The Arcane Underground

The new Dark Passion is done and going to the printer. We added four new pieces of art for the four new character archetypes, re-commissioned three of the pieces, and colorized everything else. The book finally has the punch I wanted it to have.

Here are a few preview pieces. The one on the left is the Congregation Medium template and the one on the right is the Cult Witch template. I hope you dig them as much as I do!

The revamped version of Dark Passions goes to the printer end of this week for a January release. It's a way cooler book than it's ever been.

I've been receiving the final version of the colorized art and the book takes on a whole different character now that it's all in color. The fiction spreads have changed to match the new Core Book and Vade Mecum. And the big beauty is that I got rid of those reference sheets in the back (which were intended to be in an accordion fold reference thing, but that's a whole other story) and instead I added whole appendix on creating cultist characters and running cultist games. I've written advice on playing cult characters, added the Congregation Medium Asset and the Empty Drawback, as well as four new profession templates which include Congregation Medium, Cult Provocateur, Cult Svengali, and Cult Witch. I've also added a Storyguide section with themes to keep in mind and three hooks for cultist characters.

In my opinion, it's this appendix that makes the book finally complete. Plus, it added four new pieces of really cool art to the book.

So I am working on a new version of Dark Passions that supposed to be out in January. Good news. I love this book and don't feel that the black and white edition entirely did it justice. It's still the book that people have both advised against reading before you go to bed and that early readers called me to tell me they were queasy. Perfect. Read More...

Here's one of my favorite pieces from Dark Passions (by Bruno Werneck). It shows a stylized version of a Deep One city, as one might experience under the drugged hallucinations induced by the insidious Church of All.

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Of those who've seen Dark Passions, the response to the Empty has been pretty much the same. Cool. Sick.

What are they? In a nutshell, take a person who has fallen into utter despair and hopelessness (not necessarily a hard thing in the Strange Aeon), someone who has become hollow on the inside. Then have some thing ever so gently reach inside of them and destroy whatever humanity is left inside them and set up shop in its place. Now you have a person who has succumbed to the darkness. Read More...

In this section, I will be blogging about anything related to the material covered in Dark Passions. Read More...

So Dark Passions is at the printer for real. It's been there for a while, but we've had to figure out whether the whole thing was going to be in color or not. We've opted for black & white after looking at the profit numbers, because we are a start-up that needs capital to keep all of our lovely artists happy.

This book in terms of manufacturing has had its own challenges. Read More...