Last week I was talking to James (in a conversation that will soon be available) and I said "Well you can have the conservative argument against free speech or you can have Black Sabbath and the OSR made its choice long ago."
In other news, kids, there's product.
Here's a video:
Nebulith is a new far-eastern setting, several years in the making, with all the things that implies: martial arts, samurai, ninjas, katanas--but also a lot of twists brought to the table by my collaborator, Alex Hopson, who wanted to make a setting based on his home, in Okinawa--and based on a very cool idea: a miles-high plume of smoke from one of the island's volcanic peaks has been frozen into stone, colonized by creatures, and that's where a massive dungeon is. Alex enlisted native Okinawan friends and his wife's family (locals) to help keep us honest about Okinawan culture.Personally, I worked hard on two things in particular :
First, to present samurai, ninjas, martial-arts et al with genuine new playable depth but do it in a way that did not complicate the game past what old school players want in an exploration-heavy game where a new PC can fit on a 3x5 card. To this end I made a lot of random level-up tables (like this --and what's in Frostbitten and Mutilated and Red & Pleasant) and designed modular rules which made wu-xia style combat blend into standard old school play.
We playtested the new classes (Samurai, ninja, pirate, karate master, kijimuna hunters--Okinawan elves-- and the local spellcasting women of Okinawa--the Yuta) against western equivalents in a series of extremely fun playtests and it seemed to work out very well.
The second challenge was to make the characters, cities, dungeons, castles and creatures of our little world of Awa-Nikko look as badass to you as it did in our head.
I hope I managed it.
As for Red & Pleasant Land--it's the Alice-In-Wonderland-But-Vampires setting which sold so many copies it was the first product to get Lamentations of the Flame Princess out of debt and won so many awards the people mad about it all decided to lie about rape. I decided to sue some of them and that worked--at which point Molly at Fierce Ponies decided to reprint it.
These are uncompromised works, both made with absolutely no attention to what the market wants or whether it'd please anyone else. We made the books we wanted to for the games we want to play.
If you support them loudly and in public, we can keep doing that.
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