Wine and Savages joins Savage Rifts®

Savage Rifts® heroes by Aaron J. Riley

As revealed at Chupacabracon IV this past weekend, San Antonio, TX-based writing duo Wine and Savages are contributing writers to the next series of Rifts® for Savage Worlds products. We’re thrilled to finally be working directly with Pinnacle Entertainment Group after several years of writing only for Savage Worlds licensees. It’s a dream come true to collaborate with gaming legend, friend, and booster Sean Patrick Fannon as well as our good friends Clint Black, Jodi Black, and Shane Hensley. 

Robin English-Bircher and I, Sean Tait Bircher, are expanding significantly on the material for the Federation of Magic and Magic Zone as found in the Savage Rifts® Game Master’s Handbook, while I am also contributing short sections on the Dark Woods of Alabama and the Kingdom of Monsters in Calgary.

We have no dates on when to expect this to be published. While a lot of progress has been made, there’s still much to complete. It’s a big project with a lot of moving parts, and much of it is still up in the air. As Sean Patrick Fannon announced:

We aren't going to do book-for-book "updates of all the original world books." Not efficacious at all, especially for how we are doing things and how we've started the process. 

We are, frankly, picking what we think is the coolest and most fun stuff from all of the published material, collecting it in thematically structured books. These books will present the essence of what you need to know for the themes and ideas and regions and factions in question, as well as a lot of game mechanic material that brings out the best parts of those things.

The three books we have going (all titles are tentative, and consider nothing to be locked in iron) are:

• Arcane North America: Federation, Magic Zone, Psyscape, elements of Spirit West, and related material.
• The Coalition States: Pretty much that, with some focus on playing ex-CS folks joining or working with the Tomorrow Legion.
• Blood & Banes: The Xiticix, the Vampire Kingdoms, ARCHIE, and some other related material that helps us more or less close out North America.

Look to the previous three books to get a sense of our approach going forward, and as always, thanks for the support!

Meanwhile, Robin and I both have other projects in the pipeline as well – both together and separately – that we hope to announce soon. These include freelance projects and personal works (including The King is Dead). If nothing else, working together on Savage Rifts® has helped the two of us improve our teamwork and writing routines. We expect to be able to write more and write quicker on everything moving forward.