Lester Dent penned many pulp adventures before he created Doc Savage in 1933 under the house name Kenneth Robeson. Lester Dent's Zeppelin Tales collects five airship-themed stories published from 1930 to 1932, and includes material restored from Dent's original manuscripts!
"Zeppelin Bait": Jed Day, American Great War flyer, is framed for spying for a notorious German Zeppelin Captain! Originally published in the October 1932 issue of Sky Birds.
"Blackbeard's Spectre": Zeppelin pirates steal the passenger dirigible City of Oakland before its maiden flight to Japan! One of Dent's first published works, it originally appeared as "The Thirteen Million Dollar Robbery" in the March 1930 issue of The Popular Magazine.
"Peril's Domain": Bill Kirgan battles a pirate band on a Zeppelin en route to the Arctic! Originally published under the title "The Frozen Flight" in the February 1931 issue of Air Stories.
"Helene Was A Cannibal": What menaces the flight of Germany's newest Zeppelin, the Vaterland? Originally published as "Teeth of Revenge" in the May 1931 issue of Scotland Yard.
"A Billion Gold!": A private dick gets mixed up in a Zeppelin-sized scheme in New York City! Originally published as "One Billion-Gold!" in the June 1931 issue of Scotland Yard.
Lester Dent's Zeppelin Tales is nearly 100,000 words of pulpy goodness, and is available now as a PDF from e23. It should be available from most online booksellers shortly (it is currently listed with BarnesAndNoble.com and Amazon.co.uk), and you can special order it from your local bookshop: just tell them it is available from Ingram or Baker & Taylor in the US or Blackwell's or Bertram's in the UK.
Noise Monster Productions has an enthusiastic slate of Space: 1889 audio dramas appearing in 2005. See their website, noisemonster.com, or read their press release PDF here.
All games will be from 1pm to 5pm (except as noted), 2 to 8 players, no experience required, all materials will be provided.
We'll have a table at Dragonmeet, London's friendliest gaming convention, Saturday, December 4th, 2004. Come by and listen to our evasive answers about the release date for Zeppelin Age! Pick up a flyer with exciting preview artwork and our complete catalog! Heck, you could even buy something from our current catalog!
Diana: Warrior Princess debuted strongly at Dragonmeet, London's Friendliest Gaming Convention, on Saturday December 13th. The fifty copies of Diana we sold easily beat the record for sales of a Heliograph title at any convention anywhere, including GenCon.
Diana is now available: see our Buy It! page for more info.
Diana: Warrior Princess debuts at Dragonmeet, London's Friendliest Gaming Convention, on Saturday December 13th. Author Marcus Rowland will run a Diana adventure at the convention, and Heliograph (in the person of Matt Goodman) will have a booth on the dealer's floor.
Diana should also be available at GenCon SoCal December 11th through 14th at the Adventure Retail booth (#601 right by the front doors) with Diana artist Aaron Williams.
Ads for both books are available from our Promo page.
We won't have a booth at GenCon (our stuff will be available from Wizard's Attic), but Paul Westermeyer will be running Soldier's Companion and Sky Galleons games, and Matt Goodman will be running two Zeppelin Age RPG sessions.
Event Number: 8557
System/Title: Tri-Stat, Zeppelins Over Maple-White Land
Start and End Time: Starts Thursday, 8/8/2002 14:00, Ends 8/8/2002 17:45
Description: 1918: The Kaiser is sending a Zeppelin to Maple-White Land the last refuge of dinosaurs on Earth. The British have gotten wind of the plan, and are sending a team to stop the Germans plans... whatever they might be.
Experience Level/Cost/Max Players/GM E-1 $3.00 8 Matthew Goodman
Event Number: 8568
System/Title:Tri-Stat, Zombies And Zeppelins
Start and End Time:Starts Friday, 8/9/2002 14:00, Ends 8/9/2002 15:45
Description:1933: The British Airship R100 is saved from demolition by an American millionaire, and now renamed the Empress of the Pacific acts as a luxury transport. But after a disturbing rescue at sea, can the crew cope with the supernatural?
Experience Level/Cost/Max Players/Sponsor: E-1 $3.00 8 Matthew Goodman
Event Number: 6027
System/Title: Sky Galleons of Mars 1st Ed., Exalted in the Heavens
Start and End Time:Starts Friday, 8/9/2002 17:00, Ends 8/9/2002 23:00
Description:Royal Navy Battles Martian Sky Galleons in a Battle Royale! The largest aerial steamship battle on Mars to date as the British stave off the assault on Avenel!
Experience Level/Cost/Max Players/GM:E-2 $4.50 12 Paul Westermeyer
Event Number: 6028
System/Title:Space: 1889 Soldier's Companion 1st Ed., Mucking About the Swamp
Start and End Time: Starts Saturday, 8/10/2002 17:00, Ends 8/10/2002 23:00
Description:British Redcoats and tarheels on Venus battle lizardsmen and dinosaurs in a 19th century Colonial battle royale!
