Because of the pandemic, I’m only doing two conventions this year. The first is Gen Con — which happens this coming week — and you can see my relatively loose schedule for that here.

The second is my favorite local convention, Gamehole Con, which is held in Madison, Wisconsin, from October 21–24. My son Marty and I have a full slate of events planned for that, including no less than nine two-hour demos for our upcoming Shotguns & Sorcery 5E Sourcebook. Most of the tickets for those events are already sold out, although if you move fast you might be able to grab the last few.

In addition to those, on that Saturday morning at 10 AM I’m playing in a livestream of the Alien RPG to raise money for Extra Life, with Andrew Gaska, Teos Abadia, Banana Chan, and Toni Winslow-Brill

Later that day, at 2 PM, Mike Mearls (lead designer of Dungeons & Dragons 5E) is going to interview me about my career in “Conversations by Design: Matt Forbeck.”

Right after that at 4 PM Saturday, I’m on a panel with Mike, Elisa Teague, and B. Dave Walters called “System Design for TTRPGs.”

If you’re in the area and can make it, Gamehole Con is a wonderful show with a fantastic lineup of guests. They also require attendees to be both masked and vaccinated, so it’ll be as safe as such things can be these days. Come on out and join the fun!

It’s hard to believe, but Gen Con kicks off a week from today, on September 15. It’s normally in early August, of course, but the pandemic bumped it six weeks later. Ironically, because of the rise of the delta variant of COVID the original dates would probably have been safer, but that’s the problem with trying to predict such things months ahead of time. You can only do the best you can.

In any case, the folks there have taken other measures to make it safer, including requiring masking throughout the convention and strongly recommending vaccinations. I’m triple-vaxxed myself (due to meds for my autoimmune issues), and I’ll be there masked and ready. If you will be too, here’s where you can find me:

Wednesday, August 15

• 9 PM: The Diana Jones Award ceremony. The annual kick-off to Gen Con returns, and I’m hosting it again, along with help from an expanded committee. This is a private party for industry professionals, but if you qualify for that, you’re more than welcome to join us. Shoot an email to matt@forbeck.com for the details.

Saturday, August 15

• 11 AM: Matt Forbeck Q&A. Join bestselling author and award-winning designer Matt Forbeck to learn more about his current projects, including the Kickstarter for the Shotguns & Sorcery sourcebook for 5E.
• 4 PM: 35th Annual Gen Con Costume Contest. I’ve judged the fantastic costume contest at Gen Con before. This year, they asked me to MC the event! I’m looking forward to seeing all sorts of amazing outfits. I suspect that this year lots of them will features masks.

Compared to what I usually manage at the show, that’s a pretty light schedule, but I’m trying to keep things flexible. If you see me wandering around the show, feel free to say hi!

If you can’t make it to Gen Con Indy for whatever reason, you still have other options. Gen Con is also running Gen Con Online concurrently, which you can attend through your favorite interactive screen. Plus they’ve set up several Pop-Up Gen Cons at game stores throughout the country.

On Monday, the IAMTW (International Association of Media Tie-In Writers) announced the nominees for this year’s Scribe Awards. I was pleased to see my novel Minecraft Dungeons: The Rise of the Arch-Illager made the list for Best YA/MG Novel!

It shares that honor with:

• In the Study With the Wrench (a Clue novel) by Diana Peterfreund 
• Liberty and Justice for All (a Marvel novel) by Carrie Harris 
• The Rise of Skywalker (a Star Wars novel) by Michael Kogge 
• The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel (based on the podcast) by Sheela Chari

Congrats to those wonderful authors and to all the nominees in the other categories, many of whom I count as great friends!

This is the seventh time one of my books has been nominated for a Scribe Award, and of those Mutant Chronicles won the one and only Special Gaming Award–Best Adapted back in 2009. The winners will be announced by Jonathan Maberry on July 2. Wish me luck!

On Friday, Marvel announced its plans to publish a new tabletop roleplaying game called the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game. Normally, I’d be pretty excited about this because I’m a lifelong Marvel fan and roleplaying gamer. I learned how to read with Spidey comics, and I played the classic Marvel Super Heroes RPG from TSR till my boxed set fell apart. But instead I’m absolutely gobsmacked by it because I’m the new game’s writer and co-designer.

