Black City Decisions

I've made some decisions about the Black City project.  I'm going to go forward with publishing it, of course - it's too much fun to write, and I'd love to see it fully realized in print.  Committing myself to a project should help overcome the gamer attention deficit disorder.   I have MS Publisher on all my PC's, so I'm looking into that as the layout software (if not, I'll go with Scribus).  Felt is on board for drawings, Il Male has volunteered to help with photoshop maps, so we have the makings of a team.  (Probably will need an editor, I'm sure, and will see if anyone else wants some art credits).

The book will cover both a basic campaign setting and megadungeon, so the scope will include the Thule Archipelago detailed as a hex crawl, Trade Town as an adventurer's home base, the surface ruins, the first two dungeon levels (100+ rooms each), and a high level overview of the Viking north lands.

It'll be months of work still - I need to finish mapping and stocking level 2, and sign up my players for some play testing - I'll shoot for July for a run-through with the group.  I need to take all the blog posts that have had Black City content and rewrite them for presenting the setting as a cohesive book (blog posts tend to be repetitive, disjointed, and overly wordy).

I'm pretty sure the stats will be system neutral, and we'll playtest with LOTFP Weird Fantasy Roleplaying (which basically means system neutral, too, if you've seen LOTFP stats); it was a fan favorite in the recent poll, and Viking pirates will work really well with a rules set that favors fighters and weird magic.

One last decision is whether to use Realms of Crawling Chaos for some of the Lovecraftian bits (and psionics) or develop them independently.  So far, the only Lovecraftian things in the ruins include Mi-Go and perhaps some new spells - like the resurrection spell from "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward".  The rest has been inspirational.  (I've mentioned a Lovecraftian D&D setting that would make heavy use of Realms of Crawling Chaos - that's a future project.  Black City is more high adventure than horror).