Experience Level/Cost/Max Players/GM:E-2 $4.50 8 Paul Westermeyer
Materials and characters will be provided.
Sponsored by HOT'02 & Heliograph, Inc..
Organizer/GM is Paul Westermeyer.
This event is limited to only 8 players. There are 4 seats left.
After Origins, we'll be posting our GenCon game listings.
The most visible result for readers is that we won't have a Heliograph booth at conventions. We'll still run games and demos at cons, but we won't be chained in a booth for the show. When we actually have product, it'll be promoted at shows by GOO.
So what does this mean for you, the eager Heliograph title fan? Top Men all agree that a title sold under the GOO imprint will sell better than those under Heliograph's alone, and without the icky business stuff to deal with, Heliograph should be able to churn books out at a steady rate.
A few weeks ago, I set up a list for The Zeppelin Age, zeppelinage@yahoogroups.com. That list will support a general discussion of the game and all things Zeppeliny. To subscribe, send e-mail to zeppelinage-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Space: 1889 books will remain in print and available from Heliograph until the license is acquired by someone else. Unfortunately, the existing stocks of Forgotten Futures and TRMGS are small, and we won't be reprinting those books. With the exception of Soldier's Companion, every book we've printed so far was done with print on demand, and we were reprinting them in small batches. While we will keep reprinting the Space: 1889 books, we will not reprint the others, so the existing supply will dry up in a few months (or longer, depending on demand).
We won't be announcing release dates for new books until we're certain the book will be going to press. New announcements will come six months before new book releases, and complete press kits will be available from our web site when we make the announcement.
Here's a complete list of books we've announced, but won't be publishing:
Forgotten Futures Titles
Space: 1889
Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society
The TRMGS material currently available on the web will move to the Heliograph page, but remain available. The current Forgotten Futures site will stay up until June 2002, and at that point Marcus Rowland, the author of Forgotten Futures, will decide if he wants pay for the site or have the URL redirect to his site. Forgotten Futures will continue to be available on CD from Marcus.
The cancellations do not mean Heliograph is going out of business.
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want" -- Dan Stanford.
Back in the 90s, I was under the delusion that just because something was available on the web, that wouldn't harm sales of paper versions of those books. I was grossly mistaken. While the fact that you could download the books for free wasn't their only problem, using print on demand and LSI was also a big mistake... Soldier's Companion was the first book we've done that I was really happy with the print quality, and it was so much better it was clear that I couldn't go back to POD.
In another "gotcha", distributors and retailers base their sales on future books in a series on previous books in that series. If people were going to order fractional quantities the previous sales of FF, Space: 1889, and TRMGS books, the prices I'd have to charge to break even would be outrageous. That's not to say that if these books were picked up by another publisher they wouldn't sell well... the problem is that Heliograph versions of these titles have a track record.
So we're going to do new books that don't have an established track record, and try and build a good brand with them. I'm also striving to do everything right in the promotion of these new books, using the experience I've gained over the last three plus years publishing RPG books.
The Terror fears that Tsar Alexander's grave is becoming a place of pilgrimage. It's time to dig him up and scatter his ashes. But when the grave is opened, someone has taken the brain...
Forgotten Futures is a game based on the stories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were precursors to Science Fiction.
Four to Six players, Forgotten Futures Rules. Thursday, 8/10, 10am. Length: 3:45.
Twenty years ago The Terror destroyed the evil Russian monarchy. Today a group of deluded writers including Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft are romanticising their story, making it seem that The Terror were the villains. Are they working alone, or are sinister forces responsible for this distortion of history?
Four to Six players, Forgotten Futures Rules. Date & Time: Friday, 8/11, 10am. Length: 3:45
Three to Six players, Space: 1889 Rules. Friday and Saturday (Runs Twice), 2 P.M. Event Length 3:45
As many people as can fit in the room. Friday 8pm, about an hour.
However, for the games people could find, they had a roaring good time. Chris Jones' Soldier's Companion game in particular was pretty nifty, and enjoyed by all the participants.
"All in all, this gamebook passes the key test; do you immediately have about 40 great new campaign ideas after you finish reading it?" Ken Hite, "Out of the Box", Mania Magazine, 3/3/00.
You can buy the book through a link on our site to Amazon.com, or use the information there to order from your local book or hobby shop.
The new FF volume, Victorian Villany, is available from Heliograph's Forgotten Futures site as well as from the Marcus Rowland's site in the UK. The new FF Volume covers the World of Melodrama and Criminal Fiction, 1820-1914, and Melodramatic Role Playing Rules and Adventures.