Prince Valiant GasSpore Paladin's page

Hello chums! I've written a funny fantasy book for all, it's about goblins and is available now at amazon - huzzah!

"A woman who knows everything and is never wrong, and a goblin king who cannot abide being corrected join forces to try and save the goblins from being squashed by naughty giants! Join award winning writer Richard Pett in this funny fantasy novel about the most cowardly, selfish, weak and vicious little blighters that live in the Great Forest..."

Once upon a time, there were no goblins.

Most goblins agree this was an unacceptable state of affairs; far too quiet and not enough violence. Not nearly enough violence. And without anyone to start all the fires or eat all the stuff that needed eating, boring too! And who would want to live somewhere boring? So, then there were goblins!

But now, some naughty giants want to squash all the goblins and bring back those terribly boring days.

A mysterious and frighteningly well-informed Wise Wench, an udder-obsessed Goblin King, and a pair of reluctant and, frankly, repulsive goblin "heroes" stand in their way.

Let the chaos begin!

Goblins! - The Adventure of the Wise Wench - is available for your immediate enjoyment at the sites below, as are the opening chapters which are absolutely free, huzzah! If you enjoy them, think what a fine and totally unexpected early Christmas gift the novel would make for you, and be an ideal start to reaping extra goodies in the coming weeks.

She's available here.

And in the place of the Very Special Lady.

Thank you for looking, hope you enjoy and get ready for some side splitting goblin naughtiness!

Mnaaarr!
Rich

Please tell your chums, inform your enemies and come over here to taste samples of its foulness.

And thank you very, very much for all your support and shouting (and screaming).

Paizo posters are wonderful and this is very much home.

Rich

How do you do chums!

We've funded! Last night unlocked the latest stretch goal - an amazing adventure by Brandon Hodge:

The Crooked Nail: For decades, Theatre Infernalis offered shocking and frightful entertainment to customers of the Artists’ Quarter. Those who entered the strange doorway nestled between the cheeks of the façade’s gaping demonic mouth saw a decrepit theatre transformed from a macabre tavern and playhouse into a frightful portrait of the eternal torment that awaits all sinners, and few cabarets rivaled the efficiency of Theatre Infernalis’ leering demonic automatons, macabre mortomatons, and spook house haunts to set patrons screaming into the streets.

Now rumors tell of the aging and supposedly-cursed proprietor’s deteriorating health and the theatre’s impending sale, and the Artists’ Quarter has been abuzz with those seeking one final fright with a walk through the crucible-licked walls of the infernal house of the macabre before its final curtain call. But are the theatre’s smoke-and-mirrors and cheap scares hiding a truly wicked secret? What is the nature of the curse and illness that afflict the owner? And did foul and profane rites once take place between its walls that outside forces now seek to exploit? What happens when the spookshow’s fun and games transform into a terrifying reality, threatening to spill forth an infernal malevolence onto the streets of the Blight?

The Blight is the bloated, sweaty setting of my home campaign expanded over many years and which I've been working on to be published for the past 3 years. It contains every dark alley, nasty situation and unwanted stalker and crooked friend or enemy my deranged mind could think of, and it's yours if you wish.

It comes in at over half a million words, and has an adventure path, the 9-part urban horror AP Levee, which I solemnly promise will get under your player's skins.

I've made a long-term pledge to write adventures for the Blight for as long as there is a demand for urban horror adventures, and those set in the twisted world of Between, an eerie-echo land a footstep away. So, if you'd like to join us, please come over to the kickstarter , or see what our Paizo chums have been saying about it here.

I've been posting daily updates over at the kickstarter to give you plenty of idea of the flavor and taste of the unpleasant thing.

Thank you as ever for your amazing support, sorry for the interruption, but do please come and see us, don't you know. Carry on...

Rich

Hello you lovely people, I just wanted to make sure that all my Paizo chums were aware that we're entering the last week, have 500 backers so far and are 85% funded.

The Blight is the bloated, sweaty setting of my home campaign expanded over many years and which I've been working on to be published for the past 3 years. It contains every dark alley, nasty situation and unwanted stalker and crooked friend or enemy my deranged mind could think of, and it's yours if you wish.

