Monte Cook's Blog, page 78

Exploring the ESTATE VAULT

One of the exciting things about Kickstarting projects like A Strange Box is that it allows us to create some specialty items that just wouldn’t happen otherwise. The boxed set itself is certainly one of those items, but I want to talk about a specific item not discussed yet—the Vault, the wooden box from the ESTATE VAULT and AWAKENED OPERATIVE levels. With each of these boxes, from the Numenera Reliquary to the Invisible Sun Black Cube, and now on to the deluxe boxed edition for The Strange,...

Cypher Chronicles, vol. 8-2017

Iadace and welcome to Cypher Chronicles! MCG News If you’ve backed A Strange Box Kickstarter at THE STRANGE BOX level, did you notice that upgrading to the LIBRARY OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS level for only $40 more gets you every The Strange title in PDF? It’s an incredible value! Many of you reading Cypher Chronicles are MCG Insiders (those in the know about all-things-MCG), and we are asking for your help spreading the word about A Strange Box Kickstarter. We want to reach people who may not have...

How To Get the ENTIRE Game Line for The Strange

Are you curious about The Strange RPG, but haven’t tried it? Now you can check it out in style by grabbing the ENTIRE library of previously published books and PDFs for The Strange! Of course, you could do that at any time at our store, but not with the amazing discount we’re offering right now in our Kickstarter campaign to create a deluxe boxed edition of The Strange that runs through March 17th. How do you get the entire game line of previously published books and PDF-only fractals for The...

Myth of the Maker

A Novel of The Strange In a universe as vast as ours, with tens of billions of planets potentially supporting life, Enrico Fermi’s famous question—”Where is everyone?”—has never been more relevant. That’s what Katherine Manners learned when she discovered, in a secure server room, the melted form of an unknown man clutching a message of doom from another world. A world, it turns out, in orbit of our own. Hidden in the dark recesses of a nether dimension called The Strange. A dimension that ho...

Strange Box Sharefest and Myth of the Maker

Our Strange Box Kickstarter campaign is going strong, and we know that current fans of The Strange know about it. But we’d like to reach out to new people who may not have heard of The Strange RPG—and that’s where you, dear reader, are of critical importance. By letting other people know about the Kickstarter through retweets on Twitter and shares on Facebook, you help get the word out to new people. So let’s make this a fun little challenge! Bruce’s next novel, Myth of the Maker, comes out i...

Launch Day for Torment: Tides of Numenera!

Today’s the day! The very first Numenera videogame, Torment: Tides of Numenera, is live and ready to play! Check out the (slightly-spoilered) story trailer for the game! Or take a look at the interactive quest trailer, glaive trailer, nano trailer, and jack trailer. We also have three TTON-related videos on our YouTube channel with Shanna, Monte, and Bear, talking about different aspects of working with InXile on the videogame and the Explorer’s Guide. Creative lead Colin McComb says, “I’m be...

March: Emerald City Comicon

Monte, Shanna, and Bruce from the MCG design team will be at Emerald City Comicon, working with our fiction publisher Angry Robot Books. If you’re in the Seattle area, drop in to chat or grab an autograph! Here’s their schedule: Friday afternoon: Shanna will be at the Angry Robot booth. Friday evening: Monte will be at the Worldbuilder’s Charity event. Saturday afternoon: Bruce will be at the Angry Robot booth. Saturday evening: Bruce, Shanna, and Monte will be at the Del Ray publisher’s part...

Cypher Chronicles, vol. 7-2017

Iadace and welcome to Cypher Chronicles! MCG News Huzzah! A Strange Box campaign on Kickstarter has funded. So, we’ll be creating the most spectacular experience with The Strange that we can for you. Thank you! We’ll be printing these boxed sets to order, and after the Kickstarter campaign is over they won’t be available anywhere else, so if you’ve not jumped aboard the campaign, we hope you’ll do so now; and if you know someone who loves The Strange, please make sure they know about A Strang...

New to Numenera?

The Ninth World is a vast and strange place. When you enter it, you explore a weird and wondrous landscape, meet creatures unlike anything seen in our world, and experience adventures that stretch your imagination. No wonder, then, that if you’re new to Numenera, it can be hard to know where to start. Fortunately, there are a number of excellent portals into the Numenera roleplaying game—the best one for you depends on your experience and what you’re looking for. New to tabletop RPGs? Or mayb...

Words Like Magic: My Secret Card Trick for Writing a Book

I’m a poet by nature. My fellow poets and I used to play a game called, “I Can Break Your Heart in Six Lines or Less.” I once won with a five-word poem. No, I won’t tell you. Either way, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that writing game books and novels—giant books, with five words times 1000, times 10,000, times 20,000—is something of a challenge for me. Thankfully, I like challenges. And I like big books. The truth is: whether it’s a five-word poem or a 500,000-word tome, every proje...