Going to make this one a taaaad bit shorter than last week’s. While I’d like to say it is in the interest of giving you loyal readers a break, in fact it’s because I really didn’t sleep well last night and my brain is mush.

For example, without my going back and really concentrating, most of the writing I’m doing right now looks like this:

Mopst oif tHr wrttiomg I”n dopIngh lokks L1je tyhjiis.

As you might imagine, it’s put quite the damper on my writing this blog.

No worries, though, the reason for the crappy sleep isn’t something important, or connected to Onyx Path, or anything like that. As near as I can figure, I was having anxiety dreams because my kids are all going back to their various schools starting yesterday and finishing next weekend.

They were expressing their concerns and had last minute this and thats, and all of that seeped into my head and I dreamed what I thought were three hour epic searches for classrooms only to wake up and note that 15 minutes had passed. Over and over again. I never even knew that my high school was built by the same architect who designed Hogwarts, but all those Mobius Strip escalators to the same floor, and doors that led to nowhere logical, were all there at dear old Central High.

Apparently.

Although, the particular manifestation was pretty benign and keyed to my personal “can’t find the class and the bell is ringing” freak-out, what I went through is pretty common. We take in so much stuff from others and chew it up, internalize it, and some of us can let those anxieties escape via dreams, which is pretty cool, but other stuff stays in and does affect us.

Plus, if you are doing “creative work”, a large part of that process is to open yourself up and not just absorb input from outside yourself, but to grab that stuff and use it. To use it and create something with it. It’s what we do in a very basic sense. Some do it with creative processes that have discrete stages that build towards the end creative result, others have a more intuitive process that may not even seem like there’s a creative process so much as spontaneous creation. To an outside observer.

It so happens that our business, like so many, relies on constant communication; between our in-house folks, between all our freelance creative teams, between us and our Onyx Path community, and the gaming community as a whole. That’s a lot of input, and as with so much of social media, a lot of it is not helpful – whether by intent or accidentally. It is exhausting to weed out so much extra noise to get to the signal you need for your project.

Which is why I encourage, and sometimes order, our Onyx Path crew to take vacations. Gotta let the brain absorb different input. It’s tough, though, because we do have so many projects all going at different stages for different game lines, so there’s no “good” time for a vacation, usually. Nevertheless, it is so very necessary.

And it so happens that post-Gen Con is a great time to decompress and get revved up for pulling things together as we head towards the new year, so we’ve been blinking away one at a time and popping back so another one of our Onyx team can get away for a bit.

In fact, the time between Gen Con and Fall also sounded like  a good time to reconfigure our Onyx Path website. After all, every site Impish Ian looked at said it was a five minute change. Liars! A big apology from us to everyone who couldn’t log in, or post, or get emails (that may have just been me) during the process of changing over, realizing it wasn’t working, and changing everything back. If we had known it wasn’t actually as easy as it said on the tin, we would have warned everybody.

Fortunately, Kickstarter is not connected directly to our website, so we were able to launch the Dystopia Rising: Evolution Kickstarter and fund within a day. Which is awesome because that means we can get to move quickly into creating some of the also awesome Stretch Goal projects.

We also have some equally awesome reward tiers that include getting your character into both the text and the visuals, yourself done up as one of the zombies in the art, and artifacts from the early days of the Dystopia Rising LARP. Like all of our KSs, we’ve tried to add fun and flavorful rewards that connect directly with both our new edition and the previous incarnations of the setting. Check out the link in our BLURBS! section below!

In this stretch leading up to the Labor Day Weekend, our sales partners at Indie Press Revolution are wrapping up the wildly successful 40% sale they’ve been running on our Deluxe W20 and M20 printer overrun books. If you’ve missed out on these beauties, this may be your best chance at getting them at these sorts of prices! Only until the end of the month: https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Deals-and-Specials/

In their continuing efforts to open up more Community Content sites, White Wolf will be adding Exalted to their Storytellers’ Vault site on DTRPG.com. All three editions will be opened, but if you want to create something for any of the three, please carefully read the info provided on the site detailing what is and isn’t allowed.

