December 27, 2014
A Flirtation with Fey is now live, and the "Our Products" page now links to the places you can get this new urban investigation adventure. Check it out!
Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
December 21, 2014
In A Flirtation with Fey, the PCs aid a gnome scribe, only to return to find the gnome scribe kidnapped. The PCs must follow clues to find him, exposing a much larger conspiracy. Although the PCs only meet this scribe--a gnome named Gustavus Hodgedar--at the beginning (and hopefully, at the end!) of the adventure, the adventure provides his statistics. And here they are, should you be in need of a slightly alcoholic, former adventuring gnome scholar:
Gustavus Hodgedar CR 3
XP 800
Male gnome...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
December 19, 2014
So, I'm almost complete with layout of a full adventure path for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, using the Rise of the Runelords base set and its six adventure decks.It will be called "Shield of Rannick." I won't say much more about it here--it relies on Paizo's Community Use Policy which, as a third-party publisher, Run Amok Games cannot use. I can use it independently as an individual, though, although I plan to keep the Run Amok business and this side project separate (except that I'm ...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Work with Other Publishers
December 19, 2014
I've got a print proof that both Greg and I have approved, so we're sending in copiesof A Flirtation with Fey to the Paizo webstore and making Flirtation with Fey available all over in the next week. So you'll be able to get this--in print or pdf--or or about December 26th. Merry Christmas!
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
December 3, 2014
Here is the cover for the upcoming "Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition", with art by Jeff Strand!
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Hints and Teasers
December 2, 2014
I just noticed that two Paizo products that I did a lot of writing for are both coming out on the same day. The
Giant Hunter's Handbook was a lot of fun, and required finding design space for a lot of mechanics (feats and so on) as well as learning a lot about giants in the game--what their commonalities are, how big they are in relation to each other, and so on.
Lost Treasures also required a lot of mechanics--as I created about half of the items in this book--but it also allowed me to do a ...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Work with Other Publishers
November 29, 2014
So, when I have everything all lined up to send to get a print proof, I like to hurry to do so--I know that the print proof can take as much as a week to get accepted, printed, and arrive for my review, and I might have to run the proof a second (or third) time. So as to not waste time, I rarely sit on final-but-not-quite-final-for-a-print-proof versions of my publications. I find myself having done just that over the past week or so with Flirtation with Fey. Mostly, that's been due to writin...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
November 24, 2014
I went up a few weekends ago for my second-ever GameHoleCon in Madison, Wisconsin with a few friends. I had thought that a convention named after the first line in the Hobbit would have been around for a while, but it turns out it's only in its second year, too.
Being so close to the home of many of the initiators of Dungeons and Dragons has its advantages--a lot of well-known folks from the early days of D&D come to play. It also hosts a variety of games from the "Dead Games Society," so you...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen.
November 5, 2014
So, I've had a fairly long stretch of doing no real writing; perhaps my longest all year. This is primarily due to have a succession of awesome friends in town, and also to the fact that Paizo released the first set of organized play scenarios for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game at the end of last month. We're big fans of the PACG in my household, having playtested the entirety of the Rise of the Runelord path, then played through that whole path when it came out, then playtested the entir...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen.
October 23, 2014
I'm very fortunate, as I've mentioned, to have my lovely wife--with a PhD in English--to edit all my work. Sometimes, she gives the whole thing a pass with hardly any changes; other times, she's a much harsher critic. She just finished the review of
A Flirtation with Fey and had some major revisions: entire sections that were too wordy got cut, and one of the villains had to be redone. But I'm incorporating those edits now, and it's a stronger project.
I've had a last couple of posts about rew...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Hints and Teasers
October 14, 2014
A partner at the firm I once worked for insisted that "writing is revising." It's true, but sometimes more true than other times.
