Jeff Grubb on Nebulith and Music of Ericha Zann

The great thing about the Three Castles award, given at the North Texas RPG Convention, is that the judges are RPG legends. LotFP has won big awards at the fan-voted ENNIEs before, and LotFP titles have now won the Three Castles award three times, THREE TIMES, and had to have been judged by people who were there back in the day. So we’ve had the best of both worlds.

One of the judges this year was Jeff Grubb, who was lead designer on Marvel Super Heroes, probably the game I spent the second-most time playing in the 80s, after Dungeons & Dragons. MSH was the reason I got interested in Dragon, because of the Marve-Phile column that would stat up lesser-known characters. And once one starts on Dragon, one becomes aware of a gaming world beyond what one’s local groups are talking about…

Anyway, Grubb did short reviews of all of the Three Castles entries, and more, here. The LotFP-relevant bits:

“Beats out the venerable Oriental Adventures from TSR.” (Steve Winter, one of the editors on that original OA, was also a Three Castles judge this year.) “Larger-than-usual margin.” Woohoo! Also nice to see that he recognizes that the “cringy edgelord” side has legitimate RPG ancestry and “a lot of interesting ideas.” And I personally think “transgressive, hard-edged, and uncompromisingly bizarre” is wonderful phrasing and I should put that on a banner for conventions.

If you just wait for these email updates and don’t check the site regularly, you’ve missed details about Lost Carcosa appearing at Gen Con and Ropecon, a review of Evil Dead Burn, and a little Mike Browning and Sam Neill memorial, so check those out if you’re so inclined.

For the first time in some years, we’re making new shirts and they will be at Gen Con! Multiple people I’ve shown the mockups to have said it is physically painful to look at. “Eye-destroying” were the exact words one person used. I won’t show you the mockup here because what are the chances the colors on the real shirt are as sharp and match exactly the mockup and why set everybody up for disappointment (although in the past they’ve been pretty damn close), so I will let it remain mysterious. But if you’re at Gen Con… don’t look directly at the booth as you approach it.

(Also, we haven’t made shirts in six years now and prices on those have gone up. I keep being surprised, like I expect to be immune to the forces that are making grocery prices and everything else rise, and somehow that wouldn’t affect the prices I have to pay, and charge, for making things? But the choices are to roll with it and continue to price items according to cost, or quit.)

Ropecon is next week and Gen Con the week after, and I’m caught up in preparation for those, but in the next week I plan to post videos with a more detailed look at Lost Carcosa, a look at Shipwrecked in the Swordfish Islands (which I edited, and there will be copies at the LotFP booth at Gen Con), and a review of Darkthrone’s Pre-Historic Metal. And then when I get home from Gen Con, hopefully I’ll be able to give you all a more exact time for Lost Carcosa to be available for purchase through the webstore.

Until next time…