Business! Anxiety! Oryx!
Hello lovely people!
Welcome to the inaugural Rowan, Rook & Decard email! Thanks for subscribing. Here’s what’s happened with us this month...
NOTED INDIE LUMINARY GRANT HOWITT WINS 200-WORD RPG CONTEST
The tremendously handsome Grant Howitt (who may or may not be writing this email) was one of the top-place finalists in the yearly 200-word RPG contest run by David Schirduan. If you want to take a look at his winning entry, MECHANICAL ORYX (in which you play a sort of post-apocalyptic robot antelope who helps people grow fruit), you can view it on the official site - or check out some of the 700 other entries!
WE’RE A BUSINESS NOW
We’re fully incorporated, and we have business cards and a bank account and official titles and everything. What that means is that it’s a lot easier to stick to our core tenets and pay everyone involved - from artists, to proofreaders, to Chris and Grant who write the books, etc.
JUSTIFIED ANXIETY
Hail, inhabitant! Welcome to THE COMPLEX, a fun and healthy underground utopia run by COMPANION MACHINE, a non-malfunctioning and ceaselessly fair artificial intelligence. As an AGENT, it’s your job to track down SOCIALISTS and ABERRANTS who threaten the safety of the complex. Stay ready! Don’t trust anyone! And keep your laser close by!
Justified Anxiety is a free one-page RPG by Grant Howitt (co-author of Paranoia, as it happens) which is a rules-light homage to certain futuristic comedy roleplaying games of which you may be aware. We’ll be releasing it on the site on Friday. If you’d like to support Grant in his work (and get early access to the games, or other benefits such as physical copies, exclusive rules and custom art) then check out his patreon .
THE SPIRE UPDATE
The Spire, our upcoming game of fantasy subterfuge and rebellion, is coming to Kickstarter in July. We’ve been playtesting it for a while now, and we’re really happy with the way the rules-set is progressing (meaning that our fifteenth rewrite is our final one!). We’ll be releasing the playtest rules publicly to backers of the Kickstarter, so if you’d like to start playing right away, you can do that as soon as we launch.
(We’ll also have a Discord channel where you can come and tell us how your game is going, and deliver feedback on any rules queries, because that’d be super-useful if you did that.)
Adrian Stone has delivered the rough draft of the cover, which is exciting!
We’ve been looking at which printers to use this time around - we’ve used Lightning Source for our last two Kickstarters, and while their print quality was fine at A5 size, it left something to be desired when we made the shift to A4. As such, we’re talking with Belmont - the company who do the printing for Games Workshop - to work out if we can use them instead.
Although it’s more expensive per unit, we’re really keen to make a high-quality book that’ll last for years and really show off Adi’s beautiful art. We hope you agree with us!
HEARTY DICE FRIENDS
Chris and Grant have been recording extra episodes of Hearty Dice Friends all week to fill in the gap coming up where Grant’s off to the north of England for a few weeks, where’s there’s no internet, but only wolves. If you like listening to the boys goof off, check out their Patreon - which, incidentally, also lets Chris eat food on occasion! So that’s good.
Backers also get access to our HDF discord channel, where we hang out basically all the time and chat about… well, honestly, it’s mainly roleplaying games. But in a fun way.
UK GAMES EXPO
Hey! Want to meet us in person? Of course you do, we’re fabulous. We’re going to be at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham next week on Friday 2nd June, handing out those aforementioned business cards and hustling as hard as we can. If you want to come along and chat about games, drop us an email and we’ll do our best to meet up with you!
BYE
That’s it! That’s all the news that’s fit to… email.
Much love,
The Mysterious and Indomitable Board of Directors at Rowan, Rook & Decard