What Corner of The World of Darkness Would You Like To See Me Touch on Next?

Folks who've been following my output for the past several years know that I've been delving into the World of Darkness pretty regularly. Whether it's big things like my 100 Kinfolk Project (available as a bundle where you can get over 1,300 NPCs) for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, or smaller entries like Buyer Beware: 10 Goblin Markets for Changeling: The Lost and 100 Resources and Rumors To Find on SchreckNet for Vampire: The Masquerade, I try to offer supplements that are going to be useful to a variety of players out there.

I also try to add a little extra fun, like this dramatization of "Missed Connections" over on my Daily Motion channel for folks who enjoy audio dramas!

Background Music From Tabletop Audio: Secret Facility

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As I sit here on the spookiest day of the year, though, I find myself wondering what folks would like to see me cover next? So I figured I'd open up the floor, and see where the conversation went!

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

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The Darkest Corners of The Setting

The World of Darkness is one of the places I feel most comfortable as a player. While I may lack the deep lore knowledge of some of the old hands (I didn't show up until right after the reboot that would become the Chronicles of Darkness was released), I never get tired of all the beautiful, horrific nonsense the games have to offer. Even games that aren't so much my bag are ones I at least try to read through and learn about because they're another facet of the setting that I enjoy.

However, WoD/CoD supplements are a much dicier proposal (pun very much intended) than a lot of the other stuff I work on. Because while the setting maintains popularity to some degree, that popularity is split among a lot of the different game lines, then split even further among the different editions of those game lines. Because for some reason players tend to find their comfort zone in this setting, and then only play that one game, rarely branching out to any of the near-dozen other options one might find... which is why a lot of the supplements I make tend to at least be usable across editions of a game, if not throughout the entire setting (like Evil Incorporated: 10 Pentex Subsidiaries which may crop up all over the original WoD setting, as an example).

Folks who are familiar with my work (check out the World of Darkness Supplements board on my Pinterest for a complete list) know that as of time of writing I've created content for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Changeling: The Lost. Most of it has focused on creating NPCs for STs to use in their games, along with rumors and resources players might find, and occasional strange things they might encounter for you to use as set dressing, plot devices, or both!

But what would you, my regular readers, like to see?

Would you like to see less-loved games like Promethean, Hunter, or Geist get some fresh material to spark interest in them? Do you feel like Apocalypse and Masquerade have enough content out there, and you'd like to see content for Forsaken and Requiem instead? Or are you one of the various folks who just want as much Mage content as they can get no matter what edition it focuses on?

That's what I need to know.

So take a moment and leave your thoughts where I can see them. Put them in a comment below, or leave them on social media where you found this post. Reach out to me on Twitter or Facebook, and let me know what you want to see. I listen when people ask me for things, and I take ideas that crop up repeatedly when people contact me.

With that said, I just just one caveat; don't ask for a product you aren't interested in purchasing.

Money is tight, and we're all very choosy with our gaming budgets, but generally speaking I put weeks of daily effort into creating a supplement, and then my publisher has to do layout, acquire art, and get everything arranged, while putting the product up for sale. It's a lot of work, and a lot of energy, to produce even small supplements, and nothing is worse than people saying they want something, then not actually getting copies of it when the thing finally drops.

Please, keep that in mind before you make you requests.

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the Azukail Games YouTube channel, or my personal channel over on Daily Motion. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!

"Book of The Wyrm Companion" Is Gross, Horrific, and Awful... Go Get It Now!

Of all the corners of the World of Darkness, the one inhabited by the Wyrm and its servants is certainly one of the darkest. Corruption, mutation, depravity, and awful, cosmic horrors lie at the bubbling, blistered heart of the Wyrm, and it warps everything that looks upon it. A tide of protoplasmic, inhuman, alien awfulness that stains the soul, and taints your very being just by knowing it's out there, it is a horror the likes of which mortals can scarcely contemplate.

It takes an enemy that inhumane, which is anathema to anything good or relatable, to make the garou seem like heroes, after all.

Bringing that kind of enemy across to your players, however, can be difficult. Not only that, but it's very easy to fall into the cracks and either become too unrelatable, too grim, or too uncomfortable for those around the table who came here to have fun. Which is why I would recommend that anyone who wanted to strike a better balance should immediately get themselves a copy of Book of The Wyrm Companion for their shelf.

Seriously... go check it out!

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

What Is This Book All About?

As the introduction section says, this book is a collection of things that could have been their own, separate splats, but which the creators chose to put into a single volume. There's additional, specific fomori that are inhuman, advice for creating First Response teams from Pentex, an entire section about running PCs as fomori (described as a kind of dark X-Men game, which definitely caught my interest), and a lot of other stuff that walks a fine line between gross and satirical.

I am what they made me.

The book it put me most in mind of (and which I picked up a copy of from my Friends of The Library resale room a few years back) is Freak Legion. However, while there's still a lot of content in there that I think people who want that kind of body horror/cosmic horror in their games would find useful, Book of The Wyrm Companion just slathers on extra stuff. There's a dozen different flavors of horrific in this thing, and there's a double scoop of terrible in store for anyone who grabs it.

