A New Era

I keep saying that I am going to dust off the blog and start posting to it again, and now I have some news that's going to cause me to be more active here. Outland Entertainment, the original publishers of my Action-Heroes Adventure Role-Playing Game, have decided that they are going to return the rights to that game to me. It is sad news, but unfortunately with the current weirdness of the economy things like this are going to happen. I appreciate the help that Outland Entertainment gave in getting that game ready and out to press. Honestly, Action-Heroes wouldn't be the game it is with their involvement.

What does this mean? Well, going forward I am going to self-publish the game and produce new material on my one for it on my own. We will be transferring the existing book on DriveThruRPG from Outland Entertainment to myself, so it will continue to be available on that site. I will also be offering the PDF via my existing itch.io page, so you can buy it along with my Adventures in the Unknown game. Once I receive the production files for the game, and am able to update them to reflect my ownership of it, I will update all the files on DriveThruRPG. I will also stop offering the hardcover version of the game and only sell it in softcover once everything is transferred and updated, so it you want a hardcover of the book you should buy it before I update everything. Hardcovers are a pain to move around and ship, so I am going to stick to the one physical format.

But! This does mean that Adventures in the Unknown will be available eventually on DriveThruRPG, as will any other game/supplement that I put out from here on out. This will allow me to offer a physicals edition of Adventures, which I am excited about. I will nee to make some updates to the files for that, before I can offer it over at DriveThru (and any changes will be made to the current version on itch.io as well for people who already own it).

Going forward I will make what new material I can for all of my games, but since this is now a one person operation, and I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, my resources for new material will be limited. If you want to see new supplements and new games, that will mean supporting the games that I am selling because the money for new stuff will come from sales of existing stuff. I will put out material as quickly as I can, but that will be the main limitation to things. I am excited, but I am very proud of my work on Action-Heroes and I am glad to see that the game will be able to continue to exist.

All of this will mean some changes over here at the blog. I will continue to talk about general pop culture trends, comics, music and other fun things, but I won't be reviewing RPG stuff any more here. I don't think it is right for me to use this blog as a platform for my publishing, and potentially say negative things about other publishers' products like that. Will I still do call outs to bad behavior? Probably, but it won't be here on my blog. That's pretty much what social media is for.

This is everything at the moment. I will post more on social media, once we've begun to transfer files on DriveThruRPG and I have started selling other of my games at itch.io and DriveThruRPG. 

I am excited for the future. Keep an eye open over here at the blog for announcements, as well as at my Bluesky account. Talk with you more very soon!

Action-Heroes RPG: Ground Division

 

I am working on some expanded setting material for my Action-Heroes game that will end up, at the very least, in the hands of the backers of my Patreon. Ground Division is 90s-style conspiracy/espionage action inspired by movies of the era and a number of comics from that time.

In the ramp up to launching the Kickstarter for the game, I talked about a couple of the primary influences on my design choices for the game. The name Action-Heroes is an homage to a line of characters originally published by Charlton Comics, and now owned by DC Comics. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, when Charlton was at the height of its publishing (such as it was, unfortunately) they had a line of heroic fiction that was a mix of offbeat revamped costumed heroes from the mind of Steve Ditko, espionage and military comics, and a couple of martial artists that haven't aged well. But, at that time the term "super-hero" was a trademark co-owned by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Dick Giordano, then editor at Charlton Comics, came up with the idea of calling their characters Action-Heroes (with the hyphen) instead. He felt that label fit their characters better since they weren't really mainstream super-heroes, like those published by the other comic companies.

Action-Heroes Is Coming!

After years of development and writing, along with more than a couple of pandemic-related delays, my Action-Heroes role-playing game is finally coming to Kickstarter next week. You can click here to sign up to receive a notification when the project launches next Tuesday.

I am really happy to have the game so close to the finish line, because I have put a lot of work into this system over the years, and I am really proud of the end result. Please sign up for your notification, and also please support the game's Kickstarter project. There are only supposed to be a couple of stretch goals, but they are going to provide some nice upgrades to the game if we hit all of them. 

Thank you all in advance.

Some Action-Heroes FAQs

 

With the release of the ashcan edition of Action-Heroes by Outland Entertainment over at DriveThruRPG there have been a few questions that have floated around the internet and come to my attention, so I thought I would make a post of some of these questions to point people towards. I don't know how frequent these questions have been, but they have been asked about the game.

The ashcan is no longer available for sale now that the Kickstarter has launched.. The ashcan has everything that you need to play a game of Action-Heroes, but it isn't the complete game that will eventually be available on Kickstarter and retail. The final version of the game will also have a series of appendices that outline an alternate magic system for the game, go over some collaborative setting-building rules for groups that want to create their own worlds from scratch, and a series of examples that take you through the process of building powers and special abilities for your characters in the game.

Action-Heroes is something that I have been working on for a long time, and has its origins in a system that I was asked to build for a licensed tabletop RPG that didn't come to fruition, so the rights to the system stayed with me. It is a simplified and streamlined version of one of my earliest professional game designs, and I think it is a design that represents where I am today as both a designer and game player/GM. It uses a simplified ruleset that is augmented by the ruling of the GM, and the needs of the players, that come up during play.