January 2017: View from the Pelgrane’s Nest

The Pelgranes have returned from their annual pilgrimage to WarpCon, a feast of gaming, socialising and drinking. Gareth and Cat are both former con directors, game runners and writers, and form part of the WarpCon brain trust. It’s undoubtedly the friendliest convention I’ve attended. We playtested Gareth’s game Drone, in which one character is a semi-autonomous corpse powered be cybernetic implants and the others are the remote operators. As the game progresses, the drone gains more memories and more autonomy, so it becomes a three-way battle between the drone, the operators and the GM to see what happens – tl;dr never ends well for the drone. Cat and I also worked on Pelgrane Press’s strategic goals – don’t worry, they feature only the creation of table-top RPGs.

New Releases

This month’s new releases include the Dreamhounds of Paris Limited Edition, The Crown Commands and Map Folio PDF Bundle – forty pre-planned encounters to drop anywhere into your 13th Age campaign,  High Druid’s World – the final edition of 13th Age Monthly and Cthulhu Confidential: Case Notes Edition Preorder game for one player and one GM.

New Pelgrane

The biggest news is that after an exhaustive recruitment process which attracted candidates of the highest calibre, we’ve invited a new Pelgrane to the nest – Alex Roberts. Reporting to the managing director, she will take on the support role but also bring her wide experience and unfailing positivity  into all aspects of our roleplaying game publishing.

13th Age

After two years of exuberance and invention, 13th Age Monthly is ending. I do apologize for the late delivery of the final episode, High Druid’s World. It features summoning sorcerers, dragons riders, nymphs, elves and even the fiery phoenix. If you’ve not experienced it, volumes one and two are available from the webstore. 13th Age Monthly was financially viable, but it was holding Rob Heinsoo back from delivering the many new books we have planned for the line. Rob has been able to work towards finishing the Demonologist and push forward with icon follower and class-based books and concentrate on getting the Bestiary 2 developed. This bumper monster manual features the salamander, battle shade, elemental beast and xorn. And who wouldn’t want a fire axolotl as a familiar?

TimeWatch

A set of adventures for TimeWatch, The Valkyrie Gambit is in layout, followed closely by the The TimeWatch GM Screen and Resource Book. They will be printed and shipped to backers first, but we will put them on pre-order next month for other customers to ship a little later.

TimeWatch will also feature as one half of the forthcoming Free RPG Day book, along with a 13th Age adventure written by Kevin Kulp. Warning – it features Comic Sans!

PDF Sales and Offer

For many years, we’ve sold PDFs through a variety of outlets, including Warehouse 23, Paizo, Indie Press Revolution and DriveThruRPG, and of course our very own mail order store.  DriveThruRPG offer a much better rate to exclusive publishers, and last year it because clear that the that difference and our choice to sell through the other outlets was costing us many thousands of dollars, and despite our long-running relationship with these excellent outlets, this has become untenable. So, now, the only place you’ll be able to get our ebooks is through the Pelgrane store or DriveThruRPG.

Pelgrane customers will get a 17% off voucher useable against Pelgrane Press core book PDFs on their bookshelf – look out for a similar offer on DriveThruRPG this week.

Night’s Black Agents and Dracula Dossier

We’ve shipped the first batch of the Hawkins Papers to our shipper Kixto, ready for assembly. My happiness in this image is as a result of having finally loaded the last of more than fifty boxes on the van. We’ve used child labour (both mine, and Cat’s family were involved) set fire to ovens, boiled multiple gallons of tea, and angered a printer (the mechanical kind) but we are nearly there. We are not likely to have any spares, alas.

The Fall of Delta Green

The Fall of Delta Green is two-thirds done and ready for playtesting. As a big Delta Green fan, and as an internal playtester, I can tell you this GUMSHOE adaptation does just what it’s meant to – combines GUMSHOE and DG so can you can find the clues, then regret you have. Sign up here.