Well, I’ve again been neglecting my humble little blog. So let’s get that corrected, starting with this…

Crossroad Press has released Redemptor in paperback, featuring the beautiful cover that Shawn King designed. This makes all four of the Valducan novels in print with Crossroad after my little hiccup with Ragnarok in 2017.

While audiobooks and ebooks are certainly nice, nothing quite matches the feeling of getting to hold your book in your hand and say, “I did that.”

In other news, my YouTube channel has been chugging along very well. In early 2018, I started a How to Play Call of Cthulhu series, which ended up going from my original plan of 4-5 videos to 9 videos long (there’s a lot to cover). Shortly after wrapping the final episode, Chaosium, the publisher of Call of Cthulhu, released their Introductory Starter Box set.

It wasn’t long after the set’s release that I started receiving messages and Tweets congratulating me for the shoutout. At first I was confused. What shoutout? And then someone sent me a picture. The set includes as section recommending online resources to new players in order to help them learn the game. I was the first name they mentioned.

I think the dream of every kid who picks up their first copy of Dungeons and Dragons is to one day be a game writer (OK, it was for me). Being a Game Master is fun, and you think that one day, your stuff will be good enough to get your name and work in one of those official books at the bookstore. So while it wasn’t for writing a game or module, Chaosium still fulfilled 13-year-old Seth’s dream of being named in an official RPG book. It’s a huge honor and touched me far deeper than I would have expected.

Speaking of writing RPG modules, I’ll soon have my first published scenario released. Stygian Fox did a Kickstarter some months back for a re-release and update on the collection New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. It’s a very good collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios set in Lovecraft Country and featuring work by some of the best scenario authors in the field. To mark the re-release, Stygian Fox decided to add one new scenario to the collection, one set in Innsmouth, and they asked me to write it.

It was a huge honor. I love Stygian Fox’s work on the other books they’ve released, and I got right to work. After writing, and playtesting it a couple times, I sent them the adventure “A Mother’s Love,” which will be my very first RPG scenario in print.

I’m very happy with it. Am I nervous that after building a following, and a mild reputation of a Call of Cthulhu know-it-all, how people will take a scenario I wrote? Mother-of-God, yes.

Writing a scenario for other people, is VERY different than writing one for yourself to run for players. You have to look at it from many different angles, trying to answer possible questions that you, yourself, would never ask or put any forethought in to. It’s like being in a math class where you answer the question, but the teacher is equally interested in you showing your work. I’ve never had to show my work when writing a game for my friends. If they tried something I hadn’t anticipated, I could easily cover for it on the fly. Solving the problem in my head. But modules require you to show your work for questions you haven’t even been asked yet, and that was an interesting challenge. Keeping that all in a 8,000-word package was another hurdle. I’d have loved to bulk it up to 10K, but I’m more than familiar with how quickly a module goes down-hill by being too wordy. It was a bit enlightening to see the balance from the other side for a change.

Stephanie at Stygian Fox loves the adventure, and her opinion is gold. I trust her fully. She wouldn’t release anything she wasn’t 100% confident in, so I’ll take that as a good sign. At this point, the only thing left to do is wait for final art for the scenario to be completed, and then see how people take it. But one way or another, I’ll have a professionally published scenario.

13-year-old me is quite excited.

Well that is it for now. At the moment I’m filling out Panelist Applications for various conventions, hoping to spread my con presence beyond the area it already includes. With a little luck, I’ll be making convention appearances outside of Texas and Oklahoma this year.

-Seth