It comes in at over half a million words, and has an adventure path, the 9-part urban horror AP Levee, which I solemnly promise will get under your player's skins.

I've made a long-term pledge to write adventures for the Blight for as long as there is a demand for urban horror adventures, and those set in the twisted world of Between, an eerie-echo land a footstep away. So, if you'd like to join us, please come over to the kickstarter , or see what our Paizo chums have been saying about it here.

I've been posting daily updates over at the kickstarter to give you plenty of idea of the flavor and taste of the unpleasant thing.

If you can, please do help this fund, Sister Blight is so swollen now, I dread to think what she's going to birth in the years to come if she's given sustenance...

Rich

If you've not come over to the Blight kickstarter, please do pay us a visit, there are lots and lots of updates, as well as several here on these fine boards to give you a flavor of her dangerous, sweaty streets. If dark and gritty and nasty cities with crooked shadows and deranged locations a breath away are your thing I hope you'll be able to support us.

The AP is urban horror, and having control of a whole AP is something I've really relished, it's allowed me to make a few nasty twists, turns and unexpected moments. Plenty of roleplay, lots of dark villains (and some dark friends)and lots of horror and action. If you've liked any of the adventures I've produced for these wonderful folk, and for places like Open Design, please do come along and have a look, this is 9 of the nasty things back to back. It's reprehensible what happens at times.

I really hope you'll be able to back us, we're so close now I can feel her breath. Thanks for looking here and for all your support.

I need to get back in the attic now, Sister Blight is growing and blistering and hungering and needs me to feed her...

Rich

I just wanted to flag up to you fine and lovely adventure fans that the Blight which we're discussing on these fine boards, is not just a setting, but also contains a whole twisted AP. To be sure that the adventure path doesn't get smothered by her corpulent, sweaty, heaving sister, I wanted to alert you to the AP too.

She made me really, she can be very persuasive when she's angry...

So please, if you'll indulge me...

'Blimmey that was hard.’

Writing a whole adventure path is tricky – very, very tricky - and those who do it all the time, James and Rob and all the lovely Paizo crew, deserve some sort of medal.

So why did I decide to write the Levee Adventure Path as part of the Blight city guide? Was I ill, mad or just masochistic? Probably. More importantly, how was it going to hold its own in such fine company and why would people support it? The end result is very pleasing, but there’ve been some tricky and dark moments on the way to completing Levee, the companion-piece to the Blight city guide and which forms part of the kickstarter book. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a few thoughts on this adventuring beast as she seems to have slithered beneath the oozing bulk of her kin the Blight city guide and been hidden.

First up, the Blight is at the dark and sweaty and gritty end of role-playing; friend or foe is never easy to determine, although being righteous amongst all the sin is something to really be proud of. There are lots of fantastic settings on the market, but to me, great though those settings are, they only really come to life when you walk the streets – when you and your friends take in the air, mingle with the locals and soak yourselves in the atmosphere of the place imagination has birthed. In short, when they have adventures.

For the Blight to truly come to life, she needed to be explored without bounds. So the Blight’s crooked sister Levee was conceived...

Levee is a 9 part AP taking PCs from 1st on to 10th level, where they’ll be attracting the attention of some – if not several – of the Blight’s more formidably unpleasant characters. This doesn’t mean that the AP is a short one, however, it runs to over 300,000 words – in fact as a draft there’s more AP than setting. When I started Levee with Chapter One – Hereafter – I decided that I’d like to keep the whole setting lower level, so the whole AP uses the slow advancement track. There are several reasons for this – first off the setting is low level – it’s almost impossible to get to high level without getting noticed and upsetting someone – or several someones. The second and more important is that lower level is more dangerous, death is a constant potential companion without cure, and to me dangerous is good. To give you a taster, to set out the claustrophobic angle I wanted in the third adventure – Sea’s End – set aboard a demented whaling vessel and her equally disturbing crew, it’s important that escapes are limited, if not impossible, from the vessel the adventure is largely set on.

