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Pinnacle launches DEADLANDS 30th Anniversary Kickstarter

Pinnacle Entertainment has launched the Kickstarter for the 30th Anniversary celebration of their seminal tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands.

Originally launched in late 1996, Deadlands used a novel rules system built for fast, six-shootin' action mixed in with magic and weird science. The game combined different die types with cards for greater randomisation and a whole magic system built around deck-building (this was streamline later on). The game was notable for its setting, which mixed Wild West action, Lovecraftian horror, steampunk science and black comedy. Think of Army of Darkness meets Unforgiven meets The Difference Engine with zombies and you're most of the way there. It's not for nothing that the legendary Bruce Campbell himself provided the introduction for the revised edition of the game in 1999.

The game had a revised edition in 1999, two sequel TTRPG games (Deadlands: Hell on Earth and Deadlands: Lost Colony) and a spin-off miniatures game using a simplified version of the rules, The Great Rail Wars, but an attempt to pivot to the d20 rules system (derived from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition) in 2002 backfired spectacularly and nearly drove the company out of business. Regrouping, the company used The Great Rail Wars rules as the basis for a new, universal rules system, Savage Worlds. The company released new versions of Deadlands for Savage Worlds, namely Deadlands Reloaded in 2006 and Deadlands: The Weird West in 2020. Both have been successful.

For the upcoming 30th Anniversary, Pinnacle decided not to re-release the original game. A 20th Anniversary reissue of the revised edition was released in 2017, and was recently reprinted and should be (for now, anyway) widely available. Instead, they've decided to look to the past of the game but focus on revised material for the current edition of the game.

First up in the Kickstarter package is Deadlands: 30 Years of Games, Grit, & Ghost Rock. This is a history and behind-the-scenes account of the making of the game over three decades, with exclusive new information on various movie and TV adaptations of the property that never quite took off, as well as multiple video games that were in development at one time or another but were cancelled. The book also acts as an art book, collecting most of the cover art for all of Deadlands' various editions and sourcebooks over the three decades. The book also includes the introductions to previous editions by Joe Lansdale, Mike Stackpole and Bruce Campbell, and an account of the time Campbell played the game.

As well as the requisite coins, cards and special dice, the set includes a new rulebook for playing the game. Deadlands: Core Rules combines the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Edition rulebook and the Deadlands: The Weird West corebook into one integrated edition, with irrelevant material from Savage Worlds (i.e. lasers and spaceships) removed and some material from the Deadlands: Weird West Companion added. This creates an all-new starting point for the game which is easier on both the wallet and the brain whilst trying to look up rules and not being able to remember which book they're in. This rule book will be available in a regular edition and a leatherbound special edition.

An additional new book is Deadlands: Rascals, Varmints, & Relics, a combined bestiary and item book collating previous material and adding new information on monsters and items.

The set also includes the Deadlands Accessories Box, which includes a GM's Screen, action deck, ammo tracker, poster map, dice and reference cards, and the Deadlands Starter Set, which includes a simplified "showcase" set of the rules for new players, an adventure called The Cursed Caverns, maps, tokens, pawns, another Action Deck, templates, archetype cards and so forth. 

Available as various add-ons are the extant material for the current edition of the game, including the adventure/campaign books Hell on the High Plains, The Abominable Northwest, Horror at Headstone Hill, Carnage in the Cascades and Night Train, and various map packs and archetype card sets (customisable pregen character cards, basically).

The Kickstarter will be running until 14 March and, predictably, has already been fully funded.

BALDUR'S GATE TV series in development at HBO from LAST OF US team

HBO is developing a TV series based on the Baldur's Gate video game series, set in the Forgotten Realms fantasy world and Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. The TV show will be set shortly after the events of the video game Baldur's Gate III and will see some returning characters from the game alongside new faces.

If Lump the Enlightened is not in the TV show, we riot.

Craig Mazin, the showrunner of The Last of Us and Chernobyl, is lining this up to be his next project once work on the third and now-confirmed-to-be-final season of that show is completed. Mazin will be the main writer, showrunner and producer, with Chris Perkins from Wizards of the Coast serving as consultant. At this stage, none of the team from Larian Studios, who produced Baldur's Gate III, are involved, and it appears that Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood has also not been consulted on the project so far. However, some of the voice cast from the video game may return, either voicing or playing their characters where that makes sense, or in new roles if not.

