Cthulhu Gloom Cover

Our excellent artist Todd Remick has just turned in a preliminary art for the Cthulhu Gloom tuckbox. We're thrilled by the result!

Lunch Money Button Men Freebie at Warehouse 23

Starting this week, and only while the limited supply lasts, Warehouse 23 will be including a free Lunch Money Button Men sample in the orders they fill.  Each promo packet includes one button (one of the six normally sold in pairs) and a rules sheet.  Warehouse 23 handles all the mail order from our website, so this is a great time to pick up all those Atlas Games products you've been meaning to buy but just hadn't yet.

As I said, the supply of these buttons is very limited, so do not delay!

Ars Magica Hooks Open Call

The Ars Magica line now introduces large portions of Mythic Europe, from trade to art, from Normandy to Constantinople, and from long-dead magic to newly-formed conspiracies. How do you introduce this to your players? This book is an answer to that question. It will consist of eight short scenarios, each of which gets the player characters involved with something treated in more detail in another book, and then gives them the option of pursuing it further. Each story should be something that could hook a troupe into a saga thread designed by their storyguide.

Each scenario/encounter should have the following features:

• The encounters should be short, suitable for play in one session.
• Each encounter is to be self-contained, but if the player characters decide to investigate further it leads into material from another book. The encounter might be with an artifact connected to some kind of ancient magic, or with a practitioner of rival magic, or have a connection to draw the characters to visit a particular region of Mythic Europe, and thus use that Tribunal book.
• The encounters should be designed so that they can be used anywhere in Mythic Europe, and should not be very date-sensitive.
• They should also be designed so that the player characters have to react to something, and can't just ignore it; they get to decide whether to pursue the lead further once they've resolved this issue.
• Finally, and this is very important, the other book must not be necessary to run the encounter, and we must not need to reprint a significant amount of the other book.

You may propose encounters connected to any ArM5 book you are familiar with. That includes books that haven't been published yet, as long as you know what the draft that will be published looks like. (That means that you must have been a final-round playtester or author, and that the book must have finished playtest. You should still check with me in advance in that case, just in case the point you plan to use was changed in final edit.)

I may accept more than one encounter linked to a given book, although probably not two or more linked to the same chapter of Ancient Magic, for example. You may also submit multiple encounters. In addition, I already have proposals in hand linked to Realms of Power: Faerie, Lords of Men, and the Canaanite Necromancy chapter of Ancient Magic. It would maximize your chances if you avoided those.

Submission Details

Before sending me anything, you need to send a Release Form to Atlas. Download the required release form here. You need to print it and sign it, but you can then scan and email it to info@atlas-games.com , or fax it to Atlas at +1 (651) 638-0084. We will acknowledge receipt of the Release Form, and at that point you can send your submission to the email address we send you in the acknowledgement.

Your submission must be a complete draft of your encounter. You should think that it is ready for publication as it stands. Keep it between 3600 and 4400 words long, including all necessary game statistics. If it needs maps, send sketches.

Send your submission as electronic files attached to an email with the subject line "Hooks Submission – Foo", replacing "Foo" with an informative title for your submission. Your draft should be in ODT format, which is the native file format of OpenOffice.org ( http://www.openoffice.org/ ), LibreOffice ( http://www.libreoffice.org ), and NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php) and any sketch maps should be in a relatively small format. Do not send me any image files larger than a megabyte, and try to make them considerably smaller. Do not embed images into the text document; send them as separate files.

Name the files in the form name-title.rtf or name-title-map1.jpg, where "name" is your name (surname only is fine unless you think other submitters are likely to share it) and "title" is the title of the proposal. Don't include any spaces in the filenames.

The deadline for submissions is 26^th June 2011.

After Submission

You may submit your draft before the deadline, and it's a good idea, since things do go wrong with computers. I will acknowledge receipt of each draft when I get it, but I won't read any of them until the deadline has passed.

