Forbeck.com

A last-minute reminder that I’ll be at Games Day Chicago this Saturday. As noted on the Guests page, I’ll be there signing copies of my Blood Bowl novel, which is so spanking-new that it won’t be generally available in the UK until August and the US until September (unless you find it at Gen Con Indy, at which I’ll also be signing copies). I’m told I’m to host a seminar of some sort on the book, which could involve a bit of a reading and a Q&A session if I’m left to my own devices. If you’re in the area and are a Games Workshop fan, please stop by!

Wizards of the Coast is launching a new library program called Adventures for Reluctant Readers, aimed at getting kids to read novels. The program includes a copy of Secret of the Spiritkeeper, so if you know any librarians who might be interested, please don’t hesitate to point them in the right direction. Thanks!

It’s been quiet around here for two reasons. First, I just finished Dead Ball, the second in my Blood Bowl trilogy, at 11 PM on July 16. Second, on July 17, I bundled the quads and a couple of able helpers in the minivan and chased up after my wife and eldest son for a week’s vacation near Watersmeet, Michigan. Now I’m home again, struggling to get back into the groove.

In other news, the Black Library now has a page up for my first Blood Bowl novel. They purport to have a sample excerpt up there soon.

I was late on Dead Ball, far later than I’d like to admit, and my editor (Christian Dunn) was terribly understanding about it. He turned around the comments on it before I got back, and they glowed. He’s asked me to change a single scene that may have transcended the borders of good taste, at least in his estimation as editor of many of the Black Library’s fine books. I had wondered about this when writing the scene, so I’ll make the changes soon and send off the final draft straight away. The book’s due out in December, which now doesn’t seem all that far away.

After that, it’s some work on the top-secret game for a toy company that I think I’ve mentioned here before. All of the major chains (Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Toys-R-Us, etc.) have picked up the game, so you should be able to get it just about anywhere in the US—at least anywhere near a city of any size. That should hit stores in December too. That’s about a month after High Stakes Drifter, which I mentioned a week or so back, from WizKids.

Then it’s on to revisions for The Road to Death, the next in The Lost Mark trilogy for Eberron. My editor, Mark Sehestedt, claims it’s better than Marked for Death. At least he asked for fewer revisions, so that’s a good sign. That book sees shelves in January 2006.

When that’s all done, I barrel into the next two books (for me, that is) in the Knights of the Silver Dragon series. These should hit stores in the summer of 2006.

Whew! I think I need another vacation.

At last I can finally mention something about this. (Non-Disclosure Agreements do cut into my fun.) High Stakes Drifter is the mystery CCG I worked on last year for a then-unnamed company. (It’s WizKids! Ah, that feels better.) It started out as something entirely different and morphed into the final game after several development iterations with guidance from Jordan Weisman and the rest of the WizKids R&D team. I turned the game over to WizKids months ago, and they’ve spent that time hammering my raw work into polished steel.

I’m thrilled to see that WizKids finally announced the game. Now I just have to wait until November until I can actually see it in print.

While I won’t be at Comic-Con this year (thanks to all you who asked), the good people at Conan Properties will. If you’re at the show, be sure to catch their seminar on Friday morning at 11:30 in Room 3. In addition to the guys from CPI, you can get the skinny on the latest Conan stuff from Dark Horse Comics, McFarlane Toys, Funcom, and Ace Books.

As a reminder, the new Age of Conan novels are starting to show up in stores. Loren Coleman’s Blood of Wolves and Cimmerian Rage should be there now. I have copies of both on my shelves now, and I was flattered to be among those to whom Loren dedicated the second book as “fellow barbarians.”

It seems the powers that be at Games Workshop have decided to return hundreds if not thousands of pieces of original artwork back to the artists who created them. Unfortunately, they’ve lost touch with lots of these folks. If you know any of them, please pass this on to them as soon as possible. I’ve included the entire post, plus the list of names, after the break.
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Here’s a fascinating article on sleep paralysis, the phenomenon of finding yourself paralyzed with a terrifying dream just as you drift off or wake up. I never knew this had a name, but I experienced it at least twice when I was in college. These were the sort of nightmares that keep you up for weeks because you’d rather not repeat them, the kinds of things you never forget. Somehow, it’s comforting to know they’re not that uncommon and that scientists somewhere are bothering to study them.