Mazin, a noted gamer, has completed Baldur's Gate III more than once, having put over 1,000 hours into the game and completing it on the challenging "honour mode." He is also an avid tabletop gamer, having run ongoing D&D campaigns for over fifteen years straight.

Baldur's Gate is apparently designed to share continuity with The Forgotten Realms, the Shawn Levy-produced show in development over at HBO's now (or soon-to-be) sister streamer, Netflix.

With the final season of Last of Us not likely to land before mid-2027, the Baldur's Gate show may be lucky to hit screens before the end of the decade.

Sales of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE surpass 100 million

It's been a long time coming, but sales of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence, perhaps better known by the name of its TV adaptation, HBO's Game of Thrones, have finally and officially passed the 100 million mark.

The Juniper Books rejacketing of the Song of Ice and Fire series.

The news was buried in The Hollywood Reporter's recent article on Martin, although the main focus was elsewhere (yes, The Winds of Winter still isn't out yet, and yes, the fall-out from Martin's public dissatisfaction with House of the Dragon continues to reverberate).

The series started off a little sluggishly, with A Game of Thrones only doing okay on its first publication in August 1996 (the series turns thirty this year) and it taking until the paperback was released before sales picked up, something Martin attributed to the cover quote from fellow fantasy author Robert Jordan, of Wheel of Time fame. Sales and critical acclaim grew with the release of A Clash of Kings in 1998 and A Storm of Swords in 2000. By the time of the release of A Feast for Crows in 2005, sales of the series had approached or exceeded five million. At least twelve million copies had been sold by the time A Dance with Dragons was published and the Game of Thrones TV series launched, both in 2011.

The immense success of Game of Thrones propelled sales of the novels to insane heights. The books reportedly sold a further nine million copies in the first year of the TV show alone (from 2011 to 2012). Sales hit 70 million in 2016 and are believed to have reached 90 million around the time of the pandemic, coinciding with the - contentious in some parts - conclusion of the TV series. With the franchise off the air and no new novel in the mainline series appearing, sales appear to have slowed, although spin-off books The World of Ice and Fire (2014), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015, collecting three earlier-published novellas) and Fire & Blood (2018) all sold extremely well.

Sales of the series appeared to uptick again after House of the Dragon launched to initial success in 2022, and no doubt there has been another sales boost from the successful launch of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms a few weeks ago.

Crossing the 100 million mark puts Martin in rarefied company. In the secondary world/epic fantasy field, he is just behind Sir Terry Pratchett and Robert Jordan, who have both also crossed the 100 million mark in the last few years, though of course J.R.R. Tolkien continues to rule the roost with at least 300 million sales of his various Middle-earth books (and this figure is highly conservative). Stephen King has over 400 million sales, but only around a tenth of those comes from his epic fantasy or at least epic fantasy-adjacent work, the Dark Tower series and Eyes of the Dragon, meaning that Martin may comfortably be the biggest-selling living epic fantasy author (unless you count Harry Potter as epic fantasy, which most don't seem to).

How long he holds onto that crown will be interesting to see. Brandon Sanderson recently passed 50 million books sold, but Sarah J. Maas recently hit 75 million copies sold and is selling books at a staggering rate.

It should also be noted that book sales are famously sluggish in their reporting, with the reporting sometimes trailing the real figures by many years. Martin's actual sales could be a fair bit higher than this number.

If the books continue to generate hit TV shows, we'll likely see a steady increase in sales. Obviously one thing would blast sales through the stratosphere again, but when those winds will blow remains to be seen.

Hugh Cook's epic CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series returns to print

In unexpectedly splendid news, Hugh Cook's idiosyncratic, funny and genuinely inventive Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, all ten volumes, has been brought back into print. Fans at the r/hughcook subreddit acquired the rights to the series, formed Zenphos Press and have brought the series back as both ebook and print editions.

Hugh Cook was born in 1956 in Billericay, England, but grew up after the age of six in Kiribati. He then moved to New Zealand, where he served in the military. He began writing fiction in the 1970s, publishing his first novel, Plague Summer in 1980. In 1986 he began the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness fantasy series, planned to run to twenty volumes, with two series of equal size, Chronicles of an Age of Wrath and Chronicles of an Age of Heroes, to follow. The series was cancelled after just ten volumes due to disappointing sales.

