Friday, 28 August 2015

Somnium Void status update (and a chat)



It's been a while since I posted anything about Somnium Void, so I thought I'd share an update with you. Because only I solely work on my books, and I don't really have a set schedule like a fancy pants publisher, some books can take a while to get off the ground and change many, many times during the writing process. Also, I'm prone to having an idea and running with it straight away, so I'm always bouncing between projects. However, pretty much all projects I talk about get made in some form or another - whether it's Gauntlets and Goblins becoming Halberd Fantasy Roleplaying, or Slackers becoming a USR hack blog post.

That said, Somnium Void is almost finished. It looks like it's going to be between 40 and 50 pages, and while that isn't exactly a big book, for a micro-press like me it's a lot of time and effort.

Confession: when White Star was released I almost decided to completely can Somnium Void. Here was a simple game that did space opera effortlessly. How was I going to compete with that? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was ridiculous of me to think about these things in terms of competition. As I say, I'm not a business - I'm a one-man operation who loves creating roleplaying games. I make things because I love making. Besides, Somnium Void has a tonne of differences to White Star. The premise, for one, is unique and nothing like I've seen in games in the past. Plus, it runs on USR, which is a system that some people really, really dig, which is amazing. So, really, Void is absolutely for those people - for the fans who make new USR rules and run games every week with their friends.

Oh, and, take a look at the final cover.


The way that I work and my complete crippling worry that I'm going to produce something that people are going to dislike has given me pause about my Patreon. I've not yet taken any money for anything yet, and I honestly don't feel like doing it when Void lands. I don't know what it is exactly, but I just feel weird about it. It's the reason that I will never do a Kickstarter.

Maybe I'm being silly.

Anyway, this has been your Somnium Void update. As for a launch date, let's say it's going to be this side of Christmas. I'd love to use the buzz around Star Wars to launch it (ever the PR guy that I am), so it could be next month, or it could be December.

But expect new games, adventures and whatever else to pop up before then. I'd like to release a new Canary Overdrive mission in the next couple of months. I also want to completely revamp Halberd into something a lot more bad-ass, as well as get a Deluxe T&T adventure out of the door before 2016.

I'll also be releasing my Game Chef entry Dreams in Stasis on DriveThru soon and I'm toying with an arboreal-based freeform game.




No comments:

Post a Comment