The King is Dead: The Long Halloween Continues...
And so thirty-one days of (more or less) The King is Dead content concludes. For
me this is just the beginning; the next several months will see Wine and
Savages most likely reduced to one post a week as Robin and I work on the book.
Even when The King is Dead is
published next July, I expect I’ll still be providing content and running TKiD
games well into next October.
It’s going to be a very long Halloween indeed…
A few hours ago, I caught up on my weekly TV viewing by
watching the Bones/Sleepy Hollowcrossover. The first The King is Dead
post premiered August 13th and Sleepy
Hollow premiered September 16th of that same year; they’ve
always been part of the same zeitgeist, but I’ve never before seen an episode
of that show embody TKiD – or Savage Worlds-style craziness – quite so much. “Dead
Men Tell No Tales” featured Betsy Ross, secret agent, mowing down an army of
undead redcoats with a repeating crossbow that shot Greek fire-headed bolts. I
fell off the couch laughing, recognizing her weapon as a Weird Science version
of the bolt power with a “fire”
trapping.
It’s obviously a sign from the game gods that we’re on the
right path.
 |
| Blue Greek fire, I should add. |
My thanks to all of you who have +1d my The King is Dead Google+ posts, left comments there or here at Wine
and Savages, or just plain visited the site. My thanks to those French guys who
linked here that one time, forcing me to Google Translate their comments and
discover that TKiD has an international audience – and my thanks to the Russian
and Spanish roleplayers who have also
expressed their interest. My thanks to +Clint Black and +Richard Woolcock and
everybody else who has chimed in with rules suggestions and critiques (even –
no, especially – when I have disagreed with them). My great thanks to +Kristian Serrano for giving us the Savage Bloggers Network and Google+ Savage Worlds community and helping us all meet in
the first place.
My sincere thanks to +Eric Simon for asking to publish The King is Dead through Four-in-HandGames; I really, really didn’t want to go through all the headaches of setting
up my own publishing company. I wish I could tell everybody how immensely
supportive and generous Eric has been – both with TKiD and Steamscapes – without delving into confidential business matters,
but I can’t so you’ll just have to take my word for it. He is a gentleman and a
scholar, and I hope The King is Dead
is a success for his sake as much as my own.
Finally, my everlasting thanks to my wife, +Robin English-Bircher. Her support and encouragement would alone be more than I could
hope for, but she is also joining this project as my co-writer and editor. You
can expect to see fiction and in-universe poetry from her pen helping to flesh
out Malleus and the world of The King is
Dead; perhaps we’ll even dole some out over the next few months.
As for me, I need to write up a bunch of NPCs to flesh out
Thornburg, the setting of the ongoing TKiD playtest, so that next week’s game
has a bit more meat on its bones. I’ve got the shape of the book in my head, so
it’s time to get that down on paper and outline the danged thing. With that in
place, I’ll be able to jump around from chapter to chapter, writing things as
they come to me, filling it all in a bit at a time. As anyone clicking the TKiD
banner at the top of this page knows, there’s an awful lot of material already
in place on the blog – and I’ve got several chapters of the book basically
written on top of that. Now’s the time to standardize spellings, fill in some
blanks, and get The King is Dead
ready for the world before the zeitgeist passes us by…
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