The players must rely on their wits as much as their talents to survive.

Levee is an urban horror AP with plenty of twists and turns, and quite a number of moments where I hope you’ll all go ‘what?’ and doubt my sanity as much as I do.

I also love really well developed NPCs, and Levee is brimming with them, from the early foreshadowing of the BBEG (villain? – perhaps, perhaps not…) to the climax, which brings together all the threads and major NPCs of the AP into a final, potentially very twisted, ending. To give you a sample of that, Chapter 6 – the Susurrus Theatre - is very role-play driven, it needs to be as a foretaste to the carnage and fear of the next adventure in the series - My Benefactor. In this adventure, the PCs wander the Dark Theatre districts of the Artist’s Quarter, and come close (perhaps intimately and uncomfortably close) to some of her strange locals. This interaction is more relationship than just communication, so that as the AP comes to its climax in Utopia, the friends and enemies you’ve made are happy to put their lives on the line for you – or against you.

A good adventure, as James is always happy to point out, needs great monsters, and there are some new and horrible ones to interact with, particularly those birthed in Between, the crooked shadow that lurches alongside the city. A good adventure needs plenty of dice rolling as well as role-play, and there are many moments where a slaughter-without-dialogue approach is the best way; sometimes talking too much might just get you all into a heap more trouble.

So what is Levee? It’s the Twilight Zone meets Hammer Horror, it’s gothic meets Eraserhead, Alice and Frankenstein, Barker and Doyle - it lurches from one district in the city to the next, and sometimes back again. By the time you reach the climax (if you do) the Blight will be home, but by then you’ll have seen her swollen underbelly, her crooked corners, her selfish days and her inbred nights, in gruesome intimacy. Perhaps by then you may have grown to love her - or hate her.

And just to be clear again as Greg has mentioned, I’ve no intention of leaving her; if she does well and there is demand, there will be more and more adventures in the Blight. I love to walk her streets by night when the noise is clearer.

As we begin to drift in the Sargasso of our Kicktstarter – after an awesome first week, thank you - we need all the help of our friends on the esteemed Paizo boards, where I’ve had the privilege of slithering and hobbling for a long, long time now. Please do come along and check out the website for updates, whiz a question or five over these boards and I’ll be happy to help, but do support us if you can – it won’t happen without you.
Rich

I know, tell us something we don't know. He needs help, poor demented fellow.

With the final hardcovers being despatched with unexpected slithery slimy additions from our successful kickstarter, I wondered if I could interest you in something revolting to put in your Santa's sock this Christmas, or the footwear of some of your more disturbed chums. Crooked, a novel of twisted, horrible things, demented surgeon artists and rats, lots and lots of rats.

If you're a fan of Alice, Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein, this might just be up your alley.

The ebook and POD are now available at Amazon, and Crooked is in this edition of True Review as a recommended read, close enough to the awesome Ramsey Campbell's new tome I can almost shout up and yell in disbelief and admiration of his talents.

www.truereviewonline.com/b86v29n15_00.php

The Kindle version is $6.08, or £3.82 in the currency of the very special lady.

There are some nice reviews going up, which I'd be very delighted for you to add too.

Watch out for the mirrors.

Huzzah!
Slithers away...
Rich

I hope this is the right place for this possible adventure, which is part of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess role playing game:

LotFP's role-playing activities were conceived under the dread gloom of Finnish winter and consummated during the darkless summer by a displaced American on a steady diet of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, HG Wells, HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Hammer Horror, Dario Argento, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the traditional Nordic doom metal scene, filtered through over a quarter of a century of gaming experience. Through use of forbidden rites and mystical incantations remembered in fevered dreams, LotFP founder James Edward Raggi IV seeks to recreate the past by remolding the present and conquering the future.

Although part of the Old School Renaissance, it is not LotFP's goal to recreate the old feeling with our books, either in look or content. Playing classic games is not an exercise in nostalgia or a longing for a different time - these games are vibrant and alive and continue to provide true gaming excitement today, and on their own terms. LotFP's game offerings treat these games with the respect they deserve while giving their referees and players innovative and fresh material for those games.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess presents Pyre by Richard Pett, illustrated by Michael Syrigos

The screams of a trio of convicted witches slowly dying echo through the valleys of the holy town of Mourncrag, nestling on the high edges of the GreatWood.

