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 | Prices: they’re all over the place. And one thing that Black Friday proves is that prices are largely arbitrary, concocted half by a cartel of shadowy power-brokers and half by a collection of faceless, soulless algorithms facing off against one another in an effort to get your HARD-EARNED MONEY. Severed from such pedestrian concepts as supply and demand, these prices are a fun game that businesses play with each other (and you!) in an effort to excite their shareholders.
So this year we’re offering a very special offer that you won’t see anywhere else: an EXCLUSIVE BLACK FRIDAY EVENT where we’re selling ALL of our products with an incredible ZERO PER CENT discount. In fact, to show our dedication, we’ll even charge MORE for some products then PASS THE BENEFITS DIRECTLY ONTO US.
These special prices will only be available until midnight, so don’t miss your chance! (Or until Monday, if we don’t get round to changing them until we’re back in the office. It’s Dragonmeet this weekend, after all.)
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| |  | Our second game, first released in 2016, redesigned and reformatted for its illustrious 2020 reprint. We can now announce that we printed TOO MANY COPIES and we have LOADS IN THE WAREHOUSE that JUST WILL NOT MOVE.
Unbound is a tidy little rules-light pulp action game underpinned by a fun world-building system so every game is unique. (In practice, they tend to involve powered armour of some kind. Yours doesn’t have to. But I bet it will.) It generates the absolute best session zero you’ll ever have, hands down, and the rest of the game isn’t half bad either.
Today we’re thrilled to offer Unbound at a -10% discount*, which is £27.50 compared to the usual rate of £25. DON’T WAIT – this unbelievable offer won’t stick around. Buy Unbound now. |
| *A discount of minus 10% is a ten percent increase, right? I was off when we did maths |
| |  | SPIRE! It’s the game that put us on the map, assuming that it’s a map of British Games Designers That Exist, and it remains as popular today as it was when we first wrote it. Maybe even more popular!
Anyway: one of the problems with Spire is that it’s quite hard to write adventures for because we made the setting too long and people feel like they have to read all of it first,** so you’ll be pleased to hear that we’re offering SHADOW OPERATIONS – a collection of eleven one-shot scenarios for Spire – at ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY PER CENT of its cover price today only.
Shadow Operations contains LIFE AND SOUL and SHOTGUN WEDDING, both regarded by the community as great intros to Spire – one where you have to really ruin this guy’s birthday party by murdering him, and the other where you have to make sure a wedding at the Church of the Gun goes off with a minimum of hitches.
Why eleven scenarios? We accidentally commissioned too many. It was supposed to be ten. But here we are, and most of them are great, and even the weird ones are fun. Each scenario is written to fit into a rigorous framework that we designed after running one-shots for years at conventions: no pissing about, no mysterious NPCs with agendas they won’t disclose, no in-depth investigations. Everything’s written out on index cards and players can go poke at it in whatever order they like.
Buy a copy of Shadow Operations TODAY and receive ABSOLUTELY NO BONUS MATERIALS, including: An additional exclusive scenario entitled DOCTOR MOONLIGHT’S TERRIBLE KNIFE Three (3!) beautiful bookmarks which can be arranged into a modular map of the Garden District A 15% discount code for any book that involves a dark elf OR social inequality, redeemable at your local Waterstones or regional equivalent And more!
Don’t wait! STOP WAITING. BUY IT. |
| ** Other problems include: infinite fallout avoidance clause in the first printing, the Steal skill is underpowered, one of the core character classes has to bring a lunatic hyena with them to every scene in a tense game of social gambits |
| |  | J.M. Barrie once wrote: “To die would be an awfully big adventure.” While some traditionalists believe that this line reinforces the fragile invulnerability of children displayed by Peter Pan’s eponymous main character, startling new evidence unearthed by local enthusiasts suggest that Barrie was in fact talking about DIE: The Roleplaying Game, and myopic editors removed the capital letters and added a “to” because the game was not set to be released for one hundred years.
Thankfully, with the benefit of hindsight and a functional credit or debit card, you too can take part in this awfully big adventure. DIE: The RPG is indeed awfully big - it’s fucking massive, and it’s all adventure all the time, unless you count the large sections of the book which are guides to creating an introspective allegorical world to trap flawed and desperate characters within for your own, and their players’, amusement. But even those parts contain more adventure than the average book.***
DIE is a heartbreaking, terribly clever ode to and deconstruction of Dungeons & Dragons, but also a treatise on what it means to play games with and for each other, and how what it means to be human. Is it slightly too clever? Slightly too high-concept? Hard to say. J.M. Barrie thought it was great, and he’s Kirriemuir’s greatest author.
And: you’re no dummy, right? Your brain’s all in the right place and it’s not just all fluff and old biscuits up there. You’re smart enough to get Kieron Gillen’s debut RPG masterpiece. You’re cultured enough to appreciate Stephanie Hans’ beautiful artwork. You can make a nightmare kingdom, with their guidance, for your friends to explore. You’ve got this. And then we’ve got this, and by “this,” we mean your money, if you give it to us.
