Friday 22 September 2017

The Chapel on the Cliffs: Gratuitous Gloating

There are various advantages to modern academic life, but getting your name on beautiful books isn't usually one of them. I've published a lot of scholarly works over the course of my career, from journal articles to book-length monographs, and I've become resigned to the low, low standards of academic publishing: a meaningless geometric cover design that maybe consists of a purple triangle on a white background or something, followed by pages of eye-destroying print. So it was with some pleasure that I received my print copy of the adventure that I rather randomly ended up writing for D&D5The Chapel on the Cliffs.

It is a very pretty book.


It contains many pictures of skeletons.


It has interior illustrations.





It has a proper page layout, with sections and bullet points, and also a friendly zombie.



It has full-colour maps which are much, much prettier than the crude black-and-white scrawls I originally drew for it using MS Paint.


It has statistics which I do not understand, because I don't actually play D&D5 and just wrote it in B/X and entrusted the system conversion to the editor, but they all look very statistical.


And the special edition version even includes an artist's sketchbook!


So many thanks to Raluca Marinescu for some wonderful art, and to Ben at Goblinstone for doing the layout. It makes a very pleasant change from purple triangles on white backgrounds!

5 comments:

  1. Undead, why did it have to be undead? I really do want to buy something you have written because I really enjoy reading this blog, but undead are my second least favorite monsters (just above fiends). Is it easy to reskin or replace them with some other sort of monster?

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    1. Not really, I'm afraid. They're not just 'a bunch of 1 HD monsters who happen to be undead': the logistics of dealing with a force of opponents who are magically animated, made of bones, sleep in graves, and lair in a churchyard are central to the adventure.

      (I guess you could replace them with a hive-mind army of freaky nocturnal sea-creatures who squelch around the adventure site during the night, sleep in pits in the churchyard during the day, and regenerate all harm unless killed in a specific fashion, but that seems a pretty cumbersome work-around to avoid just using skeletons!)

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