Elder Dice: The Color Out of Space dice reviewed!

I have written about Infinite Black's Elder Dice before, and commented here, and I've even used their dice to highlight things like the importance of theme and contrast. With three wildly successful Kickstarters under their belts, and having sold hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dice, their latest release, The Colors out of Space (nicely, if unintentionally timed, I must say), it was their largest, most ambitious, and also their most confusing and chaotic KS campaign to date.

Now that the dice have finally made their way stateside, a great number of fans are posting pics, and taking to social media to express their feelings about their new acquisitions. I am, it seems, no different.

I won't get into the peripheral things that ended up showing up in the box for two reasons: 1. I have real, deep, and tangible buyer's remorse over the amount of money I spent for things I not only don't need but will never use, and 2. The dice are all that really matter at the end of the day. So let's get into this and see what's what.

Monty Haul Design Notes: Alchemy, Herbalism, and Poison

One of David Teniers; many paintings of medieval alchemists

I'm going to put a quick PDF doc here (because I like how it's formatted, and blogger will just make it look ugly, see) about what my thinking process was that led me to write new rules for alchemy in 5th edition. I wrote it originally for this blog, and so it's in my conversational style. I did this for a few reasons:

1. for those of you who don't know me, here's a pretty good snapshot of how I write, and also, how I approach game design.

2. Alchemists and Apothecaries are going to be one of the feature pieces in Monty Haul #1, and here's a bit of a preview.

3. The pdf is easier to distribute as a formatted object and it lets you download it now and read it later. Well, I do that; I don't know if anyone else does. But that's how I think, so, there you have it.

Here's the PDF link from my Google Drive: Design Note on Alchemy
Feel free to snag it and check it out at your leisure; it's a quick read. And if you are so moved to back my 'zine, Monty Haul, that would be great, too! It's already funded and right now I am flogging for stretch goals.

Kickstarter is Live!

And despite a rookie mistake at the beginning (which not a lot of people saw since it was the middle of the night), we have pledges, too! If you'd like in on the action, you've got two weeks, starting today: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markfinn/monty-haul-fifth-edition-zine-with-an-old-school-vibe

The Kickstarter is Nigh!

I love using "nigh" in a sentence, don't you?

Hey, just in case you missed the first notification, here's another one for you: the Kickstarter for Monty Haul, an old-fashioned RPG 'zine for 5e, starts on Wednesday, but YOU can get notified when it drops so as to not miss out. All you gotta do is follow the link below and throw your email into the gaping maw of the Kickstarter beast.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markfinn/monty-haul-fifth-edition-zine-with-an-old-school-vibe

I will post major updates here, but if you want to stay tied into what's up with the KS, please back the project (even if it's just for a buck) and you can follow along with the updates I will be (hopefully) posting regularly in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks, oh my gentle readers. I'll see you on the other side.

Dice Notes: Some Friendly and also Unasked-For Advice

There is always a dice project on Kickstarter, it seems, and most often, more than one at a time. If you are dice-happy, or worse, dice-drunk, like some people I know, this can be both heady and frustrating. Mostly because we all have bills to pay, and people to feed. I've tried eating dice, and it just doesn't work.

I am no stranger to buying interesting dice. However, I'm seeing some...trends, let's call them, that are not just making me crazy, but also really dampening my interest in funding an otherwise great idea. In some cases, I think these are poor decisions based on a lack of experience and/or graphic arts training, and in other cases, they are just things that I personally don't like. I'll try to let you know which is which.

In any case, I'm not randomly throwing people under the bus. I really want your project to be a success, to be something interesting to add to the hobby, to be something I can partake in. I'm not being mean for the sake of being mean, nor am I trying to be funny at the expense of someone's hard work. I know these are all labors of love. And having been on the other side of the manufacturing process, maybe I can offer some constructive criticism.

Without any further explanation, here we go: