Blógünder Schlock

First, a holiday comic for you.

Too early? Not if you’re ordering Christmas cards! Pre-orders are open for 5-packs, 10-packs, and individual “Merry XDMas” cards featuring this cartoon on the front, and the XDM Fortune Cookie Magic System on the back. The interior of the card is blank and awaiting personalization… like an invitation to get together for some holiday-themed role-play during the solstice…

There is absolutely no better way to get the gamers back together for the holidays than to send the invitation along with an adventure hook AND a magic system.

We’ll be making the print run early next week, and we’ll order some extras, but if you want to be guaranteed enough cards to send to your gamer friends, please pre-order this weekend. We will have the cards in hand the week of the 16th, and you should receive your order shortly thereafter — in plenty of time to send cards out for Christmas.

(Sorry for the late notice. This was one of those ideas that kind of snuck up on me at the last minute. I only knew I had to do it once I realized that Kringle has been deceiving us for decades.)

Garden Ninja Studios is offering a new licensed product. You know you want one.

28mm "Sergeant Schlock" by Melissa Mayhew and Drew Olds

Sculpted by Melissa Mayhew, each miniature is hand-painted by the Garden Ninja himself, Drew Olds. And they’re available now.

There are only about 120 of them. They’re the perfect scale for table-top wargaming, and though we don’t have a rule-set for them, that’s okay. We’re sure you can find a way to work everybody’s favorite carbosilicate amorph into your collection.

If you’d rather paint Schlock yourself, or if you’re into the antique-patina pewter look, check out this page for the full set of options and prices on these.

While you’re over there, check out the other cool stuff that Garden Ninja offers. Their line of Mistborn minis and Goblin Quest minis are on sale for 30% off through January.

Update: As of 7:40am Mountain Time there are only sixty of these left (the inventory widget on the site is not accurate.) Garden Ninja Studios has another sixty on order, but that’s all they can get between now and the new year.

XDM Pre-orders are closed. Tracy, Curtis, and I signed two pallets of books on Monday, and I think we’ve got a few left over.

I’m going to be taking some of them to Dragon’s Keep. That’s right, on Wednesday (the day comics arrive) by 2:00pm you can get a Pre-order edition of XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery at Dragon’s Keep in Provo. As an added bonus, I may be able to draw a picture in the back for you.

In other news, watch this space for:

* My WorldCon Schedule! See me in Montreal!

* My GenCon Indy Schedule! See me in Indianapolis!

* Some auctions, maybe! Including one of only three upside-down-bound copies of XDM! Tracy got one, Curtis got one, I’m going to draw in mine and then sell it because I want to have an iPhone.

As you may have noticed I’m not going to be at Comic-Con this week. Go see my friends in the Webcomics Pavilion, including the Blank Label Comics crew in booth 1330, sandwiched between Penny Arcade and Keenspot.

The only reason I’m not closing pre-orders right now is because the stamp I just made for the “Triply-Autographed Pre-Order Edition” is cool enough to drive a few last-minute sales, so like any good mercenary I’m stretching out that last minute.

Neat, huh? Don’t worry, GenCon Indy Attendees! If you’re planning to pick up XDM at the show, we’ll be using a very similar stamp there. In fact, if you imagine the words “GenCon Indy” in place of the word “Pre-Order” you’ll know exactly what you’re getting.

So… XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery pre-orders are still open. We can’t leave them open past about 10:00am Monday (Mountain Daylight Time) because that’s when Tracy, Curtis, and I start signing (and stamping!) books.

You there, Schlock reader! Odds are good that if you want an autographed copy of XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery you’ve already ordered it, or plan to get yours at GenCon. Thank you!

I know that for many of the rest of you a role-play supplement just isn’t “your thing.” That’s fine. I don’t want to sell you stuff you don’t want, don’t need, or won’t like. But you can still help us…

Between now and Saturday we need you to identify friends who role-play (easy indicators: do they have dice in their cubicle? Do they make jokes about gaining levels at work?) and send them this link. That’s not the store link. That’s a link to a glowing review from one of the writers at Role Playing Pro. But it’s not the only one!  There’s another one here!

Tracy, Curtis, and I have been trying to tell people how fantastic this book is, but I don’t expect anybody to take our word for it. Today, though, we have some solid feedback from the target market, and it would appear that this book is every bit the “must-have” supplement we’ve been saying it is.

Pre-orders close on Saturday. Monday I’m sitting down with Tracy and Curtis and we’re signing all the pre-ordered books. The next time the three of us will be together will be at GenCon, and then who knows?

So, the call to action. Find friends who role-play, and send them those book-review links. They don’t have to be Schlock readers. They can be players of any table-top RPG — D&D, Shadowrun, GURPS, World of Darkness, Paranoia , Final Redoubt — anything. This book will help them. Samuel and John said so.

