or 13th Age versions of this stat block available yet, but this should be a nice taste of one of the more prevalent monsters you might encounter in the jungles of Thule.

Nasty, Brutish, and Hairy: Beastmen of Thule

Many dangerous beasts roam the forests and jungle of primeval Thule, but none are more dangerous than the sort that walk on two legs and possess the wickedness and cunning of a human—or nearly human—mind. Whether Thule’s beastmen are a degenerate branch of humanity slowly returning to the unthinking apes of their distant ancestry or a separate evolution of humankind altogether, only the wisest of sages could say. But anyone who runs across these violent and greedy creatures quickly discovers that they are the most monstrous and savage of Thule’s barbaric jungle tribes. The warriors of Lomar say that it would be better to kill oneself rather than to fall into the clutches of the beastmen alive—and they’re right.

Beastman

Tall, hairy, and thickly built, this warrior appears to be more ape than human, and wears nothing but crude animal skins—but humanlike cunning glints in his dark eyes.
 
Beastman                         CR 1
XP 400
CE Medium humanoid (human)
Init +1; Senses scent; Perception +2
AC 13, touch 11, flat-footed 12 (+1 Dex, +2 shield)
hp 16 (2d8 + 7)
Fort +5, Ref +1, Will +0
Speed 30 ft.
Melee stone morningstar +4 (1d8+3) or slam +4 (1d4+3)
Ranged bolas +2 (1d4+3 and trip or entangle)
Special Attacks fury, bolas expertise
Str 16, Dex 13, Con 14, Int 7, Wis 10, Cha 7
Base Atk +1; CMB +4; CMD 15
Feats Toughness
Skills Climb +1+3+3, Perception +0+2, Stealth +1+1+3; Racial Modifiers +2 Perception
Language Common
Environment temperate forest
Organization band (2–4), hunting party (2–5 beastmen and 1–2 gray wolves), raiding party (7–16 beastmen, 2–4 dire wolves, and a subchief of 2^nd–4^th level), or tribe (20–120 adults plus 50% noncombatant children, 11–30 gray wolves, 2–12 dire wolves, one subchief of 2^nd level per 10 adults, 1–2 warchiefs of 3^rd to 5^th level, and 1 chief of 5^th–8^th level.)
Treasure NPC gear (large wooden shield, morningstar, 2 javelins)


Fury (Ex) On the first round of an encounter, a beastman gains a +2 bonus to melee attack and damage rolls.
Bolas Expertise (Ex) Beastmen are experts with bolas and can choose whether to deal lethal or nonlethal damage with bolas attacks. Instead of making a ranged trip attack with bolas, a beastman can choose to entangle the target on a hit. An entangled target can escape with a DC 15 Escape Artist check (a full-round action), burst the bolas with a DC 25 Strength check, or attack the bolas cords with a type S weapon (5 hit points).
 

Beastmen are a primitive branch of humankind. Brutal, cruel, short-tempered, and contemptuous of anyone weaker than themselves, they are fierce warriors and raiders who pose a great threat to anyone traveling abroad in the wild lands of Thule. Beastmen are especially notorious for seizing captives and dragging them back to their lairs to be put to work as drudges, sacrificed to their bloodthirsty gods, or simply tortured to death in horrible ways for their amusement.

Beastmen hate humans (and most other intelligent races for that matter). They see all other peoples as enemies, and do not hesitate to kill any they cannot carry off into captivity. They have been known to engage in cannibalism, although this is considered a sacred ritual among their kind and requires the appropriate ritual preparations—eating their foes is an act of dominance, not sustenance.

Beastman leaders are usually barbarians, rangers, or druids. They fear divine and arcane magic, and usually put captive spellcasters to death in peculiar and horrible ritual murders to ensure that the “bad magic” dies with its users.

 

Beastman Characters

Beastmen are not normally PCs, but if the GM wishes to create unique beastman villains, then beastmen can be advanced by adding class levels. All beastmen have the following racial traits.
        +4 Strength, +2 Constitution, –4 Intelligence, –2 Charisma: Beastmen are strong and hardy, but tend to be cunning rather than bright.
        Scent: Beastmen posses the scent special ability.
        Bolas Expertise: Beastmen are proficient with bolas and gain the benefits described above.
        Language: Beastmen begin play speaking a debased form of Common.

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!