Blógünder Schlock

I’m checking out the new website over at xtremedungeonmastery.com (your official source for all things XDM) and what do I see? A page spread, right there where anybody can read it without buying it.

It looked almost exactly like this.

And if you clicked on it, you got a version that was large enough to be completely readable. Except the footnotes. They were incompletely or “squintily” readable.

Not to be outdone, I posted the same stuff in here. Go! Click! Read that page spread, and marvel at the wit and wisdom of the Grand Masters of XDM. But you’ll not proceed past mere marvelling. In order to truly bask and absorb you must take the heroic journey yourself, returning with the elixir, the sacred prize… in short, you’ll have to buy the whole book.

You may now pre-order your autograph edition of XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery, by Tracy and Curtis Hickman, illustrated by Howard Tayler. Tracy Hickman is the co-creator of Castle Ravenloft and the popular Dragonlance series. His son Curtis is a practicing magician. And me? Me you probably already know.

If you play table-top role-playing games like D&D*, Rifts*, Shadowrun*, or GURPS* then XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery is the best game supplement you can buy. Its principles will make anybody a better game-master, and will turn good game-masters into small gods. Its principles will also make for better players, so whether you’re running a game or playing in one you will benefit from this book.

And if you just want to read it for the sheer entertainment value I promise you that it’ll hold up just fine. This is not a dusty reference tome. This was written to be read, learned from, and above all enjoyed.

But that’s not the only new thing in the Schlock Mercenary Store this morning. You may have heard that Under New Management has gone into a second printing. We’ve fixed the typos, tweaked the cover and spine, and are now opening pre-orders for numbered sketch editions. We only did 300 of those the first time around, so some of you may have missed out.

And that’s STILL not where it ends. We also have Tagon’s Toughs t-shirts coming back to the store, and a new shirt that I’m not going to spoil for you here. Why not? Because it uses a punchline that won’t appear on in the comic until August. If you want to read it now, go window-shopping.

(*Note: D&D, Rifts, Shadowrun, and GURPS are all other people’s trademarks, and they want you to know that.)

The family went camping this weekend. I went driving up and down the canyon.

This was so we could finally participate in the massive Pope-Durfee family reunion (that’s Sandra’s mother’s family,) but my own partial participation was a concession to “Howard really needs to get some work done,” along with “Howard would like to be well-rested on Monday.” And so it was that my oldest daughter and I slept at home while everyone else was three thousand feet up.

My daughter’s excuse for not sleeping in the (crowded!) tent was that she just got back from camping and really didn’t have the stomach for it again.

In some of my non-camping time I relaxed and painted, finally finishing the Stormclad warjack pictured here. Check out my Stormclad Flickr Set if you want to see the annotated pictures and close-ups.

Is it camping if the site is only 22 minutes from your home? Yes. But not if you sleep in your home. My family went camping. I had three days worth of “picnic.”

On Wednesday, July 1st at 8:00am Mountain Time we will open pre-orders for XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery by Tracy and Curtis Hickman. Howard illustrated this must-have reference for RPG referees, dungeon masters, and serious role-players, and has been showing off his advance copy for a couple of weeks now. The book is hard-bound, 160 pages long, black-and-white, and costs $29.95.

Why pre-order? Every pre-ordered book will be autographed by Tracy Hickman, Curtis Hickman, and Howard Tayler at no additional charge. The pre-order will end at 8 pm Mountain time on July 18th. In addition to copies of XDM, our online store will also feature the as-yet-unseen XDM t-shirts and franchise kits. Orders are expected to ship by July 30th.

After the pre-order period you can still order the book, but the only way to get it autographed will be to track down the authors and artist individually.

Now, if you’re attending GenCon Indy in August you can buy the book there. Tracy, Curtis, and Howard will all be in attendance and they will be happy to commit commerce and then sign your book.  They will even have a special “Gencon Indy” stamp to certify that your copy was signed at Gencon.

If you’re patient and don’t mind a non-autographed book, you can wait until sometime this fall and buy XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery from a hobby-gaming store near you.  We do not have a street-date yet, however. Negotiations proceed apace behind closed doors.

But wait, there’s more!
We are thrilled to now be on the the second printing of Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management. Books arrive here at Schlock Central in July.

This volume was the first book we put into print.  We only did 300 numbered sketch editions back then, and it now occurs to us that perhaps some of you feel left out. Thus it is that in celebration of our first ever second printing we offer you a second shot at getting a sketch edition.  We’ll do between 700-1000 sketched books.

Orders will open on July 1st at 8 AM Mountain time along with the XDM pre-orders, and will close when we run out.  Our past two sketch edition runs have sold out within about a week.

I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen yesterday, and it was not my favoritest thing ever. Here are the rankings as they now stand:

1. Star Trek

2. Up

3. Terminator: Salvation

4. Angels & Demons

5. Transformers: ROTF

6. Land of the Lost

7. Night at The Museum 2

8. Wolverine

I got my fill of giant robots beating the cybersnot out of each other, yes. I even liked some of the bits that other reviewers despised (specifically, the twin robots “Jar-Jar” and “Binks,” or whatever their names were.) And the film had me completely gripped for the entire first Act, which concluded very powerfully.

But then we switched movies. It went from exciting and powerful with a touch of humor to being silly and stupid with a touch of “why am I still sitting here?” And there was the big Act II Continuity Flaw, in which a Transformer who has been hiding in the National Air & Space Museum (which we all know to be in the heart of Washington, D.C.) pounds his way out the back through a hangar door and steps onto an airstrip somewhere in Nevada - arid landscape with mountains on the horizon, nary a city in sight.

