It's Pulptastic here at the Lair lately

We have been in full on Pulp mode here at the Lair. I've been working on Dicey Tales, and  reading A. Merritt's  Seven Footprints to Satan. 

The Minions have been watching the Tailspin DVD collection (Costco has it for $8.99) , and we are all awaiting our Amazon order of the Tales of the Gold Monkey DVD set.  


I also ordered a cool looking book called The Rook.  It isn't The Rook from the old Warren magazines, but it looks interesting just the same. 
Ron Fortier recommended it, so thats good enough for me.

Dicey Tales Update - with new finished art!

The work on Dicey Tales is going great. I've gotten some very useful feedback from my group of "Peer Editors". They have taken me to task on a number of things and hopefully helped me dodge some bullets when this is released.  Below are a pair of final illustrations from Chris for the interior of the book.

The Russians are coming (well actually, they left already).

The whole Russian spy thing got me thinking.
So here is my rough pitch-ripped from the headlines:


There is this typical american family. husband, wife and daughter. The Daughter is 19 and  is named Ann, though her family calls her Anna.


One day a man arrives. his name is Nick and he's an old friend of Ann's father from college. 


Nick is charming and handsome. Ann's father is nervous. Ann's mother appears very happy.


eventually Ann observes her mother and nick talking, they think they are alone and suddenly her mother and nick kiss.


At dinner Ann sneaks into the guest room and quickly go through nicks suitcase where she finds a hidden compartment with a gun, passport and a whole wad of cash.


not sure what to do she turns to her grandparent and tells them what happened. the grandparents become concerned.  but tell her to forget about it and let them talk to their daughter.


the next day Ann returns from class early and finds hears her grandfather arguing with Nick in the cellar . they begin to yell and her grandfather says something to nick in a foreign language. Nick snaps out his hand and stabs the grandfather in the throat. Ann screams. she runs upstairs just as her parents and grandmother arrive.
chased by nick Ann runs into her fathers arms, all is chaos everyone is yelling. and suddenly Nick strikes Ann and knocks her out.


when she comes to she is in her bed  her grandmother is in the room with her and she can hear everyone talking downstairs in a foreign language.


The adults are all Russian spies. The Grandparents are from the old Soviet era, placed during the height of the Cold War and the parents placed in the U.S. in the 90's.  They had all but thought they were deactivated. Especially the grandparents. Nicholas is a current Russian agent sent on an assassination mission in the U.S.
the family is supposed to serve him as a "Safe House".


The Mother still considers herself an active agent, and in fact was a lover of the assassin many years ago.
The father and grandfather have basically tried to put the whole spy thing behind them.
The Grandmother is an old school communist and still serves.


So. Will Anna escape? and if she does who will she tell? Who will believe her?
Everything she knew about her family was a intricately crafted lie. 


So there's my pitch. If any of you Hollywood types are interested, drop me a line.

Lazy Sunday PhotoDump

I never had a Mullet though

I have some great memories of the 80's. Of course, I didn't know they were going to be so great at the time ( if I did, I would have taken more pictures). 

I graduated High School in 82 and spent 83-84 in a haze of self pity after a bad break-up. I joined the Army in order to take my mind off of my romantic troubles-bad move.  After the Army things started looking up and eventually became pretty damn cool.

Here are a couple of songs that always come to mind when anyone talks about "The BIG 80's".

Some recent buys from a Goodwill run

First up was a big blast from the past. This baby was from back in the day when we judged a games worth by the weight of the box. and Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU) had some heavy contenders. Honestly, I was never a big fan of FGU's games. I fully understand that Villains and Vigilantes (V&V) is considered a fan favorite and a true classic. Unfortunately instead of V&V, I bought Bushido and Aftermath, character generation almost made me cry in frustration.

The box for Year of the Phoenix is dated 1986, The movie Red Dawn was released in 1984. Coincidence?  I don't think so.

The box looks pretty complete (no dice though). Boxed games at the Goodwills in my town range from .99cents to $3.99. This went for $1.99, a no-brainer for me.

 I'm not sure how clear this is going to come out, but I took a pic of the "product catalog" just for nostalgia sake. I might scan it later if anyone wants a copy.

The Hard back 1st edition books sold for $2.49. The modules,magazines, and DM Screen were all a buck a piece. My first standing order is that I buy anything RPG related and that goes double for all things TSR. I am an unabashed TSR junkie. Talk smack about TSR all you want- just do it somewhere else. TSR brought me too much joy to ever bad mouth them. There were problems, there was drama, and there were bad choices, but the fact remains if there was no TSR chances are there would have been no gaming as we know it today. And for that alone I show respect. 

But I digress... Did you notice that the DM Screen has the Mini Module Terrible Trouble at Tragidore?