In 1997 he moved to Yokohama, Japan, and worked on additional books, short stories and poetry. He published the Oceans of Light fantasy trilogy and the standalones To Find and Wake the Dreameri and Bamboo Horses. After suffering a bout of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, he wrote a candid memoir about the experience, Cancer Patient (2005). Unfortunately, the disease returned and he passed away in 2008.

Discussion of his fantasy masterwork was kept alive by both ardent fans and also a new generation of fantasy writes who cited Cook as an inspiration. China Mieville, leading doyen of the New Weird fantasy movement, wrote an introduction for a reprint of the fourth volume in the series, The Walrus and the Warwolf (which Scott Lynch once cited as the greatest title for a fantasy novel of all time). Adrian Tchaikovsky has also revealed himself to be a major fan, penning introductions for two of the books in this reprint run.

A decade ago, I summed up the series in its entry in my History of Fantasy project thusly:

Few could accuse New Zealand novelist Hugh Cook of lacking vision. In 1986 he published The Wizards and the Warriors, the first novel in a series he called Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Cook's plan was for this series to run to twenty volumes, to be followed by two series of equal length, Chronicles of an Age of Wrath and Chronicles of an Age of Heroes. The sixty-book plan was overly ambitious despite Cook's high speed of output, but ultimately he only finished the first half of the first series (ten novels in six years) before it was halted due to lack of sales.

Unusually, the series was not one massive epic story. Instead, it was more episodic with some novels taking place simultaneously alongside others, with events varying depending on who was witnessing or instigating them. The books used unreliable narrators and a prose style that could vary significantly from volume to volume. The books also eschewed a lot of epic fantasy tropes, with the books not following a set chronology and not having a central hero or villain. The books featured whimsical humour and influences from sword and sorcery as well as planetary romance. Some books were reminiscent of the later New Weird movement (Adrian Tchaikovsky, China Mieville and Scott Lynch are big fans). Some books were more like roleplaying games, with Paizo Publishing reprinting one of the volumes, The Walrus and the Warwolf, as part of its Planet Stories line.

After the series concluded (prematurely) Cook published several more books before sadly passing away in 2008 from cancer. His massive mega-series was never finished, but its breadth, vision and general batshit insanity remain intriguing (and echoes, intended or not, of the tonal variations, dark humour and continent-skipping structure can be found in Steven Erikson's Malazan novels).

All ten books in the series are now back in print and available from the local Amazon of your choice and nationality:

1. The Wizards and the Warriors (1986)
2. The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (1987)
3. The Women and the Warlords (1987)
4. The Walrus and the Warwolf (1988)
5. The Wicked and the Witless (1989)
6. The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (1990)
7. The Wazir and the Witch (1990)
8. The Werewolf and the Wormlord (1991)
9. The Worshippers and the Way (1992)
10. The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster (1992)

Splendid news indeed.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Dispatch

Robert Robertson III is the third person in his family to take on the persona of "Mecha Man," using a powerful mech suit to fight crime. During one particularly tricky battle, he suffers a crippling defeat to the evil Shroud. His suit is put out of commission, and he is instead recruited to work for the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN) as a dispatcher, using his knowledge of superhero tactics to help the dysfunctional guys and gals of Z-Team work better together. But Robert is also working hard to repair his mech suit and bring Shroud to justice, once and for all.

Twenty-two years ago, veterans of the LucasArts adventure game team regrouped to found Telltale Games, a company dedicated to furthering the adventure game genre, a genre rooted in good writing and storytelling. Thanks to the massive success of their 2012 Walking Dead game, Telltale went on to enjoy a prolonged period of success. Unfortunately, the company ended up over-exploiting their style of gameplay with increasingly limited innovation, and the company almost completely fell apart as disillusioned developers left. One such group of devs founded AdHoc Studio to carry on the Telltale style of gameplay, but also being bolder in how they would approach the genre.

Their first game, Dispatch, has been a deserved, high-profile success. The premise is simple: an ex-hero becomes a dispatcher, basically a 911 (or 999, in the UK) call receiver who determines what help to send. There's a lot of different, competing priorities, forcing the player to make hard choices when they can't solve every single problem simultaneously. This premise also gives the game an interesting structure we haven't quite seen before: a key gameplay loop as well as the interactive storytelling the team had perfected back in the Telltale days.

