Dragonmeet left me relatively alienated and thinking a lot about my ‘career’, such as it is.
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| Sir John Soanes House was pretty great |
I don’t think I can really call myself a ‘gamer’ any more, nor do I think it likely I will have any very huge success. I do still love writing and making things, so will continue to do that, but I’m guesstimating that in the future my print runs will be around 1,000 copies. More of a Small Press for Weird Fiction.
Here is everything I have coming up;
Queen Mab’s Palace
A fully, and excellently, illustrated novel, derived from an adventure that became too complex to complete. The last and final art has been completed and numerous drafts have been considered. The next draft will be the one we take to print and I hope that printing takes place in January 2026. (The ideas behind this date from 2021!!, good god!)
We only have enough to print 1,000 copies and 500 of those are for backers so look out if you want one.
Knights of the Snail - Book One
Another novel. A long, long time ago I produced one or two stories based around the concept of Snail Knights. (You can read them here.) People seemed to like them so I tried to keep going. I developed the idea for a highly-interlaced book make up of twenty seperate short stories, each telling the tale of a different Knight.
Then, in the middle of the third story, I got utterly stuck, had a meltdown and put them aside. That was ten years ago.
That was how things stayed until around March this year when someone persuaded me to look at them again. I dug back into the Snail Knights and managed to complete the first five stories, the first two, the Tales of Sir Bird Spiralling and Sir Duno Chrime, have not changed. Added are the Tales of Sir Babbling, Sir Lucent Void and Sir Whirl.
Each story is meant to be of a very different character, and they got longer and more complicated as they went on. Book One is about 115,000 words, so a bit longer than Queen Mab’s Palace will be.
I will try to crowdfund the first book of KotS in 2026, hopefully after the early-year malaise has passed. The book is written but as you know, artists are mute, savage beasts and cannot be controlled.
The savage beast producing art for Knights of the Snail will be Amanda Lee
Hopefully the crowdfund will be popular, if it is I will try to set it up so that the more funding we get the more art Amanda makes (of course this will end up taking even more time.)
Hopefully KotS Book One will be both funded and printed in 2026 and if people like it, and it makes money, I will start work on Book Two.
Veins of the Earth ReDux
The gargantuan VotE-ReDo is still grinding forth. I am trying to re-write everything both to fill in gaps in the first book and also to make the whole thing more generally useable. You may have seen my development blogs on the Substack and here.
It will be slow, but, with Mab done and no more interruptions from Snail Knights, this can go back to the top of the list. I don’t know when it will be ‘finished’ but hopefully text complete at least in 2026.
This project will happen, it just takes time, (and no more interruptions).
I wonder if this will actually do well at all in Crowdfunding. In general, people quite like being sold the same thing twice, (strangely), but I also feel very much like yesterdays man. We will see.
Unnamed Scrap Princess Project
A project of various horrific and/or unbelievable dimensions and qualities may or may not exist. Various horrible Things may have been produced for it, various words may have been appended to the Things. Certainly something is or may not be happening.
Pig Seekers
A very wafty, wavy may-or-may-not happen project that is nevertheless technically in the planning stages. This is intended to be another book, hopefully with Tom Kemp, hopefully a bit like (though not a direct sequel to) Gackling Moon.
A book of trading caravans, gunsmoke and conspirital chromatic magic set in a monochrome fantasy Afghanistan. (Taken slightly from ‘Balach’, the first setting I ever imagined on my blog). The visible story is about learning the strange monochromatic culture and heaving your pack beasts into yet another valley with yet another peculiar ecology/government/tribe to trade yet more melons.
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| by Seamus Murphy |
The under-story is a leveless magical system based around Pigments; stolen a little from Witch Hat Atelier; the only colours in this land are illegal and form the basis of reality-warping magic that everyone denies (though actually literally everyone is a secret Chromophile and somehow involved in the magical pigment trade). If you have the right ink, and know the right signs, anyone who can draw can cast spells (with complex embodied effects); of course this is all totally wrong and everyone is against it (50% of the nations GDP comes from the trade).
The PC’s will be ‘Pig Seekers’ secretly or otherwise, playing at trading while secretly searching out the signs and pigments that enable spellcraft. To use them, or to destroy, and thus restore the Monochrome beauty of the Real? Probably all of the PCs have different motivations and levels of knowledge so this might turn into a ‘Conspiracy’ style intra-party explosion. (Of course you need to understand the Pigments in order to combat them. That’s why I personally will be researching them. (Could it be that the creation of these pigments is the very reason the land is Monocrhome, and that these two utterly opposed world-views actually secretly support each other???)
A simple trading system, a magic system and the subtleties of a monochrome reality. Will this end up with me ripping off Chris McDowall again somehow? Massively overextending myself and having a breakdown? Yes probably.
No idea if this will happen!
Broken Fire Regime, Parts Two and Three
Literally triples of people have been asking about the always-intended and largely-written sequels to ‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’.
If I ever manage to actually get through the above, I will return to the world of Broken Fire Regime with the intention of producing..... a basic PDF! Or a pair of them really.
VERY basic. Functional. Cheap. I will produce the (much larger, and intended ‘Main Part’ Frictionless Blue Glass, and then the final difficult and weird part Palaces of Fire.
These will exist as simple ‘playtest’ PDF’s for the literal dozens of fans who want to know where I was going with all this.
Beyond..
Who knows. I would like to complete the intended ‘Elemental Quartet’ of adventures before I die; so Earth (DCO and VotE), Fire (Broken Fire Regime), then Air (Littoral Storm Corsairs) and finally Water (Cold Pelagic Maze).
If people like Snail Knights then I would like to finish all four books to make one Grand Saga.
Beyond that, I have no particular plans.
Lastly;
The False Machine CHRISTMAS SALE is still on!
And will be till Christmas eve. Though if you want to order stuff to the U.S., now is pretty much the latest you can do that.
Just enter the code HOHOHO at checkout for FIFTY PER CENT OFF EVERYTHING!
Plus, if anyone likes the Vampires from Age of Sigmar, I got a bunch up on eBay at the moment. LINK.
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