Update Time!

Because I work for Blizzard Entertainment, even though I have nothing to do with the game dev teams, creating my own game, and gaming content becomes surprisingly tricky. But the long and short of it is, Hot Springs Island is effectively complete. There are two books, a big ole hex map, and 150k (hopefully useful and evocative) words.

The first book, A Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, is written for players and serves as a sort of "in game artifact". All of the art, stories, rumors, hooks, monsters, plants, information and speculative theory it contains can and should be used by characters during play. This book is basically done done. It needs a good professional editor to scrub it vigorously, but the words, art, layout and whatnot are as good as I can get them.

The second book, The Dark of Hot Springs Island, is written for the game master. It contains all the "truth" of the island. It's got the hex key, over 20 town and dungeon maps, detailed writeups of the various factions, 300+ treasures and more NPCs that I care to count. Layout on this is NOT complete, but you can see where it's going in my Swordfish Islands G+ feed. This book also needs a good scrubbing from an editor, and new maps. The maps we have are functional, but ugly, and the estimable Billy Longino has agreed to help make 'em pretty!

I have, very recently, gotten the necessary approvals from the distant and mostly silent committees to run a Kickstarter. It's going to happen in January 2016, and its purpose will be to raise funds to hire a professional editor, pay for the map illustrations, and print a small run of beautious hard bound, cloth covered, foil stamped, ribbon bookmarked, smyth sewn black and white books.

As fair warning, I'm going to be spinning up the hypetrain #choochoo, but the plan is to do this by directly sharing the actual game content and illustrations. Basically what I've always done, but with a quicker and more consistent rate.

I've also got a sort of spin off project in the works on shipwrecks. This was originally going to be included in with Hot Springs Island, but it grew to the point that it needed to go off and become its own thing. Eventually it will be a small book of tables paired up with a "push button and get a detailed and interesting shipwreck" app of some sort. More to come!

Mog'ok god of vengeance