The game is divided into eight episodes, with each episode usually spanning a day and a night. Each episode has lengthy, high-quality, professionally-animated sequences that look as good as any modern 2D cartoon, as well as gameplay sequences using a map of the area showing where crimes are taking place and what heroes are available to deal with them. The gameplay sequences are relatively basic, but do increase in complexity as the game goes on, with Robert having to not only send heroes to trouble spots but sometimes has to more directly intervene to provide assistance through hacking surveillance networks or disabling the bad guys' tech. As the game goes on, the roster of heroes changes (sometimes due to Robert's actions, such as deciding which under-performing heroes to fire or which potentially useful ones to recruit), and their suite of skills and synergies with other heroes accordingly.

This core gameplay loop is interesting, but perhaps a little under-developed. It feels like you could flesh out these mechanics and make a more in-depth and interesting game entirely out of this stuff, but they wanted to retain their traditional adventure format as well. This requires taking part in conversations, choosing replies which may or may not make characters feel well-disposed towards you, navigating possible romances and trying to make the best calls to bring the team together, rather than driving them apart.

The episodic structure gives the game a pacy feel, with each episode presented as an episode of a TV series, roughly an hour long (a bit more for the finale), with a different story and character focus in each episode whilst also furthering the overall story arc. Plot and backstory revelations follow at a steady beat, with some fun twists to the story and characters. The writing is humorous without being too contrived, and the humour falling on the slightly darker edge of the spectrum is refreshing. There's some smart writing choices, and the old Telltale problem of the game not fully responding too all of your choices granularly is there but not as big an issue. There are several major choices you can make resulting in different endings, different rosters of heroes and even different missions appearing as the game goes along. Voice acting is excellent throughout, as I think is now widely-known, and at a bit under nine hours, the game has a decent length without outstaying its welcome, but is short enough to welcome replays to see other story outcomes.

This is an adventure game where the story is the main focus, rather than the city crime-solving gameplay, and sometimes the latter has a tendency to end just as it's getting interesting, which can grate a little. The game could also perhaps flesh out the team a bit more. As it stands, it feels like three or four of the characters get a ton of development, two or three more get a moderate amount and the rest can feel a little under-used.

But it's hard to criticise Dispatch (****) too much. The game is fun, funny, well-written, well-acted and has a lot of heart, even if it's not a game you're going to be sinking hundreds of hours into. The game is available now on just about every platform going.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Brandon Sanderson's COSMERE setting picked up for adaptation by Apple TV

Apple TV+ has closed an "unprecedented" deal to bring the Cosmere universe from American fantasy author Brandon Sanderson to the screen. Apple has apparently prioritised the deal and is planning to develop the Mistborn sequence for film and the Stormlight Archive series for television.

Sanderson's Cosmere setting is the home of almost all of his adult, original fantasy fiction. So far he has published seven novels in the Mistborn sequence (with at least six more planned), five in the Stormlight Archive series (with five more planned), and one each in the Elantris and Warbreaker series. He has also released the White Sand graphic novel trilogy in the setting, and the stand-alone novels The Sunlit Man, Isles of the Emberdark, Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. A new standalone Cosmere novel, The Fires of December, will be published this year, and a further Mistborn trilogy is planned for release in 2028-30, before he resumes work on the Stormlight Archive. He also has a further trilogy, called Dragonsteel, planned, which will expand on the setting's expansive backstory. In addition to this he has a short story collection in the setting, Arcanum Unbounded, and several short stories and novellas published since. Sanderson has sold over 50 million copies of his books, and raised almost $100 million in crowdfunding projects related to the Cosmere setting, including the most successful project in Kickstarter history.

The Cosmere setting incorporates numerous planets, each with its own extensive worldbuilding, history, cast of characters and different magic system. These worlds are home to different types of magic, derived from different "shards." In the distant past, all the shards were united as one god or entity, but these were shattered by a catastrophic event. The various books explore what happens when the shards are destroyed or gain new owners, who become gods at the expense of their own souls.

The setting has been optioned for both film and television before, but budgetary concerns seem to have stymied producers on how to get them on screen. Sanderson also seemed to become wary of adaptations after working as an advisor on Amazon's Wheel of Time TV series (Sanderson co-wrote the final three novels in the Wheel of Time series after the original author Robert Jordan passed away, using Jordan's notes and outlines). Sanderson felt that the Wheel of Time TV series made too many unnecessary changes to Jordan's source material and lost a lot of the feel in the story in the process.