What’s more, we’re promoting this UNBELIEVABLE BUNDLE DEAL: you can get the DIE corebook AND both current volumes of the DIE: Scenarios sourcebooks, where a glamourous and diverse team of writers have created fun new ways to play DIE, such as:
- A wargame you play instead of attending couples’ therapy! - Trauma-induced hallucinations at a correctional summer camp!
- What if every single bad guy in the game was one of your ex-partners?
All for THE LOW, LOW, (regular) PRICE OF ONLY £75. That’s right! BUY NOW or PURCHASE THEM SEPARATELY at a LATER DATE for an IDENTICAL PRICE. |
| *** According to the Guiness Book of Records 1995 the most widely-distributed book (and therefore the average book, according to some metrics) is the Bible. And that’s a boring book unless you skip to Revelations. The second most widely-distributed book is apparently the IKEA catalogue and that doesn’t even have Revelations in it |
| |  | Whether you’re affixing a photograph of someone that wronged you to a corkboard, making sure that you’re the very last person to use a particular aeroplane emergency slide or simply ruining a balloon sculptor’s day, pins are part of everyone’s everyday life. But did you know that you can purchase pins with badges on one end?
After decades of research and development, scientists have perfected what they’re calling the “pin badge.” You might even have seen some of these marvellous inventions being worn in public, but not known where to get some – well not know no more! Here! Here is where some are got.
Rowan, Rook and Decard are overjoyed to sell four (4) charming pin badges featuring: - A singing goblin - The official emblem of the spiderwitch Order of Midwives - The city of Spire, which is so tall it needs two pins to stay in place (at NO extra cost) - An anatomically-correct heart combined with an anatomically-incorrect map of the Heart
Today, each of these charming enamel pin badges is ONLY TEN POUNDS. Think of it this way: those pin badges could stop a bullet, probably. Definitely slow it down. Are you prepared to risk your life for the sake of ten pounds? We don’t think so. You value yourself, and your internal organs, more than that.
You owe it to yourself, and your family and dependents, and those aforementioned organs, to buy as many pin badges as you can afford and keep yourself safe from bullets.****
TO THAT END, today and today only (unless we forget to change it), you can purchase ALL FOUR PINS at a special bundle rate of THIRTY-TWO POUNDS. This incredible offer is available thanks to the way that we’ve INCREASED the price of EACH INDIVIDUAL PIN by TWO POUNDS EACH, bringing the total sale value of this bundle down to REGULAR PRICE.
NOTHING MATTERS AND EVERYTHING IS MADE UP. Can you resist such a bargain? We doubt it. |
| **** Rowan, Rook and Decard Ltd is not responsible for damage sustained by pins being punched into your chest and doing as much harm, if not more harm, than the original bullet |
| |  | Here at Rowan, Rook and Decard, we make one-page roleplaying games - and we’re dedicated to innovation, which is why we’ve made the biggest one-page game ever. The Golden Sea is the second one page game we published after the infinitely more popular and approachable THE WITCH IS DEAD, and now it’s bigger than ever because we printed it on an A0 sheet of paper with the assistance of illustrator Galen Pejeau. The bulk of this sheet is taken up by a massive empty map, which you and your players can draw on – before you start your journey into the shifting sands on a beautiful skimming boat in search of glory and profit.
But there’s also lots of other stuff we put on there, such as adventure ideas, random encounters, baddies, equipment, monsters, and so on. So we’re not just selling you a sparsely-illustrated sheet of A0 paper at an incredible markup.
While many people have played the original, (spit) free A4 version of the Golden Sea (including one brave podcast that ran it as a full campaign of interlinked games), as far as we can tell no-one has ever used the big version. Could you be the first group to do so? Not unless you buy it, and you can do just that by clicking this link, inputting your payment details, then waiting a scant week or two until it arrives at your door in a special protective sleeve.
Oh wait: Christmas! Maybe it could be a thing you give to someone for Christmas. Fuck, I can’t believe we forgot about Christmas until this late in the email. Damnit. Uh - we bet you know someone who’d like it. Your Dad maybe? This could be how he learns about roleplaying games. Doesn’t matter. Work out who it’s for later. The important bit is that you BUY IT NOW at a FULLY NORMAL PRICE of twenty quid. |
| | That’s all of the amazing offers we’ve got for you this year. We’re glad you could take part in this orgy of unfettered capitalism with us. We’re glad we could provide access to high-tier roleplaying games at semi-affordable prices.
But most of all, we’re glad that you opened this newsletter, because that makes a percentage value on our Mailchimp analytics dashboard go up, and really if that isn’t the purest expression of human endeavour then what’s the point of any of this anymore. Might as well walk into the woods, lay face down in the dirt and wait until the worms take us.
Stay liquid,
Head of Big Dollar Money, Rowan Rook and Decard |
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