If I like your draft, you will be asked to sign our standard contract, which involves assigning the copyright to Atlas Games. This is not negotiable; do not submit if you are not willing to do that. Payment will be $110 per accepted submission, payment on publication of the book. Since the scenarios have to be playtested before they can be published, that is unlikely to happen before 2013.

Talking of playtesting, you will be required to revise your submission to take account of playtest comments, at least twice. In some cases, three rounds of playtest and revision are required. I may also ask you to make some changes before the first playtest.

If I don't take your draft for this book, don't take it to heart. Rejections are very common in this business. You can still send it to Sub Rosa, or even try to publish it elsewhere if you file all the Ars Magica serial numbers off. (That's likely to be impossible if you were working on introducing Rival Magic or Legends of Hermes, but is quite feasible if your scenario was connected to Art and Academe. It's probably a good idea to send me the revised version first if you want to do this, though, to confirm that the remaining elements are actual history, rather than stuff we made up for the game.)

I look forward to seeing your scenarios.

Good luck!

David Chart

Ars Magica Line Developer

Inside Legends of Hermes

The next Ars Magica book, Legends of Hermes, is almost ready for press. Take a sneak peek inside at its table of contents!

Completely Off Topic: Finnish Metal

You probably didn't wake up this morning with the realization that your personal music library has a gaping hole where the "Finnish Metal" collection should be, but on the chance that you did...let me plug Ahma, who have a new album due for release in May.  Their Facebook page describes Ahma as "a battle-proven, Helsinki-based quartet of adult men playing loud and obnoxious rock music," and notes that "[t]he sound of Ahma is thoroughly enhanced for hearing impaired, and can be best described as LOUD."  You can listen to a couple of their songs on their Facebook page.


What's the tenuous connection to Atlas Games?  Spikey-mohawked vocalist Janne Lönnqvist (he's the one on the side reading a book on their web page photo) has been our buyer at our Finnish distributor, Fantasiapelit, as long as I can remember.  He's always been great to work with, and I'm not just saying that because he's a long-time On the Edge fan.  If you like really loud metal music (or just are curious about the impact of "heavy machinery and concrete shoes" as musical inspirations), you should check 'em out.

Ars Magica 5th Edition Coming in Polish

It is my pleasure to announce today that Atlas Games has finalized an agreement with the Polish company Galmadrin, to produce Ars Magica 5th Edition's core rulebooks and supplements in the Polish language.

New in PDF: The Medieval Bestiary

The latest Ars Magica addition to the online bookstore of e23 is The Medieval Bestiary Revised Edition.  It's available for sale right now as a digital download, but you also still have the option of ordering it in hard copy if that's your preference.

Cliffourd Cover Art

Find out more about Cliffourd the Big Red God now!

Special Ops Drawing

Atlas Games is pleased to announce that Antonia Cabal of Milwaukie, OR is the winner of this quarter's Special Ops prize drawing. Antonia will get to choose a prize from among the rare and and one-of-a-kind Atlas Games items reserved for the Special Ops drawing.

Special Ops is Atlas Games' corps of loyal fans who organize and run demos and tournaments at retail stores and conventions across the country and around the world. At the end of each quarter, Special Ops demo team members who have run a game in the last three months are entered into a prize drawing for special Atlas items. The next drawing will be June 30th, and will feature a choice of prizes such as press sheets and original art from our popular Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Penumbra D20, and Unknown Armies RPGs, and from card game favorites like Dungeoneer, Lunch Money, and Once Upon a Time.

Atlas is also happy to welcome the following new recruits:

Joe McDonald
Helio B. Pereira de Sá
Ulf Bengtsson
Brandon Draper

Thanks for being a part of Special Ops!

If you're interested in joining Atlas Games' Special Ops demo team, just fill out and send in an Application Form. There's no obligation.

To request a Special Ops demo at your convention or retail store, send in our Demo Request Form .