Of Ravens and Ash

or Flirtin' With Disaster

On the whole, I try to keep my mouth shut. When controversy arises (4E, anyone?) it's time to keep your head down and focus on the writing. 

This has its strengths and weaknesses --- Goodman Games gets less attention than other third-party publishers, even though our catalogs for 3.5 and 4E stand out as consistent best sellers. Let the other third party publishers make the headlines, we'll make the adventures. 

But sometimes, just sometimes, you have to geek out.

Enter the Death Dealer.

It's tough to explain how excited I am about this project. When I do try to touch on it, I'm left sounding like I don't care about my other recent works, which isn't the case at all. Sellswords has been (favorably) compared to the original Leiber stores. Dragora's Dungeon has been reviewed as "the basis for a Conan novel." How can I not love these, when people are receiving them exactly as I intended? 

So yeah, I love the first wave of DCC/Master Dungeon adventures. Call them 11s on a scale of 1 to 10. 

Death Dealer is just an order of magnitude cooler. 

For the first time, Goodman Games will be adding, substantially I hope, to the body of work that is 4E. The DCCs showed folks how to make a dungeon crawl a story again. The Master Dungeons took that story out of the dungeon and set it on a larger stage. 

Death Dealer is doing something entirely different. My goal is to ensure that no DD adventure is ever mistaken for another iteration of Dungeons and Dragons. It needs to have a world, theme and style all its own. 

Will it work? I have no idea. Will gamers receive them with the sort of enthusiasm as the DCCs? No clue. Will it be a total flop? Hope not. 

The good news is that the world and story are backed by the amazing folks at Image. Fotos and Jones did a great job on the comic.  The GREAT news is that it has a Frazetta cover, perhaps the most iconic fantasy painting of all time. And least important, I felt exactly the same way when I finished off the first Master Dungeon, not knowing, for good or for ill, if the adventure would be a success or not. So this is familiar ground, the usual Artist's Fear. 

But that's all for the future, at least 3 months from now. Right now I'm just stoked as all hell to be adding to the world of the Death Dealer. It's alive, in a way I haven't enjoyed in a while.

 

Heck, I might even download some Molly Hatchet, just for kicks.   

//H