Monday, June 30, 2014

_Bottle City_ now available to order from Black Blade


Jon's has updated the Ordering instructions on the Black Blade Publishing web site, and posted the Bottle City transcription and ERKME#10 files referenced in the module.

For reference, here are the ordering details, which are posted to http://black-blade-publishing.com/Ordering.aspx:

===

The Black Blade web site is in the process of being rebuilt since the e-commerce package used to drive it is no longer supported by the
original vendor (who has gone out of business).  Consequently, the online store is NOT fully operational (shipping, in particular international shipping, does not
work properly). Please use the Store tab as a reference for details about our books, including prices, but do not use it to place an order.

When you are ready to order, please email us with the following details:

- First Name and Last Name
- Shipping Address
- Email Address
- Online User Name
- Phone Number
- Products Ordered and their Quantities
- Any additional notes or instructions that will help us process to your order

Please email these details to:

tacojohndm@yahoo.com

We'll then provide you with an accurate shipping quote, and will invoice you via Paypal, our preferred method for payment. If you do not have a Paypal account and/or prefer to pay via credit card, we accept all major credit cards that are supported by Square (Visa, Master Card, American Express, and Discover; details at https://squareup.com/).  To process such orders, please provide us with a good time to call you to get your credit card details:  please do not email or text them to us, since we don't want your financial information being sent through insecure methods.

Black Blade Publishing also accepts United States money orders in US Dollars, International money orders in US Dollars, and travellers checks in US Dollars.  At game conventions where we are selling products, we also accept cash in US Dollars (USD).  Black Blade Publishing does not accept personal checks.

===

Thank you for your support, as always! :D

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

New Edition of Rob Kuntz's _The Original Bottle City_

Excellent news from Black Blade Publishing!:  the new edition of Rob Kuntz's _The Original Bottle City_ will be available to purchase at the North Texas RPG convention this year!  
This new edition of the Lake Geneva Castle & Campaign adventure expands the module from 32 to 44 pages in order to provide a more-complete, plug-and-play gaming experience than the original edition.  The Black Blade edition:

- Details monster and NPC statistics so that they can be played from the module without requiring additional work from the DM---the Pied Piper edition listed many encounters as "5 cloud giants" or "4 enchanters", for example.  Monsters and NPCs are provided with equipment, memorized spells, and other notes as required to run them during encounters.

- Provides four sample god-aspect templates for use in “The Hall of the Gods” encounter; two were designed for use in Kuntz’s Bottle City events at the 40th Anniversary of GenCon in 2007.

- Normalizes monster and NPCs statistics and attributes to first edition fantasy values, especially hit dice and hit points:  HD were adjusted to use d8 HD for monsters instead of d6 and class-based HD instead of d6 HD for NPCs, while hp were proportionally increased based on the percentage of maximum hit points possessed by the monster or NPC in the original manuscript.

- Fixes errata present in the Pied Piper edition and clarifies several ambiguities in the text and map, including text dropped from the PPP edition.

For those who missed it the first time around, _The Original Bottle City_ is a site for high adventure, where strange magic interweaves with nine trapped gods, demigods, and demons who vie for its control---but all are minikins, captive in the magical city in a bottle!  In 1974 Bottle City was one of the largest design projects Rob Kuntz undertook as the co-DM of the original Lake Geneva Castle & Campaign. Found on the second level of the Castle, it stupefied the Lake Geneva gamers---that is until they touched the bottle itself and were drawn into the city, where the fun really began....

The first edition of The Original Bottle City was released by Pied Piper Publishing in 2008, and has been out of print since 2009. 

After the North Texas RPG Con, Black Blade will make available Rob Kuntz’s alternate painting for use in The Gallery (a tribute to David C.  Sutherland III’s classic Dungeon Masters Guide cover art), as well as the original manuscript transcription file for Bottle City.  Both files are password-protected .pdfs that will be published to the Downloads section of http://www.black-blade-publishing.com after the convention.


Book details: $30 USD, 44 pages + 2 11"x17" map sheets, ISBN 978-0-9842870-3-1, Black Blade product code BBP-4001.

Allan.