Talking to Iain over the weekend, I'm starting to doubt I have anything to sell at Dragonmeet.

Blackguard is coming together slowly and pleasingly and would be the major candidate to release. It looks great, which helps. However, it's coming together more slowly than I expected, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable releasing it as an ashcan.

A Need To Kill has had a couple of good playtests, but just hasn't been tested enough.

The improv book, Play Unsafe, will be ready, but I don't want my only product to be an improv book.

I desperately need someone to draw me a snakes and ladders board. With nice cartoon snakes.

Can anyone help? Usual deal: there'd be a bit of money but you won't be able to retire on it.

Graham

I'm fiddling around with covers. I quite like this. What do you think? It's a bit rough, of course.

A Need To Kill cover

Graham

Last week, I found the domain name Thievesoftime.com was available. Isn't that great?

Anyway, so I bought it, and here it is: the Thieves of Time online store.

For information, the software I'm using is ZenCart, which is free. With that, I'm using a free stylesheet called End Of Summer. That stylesheet had the rather beautiful eggtimer and, using an cheap image editor, I've replaced the words "End Of Summer" with "Thieves Of Time". If you look closely, you can see the join, but it's not too bad.

We had a usefully bad playtest of Blackguard last night.

So, firstly, Blackguard is a pretty focussed game: it works for thieves burgling buildings, but not much else.

The players, yesterday, started by meeting a maid in a pub and attempting to persuade her into giving a key. Then they did lots of time-shifting narration: "OK, let's say that two days later...".

I gave this a try, but it was fairly clear it didn't work. No problem, lesson learned.

So last night, before my regular GURPS session, I grabbed the first player through the door (Roderick) and persuaded him to try a quick session of Blackguard while he ate his Chinese. I'll outline the game in this post and the comments in the second.