Fever-flipping-Swamp

The air is moist. The moisture mixes with your sweat — the heat is relentless. The drone of insects gives you headaches, and the fever from the infected wounds has left you delirious. Your raft is damaged, and there are spirits in the trees.

You’ve only been here for three days.

Fever Swamp is a hex-crawl sandbox adventure compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess and most other Dungeons & Dragons clones.

Fever Swamp was written by Young Master +Luke Gearing , previously famed for his contributions to the world's favourite outsider role-playing 'zine, The Undercroft, and illustrated by +Andrew Walter, who surreptitiously inserted sigil magic into his work on our previous publication, Crypts of Indormancy, to uncertain ends.

On top of this, +Christian Kessler  and +Jarrett Crader have done an outrageously good job on the layout. The PDF is a thing of functional beauty.


Hard copies+PDF direct from us (PDF now, order shipped when the books arrive)

Just the PDF, from RPGNow

Fever Swamp

Why look at that cover. My, what a handsome cover! Don't take my word for it, look at it again. Now imagine the kind of words such a cover must contain. Yes! That good.

I'll spare you the endless marketing jabber and just say this: THIS IS THE NEXT BOOK FROM THE MELSONIAN ARTS COUNCIL, BOUND BY WRITING ALL-STAR LUKE GEARING'S WORDS.

Fever Swamp is:

• An adventure
• A hex crawl
• A sandbox
• In a swamp
• Very pretty
• Compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Fever Swamp is not:

• Appropriate
• Half bad

Give us all your money so that we can continue making these nice things.

Please.

My Very Own GenCon Stall

It's GenCon and I'm too poor and hate-filled to run a stall there, so instead I'm going to project my malignant presence via the magic of contrived sale events.

Spend £10 or more and you won't pay postage, even if you're Johnny Foreigner. Buy some books, or pictures, or paper miniatures, or tell someone else to do it for you, or something, or other, and so on and so on.

Where: www.melsonia.com

Coupon Code: DONTTOUCHME

Starts now, ends on the 21st.

Foreign Friendly After Expo Expo

The Melsonian Arts Council was at the UK Games Expo last week, outside the labourers entrance next to the toilets. Unless you were banging for a piss or were that security guard sleeping by the emergency exit, then you probably missed us. I think it's only fair we give everyone another chance to get in here, give us all their money and see how handsome we are, but this time we'll include our hard done-by international customers.

1. Go to www.melsonia.com
2. Spend £27 and postage is free, a whole £1 saving on UKGE's entrance fee 'cos we love you more
3. The password at checkout is GIMMETHATLANYARD
4. Doors open now and close again on June 11th at 4pm.

It's a digital, invisible expo! Just without all those people and games and fun.

We've got 10ish copies of Troika! left, and general stocks of the Undercroft are looking thin. Everyone that buys something at the Expo Expo also gets one of my special convention badges included. THEY ARE MUCH COVETED!

Crypts of Indormancy

I'm opening Crypts of Indormancy to pre-orders. Having half the job done by the time the books arrive would be a huge help, so that's what I'm doing. You can get it from the Melsonian Arts Council shop in print & PDF or just PDF on its own, or you can go to that other place and buy it, if you insist.

The description from all the various places it's being flogged:

The tomb of Thuuz, Lord Nanifer, Elven General of the Western Isle, has been found. The Islanders he once exploited and terrorised would gladly hurl his bitter carcass back into the ocean. Others, hearing of an untouched crypt in the mountains, no doubt filled with all the pomp and pride of an aristocratic burial, arrive with less ideological motives for defilement. 

Crypts of Indormancy is a location-based adventure possessing ecumenical compatibility with Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants. Appropriate for any number and level of players, all who enter the tomb of Thuuz without their wits ready will likely come undone. For Thuuz’s heirs did not leave his bones helpless and unguarded. 

