Mask of the Other is a military science-horror novel that builds on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. A squad of US soldiers steals the centerpiece of Saddam’s occult weapons program in 1991 and just gets deeper and deeper into the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. Read more about it here, including a free sample chapter. Or you can check out its first review!
The unabridged novel is now available as a $21.95 audiobook on iTunes or through Audible.com for $24.95.
While crowdfunding something entirely different, (a webcomic called A Softer Apocalypse) I promised pledgers that I would write a bonus short story if it funded. Which it did!
Special Purpose is your basic story about a nine-year-old girl living with her single dad in a blasted, postapocalyptic hellscape, but it’s OK. Her grandma has everything under control. Special Purpose shares a setting with A Softer Apocalypse, but you won’t see these characters again for a while. They matter though.
If you don’t want the PDF file at the link above you can also get Special Purpose in epub or Kindle format.
I have designed games and written novels, but only recently (in The Sleep of Reason) did I get an opportunity to script some sequential narrative, also colloquially known as a ‘comic’. Thanks to the miracle of crowdfunding, I’ve done it again.
A Softer Apocalypse is illustrated by Nick Butler, and as of this writing, the first two pages are up. Many more are to come. God willing, we plan to update it every Tuesday.
A Softer Apocalypse shares a setting with my game eCollapse, which one reviewer described as ‘a middle-class white American horror future that replaces zombies with future-shock, vampires with crushing economic despair, witches with environmental chaos, and werewolves with augmented humanity’, which is pretty fair. The weather is deadly, getting superpowers is like playing Russian Roulette with gritty biotech abilities as a reward for survival, the economy hates you but is too tired to do anything about it, and our protagonists are mostly motivated by revenge.
But wait! There’s more! As the Kickstarter was squeaking along, I promise to write a bonus story if we made it. Today, I deliver. Though there were many compelling suggestions, I ultimately decided to go with a companion piece for the comic. The characters in Special Purpose are unseen in the first 24 pages of the comic, but Brick turns up in the second chapter, assuming it gets funded. Anyhow, you can read about Brick, Heesh and their colleagues at the link above (in PDF) or here in ePub andhere for the Kindle.
I wrote a film noir game called A Dirty World, and Caleb Stokes (the brains and the looks behind Hebanon Games) went and wrote a scenario for it set in partition-era Berlin. That scenario, The Dangers of Fraternization, sets Russians, Americans and Germans on the trail of a murder mystery. But is solving it more important than stopping one another? (PCs for The Dangers of Fraternization can be downloaded here.
Thanks, Caleb!
First and foremost, if you’re unfamiliar with Mask of the Other, you can click this link here and read the sell text. Short version, it’s a Lovecraftian science-horror novel about the wreckage of Saddam Hussein’s occult weapons program, private military companies, and what armies do with enemies they can’t kill.
When I started the Kickstarter to make Mask of the Other into an audiobook, I underestimated how long it would take ACX to check the files and approve them. But all that is in the past now! If you search my name on iTunes, you can find and purchase the full, unabridged audiobook of Mask of the Other, and at least the backers have been loving it.
You can purchase it right now over your internet box at Audible.com, or possibly even get it free by taking a trial membership. (I believe I get a bounty for people who sign up to buy my book as their first purchase, but don’t let that influence you.)
Not only that, but people like it!
The early adopters have gotten their copies, and their responses have been gratifyingly positive. If you have any interest in superheroes, supervillains, or smartass jailbirds trapped in a crazy world they never made, this could be the book for you.
Some SINNER-relevant links include the following:
A lovely in-depth review by Rachel Neumeier is a good first stop if you still aren’t clear on what the novel’s about or 100% sold on it.
Its Amazon page has more reviews and the opportunity to buy it for Kindle.
DriveThruFiction offers it in several formats for the same price.
If you crave the heft of a printed tome, you can order a print-on-demand version through Lulu.com.
There’s also a spiffy hardback, if that’s your preference.
Then, once you buy and read and enjoy it, you can make comments on its goodreads page.
Thanks again to everyone who backed it!
