Many, many thanks to everyone who has bought one of our books!

You can now download a free 9-page PDF preview of Odyssey that includes the cover, table of contents, introduction, and opening section. This should give you a good idea of what topics the book covers and how it approaches them.

The initial announcement of Odyssey also offers some info on the book as well as Q&A in the comments. We’ll be doing another content preview as launch day nears. Stay tuned!

Opening with a foreword by RPG industry legend Kenneth Hite, Odyssey is, to our knowledge, the first book of its kind. It offers up 200 pages of system-neutral advice on starting, managing, and ending campaigns for game masters of all stripes and experience levels.

Tell me more!

You may have guessed from the title that Odyssey has a lot in common with Never Unprepared apart from being a system-neutral GMing book. You don’t need one to enjoy the other, but Odyssey naturally complements Never Unprepared. If you like Never Unprepared, I suspect you’ll also enjoy Odyssey.

Our previous three books have sold over 8,000 copies, and Phil Vecchione’s Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep is currently nominated for a 2013 Origins Award for Best Game-Related Publication. Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for any Roleplaying Game, released in 2011, won the 2012 gold ENnie Award for Best Aid/Accessory. Never Unprepared and our first book, 2010′s Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, are among the top 65 out of more than 28,000 products on DriveThruRPG; Masks is in the top 250. Odyssey is a continuation of our commitment to provide GMs all over the world with quality system-neutral advice.

We anticipate opening preorders for Odyssey in early June and shipping out preorders in July. (There are a couple details to nail down before we pick a launch date.) The book is currently getting a final proofread, and I still need to write the back cover copy, but apart from that it’s done. As with past preorders, if you preorder Odyssey you’ll immediately receive the book in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI form.

I’ll be posting a more previews throughout May, so stay tuned!

Show me more!

Illustrated by Avery Liell-Kok, designed by Darren Hardy, and art directed by John Arcadian, here’s Odyssey’s front cover:

Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep, by Phil Vecchione, has been nominated for a 2013 Origins Award for Best Game-Related Publication!

To say that my jaw dropped when I saw this would be an understatement of the first order.

Many congrats to Phil, and to all of the nominees!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to change my pants.

And maybe go lie down.

Backers of the Kickstarter campaign for Realm Works will be able to access Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, and Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters within Realm Works for free.

What’s Realm Works?

Realm Works is a system-neutral tool that enables GMs and players to manage campaigns in a streamlined yet comprehensive way, and by “comprehensive” I mean it does so much that it’s hard to describe it succinctly. Two of the authors of Gnome Stew, Phil Vecchione and Matthew Neagley, got a sneak peek at Realm Works from the developers, and they were so impressed that we closed this licensing deal not long after their demo. (Phil, Matt, and I are also backers of the Realm Works Kickstarter — when it comes to GMing, we put our money where our mouths are.)

The heart of Realm Works is a relational database specific to your campaign, which gives you wiki features like categories (predetermined or custom-made) and automatic hyperlinking between entries, but it’s more than a wiki. Realm Works also offers link webs (maps of how entries relate to each other), timelines of your campaign’s history, relationship webs showing connections between NPCs, the ability to reveal select bits of information to your players, and flows that allow you to create plots, locations, and events and connect them to one another. It also accepts files from other applications, making it a true one-stop shop for campaign management.

Like our books for GMs, we think this is a unique tool that will help you have more fun at the gaming table. Lone Wolf Development has a great track record as a company, offering well-known software tools for gamers like Hero Lab and Army Builder, and we’re confident that Realm Works is going to rock. Combining our system-neutral books for GMs with their campaign management tools makes a lot of sense, and we think the combination will help GMs have more fun at the gaming table.

Get our books for free

If you back the Realm Works Kickstarter, which ends February 24, or if you’re already a backer, you can get our content for free by backing at the $35 level (Never Unprepared), the $50 level (Masks + Never Unprepared), or the $65 level (Masks + Never Unprepared + Eureka). Our content will also be available for purchase in Realm Works after it’s released; we expect the final prices will match those of our PDFs: $9.95 for Never Unprepared, $16.95 each for Masks and Eureka.

