Uploaded some big high res files last night, and we should have some proofs later this week or so. Very exciting!

Can’t wait to see how these books look in print! More as the situation develops…

Since then I have become something of a dice snob. I only play those, and I don’t agree with other players who bring a hodgepodge of dice and play little attention to which ones they use. I’ll admit that I have a bias, but I think I would have it even without the history of my dice.

In an earlier blog post I talked about the adventure at Con of the North in which the nephilim barbarian, Arak, entered the gladiator arena outside of Tunis, then opened the combat with a critical miss. The crowd started booing him—aided by a PC who added to the cacophony—until he let loose with a series of swing that sent pieces of butchered hyenas flying into the crowd. Just this week in my home campaign we had a similar experience.

The heroes, having been recruited by a djinniyah to help rescue her lover from the City of Brass, had ventured across the elemental plane of fire to visit that location. (That was when they had encounters with a sphinx and a red dragon, as detailed in previous post.) Once inside the city, they discovered that the djinni was being held in a mine outside of town. The PC’s made their preparations, then popped in and attacked. Despite the fact that an efreeti, a fire giant, two ettins and some hell hounds were present, the PC’s made quick work of the opposition. They then fled to the nearby shore, where their ship was waiting to make a quick exit.

Feeling like things had been too easy until that point, I threw an elder fire elemental at them. That proved a lot tougher for them than I expected. The rogue couldn’t sneak attack it, the paladin couldn’t score critical hits and the wizard’s lightning bolts could only do half damage because the elemental always made its saving throws. That was why the rogue, in a moment of desperation, retrieved the efreeti’s greatsword and took a swing at the elemental. It had already been weakened by other tactics, but Reagan—because of non-proficiency and size penalties—needed to roll a twenty in order to hit it. Naturally, in the last round of the encounter, he did, and slew the beast. Once again, the dice played along to move the plot in a good direction.

Now the heroes are headed homeward aboard their galley, ready for the genies to plane shift them back to the Kingdoms of Legend. They have decided to aim for the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, knowing that the spell will miss its target by 5d100 miles. Here again I have to wonder: will the dice let them succeed without complications, or will they determine that a new adventure should occur?

“The Cold North” just hit the digital airwaves, and is now available in PDF. It joins “Knights of France” in the post-release, pre-print limbo, at least for a little while, until we wrap up the final details on “Sands of Destiny”. Check for it wherever fine PDFs are sold.

As some of the careful readers of this blog and listeners to the Radio IPG podcast know, Allen Drees Jr was appointed Kingdoms of Legend Line Developer two weeks ago. He will take over the reins after “Sands of Destiny” leaves the workshop and guide us through a period of rapid (at least for us) expansion in the product line. Our goal is to have more stuff released for our shared world setting, and still keep moving in a bunch of other areas. Al has been the editor on a number of projects already (most of them, in fact) and has helped with the development process on the others. With this new position, he’ll be taking on the task of working directly with writers, freeing me up to focus more intently on card games, marketing, and the rest of the business side of things.

Without further ado, I give you Al, in his own words.

***

Greetings Kingdom of Legend fans!
I am deeply humbled by Brent’s courage in asking me to take over the duties of the Kingdoms of Legend Line Developer. I look forward to working with all of our authors (both current and future) and I just wanted to take a few minutes to share my vision of the future for the Kingdoms of Legend (KoL).

For the rest of 2012 we’re going to focus on shorter, PDF-only products, which, unlike longer works, allow us to put out more KoL information faster—without sacrificing quality.

With this in mind, I am planning on focusing primarily on six or seven different PDF product lines for the rest of 2012 and probably into 2013. These product lines are (in random order): Pantheon, Kingdoms, Cities, Encounters, Adventures, Fiction, and Other.

The Pantheon line is all about the gods of KoL. We already released the first PDF in this series, called Timekeeping. Timekeeping created the foundation for the rest of the line which is going to flesh out the KoL pantheon. Each installment is going to detail three gods—except the one with Serapis, which is going to have four.

Kingdoms is kind of new, but not really. In the beginning, the “World Guide” provided a very high level summary of the campaign setting—including brief description for the countries throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia. We then released “Knights of France” and “The Cold North”, and we’re almost done with “Sands of Destiny”. Each of these books zoomed in on a particular region and provided more specific details for those areas. Unfortunately, there are quite a few countries which still haven’t been detailed—most notably (in my opinion) The Republic of the Archmage, The Holy Roman Empire, the Principality of Novgorod, and most of the nations of the old races (dwarves, elves, and gnomes). So, in order to correct this situation, I want to do this series of PDFs focusing on one specific country or kingdom at a time. Basically, these are just like the descriptions we did for each country in “Knights of France”, “The Cold North”, or “Sands of Destiny” but, instead of packaging an entire region into one long product, each Kingdoms PDF focuses on just one country at a time. With only 4-6 pages of content, we should be able to release these documents much more quickly and get a good start on fleshing out the rest of our world.

