Friday, September 26, 2014

A Red & Pleasant Land: More Info!

One of the books at the printer right now and a week or two or whenever away from going on sale is Zak S' A Red & Pleasant Land. This is LotFP's major release for the year, and perhaps our biggest release ever. It's time to tell you more about it,

"A terrible Red King wars with an awful Queen, and together they battle into being a rigid, wrong world..." A rough concept pitch might be "Dracula vs. Bathory in the world of Alice in Wonderland." But it's far weirder than that.

Zak showed an unfinished PDF to some people and we got some quotes:

"How lucky are we? Once again we get to experience the artistry and art, the cantankerous smarts, the dissident gaming philosophy of Zak S. It's inadequate to call _Red & Pleasant Land_ brilliant. With alchemist swagger, Zak takes the base matter of well-worn fantasy standards and our cheerful nerd hobbies, and makes the strangest gold."
-China MiƩville

"God, it's so beautiful, I love this. It just makes D&D look so fucking now."
-Molly Crabapple

"It should be next to impossible to do anything original with Dracula or Alice, but Zak S demonstrates instead that it's next to impossible for him to put out a bad game book. He trails his barbed artistic and gaming sensibilities through these two modern myths and emerges with something more than a mashup or a collage: it's a necromantic restoration of a nightmare that never was."
-Kenneth Hite

(These quotes will appear on the back cover of the book in abbreviated form, for space and branding reasons.)

Because I'm just the publisher and not creatively involved, I want to tell you about the physical format before the contents.


It's going to be a 192 page full color hardcover. But because the book isn't done yet, we can't adequately show you how the book will be. That cover pic there is an approximation: The red will be cloth, and the image there will be pressed into it. The yellow will be embedded metallic golden foil. The interior pages will be nice and rich as well, as we're using the same paper stock that we used for Carcosa. I don't know if we'll achieve the goal of being the most beautiful RPG book ever published, but we're giving it a go. The promo blurbs and barcode and all that will be on a jacket that fits vertically on just the back cover.

As for the contents...


You might need to click to expand that view. The book includes over 70 illustrations by my quick count, plus close to two dozen maps and map details.

(Design and layout guy Jez Gordon should get mentioned here, he's the one that put in all the hours to make everything come together on the page.)

A Red & Pleasant Land is a setting that includes tons of ready-to-go adventure material.

"Officially" the adventure takes place in Voivodja, a southest-Europe equivalent in the world of Vornheim. But if you use another campaign world, it's no problem. Being Alice in Wonderland-inspired, there are looking glass-style ways of popping in and out of this realm.

And even if you're not wanting to run adventures in the Place of Unreason, no problem, you can still use the hell out of this book, because as it says, "The creatures and ideas in this book, like those in the real world, are portable. Feel free to have your players encounter them anywhere, just as a Cold War spy might find a Russian in any hotel room."

Comments? Questions? Go here!

Monday, September 22, 2014

The Idea from Space!

In a matter of weeks LotFP's next big bunch of releases will be available for public consumption:


  • Zak's A Red & Pleasant Land (192 page full color hardcover)
  • Rafael Chandler's No Salvation for Witches (64 full color hardcover)
  • The Idea from Space (32 page softcover)
  • Reprints of Death Frost Doom (now a revised and expanded 64 page hardcover!) and
  • Tower of the Stargazer (all new layout, 32 page softcover)


Now I think R&PL has a lot of hype happening (it's been anticipated in some quarters for years), Death Frost Doom and Stargazer are well-known adventures and you know if you want them in print or not, and NSFW just had the crowdfund thing to get people interest and the hype going.

But The Idea from Space? It's time to tell you about that so you don't leave that out while filling up your shopping cart.



 The adventure takes place on a small island (in the adventure part of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, but easily transferrable to a remote island in your own campaign world) where two supernatural forces have had an age-old feud.



There is Manakata, a primal spirit of power and physicality, which grants its followers great physical attributes. It's these followers that are on the adventure's cover.

Then there's Xaxus, a sophisticated entity all about the mind, granting its followers supernatural mental abilities.

These entities have been dormant on the island for quite some time. Then a shipwreck, a divided crew, and now both entities again have followers and again they war with each other through their followers.

And into this mess come the player characters.

Both factions will want to recruit the PCs and share their power with them. Both factions want the other faction wiped out. Both factions want to get off the island and grow into the greater world.

Will the PCs side with one faction or the other? Or neither of them? Will their allegiances split like those of the crew of the wrecked ship? Will they help one or both factions spread into the world or will they be trapped on the island? Will they discover strange secrets the island contains, or find any of the rich treasures?



Written by Simon Carryer, cover art by Olli Hihnala, layout and interior art and maps by Sarah Richardson.

(comments can be left here)

Sunday, September 7, 2014

New Books at the Printer, Out in October!

We've got a few books at the printer now:


  • A Red & Pleasant Land by Zak S
    192 page deluxe format hardcover with full color interior art.
  • No Salvation for Witches by Rafael Chandler
    64 page hardcover with full color interior art by Jason Rainville and Ian MacLean.
  • Death Frost Doom by James Edward Raggi IV and Zak S
    64 page hardcover, completely revised and rewritten edition. New layout and artwork by Jez Gordon, new cover by Yannick Bouchard.
  • The Idea from Space by Simon Carryer
    32 page softcover, layout and art by Sarah Richardson, cover art by Olli Hihnala.
  • Tower of the Stargazer by James Edward Raggi IV
    32 page softcover, brand new layout and additional art pieces by Dean Clayton.

They'll be out in October. Save your pennies.