36 units sold on day one

Not big Kickstarter-type numbers or anything but still pretty personally gratifying to me, because 1) it'a more copies than the first book sold on its first day, 2) it was enough to get me at least briefly into the Top 20 at DriveThruRPG, and 3) this earned me enough to clear my production costs. So even if I never sell another unit of this at least I won’t have lost any money on it. And that means from here on out it’s all profit, baby!

Also, a thread about the book was created at Dragonsfoot for people to share their thoughts and reactions and plans for modifying and using the content in their own games, and to ask me questions and berate me for everything they think I did wrong or stupidly. Follow this link directly to the specific thread so you don't get accidentally pulled into an acrimonious debate about the 1E initiative rules or demi-human level limits ;) 

Brink of Calamity live for sale!

As of about 15 minutes ago Brink of Calamity is finally live for sale at DriveThruRPG in both (softcover) print and pdf versions. Note that DriveThruRPG is increasingly their print costs substantially on April 1st and the price of the print version of this book will go up by $3 to compensate (from $22 to $25), so if you're planning to buy the print version and want to save $3 you should place your order today, tomorrow, or Monday at the latest.

Since the adventure assumes you're using the rules and content from The Heroic Legendarium anyone who doesn't already have that should consider buying the pdf bundle that includes both titles at a substantial discount over buying them separately.

This book has been long in gestation and I had doubts at several points whether I would ever get it across the finish line (and I suspect some of you readers did as well) but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out and hope people who read about the Perlammo Salt Mines on Prince of Nothing's blog way back in September 2022 will consider it to have been worth the wait. 

Also, while I'm here, I wanted to note for posterity that at some point last fall The Heroic Legendarium became a Gold bestseller at DriveThruRPG (meaning over 500 paid sales on their platform), which is pretty nice. I'm surprised by how it continues to sell, and actually sells as many or more copies per month now as it was 2 years ago, which I can only assume is coming 100% from positive word of mouth because I'm certainly not doing anything to promote it.

Brink of Calamity proofs ordered

Hello, blog family. It’s been a minute. I’m happy to inform you all that I’ve just ordered a proof copy of Brink of Calamity from DriveThruRPG. When I receive it, assuming it doesn’t look like total ass, it will go live for sale. About 18 months later than originally intended but, hey, we all do our best. 

It’s 180 pages (about 30 of which are a revised/expanded version of Melonath Falls, the rest new) and will be $14.99 in pdf or $21.99 for softcover print (+ pdf for nothing extra - if you get the print version you’ll also want the pdf to print out table copies of the maps because they’re in the back of the book so using them in play would be a hassle). It includes all of the art Gabor Lux commissioned for the Hungarian-language version of Melonath Falls plus a bunch of PD stuff and some material from my late father’s sketchbooks but nothing AI-generated. About half of the maps (including a really beautiful wilderness map) were drawn by Sean Stone, the rest are by me (alas) - the dungeon maps were rendered with DungeonScrawl but the town and building maps and dungeon cross-sections are scans of my hand-drawn originals, which will hopefully be at least legible (we’ll see when the proof arrives). 

The playtest campaign is still going (session #29 coming up next week; the PCs are mostly 5th & 6th level now) so there’s a LOT to play through here, but hopefully there’s enough modular stuff that people who don’t want to commit to running the entire campaign will be able to strip-mine out for their own games. 

I put a lot of love and effort into writing and producing this thing and am pretty proud of how it turned out and excited that it’s so close to the finish line. I hope you’ll buy it when it goes live and enjoy reading and playing it. 

Update 2/6/25: the proof copy arrived. The good news is that 99% of it looks great - all of the art rendered really well, the inner margin is tight but not fatally so, the formatting looks decent. The bad news is that, as I feared, the hand-drawn maps aren’t legible so they will need to be redone - at least re-scanned, possibly re-drawn - and then the whole thing needs to go back through the upload and approval process so unfortunately it’s probably not going to go live for sake for another month or so. Ugh. Sorry if I got people’s hopes up. I was really hoping it would come out okay but it didn’t.