Monday, August 31, 2015

NOD (and other news)

John Stater's Land of Nod blog, and specifically his self-published, one-author, vanity fanzine NOD, were what really got me into the OSR fold and self-publishing. I don't know if he doesn't sleep, or has a really boring job, but his output, month after month and year after year, has been amazing and inspiring.

Mini-games, hex crawls, variant OSR-games (Pars Fortuna being the direct inspiration for issue #2 of Secrets and the Feathered Realm), full-on OSR/3e hybrid rulesets (Blood & Treasure), random tables, and more. PLUS 26 issues and counting of NOD.

But.

(There's always a but.)

Sales, apparently, are slumping.

The bad news. If sales don't improve, NOD is done and he'll retool to focus on discrete supplements.  (I still get my fix, but...differently.)

The good news. For the time being, he's accepting submissions for NOD.

Am I interested?

That's a really stupid question.

So. If you like NOD, buy it, contribute, or tell your friends. If you haven't read NOD, issues #1 and #6 are free. If you want something different, I recommend Pars Fortuna and Bloody Basic/Mother Goose Edition. (I'd recommend all of them, but I haven't gotten all of them yet - there's also the basic Bloody Basic; the Sinew & Steel Edition; and the Modern Edition. I think the Weird Fantasy Edition is upcoming - I'm REALLY looking forward to that.)

http://matt-landofnod.blogspot.com/


In other news...

I've got a job. A real job, that pays real money, and consumes a lot of time. Also, it's summer, and I don't write much in the summer. So that's that.

I am going to reprint Secrets 1 & Secrets 2 shortly. I've been paying off bills and buying necessaries (shoes, people), but reprints are on the agenda. I've got material for Secrets 3, but it needs additional work. The date for that is "someday".

I bought 5e. It's very nice. It's gathering dust on my shelf because I couldn't sustain the energy of running a campaign, and WotC's release plan & schedule hasn't excited me. Big adventures aren't my thing. I did write up a number of monsters (possibly for Secrets 3) in a 5e-compatible format, but I'm unsure of how to include it. Eats up page space.

Strange Races sells approximately 1 issue/month on RPG Now. Omens & Artifacts has sold 1 issue in the last 6 months, I think. Basic Illusionist sells 25-30 per month pretty steadily. I'm OK with it, considering I released them all simultaneously last November.

That's it. Go buy NOD.


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