First: The Star Pirates folks have been welcoming Schlockers with open arms. The Tagon’s Toughs fleet is up to 66 members. If you head on over there you’ll be in good hands.

Second: The automated update system for Schlock Mercenary is broken, and has to be manually dialed in each evening. This has confused the poor RSS scraper, which expects the comic to be up at a given time. Thus for you, the reader, the comic is showing up a few minutes late and the feed has nothing in it but a link.

That’s the current state.

The plan, at least as I’ve plannified it (yes, I have a copy of Barnum’s Thesaurus) is to migrate the whole mess, current layout and all, over to a WordPress/ComicPress architecture sometime this month. The source for the RSS feed will change, but the current feedburner address will still be valid. This will certainly bring its own set of hiccups, hiccoughs, hernias, and hex-nuts, but I believe it’s time to put that old system to rest and step into the 21st century.

Nine pallets of XDM arrived at the Tayler House today. You can’t have yours yet, though, because Tracy and Curtis won’t be back in town to sign pre-orders until next week.

In order to only stock for immediate demand we needed to shift six of these pallets off to our warehousing facility. This meant getting on the Schlock Hotline and calling Jon Krupp, who generously donates a forklift and a truck every time big things need to be moved.

In the spirit of X-treme Dungeon Mastery he brought an X-treme truck. I had never seen one of these before, and I had my doubts.

Here’s a link to the full photo-stream of XDM X-treme Pallet Shifting, including several shots of that lifting operation in progress. I confess… I’m far more nervous around this kind of heavy machinery than I am around firearms. Somebody needs to point a firearm at you to kill you with it, but heavy machinery has a mind of its own.

I’m pretty sure there’s a comic gestating at the end of that last paragraph somewhere.

Speaking of comics, here’s one last freebie from within the covers of XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery. It’s in a chapter about describing the effects of magic…

If you didn’t laugh, that’s okay. You probably lack the reference frame.

If you did laugh, you really need to buy the book.

The folks at Star Pirates have been itching to get me to design ads for them for over a year now. Unfortunately for them I’ve been too busy to pay much attention to advertising — which is kind of strange, because you’d expect a good mercenary like me to be taking to that particular revenue stream like a fish takes to water, but I digress — so they had to go stand in line for slots via Project Wonderful.

By way of thanks to them for their persistence (and apology to them for not being able to follow through) here is linkage: Go play Star Pirates! There’s a “Tagon Toughs” fleet out there for you to join, even. Their imagined future is a bit darker than mine, but the game is still a thematic fit with Schlock Mercenary. That’s why I’m letting them use some of my stuff in their ads.

While we’re on the subject of me not being able to follow through… Sandra’s sister Nancy has invented the salvation of short speculative fiction. I promised her some artwork, but have yet to deliver.

So what is this miracle project? It is Anthology Builder, and it lets you assemble a print collection of short fiction, selecting stories from among hundreds of reprints from popular magazines. Then you pick cover art, drop coin, and your customized anthology is printed on-demand and sent to you in the mail.

How will this save short fiction? Let’s describe the problem, first: Most short fiction is published in magazines with a very limited circulation and shelf-life. Once published, those stories rarely see reprints in anthologies because the market is a too small to support more than a few runs of mass-market paperbacks. The result is that authors have little incentive to write short stories, so they don’t. The art form stagnates.

Enter Anthology Builder: Print-on-demand (POD) technology makes it possible for extremely small print runs to turn a profit, in turn making it possible for these short stories to be marketed to the niche that loves them. This means that authors get residual royalties for work that is technically out-of-print, and that incents them to create similar work. The art form again blooms.

(On an only-slightly nepotistic note: Anthology Builder now has three Sandra Tayler stories in it.)

Anyway, Nancy asked me if I’d like to contribute cover art for Anthology Builder, and even though this is something I’d get paid for I still haven’t managed to submit something. Too busy making comics, I guess.

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.

My thrill at working with Tracy Hickman has probably resulted in me understating his son Curtis’ contributions to XDM: X-treme Dungeon Mastery. Recently I’ve started drawing the technical illustrations for contact juggling (one of which was posted over at Tall Tales Radio) and for neat tricks like this one:

Yes, Curtis and I are going to teach you how to levitate dice.

There might just be superconducting magnets involved. And we’re going to teach you how to make everything you need.

What possible purpose can this serve in a game setting, you ask? Well, an Extreme Dungeon Master (an “XDM”) will also ask that question, and then will begin to snicker as the ideas unfold.

Yes, yes… I can hear your evil laughter from here. SHHH! You’re scaring your co-workers.