Are You Hoping That the Snow Will Start to Fall?

However you celebrate the end of the year, I hope you have a good one. See you in a few days.

Going the (Festive) Distance

Calvin asked about Christmas cake. Here's the sort of tacky but nostalgic thing that comes to mind when I think of Christmas cake:



It's basically a dense fruit cake, to which is added a variable amount of booze. Some families make it a tradition to make the cake earlier in the year, then get it out of a cupboard every so often to "feed" it with more alcohol.

I'm not a huge fan, not enough to make one anyway, but if I'm offered a slice in the festive season, I won't answer in the negative.

There are plenty of recipes floating about, but this looks like a fairly decent one, albeit without the intermittent feeding.

See You on the Other Side, Meatbags!

Mid-Price-Vinter

My 2019 winter solstice themed adventure Midvinter is on sale for less than one dollarpound, from now until the end of the winter solstice itself, at DriveThruRPG!

In related news, you can listen to some people playing the adventure below, although there will of course be spoilers:

Merry Chrimble

However you celebrate the end of the year, I hope it's a good one.

Merry Chrimble!

This will probably be my last post of 2019. I hope you have a good end to your year, however you celebrate it, and I will see you in 2020.

I mean, I won't see you because that's not how this works, and I'm neither a Californian AI or a Russian hacker hijacking your webcam, but you get what I mean.

(If you want, you can still buy my new book.)

Stuck in the Middle

I have written and drawn a brand new Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure and it is released just in time for the festive season!

You can probably guess the inspiration, although -- whisper it -- I haven't seen the film!

You can get the adventure in print here or in pdf here. The physical book is a limited and numbered edition and -- as far as I know -- will not be printed in this form again.

(Now I've said that, watch it get a second printing in a couple of weeks. No one tells me anything.)

Oh! And there are also t-shirts. Two of them! If you buy at least one t-shirt and use the discount code EDWINA then the entire order will have free postage; this offer ends at 23:59 Finnish time on the 26th of December.

The Book of Dreams

I have fond memories of sitting on the sitting room floor and leafing through the back section -- always the last few pages, with the toys and games -- of the Argos catalogue and making a list of all the wonderful things I wanted for Chrimble that year. I imagine that, wherever you are, you have a local equivalent.

Someone has done a wonderful, nostalgic, thing and scanned and uploaded the Argos catalogues of years past. Look at this page from 1993's catalogue:

Battle Masters! Dungeons and Dragons! The Legend of Zagor! Warhammer Fantasy Battle! Games Workshop, Fighting Fantasy, and D&D all in one festive season!

It's interesting that Battle Masters was more expensive than its "grown up" cousin Warhammer; I suppose that's because it had more miniatures in the box, even if they weren't quite as good as the proper ones.

(By 1994's catalogue Battle Masters is gone, Warhammer has gone up by £5, and is joined by the second edition of Warhammer 40,000.)

The big surprise is that D&D is only a tenner, not least because this is the Big Black Box edition that came in a, um, big black box, with the rules, a big dungeon map, a GM screen, cardboard miniatures, and probably a bunch of other stuff too. This version of the game only covered up to fifth level -- the Rules Cyclopedia took you the rest of the way -- but that's still a bargain.

Was 1993 the geekiest Chrimble ever?

More Season's Greetings

Season's Greetings

Ghost of Holidays Past

There's a film out soon, the trailer claiming that it is based on one of the greatest "holiday" stories of all time, "holiday" in this case, of course, being the American word for "we don't want to offend anyone by saying 'Christmas'". The film?

Robert Zemeckis' Uncanny Valley version A Christmas Carol.