It’s a great opportunity to create, publish, and get paid for your unofficial Exalted material, and as Matthew Dawkins likes to point out, the Community Content sites are also a super way to “audition” for writing for official projects with us at Onyx Path.

No guarantees, of course. And better I stress it now, yes, we still hold the license to create official Exalted material, and WW is the company that runs the site and determines what is allowable, not Onyx Path.

In fact, since this is the last week of the month, two things happen here at Onyx Path. One, we put up the latest monthly installments of EX3‘s Hundred Devils Night Parade and Adversaries of the Righteous on Wednesday. We’re getting to the point where we’re looking to assemble at least the Hundred Devil monthly releases into a single book, although we actually still have a lot more to go.

Would you folks prefer us to get the current batch assembled into a book now, and then create a second book later, or hold off and create one big book? I’m probably going to ask the EX3 backers this in the monthly Backer Update too.

What’s a Backer Update, you say? Why that is an update for one of our Kickstarted projects that we send out every month to those who backed that KS. Since we have a lot of KS’d projects, James and I send out a lot of Backer Updates each month.

We send them monthly because after long experience we’ve decided that once a month is a good reliable pace to get the on-going status for the KS you backed, and if something happens that backers need to know about, like a PDF going out or a book shipping, we’ll send more updates.

Now, if you’ve backed a few of our KSs, that means you get a lot of very similar Backer Updates, particularly since we also include a notice about whatever our current Kickstarter is. We realize that hearing about a new KS while waiting for yours to progress, or getting a bunch of repeated notices, can get tedious, but please bear in mind that we also always used to get complaints that previous backers didn’t know about our current KS.

With the dearth of strong centralized communication in this business, we chose to notify our previous backers about the current KS rather than have folks miss out on it. YMMV of course, but those “Why didn’t I hear about this KS?” messages have dropped off dramatically and we sure hope those folks have had a chance to jump into the latest KS.

After all, our KSs run the same range of game worlds as our game lines: WoD, CofD, Exalted 3rd, our Storypath and 5e based settings and more – there are a lot of interests out there and we’re trying to keep the communication flowing about our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

The Dystopia Rising: Evolution Kickstarter funded in less than a day, and has already passed one Stretch Goal!

The next Stretch Goal is where we start building the Threat Guide companion PDF which is a first-person guide with mechanics to the various threats facing survivors in the DR:E world, so we’re pretty excited to get started with that!

Dystopia Rising is a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game that quickly grew into a live-action sensation. Now, Onyx Path is pleased to update the live-action setting with Dystopia Rising: Evolution, a tabletop roleplaying game that presents a fresh and exciting take on the post-apocalypse genre.

Dystopia Rising: Evolution will be powered by Onyx Path’s Storypath system, and includes all the rules you need to play as a survivor in the post-apocalypse, including rules for creating characters for up to 24 different Strains, variations on humanity that survived the Fall. It also has details on the powers of faith and psionics, along with advice on running action-adventure stories, webs of personal intrigue, or procedural investigations. And, finally, dozens of antagonists, including a variety of zombies and raiders to use in your series.

Throughout this Kickstarter campaign, we will be posting complete previews of the Dystopia Rising: Evolution manuscript as backer-only updates.

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

• Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)
• Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)
• Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)
• Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)
• Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)
• Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)
• Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)
• Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)
• V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)
• Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)
• Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: https://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

SPECIAL W20 and M20 SALE! Huge savings on our Deluxe printing overruns until 8/31!

4 DAYS LEFT!

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Deals-and-Specials/

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

This week we have the next two installments in our monthly Exalted 3rd Edition releases for Hundred Devils Night Parade (Steel Eater and Gem Seeker) and Adversaries of the Righteous (Odara, Chosen of Ash) in PDF on Wednesday!

Dixie Cochran will be at High Level Games Con in Atlantic City October 12-14, running a Women in Game Design panel, Eddy’s RPG Developer Bootcamp, and possibly making a surprise appearance at another event!