Dan Voyce's page

I'm emerging weary from the depths of hell with many new scars, a unsettling unclean feeling, a rash, and a couple of updates:

After creating a plane-quiveringly potent quintet (yup, the voting was so close we had to pick FIVE new monsters in round one!) of strange and outré planar denizens to bedevil PCs, the big news this week (actually right now) is that our first round of pitches for the planar gazetteers has just gone live! Thirteen achingly awesome locales (and I really do mean that. They're all fantastic) are now up for patron review and voting in the prject forums. Patrons are now going to have to agonise over and somehow cut down this haul to three or four to be developed for the manuscript.

If you're a patron over on Dark Roads & Golden Hells, its time to grab a portal over to the Kobold forums and weigh in!

Stark Enterprises VP wrote:

Seriously, this thing's brilliant. Are there any other products you've done?

A quick search for Dan Voyce here on Paizo shows he wrote an adventure for Tales of Zobeck. I'm sure he's contributed elsewhere though.

'Men of Honour: Alternate Paladin Codes' was the last thing I had in Kobold Quarterly (#14), and many moons ago, I also wrote Desire and the Dead, an introduction to 3e Planescape for both DMs and players (which with impecable timing came out 3 days before 4th edition was announced). Its probably horribly overwritten and amateurish by professional standards but the heart is there, and its what gave me the confidence to try Open Design... which turned out to be pretty good for me!

Hi all!

Thanks for the various supportive comments and great reviews! I'll be hanging out here, in the shadow of the holmganga stone, if anyone has other comments of queries they'd like to share. I'll answer what I can... although my default answer to everything is of course "BUY MY BOOK OR FACE THE WRATH OF WOTAN!"

Thanks for the fine comments, everyone. Enjoy!

@Marc: I think I listened to that particular song about a thousand times over the course of the project.... Definitely the "inspire courage" tune of choice for a north bard!

Ladies and gentlemen, valkyries and thanes... The long wait is over! Our (now slightly renamed) project is now complete: Northlands - a sourcebook for Pathfinder and first official supplement for our awesome All Father, Wolfgang Baur's Midgard (AKA the dark and nefarious world of Zobeck).

We have culture and psychology guides to really get into the head of vikings, cossacks, and other northerners - and let players indulge in feuds, feasts, duels, and wergild. There's also traits and feats of the frozen north (including some great Achievement Feats); New race and class options (including for those in the Advanced Players Guide; I especially like the additions to Witches and Oracles); plus hazards, haunts, and other horrible things for GMs to inflict upon their unsuspecting PCs. And rounding it all off we have more new spells, monsters (both mythological and brand new), and magical loot than you could fill a raiding longship with!

For Golarion fans, this book would be the perfect compliment for games set in Ustalav, Irrisen, Brevoy, Numeria, or Varisia… plus our gazetteer covers the far polar reaches, both arctic tundra and lost tropical worlds beneath the northern lights. For Midgard, we’re giving you teh full guided tour... From the North Pole and the lair of the cruel north wind himself to the bulwarks and granite fortresses of Krakova, the ravaged elven lands of Thorn, and the glowering citadels of the infamous “Reaver Dwarves" (with dozens of adventure sites you can drop anywhere on the map)

See the kobold quarterly site and store for details.

Sincere thanks to everyone who patronised and contributed. Long shall your glory be sung of in Valhalla!

Keep on rollin'
Dan

This project was a pleasure to work on from start to finish, so many many many bonus Hero Points to Tim and Eileen and all the other patrons that made it so special. I know I'm shamelessly biased but its perfect... except that we had to stop writing it at some point. Even now I'm rubbing my hands with evil glee at the prospect of subjecting my regular gaming group to it - they should all be out of therapy by now, it was only a playtest after all.

The Margreve is totally portable, because its as much about atmosphere as about geography (more so, I'd say). In fact there's almost certainly somewhere with the Margreve vibe near every gaming group regardless of campaign world: Its every towering forest that elicits a shiver of awe as moths dance in shafts of sunlight piercing the canopy, and the shivers of any entirely different kind when shadows lengthen beneath the boughs, when half-formed faces are glimpsed in the bowls of rotting trees, and the cruel laughter drifts on the twilight breeze.

Have fun, and keep one eye on the Big Bad Wolf!

Quick question ... We mainly play in Golarion. How easily will this port over? Any idea where it would fit?

Personally I'm a bit of a magpie when it comes to setting materials: stealing cultures, kingdoms, and individual locations from books to cut and paste alongside my homebrew stuff, so rest assured that portability is high on the agenda: We’re a setting book for everybody’s version of the frozen north (just about), not only the one from Wolfgang’s world.

Don't get me wrong, I want Zobeck fans to cry huzzah that we’ve added some great locales to Midgard’s expanding terrain, but I know I’m going to end up porting bits of it into various campaigns at home, so Trollheim (say) should be compatible with any traditional Viking lands (Golarion’s Linnorm Kings, Mystara’s Northern Reaches, Oerth’s Hold of Stonefist, etc) both when dropped in wholesale with the serial numbers filed off or plundered for individual aspects like NPCs, cultural notes (honor and duelling etiquette, or the Thing, for instance), or just style – the three major areas are really as much ways of looking at the north as much as they are specific settings: The semi-historical world of the Norse sagas, classic D&D and myths of the gods, and lost kingdoms/polar exploration respectively.

And the crunch is all generic of course! Arctic survival, equipment, grudge magic and runes, local feats etc will all click easily into place with Pathfinder (or your personal "3.whatever" ruleset).

Very cool - sounds like another winner!

We'll definitely buy a copy when it's available to the general public!

Why not throw in with on patronage? Shape the project yourself!

Dan. I have no idea how I missed that you were the author on this, other than I am obviously crap at noticing the names of my GMs when they crop up on the interwebs.

Nermal, hi there! Expect an email shortly, threatening you with the wrath of Odin if you don't subscribe. On a more positive note, its exactly the sort of thing you'd love to stretch your creative muscles on... and good practice/prep for next year's RPG superstar.

In other news: There's a new preview up on the Kobold Quarterly site:
A neat feat, a spiteful spell, and a snowy stone!

yes...I need to get over there. I loved Sunken Empires, and in my own homebrew I've neglected the north a bit...so inspiration is needed!

Plenty to inspire, I promise... and plenty of opportunities for you to add your inspiration to our corner of the north, too!

Quick update:

This week we start to hit the crunch in a big way: Grudge magic, the dark and dangerous power of revenge is manifesting in a suite of vendetta-finishing spells, incantations, and magic items, then we're onto Nordic rune magic (and maybe rules for skalds), a plethora of new survival rules such as snow blindness and 'white outs', hyperthermia, spellcasting with frostbitten fingers, and foraging/crafting in the snowy wastes), plus a bestiary of patron-created monsters of the frozen north - some drawn from myth and legemd, others unique creations.

Mapped into Wolfgang's world of Zobeck, the meat of Glories of the North will be easily adaptable to any setting. Golarion fans should find it perfect for enhancing adventures set in the Land of the Linnorm Kings or the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, but it’s also ideal for adding detail to the north of Faerun or Oerth's barbarous Telchuria or the Hold of Stonefist. We’re also throwing in gazetteers of three flavourful lands you can 'cut and paste' into your own game world: The viking fjords of Trollheim, Thule: The Last Continent, and the hidden valley of Hyperborea – all created from the fevered imaginations of patrons.

Introduction here
Gazetteer preview here.

If anyone has any questions about this project or Open Design patronage, just give a shout and I'll answer as best I can.

Keep on rolling
Dan

The article on alternate Paladin codes is a great type of article too, because its purely edition neutral.

Hi drkfathr1, glad you liked my article :-)

I love editionless stuff like this (although in this case I'm horribly biased), not least because I can come back to it for reference whether I'm playing Pathfinder,4e, OD&D, or any game featuring pirates, swashbucklers, vikings, or martial artists. If the Code of the Viking section struck a cord with you, then we'd love to see you over at Frozen Empires: Glories of the North [/author's shameless plug].

- Dan

Welcome back from GenCon to all the brave adventurers that made it this year. Hope the plunder was good and the trolls of below average strength. For those who didn't (like me), I hope you had a nice weekend and didn't (like me) turn too billious a shade of green with envy.

This week in the frozen north we're adding locations, NPCs, and adventure seeds to Thule and looking at the lost kingdom of Hyperborea and the polar wastes, and senior patrons are invoking the dark vengeance of Grudge Magic. It'll be a busy and important week for the project, with a fresh influx of patrons who may have heard about us at GenConso.

Why not JOIN US on our longship to Valhalla? I promise equal shares of booty and glory... for those who make it back alive.

Just looking around and enjoying the glorious three-ness of it all....

Looking over my Paizo Dungeon collection, I really like the way that monsters were presented, and would like to use the same format for my homebrewed nasties (DMs in my gaming circle sometimes swap adentures, so everything needs to be neat and tidy). Is there are template for monster stats buried here somewhere - my internet-fu is weak today and I can't see one myself.

Thanks