I’ve been sitting on this news for what seems like forever, and I’m so relieved to finally have it out there so I can talk about it–but I can’t actually talk too much about it yet. The Playtest Rulebook isn’t due out until next spring, and Marvel likes to keep tight wraps on details until it’s ready to reveal them. The best thing you can do to learn about the game is read the press release closely. Oh, and enjoy that amazing cover by Iban Coello.

Still, I want to clarify a few things that I’ve gotten a number of questions about since the announcement:

• The game features rules for playing existing Marvel characters and for creating your own characters. You can mix and match in your games as you like.
• We have been playtesting the rules for the Playtest Rulebook, but we have plenty of volunteers for that stage of the game’s development at the moment.
• We are not looking for additional writers for the game at the moment.
• We are not looking for submissions for the game at the moment, and I cannot actually look at these, so please don’t send me anything.

As for my credentials for working on this game:

• While I was in college, one of my first jobs in the gaming industry was demonstrating the original DC Heroes RPG from Mayfair Games at game stores in Chicago and Milwaukee, back in the summer of 1988.
• I’ve worked on more tabletop RPG projects than I can count over the past thirty-three years–including things for a number of supers RPGs–and a bunch of them won awards.
• I wrote two editions of The Marvel Encyclopedia for DK, plus Marvel Avengers: Battle Against Ultron and large chunks of The Avengers Encyclopedia and Captain America: The Ultimate Guide to the First Avenger.
• I co-designed WildStorms: The Expandable Super-Hero Collectible Card Game.
• I wrote, designed, and published a supers RPG I own called Brave New World back in 1999.
• I wrote for the Marvel Heroes MMO and the Marvel Super Heroes Squad Online MMO.
• I designed the Marvel Heroes Battle Dice mass-market game.
• I was part of the design team for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, the most recent TTRPG to date.

You might say I love comics and games and that I’ve been lucky to work on lots of things that tie the two together (like the year of Magic: The Gathering comics I wrote for IDW). You would be right, and I’m grateful for it. Thanks to everyone for all the congratulations you’ve been sending me over the past few days. I’m working hard to make this new game live up to your expectations.

Marvel will release more information about the game when it’s ready. Meanwhile, I’m having a great time working with the team there, who are all excited about the game and have been fantastically supportive throughout the process. It is, as it says in the press release, a dream come true–and one we’re finally starting to share.

Hey, it’s midnight in Stockholm, so….

On May 25, 2021 (today-ish), the brand-new video game Biomutant launches to the public. My pal Stefan Ljungqvist has been working on this amazing game for years, and I’m thrilled that it’s finally out there for the world to play.

I first met Stefan something like 30 years ago, back when he was at Target Games in Sweden and I was working on the Mutant Chronicles roleplaying game, among many other projects. We’ve kept in touch over the years since then, through many different companies, catching up when we could and even teaming up on projects here and there. He was a key part of Avalanche Studios (creators of Just Cause), and I worked with him there on a game that was never announced much less published, for instance.

Stefan is the driving force behind Biomutant, the first project from his new company Experiment 101, which is now part of THQ Nordic. He’s amazingly talented at art, design, writing, and team management, and he brought all his skills and experience to bear on this game–and, wow, does it show. It’s a gorgeous game with a wonderful world and a unique kind of playfully brutal tone.

Back in 2019, Stefan brought me on board to help with the game’s writing. While his English is excellent, he wanted a hand from a native speaker he could trust to find and respect his vision and ambition, and I was honored to leap into that role. While the story and characters all sprang from Stefan’s mind, I helped mold that with him and wrote and polished the game’s extensive texts and dialogs, working from his examples.

Only a small team of around 20 or so core people worked on the game, and Stefan did something different with the credits that play after the game’s title screen shows up. Lots of people would have chosen to put the spotlight on themselves after working so hard on this game, but he set it up so that the game displays our names–including his–in a random order, emphasizing that this was a team effort in which everyone involved played a vital role.

I’ll tell you right now, though, that none of it would have happened without him.

I cannot wait for you to play and enjoy it!

