On the Horizon

In addition to the Thousand Suns revision I've been working on for what seems like forever (with a late summer release date looking more likely), two other projects have been occupying my time. Both ought to see daylight before Thousand Suns.

First, there's Petty Gods. There's still a few pieces of artwork left to be done, but the big delay at the moment is awaiting word on whether or not I have permission to include an article written by an important figure of the early hobby as a kind of framing device/introduction to the whole work. If I can't, that's no big deal and certainly won't hurt the final version, since it was only by chance that the opportunity to include it was even viewed as a possibility. Regardless, June will be devoted to getting Petty Gods out the door at last, with or without the article.

Second, there's what I think will be known as the Dwimmermount Codex series. Originally, I wanted to present a single volume with multiple levels of my Dwimmermount megadungeon. Later, people started asking me for more information on the world outside the dungeon. Later still, people wanted my OD&D/Labyrinth Lord house rules. I toyed with several different ways to present all this stuff and ultimately decided to go the route of multiple small (32-64 digest-sized page) PDFs/booklets released on a monthly/bimonthly basis. Each volume would present some of my house rules, plus new monsters, spells, treasures, magic items, and a level of the dungeon, a quarter of the city-state of Adamas, or a wilderness area.

I'm nearly done the first volume and it includes the following:

• Wisdom-related rules
• Clerics, Druids, and Cultists
• Dwarves and Gnomes
• New Cleric, Druid, and Gnome spells
• Saving throw rules
• New monsters
• New magic items
• Details on the gods of Dwimmermount
• Level 1 of the Dungeon (The Path of Mavors), which consists of just shy of 70 rooms.

With luck, I'll finish this in a couple of days. Then I just need to scrounge up some art and lay the thing out and I'll make it available for sale. I don't know how long it'll be in its final form, so that'll determine the price, but I can't imagine it'll be more than a few dollars for the PDF and a bit more for the printed copy, should anyone want that. It'd be nice to make a little profit off this project, but I'm also a big believer in keeping RPG products as inexpensive as possible, especially since the best ones are idea mines rather than completely usable "out of the box" and the Dwimmermount Codex volumes certainly follow that model.

To clarify: I use Labyrinth Lord as my rules base and riff off them in my modifications. If you have the LL rulebook, you need nothing else to use what I've written and, honestly, you don't even need that, since the material is easily adaptable to any TSR era version of D&D and its clones. I personally use Labyrinth Lord for reasons I've discussed elsewhere, but that doesn't mean you have to in order to get any use out of what I've written.

I'll have more information in a couple of days once I've finished the last tweaks to the text.