Thank you for following the progress of Exhuming John Barleycorn!

In this newletter:

Exhuming John Barleycorn comes to Kickstarter on March 12! We’re still on track to deliver the pdf of the book as soon as the campaign closes in April (even though one of my artists is recovering from Covid this week).

We’re talking to the printer about using metallic ink for the flames and moon on the front cover! We have the graphics layers all laid out and pricing in hand, but we’ll make the call after we see how it comes out in the proof.

Appalachian adventures are about “people we know” more so than adventures in a medieval European setting. This is not an issue of geography, but of time and sensibility. Manly Wade Wellman set his Silver John stories in the late 20th century in the mountains where he lived. He knew the people and places he wrote about, and that conveys in his writing—from his natural colloquial diction to his descriptions of faces, clothing, and places.

That’s not to say J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t paint Frodo in realistic tones that made the hobbit feel like an old friend. But, where the Shire was home to the hobbits, Middle-earth was always somewhere far off to the reader. The purpose of fantasy literature is to carry us away, and the works of Tolkien, Vance, Lieber, and others do that masterfully.

Manly Michael Curtis writes in The Chained Coffin, DCC #83 about removing demi-humans from the Shudder Mountains and even includes options during 0-level character creation for doing so. Let me offer a different approach — one inspired by a Shudder Mountains game Brendan LaSalle ran at Origins a couple of years ago. Instead of excluding demi-humans, recast them as humans with quirks. A halfling is a “lucky son of a gun,” and a dwarf is a “miner” or a “mountaineer.” People don’t carry shields around the hollers, so simply give the “miner” a second attack with the butt of his axe.

Elves are a bit trickier, and there isn’t enough space in this email to do them justice, but suffice it to say that a hedge wizard who adopts Nengal, the Wild One, as their patron just might begin to grow animal ears. Keep your hat on while you’re in town! Nengal is, of course, featured in our upcoming adventure, Exhuming John Barleycorn, and as an appendix to the book, we’ll include a fuller explanation of how you can convincingly use elves-as-people in your Shudder Mountains Game.

Thanks to everyone who contributed on the Tricksy Grue website and the DCC Rocks Facebook page! I have updated the list of the known adventure modules set in the Shudder Mountains. You can find the list on the Tricksy Grue Games Blog.

Soon to be added to the list is a really cool DCC third-party published book on Kickstarter called Terror of the Stratosfiend: Snake Wolf 3, that the author, Sean Richer, decribes as “Shudder Mountains adjacent.” (I suppose that means he’s got a cabin in the next holler over yonder!) Will “snake wolves” be slithering into my Shudder Mountains game? Why yes, they will!

Only 8 days left to get yourself a snake wolf, so hurry!