Adventures Dark and Deep Update

Here's the latest on Adventures Dark and Deep™:

The Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore hard-copy books are making their way into peoples' hands (the pdf is also available at that link, and if you buy a hard copy, you get the pdf for free). The folks who supported the kickstarter have started to report receiving copies, and there is a steady stream of sales coming in at RPGNow.com. A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore is intended as a rules supplement, allowing you to bring in some of the "new stuff" from Adventures Dark and Deep into your 1E, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, etc. game. It's completely modular; take what you like, leave what you don't.

Now we move on to the real business; the three-volume core rulebook set. The stand-alone game that I wanted to play in 1985. One of the things that Gary Gygax explicitly stated was that he wanted to bring things back to a set of three books (plus a Deities and Demigods-type book). The three books will be the Players Manual, the Game Masters Toolkit, and the Bestiary. All will be released under the OGL.

There will be a Kickstarter campaign for each of the three books. I ran the numbers, and if I want them all to be as beautiful as intended, I can't quite swing the financing on my own. Art ain't cheap, and neither is professional editing, proofreading, and layout. Save your pennies!

The Players Manual kickstarter will begin in November. The Game Masters Toolkit will be either December or early 2013, and the Bestiary will cap the whole thing off in early 2013.

The Bestiary will be... a beast. We're looking at 850 or so illustrations-- one for each creature. It's going to be amazing if we can pull it off. Nearly every beasty from the 1E Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, and Monster Manual 2, fully statted and each with its own illustration. Plus new monsters. This book is going to single-handedly be a renaissance of old-school art!

Adventures Dark and Deep is my effort to imagine what AD&D would have looked like if Gary Gygax had been allowed to develop it as he had intended. It's based on exhaustive research of his Dragon magazine articles from the mid-1980's as well as public statements in various online fora and other sources over the years. I have no inside track into his thoughts, but he left enough information out in public view to make a good go of it. The game has undergone a 2 year open playtest, and literally thousands of the open playtest books have been downloaded and played by dedicated gamers across the globe. Their feedback has been incorporated into the final text to make it the best game possible. Now I just need to make it beautiful.