Aetherbound: November, 2009
Urban Fantasy Codex: October, 2009
Sarsurath: Unkown.  Sometime 2010
The Red: Unkown. Sometime 2010

All of these can change at the drop of a hat.

Last night everything rocked. The players impressed the hell out of me, and the game session seemed to hit the right level of combat and Role Play, which is a tough balance to get.  Since I knew these players and trusted them, I let them describe a lot of the stuff (and even play some of the NPC’s that their character’s knew). All in all, an awesome session.

The hero’s beat the big bad in the last game (a demon haunting an ancient library from the start of time…) and come out to the real world dazed and confused.  People have gone missing in town, and our party found and helped one of them escape this demonic library.  Now that they’ve returned out of the woods and into the city of Dark Rivers (think Twin peaks in tone and atmosphere) they’ve become local heroes, and the Sheriff really wants to know how they were able to find this missing person.

The Players quickly find out the sheriff is lying and he’s not what he seems.  They fight a few snake demons, and then after some really great RP’ing (I love it when subplots rise up from players playing off of each other…it makes for an awesome game session) they find the missing person they just saved in down town Dark Rivers, being hunted by Police Officers possesed by something OTHER.

So, all in all it was an awesome game session. Really quality stuff.  It plays like an Urban Fantasy novel/tv series, which is exactly what I wanted.  Fans of Twin Peaks, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel or Supernatural will be happy with the Urban Fantasy Codex is released.

The Urban Fantasy Codex will come out about a week before Halloween.  You’ll need the Magpie Codex core rule book to play it when it does come out, which you can get here $9.99:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=64210&filters=0_0_0_0&manufacturers_id=2675

And I realized- not really.  The part of the OSR that appeals to me (dungeon crawling, etc) I’ve always done with Tunnels and Trolls (at least when I run games…I’ve played countless 2nd and 3rd and 3.5 D&D, and I loved playing them…but as a game master, I prefer Tunnels and Trolls).  And I thought, you know what?  T&T needs more love.  Especially when it comes to going old school.

And that’s what I’m doing.

So, what is this new product going to be like?  Well, Sarsurath will be a highly weird, super surreal, epic fantasy campaign setting. The core book will be designed to be like a travelogue, written by a brave explorer who had stumbled onto this world and must quickly escape to come back home.

The world od Sarsurath is one of very few humans.  Those humans that exist in Sarsurath are slaves, mystically summoned from earth and forced to work as magical manservants. The writer of the Sarsurath core book will be one Danial Abrahms, who was exported from earth to the faraway planet during his dreams in the summer of 1890.  His adventures and explorations will be the chunky fluff of the text, with stats for everything he finds placed in easy to find notes along the pages.

The world itself is more Dying Earth than Tolkien, with ancient technology powering a lot of the magic. The humanoid kindreds on the planet will range from the very strange (four foot tall insectoids) to the slightly strange (elvish creatures with four arms), with a lot of anthropomorphic kindreds scattered about.

Magic is psi based (like in all versions of T&T), with the magic user memorizing complex images known as Sigils.  Once the image is memorized, they can cast the spell at any point by remembering the sigil. They buy pieces of paper with sigils written on them from the magic guild in order to learn and cast spells.  Spells are never forgotten (no Vancian system) although the more spells a mage knows, the higher of a chance they have of going completely insane.

Magic users who have been trained from birth have had what is known as the sorceral tubes placed into their skulls.  These look like neon glowing vacuum tubes sticking out of the skull, and allow a mage greater concentration when it comes to memorizing the spell sigils.  Rogue wizards do not have these tubes placed in their skulls, and thus don’t have the advantage.

All in all, this should be a very interesting and unique project.  I will keep you updated. It will be for T&T 7.5, but will be backwards compatible to 5.5-5.0 editions.

Here is the Aetherbound cover art, done by Zoe Stead-

We went through great lengths to make sure that you can create a game that plays like those books or tv shows. Most Urban Fantasy games don’t mimic the novels/shows, but rather go for their own setting and style. This is more like D&D was back in the day- a game that mimics a literary style. We plan on having this released before Halloween 2009.

Here is the cover-

Buy it here for $9.99:
http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?discount=8788

Anyway, I’m working on getting the print copy ready. Right now we’re having a small issue with the program we’re using to generate the PDF’s and it resampling the images to a lower resolution, making them look blurry and pixellated. I hope to have this resolved by next week so we can have a print copy for people to buy.

In other Magpie news, we plan on doing small min-toolbox books that help give you a generic set of stuff for any game in a specific genre. These will be different from the supplement books we have planned (Dark Rivers, The Red and Jade Fox) which are campaign settings with rich detail. The mini-toolbox books will be there to help you build your own campaign setting fast and easy (and will be licensed to let you easily share your creations).

Each of these toolbox books will be named like so:
Genre Codex
So, the first one will be Urban Fantasy, and will be called:
The Urban Fantasy Codex

It will be priced about $5 for pdf, about 10$ for print, and will have full color interior art by Zoe Stead. Stay tuned.

PDF available at RPGNOW for $9.99-
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=64210&filters=0_0_0_0&manufacturers_id=2675

Print version coming shortly for $19.99!