The Most High and Pure Brother casts holy water upon the embers as the sickness of lust drifts away in ashes, the turmoil over, the curse of flesh lifted.

But the burning will do no good.

This killer lurks in the monk’s dreams.

And in the bones of the town itself....

The adventure is pledge based, and you can find more information here

There are 19 other proposed adventures including the Unbegotten Citadel by Monte Cook.

Any support will be happily received and turned into seething unpleasantness.

Rich

Looks like something strange is happening...

Last winter I was locked in my cellar by Joseph Goodman, Rick Maffei and Mike Ferguson and told I couldn't come out until I'd written a Call of Cthulhu adventure. They made things worse by posting crawling things into the cellar with me every week until I complied.

Amongst the slime-trailed infestations beneath I've managed to come up with Fires of Sumatra, part of the fifth instalment of Goodman Games' Age of Cthulhu line. These are officially approved by Chaosium and the latest instalment takes place across the globe, in Peru, Tibet and Sumatra.

I can only apologise for unleashing such alien madness, and ask that you take care when reading the twisted adventures of Rick and Mike in the same insane book.

You can loose copious amounts of SAN by slithering here .

Fees go towards paying my psychoanalysis bills.

Mnaaaaaaaaaaaar.

Pett

Hey everyone,

this is a quick heads up - my hotmail account has just blasted out loads of emails to everyone in my mailing list with the title 'FOTO 04/07' - its a pretty nasty virus - if its opened it basically keeps sending emails out so you use up your quota and can't warn anyone.

If anyone gets an email from me with this on please delete it, also if you see any others in your inbox with this on, it wouls seem wise to delete them as well, this one is a nasty.

Rich

...the Kobold Quarterly website, which has free new monsters available on mondays, and a new article for traps has appeared today.

Although the whole website is tainted by the addition of a piece by Logue, you may want to check it out - I hear there are some very cool monsters indeed appearing on the site, and also in the next edition of KQ!

Ahem...

Check Joshua Steven's sample monster here

Huzzah!

Rich

RSVP - the kq website - your views and ideas most welcome.

I just wanted to add some very vocal support for the decision. Having worked with these fine fellows one and all for a long time through Dungeon, Dragon and now Pathfinder (back so far I should add, that the names Logue and Vaughn were unheard of - ah happy days:)), I wanted to humbly submit my admiration for the way Paizo goes about its business.

It may not be obvious to our friends (then again it may well be) but Paizo staff treat their freelancers with the greatest respect and enthusiasm, always ready to listen, always full of great ideas and fun. They are, simply, a joy to work for. And that, I hope you'll agree, is a reflection on the way they treat their readers.

This fine game is very much our game I feel; our support has built it, we've written our stories about it, made friends through it, had fun with it, and some people like myself have been lucky enough to be involved in sharing their ideas in print.

So now we will have a game we can all call our own, I for one am looking forward to working with you fine fellows and ladies on these boards and I can't wait to see what we make:)

So cheers to Paizo, to Pathfinder and to you (excluding Logue).

M'naaaaaaar

Rich

(oh, and excluding Hitchcock as well - the man has bad breath and boils).

OK, roll up, roll up. Due to popular demand we introduce part 2 of the Logue 2 week silence - yeh right - sweepstake.

Commencing at 18:00 GMT, we so far have 2 stakes-

At exactly 18:58 GMT - R Pett

At exactly 06:00 GMT, friday 18 May - Heathansson.

The second prize for this sweepstake to be announced shortly!

Roll up roll up - this could be your last chance to join in (but probably won't be)

OK, so Nick said he wouldn't be on these boards for 2 weeks but appeared last night at 9:23 PM meaning he has been away from the boards for 42 hours 3 minutes. Many people joined our sweepstake, with various suggestions of absence ranging from 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds to as long as 2 days 10 hours.

