Eberron and Dragon

My copy of the Eberron Campaign Setting arrived in the mail the other day. Over the months I’ve been working on Marked for Death, the first in my trilogy of Eberron novels, Wizards has sent me several copies of this book in various stages of development. The first was a 12-page brief.

The final book looks great. There’s a lot here to love if you play Dungeons & Dragons, whether you plan to run an Eberron campaign or not. It’s D&D flavored with pulpy goodness, which is right up my alley. I can only hope that many others out there share my tastes for this kind of adventure.

I also got a copy of Shadows of the Last War, the first Eberron adventure. Keith Baker, the brain behind Eberron wrote it, along with Death at Whitehearth, a short story included in a separate pamphlet. I haven’t cracked these yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, I wrote two pieces for an upcoming issue of Dragon Magazine. The first is a short story that serves as a prequel to Marked for Death. The second is for the “Novel Approach” column, in which I provide some game-oriented details about Marked for Death, including rules for a smaller airship (the aircutter) and for living fireballs.

OATF Moving Along

The Origins Awards Task Force has sucked up much of my past week. Many people have lots of great ideas for the Origins Awards, and sorting through them is a Herculean task. Plus, there are some political landmines strewn about the place in the wake of the election of a nearly all-new GAMA board of directors at Origins last month, and pirouetting through them makes it that much more challenging. Despite this, I have high hopes we’ll be able to come up with something good in the end.

If you’d like to toss your hat into the middle of the fracas, click here to join the Yahoo! group I set up for it. Traffic can be high at times. You’ve been warned.

Origins Award Task Force

Any minute now, there should be an official press release about this, but I’m going to jump the gun and start talking about it here.

The new board of GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, has hired me to lead a task force charged with improving the function of the Origins Awards. These are the adventure gaming industry’s premier set of awards, although there seems to be general consensus that they’re flawed. My job is to engage people in a discussion about them and see if we can build a plan for how to make them everything we could hope for.

You have to like tall orders like that. Wish me luck. If you’re interested in being part of the discussion, please click on the button to the left.

Diana Jones Shortlist Announced

The Diana Jones Award shortlist has been posted at www.DianaJonesAward.org. (Academy chair Nicole Lindroos was kind enough to allow the DJA committee to make its first official announcement at the Origins Awards ceremony on June 24.) The award will be given out at a ceremony on August 18 at Gen Con in Indianapolis.

I’m one of the few publicly known members of the DJA committee. The first award was given out at my birthday party at Gen Con three years ago. To learn more about all this, visit the DJA site.

Back from Origins

I had a great time at Origins. All of my seminars went well. The attendees asked sharp questions, and my fellow panelists were a joy to work with. I spent a lot of time in the Green Ronin booth, showing people how to play Dracula’s Revenge, the new board game I developed for Human Head Studios.

At the Origins Awards ceremony last Friday night, I got a few thrills. First, I was asked to present the miniatures awards, so I got to be on stage in my tux and hand out some trophies to the some deserving souls.

Second, the Redhurst Academy of Magic picked up both awards for which it had been nominated: Best Roleplaying Game Supplement and Best Graphic Design of a Book. I didn’t win for the Best Game-Related Short Fiction, but my friend and fellow Alliterate Stephen D. Sullivan did.

On Saturday night, I attended the first ever Hall of Fame banquet. I got to dine with Hall-of-Famers Sandy Petersen, Greg Stafford, and Lou Zocchi, along with Steve Kenson, Robin Laws, and Tim Gerritsen. I even got to shake hands with Charles Roberts, who designed Tactics, the first modern wargame. You couldn’t ask for much more from a night.

Lots of Little Things

This week, I managed to take care of a bunch of smaller things. These include:

An entry in Hungry Little Monsters, the next charity jam book from Sean K. Reynolds, my coauthor on Unapproachable East.

A couple of articles for Games Quarterly Magazine.

An essay for the latest edition of Warzone from Excelsior Entertainment. .

An essay for the second edition of Godsend Agenda from Khepera Publishing.

And now I’m off to Origins. Whew!