If you like the sound of Realm Works combined with Masks, Never Unprepared, and Eureka, backing the Kickstarter is a great way to get all of these tools together in one place for an excellent price.

On a personal note, this is also a big milestone for Engine Publishing. The company is less than four years old, we’ve taken all sorts of gambles by producing material for GMs that some in the industry told us would never sell, and back when we published our first book we never imagined we’d be licensing our content to another company for inclusion in their software. It’s humbling and fantastic and a bit surreal all at the same time. Many thanks to everyone who has supported us and our work, and I hope you’ll check out Realm Works.

The short version is that 2012 was the best year in company history. We sold 4,255 books in 2012, as compared to 2,863 for 2010 (Jun-Dec) and 2011 combined. This was due to a number of factors:

• The release of our fastest-selling book yet, Never Unprepared
• Our partnership with the Tabletop Forge Kickstarter (which resulted in 644 sales)
• The success of our 2011 release, Masks, which won a Gold ENnie Award
• The logical boost to sales that comes from having three products available instead of one or two, as well as bundling those products at a discount
• Having a history of producing well-reviewed, well-received products
• And, at the risk of sounding like I’m bragging (which I’m not), the fact that Engine Publishing and the authors of Gnome Stew have fans who support our efforts

That we have fans still feels strange to me. This is a small, young company with a somewhat non-mainstream product line, and I’m just not used to the idea that we have fans — it’s something I never expected. I don’t, and never will, take having fans for granted. My thanks to everyone who has ever bought one of our books!

Here’s the numbers in screenshots and a pretty graph — not just for 2012, but for our lifetime sales, which now stand at a mind-boggling-to-me 7,118 products sold.

Every book is discounted, making this a great time to pick them up if you’ve been on the fence, but I’d like to draw your attention to the package deals. These are 20% off every day as a thank-you for buying more than one book, but now they’re an even better deal: $24.95 for all three of our books in PDF, or $62.95 for all three books in print.

Many thanks to Ville for creating the matrix — that’s really the crown jewel of the Free Downloads page. It extends the functionality of Eureka in a neat direction, and it’s really nicely done.

Voting for the winners is open until October 31. The voting booth is on RPGGeek, as are the voting instructions. Unfortunately, voting isn’t open to everyone, only to RPGGeek members who have an avatar or are supporters of RPGGeek. If that’s you and you’re so inclined, I hope you’ll consider voting for Masks and Never Unprepared.

Here’s the complete list of nominees, and may I just say holy shit are we in fantastic company:

Game of the Year

• 13th Age
• Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
• Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game
• Dungeon World
• Hollowpoint
• Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
• Microscope
• Monsterhearts
• Night’s Black Agents
• The One Ring

Best Artwork & Presentation

• Ashen Stars
• Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
• Imperial Histories
• Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: Basic Game
• Mutants & Masterminds Hero’s Handbook
• Night’s Black Agents
• The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box
• Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition
• Savage Worlds Deluxe

Best Supplement

• Bookhounds of London Limited Edition Package
• Cthulhu by Gaslight 3rd Edition
• Fiasco Companion
• Imperial Histories
• Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game
• Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Advanced Race Guide
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary Box
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box
• Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition

Best Podcast

• 3.5 Private Sanctuary
• Actual People, Actual Play
• The Canon Puncture Show
• The D6 Generation – Dice Are Our Vice
• Fear the Boot
• The Jank Cast
• Jennisodes
• Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff
• This Just In…From Gen Con!
• The Walking Eye Podcast

Congratulations to all of the nominees!

Here’s what he had to say after getting back:

Queen City Conquest was awesome! I ran my first two Con games there, and it was a ton of fun. The Engine Pack we donated to the charity auction helped to raise $600 for Children’s Hospital in Buffalo. That money was used to buy things for the hospital, in terms of games and such for the common areas on the hospital floors.

Providing this kind of support to cons, charity auctions, contests, and the like is something Engine Publishing and the teams behind our books enjoy doing, and I’m thrilled at how this particular event turned out. We support events like this more or less as often as we’re asked to, as long as the event is gaming-related. We do it because it’s the right thing to do, not for PR, and I love it when it goes well.

If you’d like to inquire about prize support for your event, check out our Prize Support for Gaming Events page.