A few weeks ago, I turned in one of my larger Paizo freelance assignments: three of the tombs in the upcoming Tombs of Golarion book. I thought each of them was quite good, in its own way, with some flavorful maps. I received an email about a week ago asking for a rewrite of one of the tombs. The map wasn't large enough--and the new map necessitated several new room...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Work with Other Publishers
October 9, 2014
This is a quick update. My first Pathfinder adventure path volume, #87 The Choking Tower, just hit my downloads today. I'd seen a post-development pre-edit version of it, and I'd already seen some of the art, but it was glorious to see it all together in a final product. I see quite a bit of my original writing shining through, and areas where it's been changed has been to streamline my encounters or to fit the adventure in with the other chapters of the Iron Gods Adventure Path.
In all, I'm p...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Work with Other Publishers
September 29, 2014
I've started my first Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition game last week. I intended it to be a one-shot adventure to show off the rules, but wanted to leave some opportunity to have it grow into a more robust campaign. I'm using the Legacy of Fire adventure path, and starting off with Howl of the Carrion King, the first adventure in that series. It converts incredibly easy, primarily because one of the core monsters in the first few encounters meshes so neatly with 5th edition rules (pugwampi g...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen.
September 25, 2014
I've gotten an encounter map in for one of my upcoming adventures, "A Flirtation with Fey" and thought I'd share it. This is the PCs' map, so it doesn't show all the monsters and traps--but, really, what is there to fear from a simple wagon...its contents ravaged and scattered...its driver slain...its pony felled with a single bladed strike...no, nothing suspicious or strange about this at all...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Hints and Teasers
September 16, 2014
Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition is moving along quite well--well enough that I've updated my "Upcoming Products" page to include it (I've also moved
The Emergency Villain Collection to released products, as it will be available later this week). As a teaser, and to show the re-working I'm doing to about forty percent of the encounters in
Kingdom of Toads to make
Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition, here is the updated version of the powerful dragon Avoravax:
Avoravax CR
21/MR 7
XP 4...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Hints and Teasers
September 8, 2014
When I was deep in the writing of
Kingdom of Toads, I heard about the Mythic Adventures hardcover coming out. This sounded like a good fit: the story of
Kingdom of Toads is a bit fairy-tale, a bit myth, and a lot of over-the-top encounters. However, the mythic rules were pretty new, and would require that I master them pretty deeply to provide a good mythic product. I'd also have to unwind a lot of the writing I'd already done, I believed.
It's quite some time later, and I've got a much better...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Hints and Teasers
September 1, 2014
I was proud to have an article accepted to Wayfinder #11 (the Weal or Woe article titled "Vice Rising"), which had a theme of "Cheliax," the devil-ruled nation in the Pathfinder game world. I also had a second submission that wasn't accepted, which I thought it was a combination of silly, clever, and a bit gruesome--so here it is!
Chelaxian Halfling Slave-Chants
(excerpt from Chapter 14 of
“Anthropology of the Halfling People” by Professor Julian Delphus of Absalom)
As has been previousl...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Work with Other Publishers
August 30, 2014
My version of the Skull and Shackles base set for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game arrived today, and we played our first game. It was familiar, since we'd playtested the entire Skull and Shackles adventure path for it already, but it was very neat to see the full-color art and the mechanics that had some of the proud nails hammered down. It's been quite some time since I spent so much time saying "oooh, what does that do?" over this game, and it was really neat. Looking forward to playing ...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen.
August 26, 2014
So how many copies of my RPG products did I sell at Wizard World Chicago? Three. One copy of each of The Underdelve Menace, the Emergency Character Collection, and Teeth of the Storm. I met a lot of neat gamers, but on the whole, comic convention attendees are quite certain what the "Pathfinder" game is; I had a lot of people give my products blank stares.
My friend gets most of his sales from conventions like this, and very little on-line. I'm the reverse: I get most of my sales on-line, and ...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen.