This post probably doesn’t apply to most of you reading it, but if you get my posts emailed to you via Google’s Feedburner, that’s all about to stop. Google is finally laying Feedburner to rest, which means it won’t bring my posts to your email inbox any more.

All’s not lost though. I’m switching over to Jetpack/Wordpress for subscriptions to the blog. If you want to get on that list, just go to my blog and look for the subscribe button in the lower right under “Posts via Email.” Simple, and better yet, the new format should be easier on the eyes.

If you want to subscribe to my (incredibly irregular) newsletter too, you can do that in the spot just below that part. I only send that out a couple times a year, when I’m launching something big.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I updated this blog. Let’s just say that helping hold down the home fort during a pandemic and getting work done at the same time has been a wild juggling challenge, and this is one of the flaming chainsaws I let drop.

Since the last post back in December, I managed to get two more Shotguns & Sorcery RPG books out to the Kickstarter backers. We’re waiting to get proofs back from DriveThruRPG for the print-on-demand versions now. Once those are in, we’ll make the books available to the public.

The first of those–Miners & Mobsters–is a 40-page adventure my son Marty wrote for the game, based upon my novella “The Job Never Ends,” which appears as a bonus tale Shotguns & Sorcery: The Omnibus. Here’s the cover, by Jeremy Mohler.

The second new book is The Pathfinder Conversion, which is just what the title says. It’s a 56-page book that lets folks who have Shotguns & Sorcery: The Roleplaying Game convert it for use with the Pathfinder system. We went back and forth about whether or not it should be for first or second edition Pathfinder, but since second edition didn’t exist when the Kickstarter ran, we figured we should go with what had been promised to the backers then: a first edition book.

Marty wrote this book too, and I hired superstar Pathfinder expert Owen K.C. Stephens to develop it (i.e., check everything over and make sure we got it right). Jeremy provided another fantastic cover for that too.

To fulfill the rest of that Kickstarter–which I took over from the original publisher last year–we still need to deliver two more things: a comic and an art book. The comic is entirely done except for the cover, and I started in on the art book last week.

Once those are out and the Kickstarter is fulfilled, I should have some news about a new Shotguns & Sorcery project that Marty and I have been working on for the past several months. We’re excited to get that out there too, but we want to make sure we make everyone happy about the previous Kickstarter first.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a long-promised game for Calliope, teaming up with my pal Mike Selinker and the rest of the folks at Lone Shark Games. Plus Marty and I are developing another game with an old friend, which hasn’t been announced yet. On top of that, I’m working on a big, brand-new tabletop RPG that should be announced soon, hopefully next month.

Beyond that, I’ve been writing for a couple of video games. The first of those should have an announcement and a demo out later this year, and the second is still in the starting stages. I’ll let you know more about them when I can.

Lots to talk about, but not quite yet…

Wow. It often feels like I’m spinning my wheels and not getting much done, but maybe all that stuff explains why I haven’t been here so much lately.

Oh, yeah, and I taught a game design class–GDD-325 2D Game Design–as an adjunct professor at UW-Stout this term too. That wrapped up a couple weeks ago. Whew.

Anyhow, I hope you’re all doing well and have managed to soldier on without me. Now that my entire family and I have been vaccinated, I’m getting ready to get back out there in the world in person, and I hope to see you there too!

One of the impetuses for me getting back to this blog is the impending release of Biomutant, an amazing new game from Experiment 101. My longtime pal Stefan Ljungqvist spent years designing it, and he brought me in to help out with the dialog and lots of other bits of text during that time. It’s due out next week, on May 25. I’ll post more about that in a bit. (I hope.)

The rights to Shotguns & Sorcery: The Roleplaying Game reverted back to me earlier this year, and I’ve been working to get the things promised to backers in the 2015 Kickstarter off to them ever since. The core book–based on Monte Cook Games’ Cypher System–finally released to the public this summer, and in the past couple months, I managed to get three other things for the game out the door:

• The Player’s Guide: A cut-down version of the core rules, offered up on the cheap so you can get a taste of the game–or have a spare reference copy at your gaming table.
• Encounter Cards: A set of 52 monsters and NPCs, each on their own poker-sized playing cards. They come with an illustration on one side and stats on the other, complete in a snazzy tuck box.
• Monsters & Mean Streets: A 64-page book of creatures and NPCs for use with the game, which just came out today. My son Marty–who just graduated from college in May–wrote this one, and I love it.

