Category Archives: Announcements

Hey, there’s something coming up that I want to tell you about!

Announcements, Crossposted

Only Three Days Left!


This Kickstarter of ours is a quick one¹. It closes on Friday, so if you want the Game Chief’s Deluxe RPG “Handbrain” Screen, you should pledge today. Or tomorrow. But don’t wait until Thursday, because by then you may have become distracted by other things, and then it will be Saturday…

I’ll be posting a photo tutorial later today explaining how to use some simple hobby paint tools land techniques to make the ABS plastic screen look like it’s made of rusty wrought iron.

¹ The project had to fit between a couple of other things: the earliest date at which we could, in good conscience, launch another Kickstarter, and the last possible date at which we can give the manufacturer numbers for the run, and still ship stuff in July². 

² Why July? Because August is full, and September is full, and October is aghast at how ragged we are after our slog through August and September, and November is like “are you ready for the holiday stuff yet?”

Announcements, Crossposted

The Game Chief’s Handbrain

Two years ago I had this idea for what I really wanted in an RPG screen. We spent a chunk of R&D budget determining whether it was a thing that we could actually make, and it turns out we can. So we are!

The project is 97% funded as of this writing. The molds have been tooled, and the manufacturer is waiting on us. When our Kickstarter closes we will tell them how many to make. This is going to fulfill very quickly¹.

We’ll be including PDF templates for the half-sheets, to help you align whatever information you want on the drop-ins you print, and we’ll be including some Planet Mercenary drop-ins as well. Oh, and we’ll include an adventure, “Size Might Matter,” which will debut at Gen-Con.

If this is a thing you want, you should act soon. The Kickstarter only runs for 17 more days, because our manufacturer really does need to get started.

¹ The Planet Mercenary Kickstarter is going to be fulfilled at around the same time as this one, because it’s off to the printer now. By the end of July we’ll have gotten everybody their physical products for all this stuff. 

Announcements, Crossposted, Journal

PLANET MERCENARY Goes to Print This Monday

Ten days ago I finished my last big piece of writing for Planet Mercenary. Yesterday Sandra and I finished the last small piece. Today we reviewed the cover layout, and realized it’s ready to be sent to the printer.

This has taken much longer than I wanted it to, but the project looks much, much better than I believed it could. Part of the delay is due to repeated discoveries that we could be doing something better, and then deciding to do it better. And of course another part of the delay is us not knowing how to work as quickly as we originally thought we could.

If you backed the project, your book (and anything else that ships with it) will be shipped July. If you didn’t back the project you can still use Backerkit to place a pre-order, but that link will go away in a few weeks. Eventually we’ll have Planet Mercenary in the Schlock Mercenary Store, but that’s not going to happen before July.

I need to write a whole different post talking about how awesome Sandra and Alan are, and how grateful I am that they figured out how to work with, and around me. For now I’ll just say that in terms of actual work done, Sandra’s name is listed at least one position too far to the right.

Note: The cover art above is by Jeff Zugale, and was laid out (along with the rest of the pages in the book) by Mike Brodu under Sandra Tayler‘s direction. The fact that the logo I designed two years ago is still a part of all this is evidence more of the force of my personality than my skill at logo design.

Announcements, Crossposted

Schlock Mercenary PDFs

The first six Schlock Mercenary books are available in PDF format.

That’s right, if you want to read Schlock Mercenary electronically, offline, without taking up the space associated with physical books, we have a solution for you.

For your convenience, here are abbreviated listings and specs for the PDFs.

THE TITLES

THE TUB OF HAPPINESS, Schlock Mercenary Volume 1

$12.00
240 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 305MB

Welcome to Tagon’s Toughs, a mercenary company whose newest recruit is almost as much trouble as the new owners. 

THE TERAPORT WARS, Schlock Mercenary Volume 2

$15.00
240 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 305MB

Schlock, Tagon, and the rest of the company hunt for eyeballs, embroil themselves in a battle for galactic domination, and then look for honest work. 

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT, Schlock Mercenary Volume 3

$9.00
80 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 99MB

Tagon’s mercenary company has been  company dragooned into government service. General Xinchub is going to pay them to hunt down their friends… unless they give him a reason to blow them up without paying them at all.

THE BLACKNESS BETWEEN, Schlock Mercenary Volume 4

$9.00
96 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 107MB

Captain Tagon, Sergeant Schlock, and the Toughs still have ‘government problems,’ but now they’ve attracted the attention of something ancient, invisible, and very, very much worse.

THE SCRAPYARD OF INSUFFERABLE ARROGANCE, Schlock Mercenary Volume 5

$9.00
80 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 162MB

In need of refits, repairs, and paying work, the Toughs find exactly what they’re looking for… except for the bit where the recipe for ‘landmine’ has been scrambled across the small appliance buffer.

RESIDENT MAD SCIENTIST, Schlock Mercenary Volume 6

$12.00
144 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 183MB

When teraports start missing their destinations across the galaxy the inventor of the Teraport must find a solution. Unfortunately for Tagon’s Toughs, said inventor works for them, and whether or not he’s got problems to solve they have incoming fire to deal with first…

Delivery, Bandwidth, and Future Plans

Any PDF purchases you make from us can be accessed immediately by logging in to your Schlock Mercenary Store account. An email will be sent with a link after the order is completed, but the mail-bot sometimes takes a day or so to come back from whatever passes for “break time.”  If you have any trouble accessing your file, email schlockmercenary@gmail.com. We’ll make sure you get your stuff.

Our store’s ISP handles digital delivery nicely, but there is some throttling going on, and bandwidth is not cheap. We’ll be staggering the releases of the later PDFs (Books 7 through 12, as of this writing) to conserve bandwidth.

Some of these Schlock Mercenary collections have been available in the past from Baen Books.