And I am proud to announce the winner is!

Greg Vaughan who said 'he'll be lurking after about 8 minutes of saying he'll be gone for 2 weeks to see what people are writing on his thread, then he knows that one of us will post something about him whilst he's gone, so he'll have to keep looking at that one, his fingers itching to type a retort. Finally the tension will get too much for him at about 42 hours 3 minutes when he'll have to snap and let everyone know he's still out there.'

2nd place

Heathansson 2 minutes

3rd

Steve Greer 8 seconds

Congratulations Greg for getting it spot on, you win a signed copy of 'Hollow Threats' by Richard Pett:)

Sickened by the endless praise heaped on my nemesis Logue, I thought it would be fun to take advantage of his oh-so-rare silence by manipulating his fondness for calling himself a thespian5/monk3/adventure writer3 and coming up with a list of things he'd be if he were a monster or PC.

I've already had one take with Little Goule (heh) but Nick seemed to regard this as beneath him and somehow upset that he'd made me a dazzling high-level cad with a silver tongue and vast acting skills whilst I'd made him a vile scrap of childlike skin with wings.

So, let me commmence:

(for those concerned that Nick will be cross about this let me reassure you that he'll think it's a wedding present and he'll love the attention in his abscence)(in fact getting attention when he isn't here will make him even more intolerably enthusiastic when he gets back).

If Nick was an orc:

Throst MummyPants - male orc bard 6

Throst is the tribe singer, a pale orc who tends to the fashions of men he spend most of his time in his hut, which has been built for him on the outskirts of the village in case any other orc tribe leaders see it when visiting and decide the tribe are easy meat. Throst's hut is decorated with tribal fetishes, mask of smiling antelopes dancing with sheep, and mobiles depicting suns and moons with happy smiling faces. Throst's mother recently threw him out of her own hut, tired of being kept awake by his endless songwriting and scraping on his violin. Now the bard has all the time he wants to write his songs, including I think it's bad to fight; let's collect flowers and not have a battle, and his least popular sometimes I dream I'm an elf (and you know what, it's not too bad).

If Nick was a dwarf:

Thinny StubbleChin - male dwarf aristocrat 2
They always bully Thinnly - it's not his fault he can't grow a beard and has to make do with stubble, and if that wasn't bad enough, the younger dwarves have taken to calling him girlchin in front of his friends. Thinnly, Chief MightyAxe XI's twelth and youngest son is far happier in the hills above the mine he works in, ever since his horrible accident involving him getting lost in Spooky Mine when he was a child. Thinny's saving grace is that he's a magnificent diplomat - no dwarf has ever been able to sit at the same table as the Elves of Tullgy Wood, let alone eat their fancy buns shaped like unicorns, honey coated seed cakes cunningly made to look like mushroom people, and drink their non-alchoholic elderflower nectar in flagons of crystal covered with filgree work depicting happy dinosaurs.

If Nick was a roper:

Glowy Shortarms - male roper expert 7
The monocle wearing flourescent orange roper Shortarms finds his strangely hued skin a disadvantage when it comes to blending into cavern walls, and was quickly removed from the crack front line Cunning Roper Assault Parties of King M'NNnnar the Mighty. Finding time on his tentacles, he has taken up basket weaving, fashioning fine wicker baskets, bread holders and picnic hampers for the ungrateful ropers, who can't seem to find any use for the items he makes. He's considering moving to a nearby man-town, but is having difficulty finding six-armed jumpers, single huge shoes, and hats that fit

...which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs. And the frogs shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and upon all thy servants.

OK this is my second attempt at this. I'm very worried about Nic Logue's sanity, and I'd appreciate it if some nice poster out there would pass on their observations on Nic's flimsy grip on the real world by letting me know just how disturbed his adventure writing has become.

Much appreciated, pip pip and all that.

Rich

...which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs. And the frogs shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and upon all thy servants."

I just want to post my concern for the young masters sanity, ask for a report from some kindly poster on his adventure and his apparant loss of grip on reality as soon as possible please.

My thanks.

Rich