August 23, 2014
Just a quick note--I'm off to Wizard World Chicago for the day. A friend of mine owns a comic company and obtained an exhibitor booth and badges, which he's kindly sharing with me in exchange for a place to crash during the convention (he's attending all four days; I'm only attending today). How many of my RPG adventures will I sell at a comics convention? My prediction is "some, but not many." Let me be a little more specific with numbers: my friend is bringing around 60 copies of each issue...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
August 20, 2014
Whether my next release would be The Emergency Villain Collection or Perils of the Broken Road came basically down to which art came in first. The text for both is complete, and I've even started the layout for each (to the extent I can do so without the final art). Today, I received the last of the great pieces of art from Rick Hershey for the Emergency Villain Collection, so that will be the next product Run Amok Games releases. It's also a pretty consistent--although unintentional--organiz...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
August 15, 2014
On old friend of mine started his own comic company just about the same time I started a game publishing company. He's had a good run in his first line, a story about a superhero named Stalker, and he's trying to put it together in a graphic novel compilation via Kickstarter. It's worth a look, to see if it's worth your dollars (it's worth some of my dollars!). You can find it here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1086568316/stalker-donning-the-mask-graphic-novel Continue reading...
Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
August 9, 2014
I hadn't planned on going to GenCon this year, but some longtime friends are making a special trip out, so I'm headed down to play with them. I'll be there only Friday night and Saturday morning/afternoon, but I'm really looking forward to it. I'll be playing the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons in the slots I'm signed up for (or, more accurately, the slots my friend Russell signed us all up for) and I plan to bring the same character that ultimately survived the Lost Mines of Phandelver s...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
August 7, 2014
Normally I have a pretty good sense of the release order my next Run Amok Games projects, but right now I've got a a few aaaaaalmost done projects, and some sporadic art for each--but here's some! This is one of the villains in the upcoming Emergency Villain Collection. He's a very angry tree-person named Boughbrother. Is the Emergency Villain Collection next? Probably, but who knows?
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Hints and Teasers
July 17, 2014
I got to play an awful lot of the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons last weekend--about 20 hours in total. A few months ago, I had given up on an earlier playtest version of the edition as being "not complete enough to really play," and I'm pleased to see that has been fixed (obviously) for the final release.
I made a stalwart human fighter named Harald Knauf. He lasted less then one combat. I got to make only 4 rolls with him: an initiative check (which he rolled reasonably well, but was sl...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen.
July 10, 2014
Last weekend, I was able to make it to my first ever PaizoCon, the convention held every year in Seattle by Paizo Publishing. I was able to play in some very fun games run by Paizo employees, and attended several seminars about how to improve my writing and the state of third-party publishing. Perhaps best of all, I was able to sit down with several of my developers and talk about what they liked that I did, what I could do better, and how I can get more work from them in the future.
Also, I s...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Work with Other Publishers
June 27, 2014
Back in May, I mentioned a large project for Paizo where I'd taken on 13,000 words to describe several magic items with complex backstories and campaign uses. That project was announced recently--it's called "Lost Treasures", and it's more than just magic items. There are valuable non-magical items, quest items, and so forth all included. I'm excited to see how my work appears in the final product, and what other goodies the tome contains!
Link is here.
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Work with Other Publishers
June 12, 2014
Our usual board game group has some moderate roleplayers who sometimes really get into the exploration in Betrayal at the House on the Hill or the characters in the Pathfinder Card Game. So last Tuesday I decided to roll out Fiasco for the group, though I'd never played it before and hadn't really finished reading the rules.
It was a blast.
For those unfamiliar with it, Fiasco is an indy RPG with no game master; the players all build webs of relationships based on the setting, before deciding o...
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Posted by Ron Lundeen.
June 10, 2014
Huzzah! A Lucky Morning is now available at all the usual outlets (with print copies on their way to the Paizo store now). I'm quite proud of this little investigative adventure, which is equal parts creepy and murder-mystery-y (patent pending on that word, I guess). Check it out!
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
June 5, 2014
So, I liked the print proof of A Lucky Morning. I'm sending several copies to Paizo for them to vend in their on-line store, but the adventure itself should be available in print and pdf this weekend from the usual places!
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Posted by Ron Lundeen. Posted In : Announcements