Now, with all of that explanation and praise out of the way, I would point out that this is also a book with a BIG content warning right up front. While the creators attempted to give it a darkly humorous polish in some places, and to make it feel more like satire in others, there's no mistaking this for anything other than what it is. This is a grimoire of the inhuman, the monstrous, and the disturbing. For folks like me, who want WoD games to feel like horror games, that's going to be exactly what you want in your tool box. For those who may want games with cleaner morality and less disturbing content, though, this may be a bridge too far.

Let the buyer beware, this is one of those WoD tomes that comes with a warning label. The creators put it on there, and I'm reminding folks that they know their business.

Consider Some Supplemental Stuff To Go With It

This volume has a lot of contributors who all put their sweat and effort into different parts of the project, but Clinton Boomer and Josh Heath are both on the list. Talented folks who work extraordinarily hard, I have worked with both of them on previous WoD projects. And since we're talking about the Wyrm and all the awful, nasty things it makes, I figured I'd mention some of them here.

Where my Glass Walkers at?

Company Picnic is a tale Clinton penned a while ago, and it came out as part of all the efforts in and around the Tales From The Moot collection. I know that he and I enjoy writing fiction set in the World of Darkness, and if we can boost the numbers on these tales we'd be happy to lay down some fresh text... perhaps even touching on other spheres of the setting while we're at it!

Another project Clinton and I shared was the 200 Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk list. This supplement was the capstone to the 100 kinfolk project, which is currently available as a bundle if you like a good deal!

Lastly, if you need extra bad guys to go along with this book, consider grabbing a copy of Evil Inc.: 10 Pentex Subsidiaries. There's all kinds of corporate wickedness in there, and it pairs beautifully with the more obviously corrupt aspects of the Wyrm! There's even a sample audio drama from it below, if you want to take a moment to listen...

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!

Should I Start Up My Character Conversions Once Again?

I've been creating RPG content for quite a number of years, now. I've worked for companies big and small, I've dabbled in half a dozen systems, added to existing settings, and made one of my own. However, if I look back to where it all got started, I can trace my career (such as it is) back to my Character Conversions project... something that started as a lark, but became something more.

You never know the places you'll go.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

How It All Got Started

This whole, sordid tale actually goes back to one of my earliest gaming stories, Don't Ever Field a One-Eyed Dragon. During the course of this game there was something of an arms race between myself and the GM, who had a bad habit of letting far more players than he could handle join the table, and then scrambling to come up with appropriate challenges for that many adventurers. This led to my acquiring a cohort via the Leadership feat, and I built him using one of the earlier drafts of my Incredible Hulk character conversion guide. I enjoyed the character so much (and there were so many shenanigans) that I turned the build I'd used into an early draft of that guide, and threw it online on a website called Associated Content that hasn't been around for a long, long time.

And folks really liked that guide. So much so that I was getting a dozen or more requests for other characters. That was when I realized I might have opened up a Pandora's box; I could either struggle to close it, or throw the lid wide open and see where it went.

I went with the latter option, for those who are curious.

The first thing I did was put together other members of the Avengers, such as Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Thor. I spiraled out from there, touching on characters from the DC Universe, Game of Thrones, figures from history, horror movies, action films, and toward the end of my active run, from the Warhammer 40K universe. The project currently has about 60 or so guides in it, and it spans more than 6 years. Not only that, but it was started on Associated Content, which then became Yahoo! Voices. That site closed and I started moving the guides to HubPages, but Google banned my AdSense profile, so I was no longer allowed to make money with that site. I moved them to InfoBarrel, which is also now defunct, and eventually they found a new home over on Vocal.

That was a lot of work to both move the old guides (which were updated and remastered when they went up on Vocal), but I can honestly say that without them I probably wouldn't have half the career I do today as a game designer. It was these guides that got me noticed by Azukail Games, who is the primary publisher I work with. It's also what got me a gig with Louis Porter Junior when I put together the entry Lucia Krille: Enemies of NeoExodus, which was a direct riff on the character of Absorbing Man from Marvel Comics.

One frustrating thing about this project, though, is that every time it started getting close to really building momentum, something went wrong. Just as my Gotham guides were really getting a lot of attention, Yahoo! decided to deep six the site, which sent my searchability plummeting. I got half of them back up on HubPages, and then they were no longer allowed to pay my bills. I got them on InfoBarrel, and a site update that was never fixed tanked both creator tools, and made articles almost impossible to find via a search. Then I got them all up on Vocal, and Pathfinder announced a new edition was coming out, telling me that once more the project's days were numbered.

Would Readers Like To See It Return?

While there have been a couple of updates to the project, such as my guides for The Mandalorian, or the soldiers of 40k's Death Korps of Krieg, my character conversions have more or less been in cold storage for 2022. And the reason for that has been, honestly, new installments just didn't get the views I needed to justify the time, energy, and effort to keep the hits coming. For context, I make $6 for every 1,000 reads an article gets. When guides were getting 5k reads, I was more than happy to spend the 2+ hours it takes to put them together. When they get 250 reads, though, not so much.