Crypts of Indormancy is written with the relentless wit of Ezra Claverie and illustrated by Andrew Walter’s unbidden alien hands. Never before has such a conjunction occurred and for all our sakes pray it never does again lest our feeble minds slough away like wet cake in a rainstorm.

 Let's see, what else can we say?

• Andrew and Ezra really are as good as it sounds
• It's an actual book, printed in a print run, entirely not on demand
• It's published in the UK. This should fill you with 80s nostalgia for when that wasn't an unusual thing to say. Gimme all your money and I'll try to fix that.
• The Kickstarter did well enough that it won't bankrupt the Melsonian Arts Council if it fails miserably. Which is nice. Though please don't let that stop you.

DONE

Inform your friends, buy some for your neighbours, post it on all those internet places the cool kids go to, take pictures of yourself playing it and having the most wonderful time imaginable with a look that says "oh aren't you envious, you too could be having as much fun as I, but you can't because they all sold out in, like, a day and Dan retired to the peak of Mt Snowdon, Ezra died in a debauched tour of the riviera and Andrew became a caricaturist at South End who never makes any money 'cos all he can draw is unfailingly accurate and cheerful scenes of  his customer's death." Yea. Do that.

Hex Mapping Notebook

I wanted hex grid paper and all I could find was a guy who copied some online templates and sold them for a fortune on Amazon. So I made my own without copying them like an arse and for a fraction of the price.

GET THEM HERE

They're A6 notebooks, saddle stitched, with thick enough paper that you could probably get pretty heavy with the colours, and plenty of space for you to blab on. One of these could contain months and months of games that you scribbled together on the bus.

The intention on how to use them is that you'd link the maps together inside the book by writing page references on the borders, telling you what maps link where. Or you could create a single big scale map and then do loads of sub hexes and reference them that way. I like the first method, since you end up with a much weirder map if you collate them, kinda like this.

Someone better buy these, 'cos I didn't make many and I intend to use the crap out of them.

The Undercroft #10 is basically out

Say whaaaat? It's out already? But it's only been 3 or 4 or 5 or something months. Oh how time flies.

But don't mind that, mind that the latest issue of the worlds premiere, hyper functional, deluxe RPG zine is out and you don't own it yet. Exchange your boring, uninteresting money for pictures and written things by the industry's most talented humans in the world's most prestigious periodical.


Get it on RPGNow now! Now.

Order a print & PDF copy on my hot hot HOT shop shop SHOP (shipping end of the week)

Subscribe for future issues at something like a discount

WARNING: Don't buy the zine again if you already have this on your Patreon, you already paid me and I'm already sending it!

Too much stock, too little cash. Also too little stock.

People looking to pick up the Undercroft: The POVO free shipping coupon will be active until the end of the Sunday the 26th. I reprinted the out of stock issues, so they're good to go again.

Also the blood stained issue 7 is almost out of stock. I will not be making more of those 'cos they take way too much time and blood.

Show your friends! Buy one for the neighbours! Tell your FLGS they suck!


http://melsonia.bigcartel.com/

Something Stinks in Stilton is in stock

It's here! It's here!

In the 13th century, Stilton produced amazing cheese. Then the Church came and suddenly the cheese trade died out. Now it’s 1730 and the village of Stilton has started producing great cheese again.

You intend to find out why.

An adventure into darkest Cambridgeshire, for levels 1-3. Compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess and most other old fashioned Dungeons & Dragons clones.

Issue #8 of The Undercroft, written and illustrated by +Oli Palmer , with a cover by the inimitable +Anxious P. . 

On sale now at the store amd RPGNow

The Undercroft #7

And on and on it goes.

Go and buy it. For a limited time there will be a special cover and other tamperings attached to this issue, see the selling page for more details, but assume the first hundred or so will be special and of limited supply.

This issue  sees the return of +Matthew Adams +Jeremy Duncan +Luke Gearing Ezra Claverie & +Sean Poppe , and the début efforts of James Holloway, +Nicolò Maioli (cover artist), and Louise Perfect. And me!