This Green Hornet costume for the re-issued Action Man figure was in the games section for $3.99...SCORE!

It has comic book characters on the cover. So it was marked as a kids book....99Cents.

This looked to me like Risk for the brainy set.  Avalon Hill Games fall into my "all games get bought" policy.

I have yet to really go through it but it looks complete and only partially punched.

And my best score this round...and it's complete...for 99 Cents...no shit...99cents.

The Last Airbender breaks wind

 I cant recommend The Last Airbender as a movie worth shelling out $8 bucks or more to see. It just isn't that great. The movie looks nice- the costumes and the martial arts choreography are up to snuff. But the acting was wooden, it was way too dark of a film, there was no humor, and it was just plain boring. 

There wasn't a single belly laugh or a "hell yeah!"moment in the whole movie. Shyamalan was the wrong director for an adaption of a children's anime adventure film. 

Lazy Sunday Photodump

My RPGNow "Staff Reviewer" rant

So after a year of selling my various editions of Legends of Steel on my own, I'm persuaded by a friend to put them up on RPGNow. The move appears to have been a good one. Yes, I lose a percentage of each sale, but the supplements are now being seen by a much larger audience. As a result, sales have improved nicely.  

I do have one gripe though.

When you post your book for sale, they ask if you would like to send a copy to the "staff reviewers" at RPGNow. I checked ok (a little added publicity never hurts right?). 

So then I post the books and almost immediately a couple of dozen books fly out the door-but at $0.00.  These are the review copies. Okay, so I wait. It's been about a month and so far I see one staff review of one of the LoS books. 

Maybe I should give it a bit more time, but one review after a month seems a little sparse. I'm wondering if these "Staff Reviewers" really do all that much reviewing or are these guys just buddies of the owners who get treated to free copies of peoples stuff? 

It reminds me of when I first came out with Broadsword and LoS.  I sent out a bunch of review copies to friends, Blog owners and "message board royalty" in the hopes of getting some reviews back. A few solid guys reciprocated with reviews, but most just put me off with excuses. Needless to say I don't send out review copies anymore, and next time around I dont think I'll be checking that box on RPGNow.

Calvin & Hobbes

Getting kids interested in reading can sometimes be difficult. It's a hard sell these days to convince the kids that books and their imagination could be just as stimulating as the latest version of Pokemon for their Nintendo DS. For those of you with young boys, I want to give you a heads up on a discovery I made. Calvin & Hobbes.  You may remember this dynamic duo from a decade or two ago-a precocious 7 year old and his stuffed tiger. 

Calvin & Hobbes were featured in just about every major newspaper (that is, if you can remember newspapers).  Well, it seems that even though the strip's creator never took to the mass merchandising route, he did release a number of books containing color and B&W strip collections. Nowadays you can get these at just about any used book or thrift store for like $2-$3. 

With my own minions I've found that the collections of Calvin & Hobbes strips resonate.  Many of the themes of a little boys life (homework, bullies, parents, little girls, teachers,playing outside) are covered in the pages of the strip. Not to mention Calvin's imaginary adventures as a spaceman, superhero,  or even a dinosaur - there is plenty there to stoke a young imagination. But be prepared for questions regarding complex ideologies and ethical quandaries- because as Calvin discovers and questions the idiosyncrasies of his world, so will your minions. But the thing is while they are doing this they are laughing, and more importantly-reading. 

Dicey Tales - A Pulp Era Supplement for BoL

Well this is the project that has been filling the time I've saved by not posting as much here and on the forums. It's called Dicey Tales- It's a Pulp expansion for the Barbarians of Lemuria Rules Engine by Simon at Beyond Belief Games. This spectacular cover was done by Jason Chalker from The Manly Art Blog (go there, it's cool). I cant think of another pulp gaming cover more reminiscent of the pulps save for the venerable Justice Inc. cover from Hero Games.
The majority of the interior art will be done by another "friend of the Lair" Chris Schieffer.  Here are a couple of proposed sketches he's working on.

Hador is still being finished up and will most likely be released as an adventure setting for Dicey Tales and then for Savage Worlds.  


I'm currently working on the Game Masters section. The Players section of Dicey Tales is being looked over by a crack team of Pulp aficionados and BoL veterans. They have already begun to help me plug holes, remove inconsistencies and correct my grammar.
As with all my projects, you can calender it for a "soon" release date, but I am getting the art together so that means it wont be too far off. 

And we're back!

The long blogging hiatus is over.  I've been around,  just not posting here and on the various boards that leech off my time.  I have several projects nearing fruition, including one way overdue project: Hador.
Nothing was ever shelved, I just have quite a bit going on in the daily upkeep here at the Lair, and to be honest, blogging became a bit of a chore. 
But now I'm looking forward to it again and I have a few things to talk about.
So let's get started.