Now, you\u2019ve probably heard me whinging about the personal troubles that befell us in the last few months of 2012. Hurricane Sandy and then illnesses felled Todd Shearer, the artist for Better Angels<\/em>, and we had to get new artists on board; and then a holiday plumbing disaster overturned my own house and office. Enough of that! Time to get to work.<\/p>\n This week Jessica Hopkins is laying out the new issue of The Unspeakable Oath<\/a><\/em>. It features a multi-system modern-day scenario by Greg Stolze, a Trail of Cthulhu<\/em> scenario by Adam Gauntlett, and features, columns, and reviews by a host of the best writers in Cthulhu Mythos gaming. Look for The Unspeakable Oath<\/em> 22 in February.<\/p>\n Dennis Detwiller and I are working hard on The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man<\/a><\/em>, his amazing Dreamlands campaign for Call of Cthulhu.<\/em> He\u2019s polishing up the last text and illustrations and I\u2019m laying it out and editing it. I hope it really makes a splash when it hits, because it is great. If you read the short-lived but excellent Call of Cthulhu<\/em> magazine Worlds of Cthulhu<\/em>, you saw the first part of Sense<\/em> in its final issue. We are thrilled to bring the whole thing out at last. I expect to have it in hand in March.<\/p>\n Last week I sent a preliminary ebook preview of the full Better Angels<\/a><\/em> rulebook to its Kickstarter backers. So if you didn\u2019t get that link, let me know. If you got it, I hope you love it! Arc Dream newcomers Brett Barkley<\/a> and Kurt Komoda<\/a> are banging away at the art for Better Angels<\/em> and it has been terrific to see their work coming in. In the next few weeks we\u2019ll send the finished art to Simeon Cogswell for layout. (If you\u2019re in Asheville, by the way, check out his game shop The Wyvern\u2019s Tale<\/a>.) I expect we\u2019ll finally see Better Angels<\/em> in all its nefarious, full-color glory sometime in April.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be getting to work on The Unspeakable Oath<\/em> 23 as soon as TUO 22 ships, so we ought to have it in April or May.<\/p>\n Then issue 24 in July.<\/p>\n One Roll Engine line editor James Knevitt has a whole lot of excellence on the way. We have two new books for GODLIKE<\/em> in editing now \u2014 they\u2019ll go into playtesting in March and April \u2014 and Benjamin Baugh is in the final stages of his newest masterwork, Drachenritter<\/em>.<\/p>\n First is The Courtyard of Hell<\/em> by Allan Goodall, which deals with the vicious city fighting of Ortona<\/a>, Italy, in December 1943. Allan conceived it as a one-shot adventure to go out free to the backers of the GODLIKE<\/em> paperback and PDF edition<\/a> at Kickstarter, but the more he developed it and playtested it, the more ambitious it got. The final project looks like it will be about 128 pages long, a full campaign that put Talents in some of the most brutal combat of the Italian campaign. Like we promised, the PDF will be free to GODLIKE\u2019s<\/em> Kickstarter backers. But it\u2019ll be more than worth picking up in print as well. I expect The Courtyard of Hell<\/em> to debut in print in July, fresh for GenCon.<\/p>\n Next comes Bloody Omaha<\/em>, a GODLIKE<\/em> adventure by Mike Montesa that sees a squad of ordinary grunts hitting Omaha Beach in the infamous \u2018Ten Minutes of Hell,\u2019 when entire units of Axis and Allied Talents squared off and annihilated each other. The regular men struggled just to survive \u2014 and some of them spontaneously became Talents themselves.<\/p>\n Bloody Omaha<\/em> is the first part in a series of adventures that Mike is working on that follow the same unit through the Normandy campaign to the streets of Paris. Does it sound familiar? Mike played out and reported this campaign in a staggering Actual Play series on RPG.net a few years ago, \u201cThe Good War.\u201d<\/a> I\u2019ve been angling to bring it to fruition as the definitive GODLIKE<\/em> Normandy sourcebook ever since. Bloody Omaha<\/em> is just the beginning. Look for a Kickstarter program to launch it in May and, assuming it succeeds, for it to be in print at GenCon.<\/p>\n Benjamin Baugh has been working on Drachenritter<\/em> for years. It\u2019s a roleplaying game about knights in grimy armor riding bad-ass dragons to war as they struggle to save their peoples and civilization itself from a looming Dark Age.<\/p>\n You play it out on multiple levels. In the big picture, you build up the kingdom or chapter house that your knights and dragons serve. On a tactical level, your dragons fight it out in the skies against other dragons and against the castles and weapons that the enemy brings to bear. On a character level your knights face conflicts with their enemies and rivals in political, legal and military disputes \u2014 and occasionally they track down monsters that still ravage after an ugly supernatural war. The dragon-knights are soldiers, marshals, judges and nobles, and there\u2019s room for every kind of play style.<\/p>\n Drachenritter<\/em>\u00a0is high fantasy as told by the boots on the ground and the claws in the air. It\u2019s dirty and muddy. It\u2019s set in a land recovering from war. Villages burn. Families shatter. People die. Bad things happen. It\u2019s up to the players to save their people from the worst of it.<\/p>\n Drachenritter<\/em> uses a variant of the One Roll Engine that powers Reign<\/em> and GODLIKE<\/em>. Watch for playtesting in March, a fundraiser at Kickstarter in April, and a full-color hardback core book in July for a fire-breathing GenCon debut.