Monday 16 December 2019

Esoteric Enterprises Is Here

Esoteric Enterprises is done!
It's been published by Soul Muppet publishing, who handled all the printer stuff for me. Zach's put a lot of work into making this happen (there were issues with things like page size) and I'm super grateful for it all.

Anyway. What's in the book? It's pretty dense:

  • Eight classes: The Bodyguard (chunky hard-to-kill combatants), Criminal (flexible skill experts), Doctor (mad frankenstein scientists with healing and experiments), Explorer (slippery survival-oriented urban explorers), Mercenary (highly effective violence experts), Mystic (spellcasters who rely on a divine patron for unreliable aid), Occultist (vancian casters with extra experimentation) and Spooks (a modular class of build-your-own-monster PCs).
  • Spells and equipment tailored to suit the setting, including 30 different narcotics and a whopping 70 magical grimoires.
  • XP for treasure that folds into a system where level equates to an abstraction for character wealth and status.
  • Combat that's nasty, brutal and short.
  • Injuries that are nasty, brutal and long-term.
  • Systems for dealing with criminal contacts, medical experiments, exploration, heists and other criminal activities.
  • Magical experimentation that can result in backlash, ranging from the surreal to the slightly apocalyptic.
  • Systems to roll up a complex network of underworld factions - ranging from street gangs to broods of vampires to weird cults - along with mechanisms to track the relationships between PCs and different factions, police activity and various events in the underworld.
  • Similar systems to roll up an undercity; basically a small megadungeon beneath the town, with 30 different types of complex, 40 example underworld hazards, and extensive treasure tables (including tables to create magical artefacts and weapons, and 40 sample magic items)
  • A bestiary with over 200 monsters and NPCs. That's more than the D&D monster manual (and mine are way cooler)
  • A bunch of other stuff I'm probably forgetting about.

So at 247 pages, it's packing an absolute TON into it. Seriously, this thing has absorbed me for a good two years now.
The whole thing is basically a mashup of lovecraft, world of darkness, crime fiction, paranoid fiction, body horror and dungeon fantasy in one package, using oldschool mechanics that should be reasonably familiar.

I've run it a bunch. It's really fucking good. Examples can be found here and here. I'm really into it, but I would be, since I made it by smashing all my favourite stuff together into one big horrible frankenstein game.\

Here's some pictures of the actual book:


Print copy available here. The print version is hardback, high quality, full colour. It's a limited run, rather than PoD, so get it while it's still there, I don't know when the next run will happen.
PDF available here.

27 comments:

  1. This looks great, I bought it, I can't wait to read it!

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  2. Me: Ah, I think I've bought all the gaming books I'm going to buy for a long time.

    You: Hold my beer.

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  3. It looks pretty. Just ordered the hardcover.

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  4. The printed version look lovely, but beyond my means at this point, so I very much appreciate the discount on pdf.

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  5. Oof, that price is rough enough with the exchange rate, but adding 20.00 for overseas shipping spikes the price well, WELL up past what I can pay for a single book.

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    1. It should also be available from exalted funeral for american customers soon, I'll put the link in when it goes up.

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    2. VERY good news - many thanks for your foresight in setting up the extra distribution channel (*cough*especially when many US makers don't do the same for those across the pond*cough*). Said gratitude will be expressed in the form of many tiny slips of paper with American Presidents on them at the earliest opportunity.

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  6. That is amazing and lovely. Congrats and well done!

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  7. Just purchased it as PDF on DriveThruRPG tonight. Will be purchasing hardcover through Exalted Funeral when it the book reaches American shores (I'm in witch-haunted New England). As I flip through the PDF, I am in awe. Emmy, you are, hands-down, THE definition of OSR amazing.

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  8. Super excited about this! I'm waiting for Exalted Funeral to put up the store page for it so I can grab the hard copy.

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  9. Haha, whoops... didn't realize it was coming out in the States eventually. I hear things like "limited run" and I smash that order button.

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  10. Is there a character sheet available for EE anywhere?

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    1. Not yet. I have some designs I'm fiddling with. I'm thinking of doing PbtA-style playbooks, with all the cgen info for a given class on that sheet.

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    2. That would be cool! But I'd still like a more traditional character sheet, those tend to be more useful to create VTT usable character sheets from.

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  11. Well done, Emmy. This is beautiful.

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  12. Ouch already sold out .... gosh! Gone as fast as an ice-cream in hell!

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  13. That appears to have sold out very quickly! Any plans on still doing a US distribution, or are all the physical copies now gone?

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  14. The book lists spell-caster NPCs/monsters who have spells that have been "memorized dangerously" ... but I could not find the definition of "memorized dangerously" in the book. Is this meant to mean occasions when spell-casters memorize spells in the wrong spell slot?

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  15. Hello! Will the print copy be available at Exalted Funeral (I'm in the US)? Thanks for creating this!

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  16. . . . not sure if the 2nd print run has occurred, if some people cancelled their orders or what but Melsonia has EE back in stock. Or, at least, they're taking additional orders. They took mine at any rate! ~showers creator with US $$$ from afar~*

    *Not sure if Exalted Funeral sold out already or hasn't opened orders yet but, well, given how fast the print run ran out last time I'm not taking any chances. Plus my SO has a friend who's a philatelist so the Royal Air postage won't go /entirely/ to waste.

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    Replies
    1. yeah, there was a 2nd print run.
      I don't know if the books for EF have physically arrived yet, alas.

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  17. Hi ! Is it the good place to post questions about the game's contents or rules ?
    Here's one : the occultist can only learn new spells through texts (grimoires or scrolls) which need a Translation roll. Given that no occultist has the Tranlsation skill, the occultists should very well choose and cherish their initial 2 grimoires. Am I wrong ?

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