The Release With the successful conclusion and fulfillment of my Kickstarter, I am releasing How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox and The Isle of Pyade to the public on Friday, April 12th, during the livestream of the Random Party Generator at 8pm EDT. Special discount coupons will be available for those joining the live stream, along with a live drawing for at-cost print copies of both Blackmarsh and at-cost hardbacks of both books. The discount coupons will be active for one week after the show. Until they go public during the live stream you can monitor the Bat in the Attic storefront on DriveThr ..read more

 Happy New Year I wish everybody a Happy New Year! I have much to be thankful for in 2023, especially family, friends, and work. I want to thank everyone who supported my How to Make Sandbox Kickstarter. I appreciate the outpouring of support for my project. How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Because of my backers' generosity, I was able to increase the size of my art order. I commissioned 17 additional pieces from Rick Hershey of Fat Goblin Games. I also got back the cover art from Richard Luschek, who did an outstanding job! Once I get the interior pieces back I will be able to complete ..read more

The print version of Blackmarsh is now available again both in softcover and hardcover feature cover art by Richard Luschek. Many of you will know him from his work on various Harn products available from Columbia Games. The books are using the new digest size layout. The full map of Blackmarsh is still inside the book and the book fold has been taken into account for its presentation.  Softcover Digest edition - $6.99 Hardcover Digest edition - $11.99 Again appreciate the support of all of you have given me over the years and the kind words in your reviews ..read more

We are in the last 48 hours of my Kickstarter for the book about How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox. The level of support far exceeded what I expected from my Basic Rules for the Majestic Fantasy RPG Kickstarter. I am humbled and appreciative of the support that has been shown.  There is still time to sign up just click on the link below. The beta PDFs of both How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox and the Isle of Pyade are available to backers.  How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Kickstarter Because of the level of funding, I was able to upgrade my art budget and commission some pieces from Ric ..read more

How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Beta Layout I am pleased to share the first beta layout of How to Make the Fantasy Sandbox Kickstarter for my backers. Some of the art are placeholder pieces. I have been buying stock art over the years but there are gaps, particularly in pieces that depict various characters. Thanks to your generosity I can not only cover those gaps but also expand the amount of custom pieces I can order.  I want to give a shout-out to Fat Goblin Games, and The Forge Studios where I bought much of my art from.  They both have Patreons and I recommend them if you are lo ..read more

  How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Kickstarter Starting in 2009, I wrote a series of 24 posts on this blog covering the different aspects of creating a hexcrawl-formatted setting.  Over 150,000 views later I have finished the series. Along the way, many of you thanked me for writing the series and told me how it helped your own efforts. Now that the last post has been completed, I combined and rewrote these posts into a single 150-page book. I also consolidated the small fantasy setting I was using, the Isle of Pyade into its own document that you can drop into your own campaign. Ma ..read more

 Part XXIII  Index Page This is the twenty-fourth and last post in a series detailing the 34 steps I recommended for making a Fantasy Sandbox Campaign.  Today's post will cover steps 33 and 34.  33. Make up a rumor chart with 10 to 20 items that feeds the players into the encounter and plots you created above.  34. Identify major regions and create a random encounter chart for each (monsters, wildlife and NPCs)  To do this post, I had to go back and collect all the previous posts and consolidate them into a single document detailing the Isle of Piall.  ..read more

Douglas Cole, over at Gaming Ballistics, is in the last 24 hours of his latest Kickstarter campaign, "Best Supporting Actor". In the spirit of AD&D's Rogue Gallery, this compilation of NPCs is designed for use in your campaign for OSE or any classic D&D edition. Best Supporting Actors for OSE What sets Doug's work apart is his experience with SJ Games' The Fantasy Trip. TFT, both in the past and today, has a tradition of presenting interesting NPCs in a simple and easy-to-use format. With this Kickstarter, Doug applies his experience with TFT to one of the OSR's more popular systems ..read more

I understand everybody is tired of Wizard's drama despite the good news. I appreciate that once again you have taken the time to read my post and hope the following is informative and useful. Friday afternoon, Wizards of the Coast using DnD Beyond announced this. The hobby and industry resounding NO! worked! With results far better than expected with the entirety of the 5e 5.1 SRD released under the CC-BY 4.0 license. The link is below. SRD 5.1-CC Saying No! The numbers were pretty clear even for an Internet survey. 88% do not want to publish TTRPG content under OGL 1.2. 90% would have to ..read more

For those who don't know, there is rarely a day that doesn't go by when somebody doesn't download a free copy of Blackmarsh from DriveThruRPG. Over 13,000 since its release in 2011.  Each order is accompanied by an order number. To date, this has meant I had a Blackmarsh order come in on the January 1st. So starting around 2015, I have been tracking the Order # in a spreadsheet.  One of my older posts doing this in 2015. Another from two years ago. The idea here is that by tracking the January 1st order number we can get a sense of the relative increase (or decrease) in DriveThr ..read more