The Arcane Underground

You may have heard it. Topps has shut down WizKids wholesale. And yes, our publisher's primary bread and butter as of right now are Shadowrun and Battletech, both licensed from WizKids.

The goods news is that nothing will be changing in the short term. Catalyst Game Labs are a group of peeps who aren't stupid and their contract covers their butt.

No need to panic. Please return your seats to their upright and locked position.

Listen, I am a big proponent of taking a setting and making it your own. It is, in my opinion, essential to get yourself invested in any game you're playing. I designed CthulhuTech to be flexible so that you can do just that – within the reasonable parameters created by the setting.

But really, you bought the game, so play it however the heck you want. Just don't expect other players to agree with your changes, especially if they go against the published rules or the spirit of the setting and don't be offended when they don't agree with you. Read More...

So I created a survey today to find out your opinions of this blog. Please take a couple minutes to answer the five questions so I can know better how to make this blog useful for you.

Finally. The Catalyst Game Labs edition of the CthulhuTech Core Book and Vade Mecum are on shelves. What a relief. These editions are what I always wanted them to look like. Even though the electronic version of the book are easier to search when we're gaming, I still use my hard copies because they are more beautiful and fun to hold.

If you're waiting to go buy your copy, don't wait around and see. Do it now. Catalyst is all about keeping the books in print. The new edition of Dark Passions goes to press on Friday for a January release. I've been writing in Damnation View every day because that's due to come out in April. The line is real and it is being supported and now is the time to jump in with both feet.

Yes, I have heard through the grapevine that the Catalyst editions of both the Core Book and Vade Mecum are in the country and shipping to distributors. We've put the official release date at the third week in October, but it might be even earlier. Brilliant. Can't wait to have this edition in regular distribution and can't wait to hear what you guys think of it.

Why ethereal? Because it hasn't been approved by Catalyst officially yet. But I wanted to leak a little info here anyways. Remember, this all may change, but here's hoping not.

So what have we got planned for rest of 2008 and 2009? More CthulhuTech obviously: Read More...

Well, my friends, I am finally home (for at least a few days) from the chaos of the last month and a half.

The end of July was ComicCon in San Diego, which is always nuts. 160,000 people crammed into downtown San Diego with probably a quarter of them all on the exhibitor hall floor at any given time. Don't dare try and stop to look at anything – you may end up consumed by the mob. That isn't to say I didn't succumb. Dan Brereton was there and I am a sucker for the Nocturnals, so he got a couple of my hard earned dollars. But that's not why I was there. I was there to have meetings to make a CthulhuTech comic book real. It looks like we will be doing comic books sometime next year, the only question being our publisher. We have options and are pushing to have more options, so we'll see. Read More...

I haven't posted anything here in a while, for several reasons.

The first is that the Core Book has been out of print for more than six months. This is due to a bunch of reasons, most of which required my attention. Which rolled into us switching publishers, which required me to redo a bunch of stuff in all of our books. And it's this publisher change that it having me post again. (For the full story, go to the official web-site.) Read More...

So I've added categories to the posts as well as RSS for both posts and comments. You'll find both underneath the page tabs on the right side of the page.

Piracy. What can you say about it? It's so pervasive in today's electronic world. The reason this is on my mind is because a group of pirates on the internet have declared war on CthulhuTech and have decided that despite the hard work and personal money I've put into the project that everyone should have it for free.

You've probably heard it all before, but let me lay it out in simple terms that most pirates just don't get. Read More...

A pirate on the internet recently said, and I paraphrase, "I hope the guys who make CthulhuTech go out of business so that it will be open source."

Not happening. That's not the way copyright law works. Unless I voluntarily give up or sell the rights to CthulhuTech, I own the intellectual property until I die and then some. Just because a publisher goes out of business or isn't doing anything with a property doesn't mean it's public domain. Somebody still owns it.