Bloody Holidays

I know, I know. It’s been deathly quiet around here lately. My New Year’s resolution last year for weekly updates hasn’t been 100% successful, but it seems that I might be able to slide through with a solid B.

I spent a week in LA in early December, doing some consulting for a company that shall currently remain nameless. They were great people, though, and I think we’ll be making some wonderful games together in 2005.

While there, my hosts and I mounted a field trip of sorts to Gen Con So Cal on the Thursday of that show. They only stuck around long enough to get the lay of the land. After they left, I managed to find all sorts of friends to hang out with into the midnight hour. One of the great things about the adventure game industry is how many friends you make in it, and you get to see them a lot during the summer convention season. When that ends, though, it can be a long, cold winter (especially here in Wisconsin) before you get to see them again. Gen Con So Cal breaks that up nicely. Now I’m looking forward the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas in March, where many of us can get together again.

Since I got back, I’ve been buried in my first Blood Bowl novel, which should be out sometime next summer. As I tell people, it’s a fantasy football novel, but not the kind that involves the NFL. It’s dwarves, elves, ogres, zombies, vampires, and more playing a version of American football that’s more like rugby than anything else. It combines sports, fantasy, and humor, which I haven’t seen done in too many other places. One of Robert Lynn Asprin’s Myth Adventures books featured “the Big Game” (a riff on the University of Michigan-Ohio State rivalry), which the closest thing I can think of. Blood Bowl is hyperviolent too, which changes the tone a bit. It’s not gory, per se. It’s so over the top it’s more like a Warner Bros. cartoon at times.

Anyhow, I’m back to that now. More when I can come up for air! Until then, best wishes for happy holidays to you all!

Marked for Death Update

In an effort to clear the decks before kicking out the rest of my Blood Bowl novel, this week I took care of some details for Marked for Death, the first in my upcoming Eberron trilogy. I got the galleys (final author’s proofs) in late last week and turned them around right away. Reading through the book again, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. The first draft was a real mess, written more like a screenplay than a novel, but now the book breathes like an epic adventure should. It’s slated for a March 2005 release, and I can’t wait to see it.

I also revised a “Novel Approach” article about the book for an upcoming issue of Dragon Magazine. This comes complete with stats for a smaller, party-sized airship and a living fireball spell. This article should appear in the same issue as a prefatory short story that introduces four of the characters from Marked for Death as they investigate a mysterious crater on the edges of the Mournland.

Ghost Stories Told

I just got my author’s copies of Ghost Stories in today’s mail, and I understand the book should be in stores soon. It’s an anthology of adventures for regular mortals set in White Wolf‘s World of Darkness, plus some guidelines on how to use ghosts in your World of Darkness game. Rick Chillot, Geoff Grabowski, Matthew McFarland, Adam Tinworth, Chuck Wendig, and I all chipped in bits under the auspices of developer Ken Cliffe. My story’s about, well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

This the first gaming material I’ve ever written for White Wolf, and the first thing I’ve written for them in somewhere around 10 years. They’re still great people to work with, and the book looks like a blast. Check it out.

LA Bound

Up until a week or so ago, I didn’t have any plans to make it to Gen Con So Cal, despite the wonderful time I had there last year. Then I got a call from a company that wants to fly me out to LA for part of that week for a meeting. I arrive November 30 and depart December 3, so it’s a short trip. With luck, though, I should be wandering around the lovely Anaheim Convention Center for part of the day on that Thursday or Friday. If you’re around, too, I hope to see you there.

It’s Quiet—Too Quiet

My apologies for not posting here much lately. There have been two reasons for that:

1) I haven’t had a whole lot to report.

2) Various colds and viruses have been treating my family like the Packers treat a loose football.

Now, though, it seems like we’re all on the mend, and I’m rolling again. I used the blank spots in the past few weeks to work on a few outlines for upcoming books (like two more in the Knights of the Silver Dragon series) and to craft another proposal or two for some new projects I hope to start working on sometime next year.

Right now, I’m hot in the throes of Blood Bowl, the first in what looks to be a trilogy of novels for my friends at Games Workshop. After that, it’s onto the second book in The Lost Mark Trilogy, my Eberron series for Wizards of the Coast.

In the meantime, the latest issue (#3) of Games Quarterly Magazine should be in stores around now. It contains an article I wrote praising Once Upon a Time, designed by Richard Lambert, Andrew Rilstone, and James Wallis and published by Atlas Games.

Don’t forget to gear up for National Games Week too. That’s next week, from November 21–27.

Comments Working

I built Forbeck.com around Movable Type, a great blogging and content management tool. Like many bloggers, however, spambots inundated my pages with comment spam. I recently upgraded to Movable Type 3.1 so I could implement its new antispam tools. This includes a commenter registration service designed to put a stop to spambots and the like.

I had a few issues surrounding the upgrade, but I’ve worked through them all now. I’m currently blocking comments from anyone not registered with TypeKey. This is a free service that lets you register for commenting on any TypeKey-based blog (like many Movable Type installations) all at once.

The upshot: To comment on posts here, you now need to register with TypeKey. If you do this once, you should be set forever. If you don’t care to bother with it, you can still e-mail me personally. I’ll be the only one able to see your erudite and pointed commentary, but I’m comfortable with that if you are.

Ghost Stories

I’m told that White Wolf just got advance copies of Ghost Stories in their office. I’m looking forward to seeing the book myself. It should be in stores in November, hopefully earlier than later.

No Comments

I’ve been getting a ton of spam in the comments sections on this site, so I upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type. It works great at stopping the spam, but it also breaks some of the custom templates I generated for use with the last version of the program. As such, I’ve shut comments off for now. I hope to have them back up and running soon. In the meantime, you can just e-mail me with you comments directly, please. Thanks!

Xbox in the House

As a reward for finishing up the second draft of Marked for Death, the first in my Eberron trilogy, I went out and bought myself an Xbox. Since I left Human Head, I no longer have a PC on which to play games—one of the great benefits of that job. I’m a happy Mac user, but the fact is that the best games often either never make it to the Mac or are months late. I didn’t want to spring for a whole new computer just to play games, so the Xbox fit the bill nicely.

I’ve already gotten a number of games, most of which are rated E so I can play them with (or at least in front of) my kids. If anyone has any recommendations, though, or spare games lying around, don’t be shy about letting me know.

New Novel: Blood Bowl

I’m currently hard at work on my next novel, a book for Games Workshop‘s novels and comics division, The Black Library. It’s based on Blood Bowl, GW’s game of fantasy football, in which orcs, dwarves, elves, skaven (rat-people), undead, and even humans violently spar for supremacy on the blood-spattered pitch. It’s an explosive and hilarious mix of fantasy and sports.

I worked on a Blood Bowl supplement (the Blood Bowl Companion) back in 1990, as my first freelance gig after finishing up a six-month student work visa in the Games Workshop Design Studio in Nottingham, England. I’ve kept in touch with many of my friends from GW over the years, and I even did a bit of editing for the Black Library a couple years back, just to keep my hand in.

Blood Bowl is one of my favorite games. The background is just over-the-top great, and it blends two of my great passions (fantasy literature and football) with a flair that hits you like an ogre linebacker. The plan is for this book to be the first in a trilogy. Expect to see it on store shelves next summer.