Tag Archives: Schlock Mercenary

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. 

 

Announcements, Crossposted

Seventy Maxims, Maximally Available

Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries is now available.

At this time, the book is only available from the Planet Mercenary backerkit page. The Planet Mercenary RPG is not yet shipping, so if you want your Seventy Maxims book to ship immediately, make sure it’s the only thing you put in your cart.

There are two editions, which we’re calling “Pristine” and “Defaced.” Cover-compareThey are both in-universe artifacts: the pristine version is one of the thousands of copies of the Seventy Maxims book that the average connoisseur of 31st century printed collectibles might find themselves fortunate enough to acquire; the defaced version is the copy that CDS Sergeant Edwards¹ handed to Private Karl Tagon on March 1st, 3035.

Karl’s book has some mileage on it. He made notes on the pages, and on January 28th, 3093, handed it off to his son, Captain Kaff Tagon, who had it for six years, making his own notes. He gifted it to Captain Alexia Murtaugh in 3099, and she added her notes. When Murtaugh was injured in early 3100 Sergeant Schlock went through her stuff, and borrowed the book. He found a felt-tip pen, too, and treated the existing notes as permission to deploy it.

The pages of the two books look quite a bit different.

M27-Compare

M44-compare

 

Both books have scholarly² commentary at the bottom of each maxim’s page, and and the scholars do not always agree with the sentiment of the source material.

This book took a lot more work than we thought it would, but based on the response from people who’ve already gotten their copies, all that work was worth it.

 

¹ Sergeant Edwards, later Banneret Commodore Edwards of the Continuance Fleet, does not appear in the comic strip anywhere. Maybe someday I’ll tell his full story. 

² The scholars in question are all me. I had far too much fun critically pontificating on my own writing.