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll have TUO 25 in September or October, and, knock wood, issue 26 to close the year in December.<\/p>\n Ah, Operation Torch<\/em>. GODLIKE\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0own perennial \u201cdevelopment hell\u201d project. Dennis Detwiller started it more than ten years ago. Then Brian Underhill and I worked on it a while. Then it languished. Then Allan Goodall turned out to be a genius at GODLIKE<\/em> and came to the rescue.<\/p>\n Operation Torch<\/em> is a full-length campaign that starts with espionage in Casablanca ahead of the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942. The German Army has been battered hard in the desert by Montgomery and is struggling on the Eastern Front. As the Americans and British approach the shores of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, all that stands to stop them are the half-hearted garrisons of colonial Vichy France. But there are also hundreds of Germany\u2019s \u00dcbermenschen<\/em>, superpowered veterans of years of war, who mean to throw the squabbling Allies back into the sea. It\u2019s up to the untested Talents of the new Talent Operations Groups to stop them.<\/p>\n With James Knevitt\u2019s help, Allan is in the last stages of rewriting, expanding and playing Torch<\/em> now. We\u2019ll open it up to outside playtesting and a Kickstarter campaign this summer. If that goes well, we will celebrate at GenCon and we\u2019ll have the finished book shipping this fall.<\/p>\n A few years ago, Dr. Paul Mitchener came up with Blood of the Gods<\/a><\/em>, a thrilling take on Wild Talents<\/em> that sees the player characters as the superhuman offspring of the gods in mythological ancient Greece. In the meantime he\u2019s been working on an even more ambitious idea. Under Knevitt\u2019s stewardship it sees fruition this year.<\/p>\n Ninth Legion<\/em> is a new campaign setting for Reign<\/em> that features a lost imperial Roman Legion a hundred years after it vanished into a sprawling, fantastical Otherworld. The stranded soldiers named their new home Arcadia. Generations of their descendants have been born and died in New Rome, the colony that they forged. To the heirs of the Ninth Legion, Arcadia is the only world they know.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a world of magic and passion, where the powers of far-off Roman gods vie with the strength Fey spirits of nature and old Celtic witchery. It\u2019s a world where the traditions of New Rome struggle with the ancient ways of Gaelic tribes. It\u2019s a world of monsters, adventures and war.<\/p>\n Look for playtesting for Ninth Legion<\/em> to begin at the end of summer, a fundraiser to finish its development in the fall, and a beautiful finished book in the winter.<\/p>\n We\u2019re working on a collection of new Cthulhu Mythos fiction, Delta Green: Failed Anatomies<\/em>. It\u2019ll feature several stories by Dennis Detwiller, with guest appearances by Robin Laws, myself, and a few other friends. We don\u2019t have a firm date for it yet but we expect to see it sometime in 2013.<\/p>\n After The Courtyard of Hell<\/em> and Operation Torch,<\/em> Allan Goodall will finish The Silver Pavilion,<\/em> his long-gestating Wild Talents<\/em> setting of magic, mythology and samurai in the days of Japan\u2019s Onin War, just before the Warring States era. Look for it in 2014.<\/p>\n And in 2014 we\u2019ll at last see Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game<\/em> uses a variant of the the rules that have always powered Call of Cthulhu<\/em>. It brings the legendary<\/a> Delta Green setting firmly into the 2010s and a world that\u2019s been transformed by the War on Terror. It\u2019s a standalone Cthulhu Mythos horror RPG in the \u201cpurist\u201d style, low on pulp and high on tension, existential cosmic terror, and the violence of men and women investigating and struggling against powers they can\u2019t hope to understand.<\/p>\n The design team \u2014 Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, Kenneth Hite, Greg Stolze and myself \u2014 will spend 2013 finishing and playtesting Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game<\/em> under the watchful guidance of Delta Green creator John Scott Tynes.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 2:25 p.m., January 14. Only a few hours left in the day. Only two weeks left in the month.<\/p>\n Back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The new year has kicked off with a lot of excitement for Arc Dream Publishing. For Queen and Orphans First off, we\u2019ve<\/p>\nThe Unspeakable Oath 22<\/h2>\n
The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man<\/h2>\n
Better Angels<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/BA-logo-V4-300x150.jpg\" "\\"Better"){kind=logo}
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Unspeakable Oath 23 and 24<\/h2>\n
The Courtyard of Hell<\/h2>\n
Bloody Omaha<\/h2>\n
Drachenritter<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Drachenritter-preview-logo-300x194.jpg\" "\\"Drachenritter"){kind=logo}
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Unspeakable Oath 25 and 26<\/h2>\n
Operation Torch<\/h2>\n
Ninth Legion<\/h2>\n
Delta Green: Failed Anatomies<\/h2>\n
The Silver Pavilion<\/h2>\n
Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game<\/h2>\n
But For Now . . .<\/h2>\n