Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Tag Archives: AMARNA


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First steps towards the AMARNA roleplaying game

I’m designing some material for the roleplaying game side of AMARNA and I thought I’ll start with a set of character sheets for the main characters.
Go for high-quality PDFs,to be distributed for free as a gadget.

I was highly impressed by the recently discovered Achtung!Cthulhu handbooks, in terms of overall quality and look, and I’d love to do something similar, creating a file folder or memorandum-style booklet for the good guys and one for the bad guys.
Or do a “fake documents” trying to copy the style of the French Call of Cthulhu handbook.
And I’ll also steal the idea of “statting” the characters for a variety of systems.

Screenshot from 2018-02-27 17-22-53

I’ll certainly go for Call of Cthulhu/Basic RolePlaying (with provisions made for Pulp Cthulhu), and for Savage Worlds, but I’d also try and add other systems – Ubiquity, for instance, to be used with Hollow Earth Expeditions, and maybe the old reliable D6 system. I’ll have to cram a lot of numbers and tables in those files.

Something for the weekend, but also an important first step in putting together the AMARNA campaign.
It will be fun.
And it will also be a good opportunity to revisit a few old systems, in view of my (slowly growing) catalog of pulp roleplaying games.


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Almost there…

The second installment of AMARNA is going through editing, and we’ll be back on schedule, and release it in February as planned despite having wasted ten days being sick.
What is not going as planned is the development.
As originally dreamed up (what got into me?) AMARNA should have been six 8000-words episodes.
But the first episode was over 12.000 words, and the second will clock over the 10.000 words mark. Which means that the planned 50.000-words novel will be closer to 70.000 words by June.
And yet, I’m having lots of fun, and hopefully the readers are having fun, too.
And things are going to heat up in the next weeks. With the second episode, now all the pieces are on the chessboard. The next four episodes will floor the accelerator.

old-vintage-photos-of-egypt-1870-1875-14

Now it’s time to start working on the rest of the spin-offs, the new Curse of Fantomah episodes, and hopefully the roleplaying material. And I’ll have to see if my Italian readers are interested in kickstarting a translation and Italian single-volume edition.
That would be good.
As they say, no rest for the wicked.


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A few things I know about her: Valerie Cazaret

Amarna preview smallThe second episode of AMARNA is about to hit the shelves, and I thought I’ll do a series of posts, over the next few weeks and months, as the other episodes come out, about the characters, the good guys and the bad guys and all those in between.
There’s a bit about them in the press book I created for the launch of the series, but as it usually happens, I am finding out more about my characters as I write about them.
That’s the way I work – a quick sketch, a photo reference, a list of details, and then I let the guys run away with the story.

And when it comes to running away with the story, nobody beats Valerie Cazaret. Continue reading →


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Two-months review

It’s been a busy two months, December 2017 and January 2018, two months during which I finally put to work the fast internet connection activated in October and I started my online courses. Two months during which the first phase of the AMARNA project started, and of course the first two months on Patreon.
With this post, I will try to give a brief overview of these two months, focusing on Patreon in particular. Continue reading →


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AMARNA on Amazon

Amarna preview smallMore oompa-loopa shenanigans: last night, Amazon informed me that the first episode of AMARNA is now live.
And what about the disappearance of my files and the long silence afterwards?
Nothing – this will remain a mystery forever.
And it’s somewhat fitting, don’t you think?

But let’s look at the bright side: AMARNA is available on Amazon, too.
More choice for my readers, hopefully more sales.
Everyone’s happy.
Possibly Jeff Bezos’ oompa-loompa’s too.


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AMARNA, episode 1

Amarna preview smallAnd so we made it, despite the revolt of the Amazon oompa-loompas.
Because you see, I spent almost one hour uploading the text and the cover of the first episode of AMARNA on Amazon, and when I hit publish the thing just vanished.
[snaps fingers] Like that!

And so I said to myself, what the heck, I’ll use Gumroad1.

And so, here it goes – a simple zip file including both the epub and the mobi versions of the first episode of my serial, DRM-free, that you can buy on Gumroad for the same price you’d pay for the mobi alone on Amazon2.

And what’s more, on Gumroad you can SUBSCRIBE to the whole series, and get the files in your mailbox as soon as they are released, saving up to 22% on the retail price of the six installments.
Is this cool or what?

And now, what about a little preview?
Want to see how it starts?  Continue reading →