The Cities line is very similar to Kingdoms but, as you can probably guess, it is all about providing even greater detail for one specific city. These documents are going to have things like the city’s history, geography, people of interest, one or two specific interesting locations within the city, and stuff like that. My short list of cities for this product line include Paris, Rome, Palmyra, Alexandria, Novgorod, and some of the non-human cities.

For the Encounters line, we present a single encounter at three different Challenge Ratings. I want these encounters to utilize those interesting and unique antagonists people don’t see very often—usually because these monsters are difficult for the average GM to use easily. The different CRs allow a GM the flexibility to utilize whichever version works for their party at the moment.

The Adventures line is all about providing a fun and interesting four hour gaming session—whether at a gaming convention, a game day, or a home campaign. We provide six pregen PCs and a story with about four encounters.

Fiction is our foray into writing short stories set in the Kingdoms of Legend. No rules—just fun reading made available in PDF, epub, and mobi formats.

The Other category is for things like “Ultimate Treasure Fleet”—basically any cool thing we want to do that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

As I hope is obvious, my goal is to provide our fans with a lot more KoL content! Please let me (or Brent) know if you are interested in seeing a specific KoL location detailed in one of these PDFs—or if you want to join the team and help build the setting!

Sincerely,
Allen Drees Jr
KoL Line Developer

So we have covers, maps, and writing. Sounds like a completed book to me!

In related IPG news, Allen Drees, Jr. is now the Kingdoms of Legend Line Developer. He will be taking over much of the project coordination duties after Sands and Cold North leave the building. Watch this space for more info on the plans moving forward.

At the end of the previous campaign session, the heroes had been recruited by a djinniyah to undertake an expedition to the fabled City of Brass. Her goal was to seek out a lover who’d been captured by the efreet, and she’d heard of the heroes’ exploits through NPCs. For that reason the PCs found themselves, along with the crew of their Mediterranean galley, sailing on some unusual seas. Because of the necessary outfitting, we didn’t have a lot of time for encounters. I ran them through an attack by an ogre mage and his ogre crew, one that the heroes handily defeated. Continuing onward, they ran into a sphinx. Because we were running out of time, I decided to cut things short and to issue a challenge—the players should come prepared with riddles for the next session.

This brought up a curious situation. How should I resolve the conflict? While we could have used Intelligence checks of similar game mechanics to do so, that just didn’t seem right. The chapter from The Hobbit, “Riddles in the Dark,” has always been a favorite of mine, so I figured we’d actually challenge each other. Given that I use riddles with my students in class when there is extra time, I figured it could be a fair contest.

It turns out that I was wrong.

We ended up playing best three-out-of-five, and I, playing the sphinx, lost. It was fun, however, especially since the sphinx had wagered a phylactery of positive channeling against the party’s decanter of endless water. Afterward, I should add, the sphinx flew away and found a red dragon to sic on the PCs. All in all it made for a great session, with a contest of riddles and combat against a dragon. This felt like classic fantasy.

Listed below are the riddles that came into play. Check out this thread in the IPG forum to share your answers!

**

1. What is black inside red inside white inside green?

2. What thing is so delicate that, even by saying its name, you break it?

3. Feed me and I live; give me a drink and I die. What am I?

4. I’m thinking of two English words that have to do with fighting. Each has six letters, and the first three of one are the last three of the other. What are they?

5. Halo of water, tongue of wood ?Skin of stone, long I’ve stood. ?My fingers short reach to the sky ?Inside my heart men live and die.

6. Five hundred begins it, five hundred ends it, five in the middle is seen; first of all figures, the first of all letters, take up their stations between. Join all together, and then you will bring before you the name of an eminent king.

7. I am a wonderful help to women,
The hope of something to come. I harm
No citizen except my slayer.
Rooted I stand on a high bed.
I am shaggy below. Sometimes the beautiful
Peasant’s daughter, an eager-armed,
Proud woman grabs my body,
Rushes my red skin, holds me hard,
Claims my head. The curly-haired
Woman who catches me fast will feel
Our meeting. Her eye will be wet.

8. A moth ate songs–wolfed words!
That seemed a weird dish–that a worm
Should swallow, dumb thief in the dark,
The songs of a man, his chants of glory,
Their place of strength. That thief-guest
Was no wiser for having swallowed words.
What Am I?

In the next few days I will be adding the short story to a whole host of sites: iBooks (the iTunes bookstore), Google Play, the Amazon Kindle store, and more! If you have a favorite format for digital readers, let me know in the comments section.

You can see more of the IPG fiction released thus far here.

Cover art by Boleslav, originally used on the adventure module of the same name (you can find the adventure here).

Also released for sale is a new PDF entitled Kingdoms of Legend: Timekeeping. This document explores some of the background of the campaign setting and includes an illuminated calendar.