What if I told you the award-winning roleplaying game The Secret Fire had a killer follow-up sourcebook written by veteran designers including Ed Greenwood, Logan Bonner, Thomas Reid, and George Strayton, with a foreword by Mr. Jim Ward?

The Way of Tree, Shadow & Flame supplement contains new races, callings, prayers, spells, background and relationship tables, rules for running domains, and more — hundreds of pages of material for players and game masters alike.

And with your help, The Secret Fire’s system of roleplaying mechanics for creating three-dimensional characters and forging epic storylines with your games will be converted to both Pathfinder and Swords & Wizardry in official companion books.

And that’s not all.

New David “Diesel” LaForce artwork, a unique Stan! comic, special Pathfinder mechanics by Owen KC Stephens and Brian Berg, a gazetteer by the master himself, Bruce Heard, an origin story of the TSF world by Ed Greenwood (in addition to his design work on the supplement), new Swords & Wizardry mechanics by Matt Finch, cartography by Tom Fayen, a dark and dangerous adventure by Paizo RPG Rockstar Tom Phillips, and more will all be part of this fantastic collaboration of designers and artists that spans the lifetime of roleplaying games!

Click here to check out the campaign!

Find out more about George Strayton here: http://www.secretfiregames.com/about/ and follow The Secret Fire page for more about this amazing project here: https://www.facebook.com/thesecretfirerpg.

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Happy Halloween!  And I hope my fellow New Yorkers and everyone else affected by Sandy are safe and doing well despite the current issues.  I’m pleased to announce the release of our first stand-alone adventure, The Rings of Doom, written by veteran designer Steven Winter. You can find out more about the module by clicking below.

The Rings of Doom at DriveThruRPG

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The last few images for FRAGMENT I are coming in. Here’s the new page header….

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First, I just wanted to say that I had a fun time being interviewed for Genre-tainment, a great online broadcast about all things…well, genre-related. My interview will be aired as part of the show Tuesday September 18th at 7 pm Eastern time. I just wanted to give a big thank you to Marx and Julie of Genre-tainment. They’re great people, their know their subject, they’re fun, and you should check out all their shows, which are available for download!

You can check out the new episode premiering tomorrow night as well as their entire catalogue here!

Second, don’t forget to check out our Facebook page where we post all kinds of tidbits, news, and the like about the game and related information (convention appearances, interviews, tips and tricks, and so forth). For example, I just posted a quick reminder that you can perform any Action (Skill Test/Contest, Attack, Prayer, Ritual, Spell, etc.) at ANY point on your turn, even WHILE moving. So stay tuned to The Secret Fire Facebook page for more updates!

And while you’re there, we’d love it if you could Like us!  Thanks!

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Every once in a while we post screenwriting-related information on the TSF site if it relates directly to gaming, and in this case it does. See the Downloads section for the press release about the development of the a feature film screenplay for QUAG KEEP, the 1978 pro-gaming novel (the first official novel based on D&D) written by the legendary Andre Norton.

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In the forthcoming FRAGMENT I: THE WAY OF TREE, SHADOW & FLAME, we’ve managed to streamline the game system (without changing any of the math) and to provide new options that enable groups to create a unique version of the game that best suits their particular play-style.  Here are two examples, one of the former and one of the latter:

1. Stamina Points: The original formula for determining Stamina Points per Wound Level involved adding a +2 to every character, no matter his or her Calling.  Now, that +2 has been incorporated into the Calling’s Base Stamina, eliminating the need to do the extra math and yet yielding the same result.

2. Deck of the Elder Gods: This optional mechanic enables the generation of random values for attacks and Skill Tests/Contests using a standard deck of playing cards, with each suit mapped to a particular Elder God (except the Great Unknown, which works in a way appropriate to the name of that Elder God; full details appear in the book). Players simply draw a card from the Deck of the Elder Gods to generate a number from 1 to 20 (A–10 = 1–10, J = 12, Q = 15, K = 20) and identify a suit/Elder God (for example, a 10 of Spades equates to a roll of 10 under the aegis of the Elder God of Death). A player can spend Energy Points up to the number of Ranks her or she possesses in the associated Elder God (Death, in this example) to increase or decrease the score generated (adding the usual adjustments to the final value). This mechanic gives more control to the players, further incorporates the Elder Gods (also known as the Eternal Powers) into the game (see below for another mention of how this has been accomplished in the supplement), and is another expression of how a PC’s experience with a particular Elder God can affect the outcome of certain events.

Other areas have been streamlined, as well, and more options similar to the Deck of the Elder Gods focus the game on the use of both Energy Points and the manifestations of the Elder Gods in the game world (for example, an Elder God Roll to avoid an effect, say poison: a player rolls a die literally on the Character Wheel on his character sheet; where the die lands — which color it lands on or closest to — determines which Elder God applies and adjusts the roll based on the number of Ranks the PC has in that Elder God or double the number of Ranks if the roll indicates the influence of the same Elder God as the attack itself, Death in the case of poison — but more on this in another post…).

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Check out a couple of sneak peeks at the new supplement in the Downloads section (FRAGMENT I Preview #1 and #2) showing a few pages from the Equipment chapter and the Constructing & Running Domains chapter.

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…visit our Secret Fire Facebook page.  We’ll still be posting information, downloads, and so forth here at our main site, but most news-related material will appear on Facebook simply beceause it’s simpler to navigate, easier to access, works on all mobile devices, and today they just released a brand new version of the app that has been rebuilt from the bottom up using Objective C rather than HTML 5 (for those tech-knowledgeable people out there who know how dramatically that should increase the speed of the app).

And if you could take a second to “Like” us on the page, we’d really appreciate it!  We hope everyone’s enjoying the last couple of weeks of Summer!

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I had a fantastic time at GenCon this year and wanted to publicly thank CEO Adrian Swartout for having me as a Guest of Honor.  It was great fun hanging out with old industry friends (many of whom I’ve known for 20 years or more), spending time with the great folks at the Legendary Realms Terrain booth selling Secret Fire products, participating in the panel on the Dungeons & Dragons Documentary, and doing writing panels and seminars for very intelligent, inquisitive, and enthusiastic attendees.

Here’s a shot taken by a great photographer, John Schisler, whom I met at the convention — a fellow gamer (I encourage you to check out his website at www.creativephotographie.com).

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