You can buy all of those right now, and as a special bonus, I have a limited number of copies of the first printing of the core rules still stacked in my closet. If you grab one of those, I’d be happy to sign it for you before we ship it out.

We have four more Shotguns & Sorcery products still in the pipeline:

• A 32-page (at least) adventure. I have the text for this in, and it’s currently in layout and waiting on some art.
• The Wizard’s Wife. A full-length comic book. The pages for this are done, but we still need lettering and a cover. See the first two pages below.
• A Pathfinder 1E rules conversion. I just got the edited text in for this, and it’s heading into layout after the adventure.
• An art book. Which I’ll start collating once I have the art for all the other books in.

Whew.

Once all those are out, though, that’s not the end. I have plans for more Shotguns & Sorcery things, which I should be able to announce in 2021.

Stick with us. There’s more fun on the way.

Today, the Black Library released two new editions of books based on Blood Bowl, Games Workshop’s game of fantasy football. In this case, the fantasy doesn’t involve NFL teams but elves, dwarves, vampires, and other fantastic monsters having over-the-top hyper-violent pun-filled battles in between slaking their thirst on ales like Bloodweiser and Killer Genuine Draft.

This was one of my favorite games back when I worked at the Games Workshop Design Studio in 1989-1900, and I had the honor of helping out Jervis Johnson with the writing on one of the game’s early supplements, The Blood Bowl Companion.

In the early days of the Black Library (GW’s fiction division), founding publisher Marc Gascoigne asked me to pitch him ideas for novels set in GW’s worlds. I tossed him something like ten one-paragraph ideas, and to my shock, he chose the jokey one I’d tossed in for a Blood Bowl novel.

Over the years, I wound up writing four novels, five comic books, and one short story for Blood Bowl. They went in and out of print over the years, but as of today, you can pick up all of the novels and the short story once again.

The Blood Bowl Omnibus contains all four of my Blood Bowl novels: Blood Bowl, Death Match, Dead Ball, and Rumble in the Jungle. An earlier edition of the omnibus came out back in 2007, but that version only contained the first three books, as Rumble had just been released. This is the complete thing, and it weighs in at almost 900 pages.

The only other prose I’ve written for Blood Bowl is a single short story called “The Hack Attack,” which came out back in 2017. It was collected in the Blood Bowl anthology Death on the Pitch in 2018, which has since gone out of print. Today, a new, expanded edition–Death on the Pitch: Extra Time–is out, featuring two new stories added to the bunch.

So, get yourself to your favorite bookseller and stock up on all the funny football mayhem can you manage. You’ll have a ball!

Like most people, I’ve been staying close to home and hunkered down in these pandemic-plagued days. If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have spent more time at C2E2, which wound up being the last convention I attended this year. While some of those shows have been canceled outright, many of them have gone virtual, so I’ve been joining in via Zoom rather than in person.

For instance, look for me on a couple panels at the upcoming Storytelling Across Media convention held by the Comic-Con Museum. Those have been pre-recorded and should premier on October 24. One excellent panel run by Ross Thompson features him talking with Sen-Foong Lim, Elisa Teague, Banana Chan, Jon Cohn, and me about how stories and games dovetail together.

The second is a spotlight on me, which is always a little more unnerving, as it’s a solo event. The folks at SAM asked if I knew anyone who could interview me for it, and I suggested my son Marty. They loved the idea, so you’ll get a chance to watch my college-graduated kid grill and rib me for the better part of an hour.

The week before that, on October 17, I’ll also be at guest at the Fox Cities Book Festival that same day. I was originally scheduled to be at the physical show, but I’ll now be Zooming into the virtual event instead. Tune in at 1 PM Central Time to see for another spotlight on me, during which someone I’m likely not related to grill and rib me instead.

I mean, my mother was born in raised in Menasha, which is one of the Fox Cities, so it’s not impossible I’ll be related to the interviewer, but it would be one hell of a stretch. Unless it’s me interviewing myself…

It’s getting a little Inception-y this year.

Either way, I hope you can set aside some time on a couple Saturdays this October to watch me blather on about what I do for a living. It’s going to be a fun time.