With that said, writing these guides is something I did long enough that I sort of miss it now... so I figured I'd ask if it's something my readers would like to see make one more triumphant return?

There are, however, some provisos here.

Before anyone leaves a comment below, or on social media where you found this link, I want to make something clear. If I do bring this project back and start adding to it once again, I will more than likely continue these write ups in Pathfinder Classic. While it's possible to write some guides for DND 5E, I do not have access to the material for that edition (it doesn't have a complete SRD like Pathfinder does), and I feel that it is much too limited, mechanically, for the sorts of tricks and tips that I feel is necessary for the deep dive into a character's abilities that is the series' main selling point. While it might be possible to start making guides for Pathfinder's second edition, I am extremely reluctant to do so. I did not care for the playtest, and while there were changes made afterward, none of them served to make me eager to create anything for that system the more I read about its finalized version.

With that said, if there's folks who want to sponsor guides for particular characters in a particular edition, I'm always happy to listen to business proposals. But I wanted to be clear about the direction that I would take things if left to my own devices so that folks know what they're supporting/asking for.

If you're still with me, there are a couple of things I would like you to do in order to help let me know this is a project you want to come back:

- Leave a Comment: Either below or on social media is fine, just put it somewhere I'll see it. Feel free to make a character request in your comment if I haven't covered them yet!

- Share a Guide: Increased traffic is what really gets my attention. So share which guide you like best, or just the Character Conversion master list to help get it seen by folks.

That's it!

I'll be reading the comments and checking the numbers. If enough people are willing to help me break the seal and take this one out of cold storage, then it's something I'm happy to do in the coming months!

Lastly, if you're someone who's been thinking about trying their hand at writing a character conversion, I'd recommend reading through Tips For Writing RPG Character Conversions. I basically boiled down my process, what I learned, and how I was able to keep things going as long as I did.

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!

Which Sci-Fi Supplements Would You Like To See Next?

Folks who've been watching my release stream of late have likely noticed a trend where I'll put out a fantasy RPG supplement one month, and then half a dozen months or a year later a sci-fi version of that same supplement comes out. In case you were wondering, you're not imagining things... but even better, now you can weigh in on the process to get the supplements you want to see next!

Supplements like this one, if you haven't gotten your copy yet!

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

To Boldly Go Into New Genres To Reinvent Our Ideas!

I talked about this a while back in General Use RPG Products Hedge Your Bets (And Overall Sell Better), but I figured I'd restate it for folks who didn't catch that post. In short, if you want to make a living creating RPG supplements, you have a better chance of selling larger numbers with content that can be used across different games, and which never goes out of style, than you do making content that is specific to a particular game, a particular setting, a particular edition, and so on.

However, even if you make something that can be used in different games, you're usually bound by genre conventions. Which is where my notion of re-visiting older supplements of mine and shifting their genre came about.

That cluster looks like it needs some exploring!

Regular readers have no doubt noticed some of this happening, but if you haven't, here's a brief list of some of the projects that have gotten a dual-genre release so far you should check out:

- 100 Superstitions For a Fantasy Setting and 100 Spacer Superstitions

- 100 Random Mercenary Companies and 100 Sci-Fi Mercenary Companies

- 100 Gangs For Your Urban Campaigns and 100 Sci-Fi Gangs

- 100 Fantasy Foods and 100 Sci Fi Foods

You get the idea, I'm sure.

Why do things this way, I'm sure some folks are wondering. Well, generally speaking, it's because if a fantasy supplement covers a particular niche that seems popular or in-demand then there's a strong correlation to a sci-fi supplement doing comparably well. The sci-fi one usually does a little less in terms of numbers and sales, but that can be at least partially chalked up to the fact that on the whole fantasy RPGs are a great deal more common that science fiction ones in the market.

There's one more reason, though... sometimes I need a month of slightly less-intensive projects so that my brain can recover. Because going deep into Sundara stuff, or writing module content, really takes it out of me.

So I'd like to ask folks to check out this pinboard for my RPG supplements, and cast their vote for which fantasy supplements they think should have a sci-fi counterpart that hasn't been covered yet. Should I make a sci-fi collection of bands to find in the cantina inspired by my 100 Fantasy Bands? What if I delved into the madness that lurked in the deep black and put together some terrifying cults as a sister supplement for my 100 Cults to Encounter? Or should I put together some unions and guilds that manage things out among the stars as a more expansive version of my 100 Fantasy Guilds supplement?

Just leave a comment below, or if you saw this post on social media toss it in the comments to be sure I see it! I'm going to be putting in fresh proposals for new projects soon, and I like to at least try to give my readers what they like.

Speaking of New Sci-Fi Projects...

Another fun thing for all my science fiction lovers out there before you go! I recently dramatized my 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Warhammer 40K Edition over on my Daily Motion channel... even better, I figured out how to turn off the Auto Play option for when I share things on this blog. The sound effects alone took me like 6 hours to edit in and balance just right, so consider stopping by, giving it a listen, and if you enjoy it sharing the video around on your socials!

I'd like to keep making stuff like this, but I need the viewer numbers to make it happen.

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!