I can understand taking certain shortcuts for the sake of the story, but this knocked me right out of the film. I stopped believing in Transformers, and started seeing the whole thing as a dumb cartoon for kids, only with too many boob-cam shots for me to be comfortable treating it as a kids’ show.

That’s a high crime right there. When a film-maker manages to convince me to put on my suspenders of disbelief, it’s okay for him to tug on my pant leg from time to time. Ripping my pants off sideways and then giving me a wedgie? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Anyway, that was Act II. Act III had another continuity problem, this one more obvious. Four people in car, one freaking out. Somebody tases the freaker-outer, and he slumps. Cut IMMEDIATELY to car exterior, swerving to a halt. All four people jump out heroically. I actually spoke out loud… “It was nice of them to wake him up.”

But Act III’s big crime was that it meandered. Oh, sure, there were giant robots blowing the crap out of stuff and each other, there were Constructicons being all huge and dangerous, and our heroes were being all heroic and outnumbered, but it just went on and on and on. With lots of boob-cam.

By the time the film ended I didn’t care. I wanted to get out of the theater into sunlight and the real world. I wanted to go to the gym. You know the old theater saw, “Leave ‘em wanting more?” This movie was like a buffet of mediocre all-you-can food at which I unwisely ate enough for three days and then left, swearing I would never come back.

Perhaps appending the “L” to ROTF is misleading. But I bet this movie would be riotously entertaining with a group of like-minded friends shouting at the screen, or maybe just RiffTrax. In fact, that might get me to sit through the whole thing again.

Well, no. There isn’t. Garden Ninja Painting Studio lives in somebody else’s garden. But they’re good friends of mine, and good things are coming.

First, though, they’ve partnered with BSCReview.com to run a contest. The winner gets a full set of patina-finished Goblin Quest miniatures. These were sculpted by my friend and mini-paint mentor Drew Olds, and are licensed characters from Jim Hines’ Goblin Quest books.

There’s a second contest starting in a week, and a third a week after that.

Now, on to good things. Garden Ninja Painting Studio is going to handle the production (and painting, for those of you who want it) of a 28mm-scale Sergeant Schlock miniature. Melissa Mayhew is putting the finishing touches on the sculpt, so we expect to have it ready in time for Christmas.

I can’t wait to get one.

In the meantime, go over to BSCReview.com and sign up to win some patina-finished pewter.

Y’all went through our scratch-and-dent books pretty fast, folks. It almost makes me wish our volunteers had dropped a couple of cases of books down the stairs or something.

If you’ve still got book-money burning a hole in your pocket and cannot hold on until July 1st when we open XDM pre-orders, let me point you at an excellent alternative: The Book of Biff. Chris Hallbeck delivers the single-panel gags five days a week on the web, but he’s also got four books in print now. The humor is cognitive yet absurd, and I don’t feel the need to understand the eyebrows. Or the rocket hands.

I’ve loved single-panel humor ever since Gary Larson raised the bar on the art form with The Far Side. David Farley cranked it up a notch for ten years or so with Doctor Fun. And now Chris Hallbeck gives us The Book of Biff in that same grand tradition.

Chris has advertised with me in the past, but this blog mention isn’t something he’s paying money for. It’s just my way of saying thanks to him for making me laugh.

With Scrapyard out the door Sandra is in the throes of the post-shipping clean up. You should see the basement. It looked like a tornado hit it. Then it looked like FEMA hit it. Then it looked like nice, competent professionals came in and put everything back together.

Anyway, part of this clean-up process includes updating the store listings to reflect actual inventory.  We found a few more mousepads, pins, and loose magnets lying around.

And if you really must have all eight of the magnets, you can buy a full set.

We also have a pile of damaged books for sale at clearance prices.

These books are all dinged, dented or damaged in some way, but no more than you probably would expect after the book has been read a few times.  We guarantee that none of the pages are ripped, loose, or missing.  If your budget is tight then these scratch-and-dent books are a great way to go.  Supplies are limited to what we have on hand.

An array of posters and special prints is also available.
Sandra tells me that we need to clear out some of this inventory to make space for new inventory.  The very shiniest of the new inventory will be XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery by Tracy and Curtis Hickman, illustrated by yours truly. We’ve gotten our twenty advance copies, and this book is wonderful. Pre-orders for XDM will open in July.

I’ve been interviewed a few times in recent months and I have failed in my responsibility to you, fair reader. I never linked the interviews for you.

The first interview was back in February. Nathan Gibson interviewed me for his “Do A Barrel-Roll” blogspot site as part of a class project. He gathered a couple dozen questions that he didn’t end up using, but which I answered by way of preparation. I’ll post that Q&A below.

The second interview was for a special-interest periodical called “Mormon Artist.” Allison Aston dealt me some of the usual, “being a webcomic guy” questions, but there were also a few stumpers in there about home, family, and faith. My favorite part of the interview was the photo shoot — those shots in the sidebar are nifty.

And now, the Q&A (most of these came from you readers): Read the rest of this post »

With the airing of the June 12th, 2009 installment of Schlock Mercenary I celebrate three things:

1) Nine full years of Schlock online.

2) The beginning of the tenth year of Schlock online.

3) The recycling of a nine-year-old punchline. Under the current conditions, that’s the very oldest of my punchlines I can re-use.

It’s been a great nine years. Here’s to nine more, only I want them to be even better.