Tag Archives: Schlock Mercenary

Announcements, Crossposted

Schlock Mercenary Turns Seventeen

On Monday, June 12th of the year 2000 the very first Schlock Mercenary strip appeared on the web.

Yesterday, Monday, June 12th of the year 2017 marked the seventeenth anniversary of that start date—seventeen years of uninterrupted¹ daily² updates here at schlockmercenary.com.

That I am now in my eighteenth year of doing this stands as evidence of ongoing good fortune. I’ve enjoyed seventeen full years without any sort of debilitating injury or crisis preventing me from working for more than a couple of weeks at a time. I’ve gotten sick and been injured, of course, but I keep getting better with sufficient time to spare.

At some point this streak will end. That point lies in the mists of a hopefully-distant future, and is not today.

Today I am making comics.

(Just as soon as I finish this blog post.)

If you would like to celebrate the beginning of Schlock Mercenary’s eighteenth year, you might consider sharing the strip with a friend. But whatever you do, don’t send them back to the very beginning. That would be cruel. Start here, with Book 12.  Which, by serendipitous convenience³, is the most recent of the Schlock Mercenary stories to appear in print.

How long will Schlock Mercenary continue to run? The over-arching story is in its final act, and will draw to a close soon, probably  in Book 19. But on the day following that big finish there will be another update, and another one the day after that. Those will launch a new story, featuring some characters you know, and a universe you think you know, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is a satisfactory conclusion coming up, and you can enjoy it secure in the knowledge that it won’t end the delivery of daily strips here at schlockmercenary.com.

¹ There have been service interruptions, of course. Like that time the data center’s UPS failed, and a fire destroyed part of the facility. But Schlock Mercenary has updated every day, and with a bit of back-up hosting has never been unavailable for more than a few hours at a time.

² That’s 6,210 strips. Yes, the image files are backed up in more than one place. 

³ A friend who also happens to be flush with the good fortune of a spot of discretionary income, might purchase that book as a gift. Shared links are lovely, but a thing made out of colorful paper is a thing that will be remembered. 

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

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.

Announcements, Crossposted

Pre-Order Prints

We have some new posters and prints available, and they’re gorgeous. Before I start in with the images, let me start the clock running. The Eina-Afa and Ships-to-Scale posters are going to be limited runs, so if you want them, you need to pre-order them this week.

We’ll print more than we need to fill the orders, but because of their 18″ x 24″ format we won’t be doing a huge run.

Image time! Here are the 11″ x 14″ the travel posters¹: the Planet Mercenary project has made some of the locations in the Schlock Mercenary universe feel so much like real places we figured we’d extend the illusion even further with a bit of sloganizing.
The images above were created by Bogdan Bungardean, who did a lot of the interior work on Planet Mercenary. The travel posters are $5.00 each, but if you order all three, it’s just $10. They’re each  11″ x 14″, a perfect fit for standard frames you can find in walled markets, targets of opportunity, and deep jungles.
Bogdan also did one of my very favorite pieces in the book, an illustration of one of Eina-Aafa’s vertical hurricanes. This one’s 18″ x 24″
The poster has the logo and the slogan down in the white-space, so if you want to crop those and frame the image without them, you can do that. It’ll mean a non-standard frame size, of course, but it’ll look really nice on your wall.
Finally,  starshipwright Jeff Zugale assembled his Planet Mercenary ship designs into a catalog poster displaying the ships to scale².
These are the same vessels that will appear on the Planet Mercenary Game Chief screen, but this is an 18″ x 24″ poster. You can pre-order it here.
Here’s a link to all our posters and prints, so you can see what’s available.
As I said at the top, the Eina Afa and Ships to Scale poster are both pre-orders, and will be a limited run. We’ll hold pre-orders for a week, then place our order with the printer. They’ll likely ship in about two weeks.

¹ I had some Star Wars travel postcards, which I think I got back in 1993. I liked them, but I found myself wishing I’d spent extra and made the space for the posters, which they also sold. Is this project inspired by that? Of course it is. 

² There are three scales. If you look closely, you’ll see that each section of the poster includes a shrink-box of the previous section. This was the only way to show a three-meter vehicle and an eight-kilometer Oafan cargo lifter on the same sheet of paper.