Last night at the Alliterates meeting, we tried something new. We each brought a favorite poem to read and chat about. I choose two. I love “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, but picking it is like saying the Beatles are your favorite band. It’s just too easy.

So, I also brought along a short poem by John Keats that no one at the table turned out to know. I used it as the epigraph for the adventure I contributed to Ghost Stories, a World of Darkness adventure book White Wolf published last fall, but I first found it in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion novels, which feature Keats as a character. Anyhow, here it is, in its creepy entirety:

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

John Keats

On Friday night, Ann and I went to see the New Court Theatre’s production of Brighton Beach Memoirs. As always, we had a great time. Josh Burton, who directed the play and runs the company, consistently puts on productions of the highest quality and with some of our area’s finest actors. If you’re anywhere in the area, be sure to put it on your to-do list.

During the intermission, Josh helped serve snacks and sell raffle tickets. He looked at me and said, “I’m sorry, but what’s your name again?” I told him. (Josh used to work in the same offices as my stepmother, but we only see each other a few times a year, mostly at his plays.) “That’s right! I’m sorry. Oh, and guess what? You won something in the last raffle.”

So, it seems I have the eponymous neon sign from their production of The Spitfire Grill on its way. I think it may end up over our stove.

My sister Jody just dropped me a note about a good cause my fellow Wisconsinites might be interested in:

This is the website and story of Corinna’s brother, Pete. Do you all remember
Corinna, with the twins and the tatoos:) Anyway, her brother was diagnosed
2 years ago, at the age of 18, with bone cancer. The parish in Spring Green,
where Corinna and Pete grew up (with thier other 7 siblings) is creating
a fund for Pete. He had most of his leg amputated because of the bone caner
and is hoping to get an artificial one that will allow him to run and do
several other things he wouldn’t be able to do with the kind he could get
with help from insurance. The kind he’s looking to get isn’t covered at
all by insurance. So, here on the website you can check Pete out and find
out about the documentary a friend did about him that won a prize and about
how you can help if you like. Even notes of encouragment help. In August
there will be a fund raiser for him.

So, stop by 4Petesake.com and check it out. If you’re a fan of the American Players Theatre, you might notice that some of its best actors—including the all-too-talented Jim DeVita—are taking part in the fundraisers. You could too.

Amazon.com now boasts a cover for Dead Ball, the second in my trilogy of novels based on the Blood Bowl board game from Games Workshop. You can see a tiny copy it below and find a larger version by clicking on it.

Ironically, while Googling for “Matt Forbeck” and “Dead Ball,” I stumbled upon some pages that mention Fast Break, a basketball CCG I designed for WildStorm Productions back in the mid-’90s. One card in the set was “Dead Ball,” and another was “Matt Forbeck.” We put a lot of the design and production team in the game as players, which makes me one of the few game designers I know of to have my own sports trading card, complete with an artist’s rendition of me taking it hard to the hoop.

Atlas Games just released a PDF version of Seven Cities, a d20 sourcebook I wrote for them a while back. It features seven fantasy cities in the standard D&D sizes and uses an innovative telescoping technique to fit them all into a 128-page book. If you haven’t got a copy yet, you can pick up the electronic version through RPGNow.com for only $9.96. Dead-tree versions should still be available through store or directly through Atlas for $21.95.

As posted on the Black Library’s site, I’ll be signing copies of Blood Bowl at two conventions coming up soon: Games Day Chicago (July 30) and Gen Con Indy (August 18–21). At Games Day, I’ll be wandering the hall and taking up time behind a stack of books at the sales table. At Gen Con, I’ll be in the Sabertooth Games/Games Workshop booth, hopefully with an equally large stack of books.

In both cases, it’s your chance to get a copy of Blood Bowl before it shows up in stores in the US on September 1 or so. (It’s due in the UK on August 1 instead.) If you’re planning to be at either event, please be sure to stop by and say hi!

Greg Stolze and Dan Solis were on NPR’s On the Media this weekend. I don’t see a permalink over there, but if you check in soon, you can hear Greg and Dan talking about their game Meatbot Massacre via a RealOne Player link. The cool thing about the game—besides the fact that Greg is behind it—is its business model: the Ransom Model.

In short, Greg and Dan created the game and then posted a note saying they’d only release it if they got $600 in donations before a year was up. They got the money in only five months, and now those of us who came to the game late can now have it for free. This falls under, “It’s so crazy it might work!” And it did.