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.

6 comments:

  1. Awesome!

    Will this be available outside of the Con?

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    Replies
    1. Yes, Anthony: the adventure will be available to order via the Black Blade web site after the convention: http://www.black-blade-publishing.com

      Allan.

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    2. That's fantastic! I look forward to getting a copy.

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  2. Kudos for making the original transcription file available again.

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  3. What's next? The City of Brass? :-)

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  4. Black Blade and I are indeed negotiating the "redo" of City of Brass, that from my original ms of 90,000 words. The publishing order for these future releases will depend on completeness of each and the order in which they received them, so Cairn of the Skeleton King and Tower of Blood will likely come first.

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