This was a long time time coming and, going by the reviews, worth the wait. BETTER ANGELS is my new supervillain RPG, out now courtesy of ARC DREAM publishing. The ARC DREAM site has a ton of promo material, art previews, links to those glowing reviews, and (most important) the opportunity to buy it. I’ll leave the heavy marketing at those links, but if you’ve ever wanted to twirl your mustache while cackling over a helpless do-gooder, you really owe it to yourself to check out BETTER ANGELS.
If you like rockets, time travel, cheap laughs or all of the above you can buy Dinosaurs… in Spaaace! from IPR, with the PDF bundled free if that sort of thing appeals to you. Customers who prefer electronic files can get it both from IPR and from RPGNOW.
If you have gotten sick of waiting on my intermittent updates here, I don’t blame you one bit. If you want to hear about my projects and updates via email, send me your address and I’ll put you on a notification list. Just between you, me and the Internet, there might be opportunities for some special offers on there, too.
If you don’t know the tragic story of EVERWAY, sit a spell and grab a hankie.
Once upon a time, Wizards of the Coast made huge, serious, coke-dealer sums on Magic: the Gathering and decided to hire the coolest, most brilliant, most innovative designer they could find to make an RPG for them. They picked Jonathan Tweet and the game he made was EVERWAY.
People complain that EVERWAY was too politically correct, and speaking as a guy whose published ouvre is perhaps littered with more sodomy jokes than are strictly necessary, they may have a point. But that minor flaw (if it is one) is more than overweighed by EVERWAY’s brilliance of concept, not to mention art that is just gob-smack stunning. No game since has looked this good, full stop.
EVERWAY was aggressively right-brain. Characters were developed by picking out images from a huge collection of the aforementioned gob-smack stunning art. Stats were quite sketchy. Task resolution was a draw from a deck of cards that worked essentially like the Tarot, and their impact was not numerical but pure, grade-a plot and tone. It was an end run around all the simulationist math that characterizes most gaming. (I’ve got nothing against simulationist math, but before EVERWAY, I’d just assumed that was How Gaming Was. Nuh uh.)
To support this game of hot hot plot-on-plot action, Tweet was allowed to hire his goofy camp follower to write the first sourcebook. That was me, and SPHEREWALKER was the first book that was cover-to-cover Stolze.
(Okay, it’s not true. There are entries in it that were written by the WotC staff. But not many.)
I’m not sure how WotC came to eject EVERWAY. I’ve heard stories, but I’m making an effort to keep this site bitterness-free (or at least bitterness-reduced) so I’ll just say that Rubicon Games got the license along with my book and eventually published it. I liked the cover but, in retrospect, there were better options – especially given the breathtaking quantity and quality of art they’d inherited with the game.
The book itself is a stat-free pile of ideas – organizations, monsters, characters, realms, theories, histories, arcane practices. I’d read The Dictionary of the Khazars and been really wowed by its nonlinear but interconnected structure. (That same influence cropped up in City of Lies, too.) I just came to the project with all the energy and unfettered enthusiasm of a newbie writer fanbone getting his first shot at a big publication.
Rubicon games published a few other EVERWAY supplements – an adventure I wrote calledWaves of Time was released as a CD-ROM, cheaper than printing it I guess. SPHEREWALKERreally impressed the hell out of some people, including Ken Hite, thus indirectly leading to my work for Trinity. I got paid in full at WotC rates, something I appreciate more in retrospect as I’ve come to understand how rare being paid in full at a good rate is.
Still, I can’t help but be a little disappointed. Very little of my work – Godwalker, UsagiYojimbo, all the editing and new material in the second edition of Unknown Armies – is as much an unalloyed work of love and enthusiasm. I guess I wish the market had loved it as much as I did.
Yet, as I write that, I find myself saying, ‘screw it’. Would I be happier if it’d sold phenomenally and kept Rubicon afloat for a few more years, at the price of radical changes to my vision (and maybe a tit-splayed cover)? I wouldn’t. It was a work for hire. I was told I’d make X dollars and I did. The book is good. I’m letting my regrets go… now.
(After Rubicon folded, a company called Gaslight Press bought the rights to EVERWAY andSPHEREWALKER. Near as I can tell, Gaslight is dead and the corpse ain’t even twitching. If anyone reading this knows what happened to the rights to EVERWAY and SPHEREWALKER,let me know… for old times’ sake.)