Self-Promotion Time Come on!

Okay time for a little self promotion, then I will get back to writing about other people's stuff. Untold the Game, is a new card based role playing game created by a group of friends of mine called the Wandering Men. These guys are writers and geeks like me. They get the idea of pulp fiction and the importance of story. So they created a game for role playing the story.

Role playing games have been with us all since we were kids. Cops and robbers, House, Tea Parties….not that I ever had tea parties….superheroes for me! And I think everyone has heard of Dungeons & Dragons and many of the games that followed it. Well, Untold is such an animal, but it uses a non-collectable card system to handle character creation to combat to magic with one basic mechanic. Those interested in the game can find it here: http://www.untoldthegame.com/

What is great about Untold is the story that surrounds it and the world heroes adventure in. Splintered Serenity is a sci-fi future where three realities, universes are colliding. There is the Apoc-Earth, a dark shadow of our reality some three hundred and more years into the future after what is simply referred to as the Event when a new world rises from the old.... with a humanity far superior to the one that had come before. Churls: giant barbarians with mystical abilities and the High-bred, pure super soldiers trying to revive there lost civilizations and survive this chaos. They are not alone for the races of the other realities now call Earth home, the Klik, sentient mechanicals that look as if they were created by a mad Victorian era scientist, they hail from a place they call the Great Machine, a world of clock work gears and logic. The L'Na, animalistic creatures from Ai, a world of magic have found their way to Earth with their mystical ways and are now experiencing one far different than their own.

So this is the world that needs stories to flesh it out and The Wandering Men were desperate enough to want me to help with it. So the guys have given me an opportunity to create brief back stories for characters like Oru, a L’Na who is at his heart an archeologist, a raging Churl in Helm, and a water-borne protector in Cetacious.

These characters were given artistic form by some very talented people, so that there might be a picture to hang my words around. I have also created monsters for heroes to fight in the form of the Sand Sniper, and fleshed out the lives of other creatures like the Gree Gree.

Sarge’s Tale is a serialized, pulp style novella by me; based on an adventure written by Brannon Hollingsworth and Nathan Ellsworth. The guys were once again desperate for some content so they were willing to let me use their adventure as a blueprint for my own.

So take a look if you want, if you see something you like shout it out. The Wandering Men and I would love if you come by for a visit.

Here is the beginning to Sarge’s Tale:

Chapter 1

The sun, a white ball in a steel blue sky scorched the parched earth, creating a shimmering haze in the distance. Sergeant Alisa McGraw scanned the hardpan that became the broken mesas and small canyons that served as the seat of Base LANS. A seat of science and military might before the Apoc, LANS was now one of the cells of High-bred civilization spread across the blasted continent.
"What is it, Sarge?" asked Corporal David Miguel, a dark skinned massively muscled man that dwarfed her by almost a meter. The sergeant suspected her second of being a Churl. He wore a helmet with a polarized visor over his close shaven head. Though standard issue, the helmet was too claustrophobic for McGraw to wear over her own tightly braided red hair.
The sergeant lowered her electron-binocs, her blue eyes squinting, unprotected by the flare-compensators. She looked to her second and back to the ten man patrol under her command. The feeling of dread that gnawed at her spine would not abate, only increased as she took in the no-man's land before her once more. Scrubby brush, large boulders, and smaller rocks broke up the washed out browns and grays that merged with the colorless blue horizon. Something was out there waiting for them. What it was or where? That was the question that made her pause. She handed the binocs back to the corporal. "Not sure, Miguel, but lets take it by the numbers, skirmish line, ten meter spread, covering fields of fire."