Into the Unknown is complete! (pending proofs for release)

-
Today, I finished the last bit of writing, editing and proofreading on the last book, uploaded the files to onebookshelf and am now awaiting approval (which will go through no problem I expect) before I can order proofs. When they come in, and assuming they look as I expect them to look, I press the button for release and they are released! I expect this will be no more than two weeks away.
In between there is a few hours work with fitting the pdf products with cover and back cover, writing product descriptions and setting up bundle deals. But the files I have on my computer are basically the ones I expect to go on sale in two weeks or so.

I can't quite believe I am finished. This started out as a small scale project I thought I wrap up in a few months, grew into a complete game with ambitions for proper layout, plenty of artwork and all that jazz that people would enjoy having at their game table. The last year of sickness I've battled with didn't exactly speed things up.

The biggest challenge has without a doubt been book four, the gamemaster's guide. Where the other books were in large part about creative adaptation, much of the gm guide was written from scratch - Add to that, it took a very long time for my vision of it to condense into its current form and structure. The finished guide is my attempt at a definitive old school GM guide, most of which appplies to any ruleset - It straddles between brevity and focus vs completeness, fluff/advice vs. usable toolsets. Unlike the DMGs of D&D, it does not attempt to be a catchall versatile guide to all things D&D.

It's pretty focused on how to build a dungeon, build a wilderness sandbox, and build a settlement; and how to run adventures in these. Sprinkled with some advice on how to do all this in the Old School way. It's been thoughtprovoking to me that since Basic and Expert D&D, it's only really non-d&D products that have offered a tight focus on this aspect of gaming, in a way that doesn't either gloss over lots of stuff that old schoolers would consider integral to old school play (Pathfinder, 5e) or leaves a lot unsaid for newbies to figure out themselves or online (retroclones).

In that sense, Into the Unknown exists in a similar space to Torchbearer, The Perilous Wilds and Freeboters of the Frontier - As a modern and comprehensive light ruleset to emulate old school style of play. The difference to these is that ItU is basically teaching 5e how to play like B/X. "Un-advanced" 5e so to speak, with a focus on OSR style gaming.

I am glad that I did the heavy lifting early on while my enthusiasm was high. There is a lot of number-crunching on damage-per-round, design analysis etc., under the hood to make it fully 5e compatible that most players will probably never notice that I wouldn't want to ever do again. But it's done, and I am quite happy to be able to say that you can take your 5e dragonborn paladin or tiefling warlock and use at an Into the Unknown gametable without any conversion necessary.

There is a character sheet in the making, that I am excited to see myself. But I won't wait for it to finish. I am too excited to share all this with you guys!

Comments

Post a Comment

Top 6 most viewed posts in the last 12 months

The Difficult-to-Believe Case of Zak Smith's Innocence

-
I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt . Yesterday,  Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper  by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one. tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study.  Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be th...
Read more

The 3 Mile Hex - The Natural Unit for Exploration

-
Image
There will be interludes between the AD&D Appraisal series, to keep my own writing motivation going. I was going to do a 3-mile hex post outlining the virtues of it, but turns out Silverarm did that already and stole all my points  (even down to the "Outdoor Survival also uses 3 miles") and added more points I wasn't aware of myself. So go read that excellent piece and come back here. What I instead want to talk about is how the 3 mile hex is a very close fit to our natural sense of distance and visualisation and how the that makes the 3-mile hex the perfect blend between immersion and usable game artifact and how to actually bring that into your game.  Minaria hexmap. Scale: 1 hex = 50 miles. Not what we're going for here. A while back, Noisms contemplated the difficulty of creating a sense of wonder in journeys . The difficulty with journeys in RPGs is the scale of it. It becomes too big, and thus too abstract, to visualize, to immerse oneself into.  I tried, un...
Read more

In Praise of "Black Box" D&D

-
Image
when it comes to non-Advanced D&D, The internet, and in particular the OSR blogosphere, has deserved praise galore for the B/X sets for D&D. And whilst not quite as enthusiastic, the Mentzer editions for those Basic and Expert sets also get plenty of praise for its art and way of introducing the game. The Holmes set also has its fair of passionate fans. And of course the original brown booklets themselves. Of newer releases, the Rules Cyclopedia also has a large following of fans. One release that hardly ever gets a mention is the 1991 'black box', by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning. Actually, the Rules Cyclopedia was published as a sort of companion to this set. Together  they represents the fifth and final edition of non-advanced D&D. "The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game" also labelled "Classic Dungeons & Dragons" It's short, 64 page booklet, so much the same as its predecessors, comes with a simple dungeon m...
Read more

Addendum: Why "Roll under" Ability checks really are the best of checks

-
Image
My recent meditations on roll under ability checks and rant against the D20 unified mechanic has generated a bit of commentary and further clarified my own thinking on the matter. This post is an addendum to my  Using Ability Checks in B/X  article, seeking to further explicate why the "Roll Under" ability check truly is the best of ability checks. Earlier today, during my delvings into the blogosphere, I came across this box from  Quarrel & Fable , a Fighting Fantasy spinoff: First thing that struck me was how similar it was to my proposed resolution for Ability Checks . And secondly, it combined those thoughts with my memories of the old Fighting Fantasy  [FF] gamebooks and set my mind spinning into that cross section and how much I always liked the elegant simplicity of the FF mechanic. The best part about doing a post involving Fighting Fantasy is the chance to showcase some of the brilliant art in the gamebooks Now, I've given reasons already in prev...
Read more

How Difficulty Class and the D20 engine ruined roleplaying

-
Image
It seemed revolutionary at the time. 3e came out and made a unified mechanic. Roll 1d20 against a target number to see if you succeed. In combat, AC is the target number. For everything else, it's a Difficulty Class [DC]. That's it.  Some of those DCs are calculated as a function of level, opposing ability score etc. But what we also got from this system was a way of ad hoc determining the difficulty of something and then simply saying "roll against that target number to succeed".  In its core form, this is wonderfully simple and intuitive. All you need to internalise is the size of the numbers on a d20 in relation to overall difficulty and then you can resolve basically anything with it. The part about size of numbers has proven to be a bit of an achilles heel for d20 over the years, but that is a different point I will address further below. No, the real point here is that there's an unintended side effect to DCs as a unified mechanic. There are other downsides ...
Read more

The Fighter Across All Editions of TSR D&D

-
Image
Ok, it's time to get back to elf-games. And why not look at the class that is simultaneously the most beloved and under-appreciated class in the history of D&D? I was going to include assessments of WotC fighters too, but honestly, they end up being so different, and embedded into different systems, that it's like comparing apples and oranges. I would still like to look at the 3e fighter, as that has at least a little continuity with TSR D&D but I think that's for a different post on why feats aren't so bad after all and have a place in all versions of D&D... Moving ON , let's dig in: OD&D : Fighting-Men, as they are called. They get d6 hit die like everyone else, but they start at HD 1+1 and gain more HD as they level than clerics or magic-users (at level 10, the fighter has 10+1, cleric 7+2 and and magic-user 7). They have no armor or weapon restrictions. For weapons, this only matters in regards to which weapons are typically magical (swords, figh...
Read more