Sanderson's deal with Apple suggests he will be more closely involved in the process, and will have more approval over scripts and writing choices. He may also write some scripts himself, and will executive produce all the projects. This level of control is unusual, to say the least.

Apple have already put The Stormlight Archive into development, assigning production company Blue Marble (run by Theresa Kang) to make the project a priority. However, I'd be surprised to see anything on-screen this side of 2028 or, more likely, 2029.

RIP Jean Rabe

News has sadly broken that fantasy author and tabletop RPG legend Jean Rabe has passed away at the age of 68. She is best-known for her contributions to the Dragonlance fantasy setting and Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.

Born in Ottawa, Illinois, Rabe was a keen gamer as a child, starting with checkers and chess and moving up to wargames as a teenager. In 1974 she was introduced to the newly-launched Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. She worked in journalism through the 1980s before leaving the field to join TSR, the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, in 1987.

At TSR she ran the RPGA Network, wrote articles for Dragon Magazine and penned novels and adventure modules for D&D and Gamma World. She became particularly noted for her contributions to the Dragonlance series. In 1996 she penned the books marking the start of the Dragonlance Fifth Age gaming era.

She also edited a BattleTech magazine, MechForce Quarterly, worked for Imperium Games and wrote fiction in other D&D settings as well as the Star Wars and Shadowrun universes. In 2005 she served as a juror for the Andre Norton Award for YA Fiction; she knew Norton and had co-written multiple works with her. Rabe also was the business manager and editor of the SFWA Bulletin until 2013.

After a hiatus in the early 2010s, Rabe returned to writing and publishing with the successful Piper Blackwell Mysteries urban fantasy series, which extended to six novels published from 2018 to 2023. Her last novel was The Love-Haight Case Files, cowritten with Donald J. Bingle, published in 2024.

Rabe's Dragonlance novels include the Dragons of a New Age trilogy, Maquesta Kar-Thon (with Tina Daniell), the Dhamon Saga and The Stonetellers series. She also wrote the Forgotten Realms novel Red Magic, three Endless Quest novels, the Shadowrun novel Aftershock, and multiple books with Andre Norton, including Return to Quag Keep, a sequel to the very first D&D-based work of fiction.

Rabe was also a prolific editor, editing sixteen anthologies from 2001 to 2013, mostly for DAW.

As well as gaming and journalism, Rabe was a keen animal-lover. She is survived by her husband Bruce Rabe. She will be very much missed.

BLAKE'S 7 reboot in development

It's that time of the decade when somebody decides to try to resurrect classic dystopian British space opera Blake's 7. Blake's 7 ran for four seasons and 52 episodes from 1978 to 1981 and attracted a cult fanbase and critical acclaim for its dark themes, ruthlessness to characters and endlessly quotable dialogue. The show has recently been reissued in a remastered format on Blu-Ray, with new visual effects.

Since the show ended - on a famously apocalyptic note - various attempts have been made to relaunch the show. James Bond director Martin Campbell helmed an attempt in 2013, though that petered out. Based on their plot synopsis (which turned Blake from an engineer into a generic soldier), it appears they didn't entirely "get" the property in the first place, so that may have been for the best.

This new attempt is being led by Peter Hoar, best-known for directing the Last of Us episode Long, Long Time, and producers Matthew Bouch and Jason Haigh-Ellery. They have set up a new company Multitude Productions to get various projects onto the screen. Intriguingly, they suggest they are targeting a low-budget model to attract UK and European funding, and also want to dispense with the showrunner model, which they feel has not worked as well in UK television production as it has in American.

Multitude plan to develop some scripts and then seek international partners. However, Hoar in particular is keen to see the show air on the BBC in the UK, as the original did.

The project is in its very early stages.

Next MALAZAN novel, LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL, slated for October 2026 release

Legacies of Betrayal, the third Tales of Witness book in the Malazan world by Steven Erikson, has received a tentative release date of 1 October 2026. The book is the second half of No Life Forsaken, the two books being planned as one novel and then split in two for length when Erikson went long (not an uncommon occurrence).

Erikson is currently writing the final Kharkanas Trilogy novel, Walk in Shadow, which he hopes to finish this year before writing the fourth and final Witness book.

Meanwhile, Erikson's collaborator Ian Cameron Esslemont is writing the fifth Path to Ascendancy prequel novel in the same world, The Last Guardian, which does not have a release date as yet.