Alas, a change of plans.

Today, Wizards of the Coast eliminated my position. I have unfortunately been let go, after more than 20 years of employment with TSR/WotC.

I still hope to write for the Forgotten Realms novel line as time and opportunity permit. In fact, I'm going to go home tonight and finish my second draft of Prince of Ravens. There may be some more opportunities down the road.

D&D fans... thanks for a great run. I hope I've given you some good gaming over the years. Your game is in good hands with Mike and Monte.

For fans of the A&A minis games, I would like to say that this does not signal the cancellation of any miniatures lines. I hope I can take on some of the design work on a freelance basis, but we'll have to see.

Time to splice the main brace, as they say. ...

Merry Christmas, folks! It’s been a few weeks since I posted, so I thought I would drop by and provide an update for what’s going on with me these days.

Prince of Ravens (fiction): I am currently wrapping up my second draft of Prince of Ravens, which will be available in the summer of 2012 as an ebook. Prince of Ravens marks the return of a character of mine that I haven’t written about in ten years: the rogue, sorcerer, and general troublemaker Jack Ravenwild, native son of the city of Raven’s Bluff. Jack was the protagonist of my novel City of Ravens, which I regard as some of the best writing I’ve ever done. As City of Ravens readers might expect, he soon becomes entangled in all sorts of fraud, scheming, skullduggery, and misadventure. I’ll probably

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Surface Action Opening Salvo, Part 3

Welcome back! Our Opening Salvo previews for Surface Action, the sixth set for the Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures game, continue this week with a look at two light cruisers: HMS Sheffield and Giovanni Delle Banda Nere. Surface Action releases on 25 October 2011.   

 

HMS Sheffield

A member of the famous Southampton (or “Town”) class of light cruisers, HMS Sheffield was a well-armed, well-protected warship with good speed and excellent endurance. She and her sisters represented an important change in British cruiser design, moving away from the undergunned Leander and Arethusa class designs toward a heavier, more capable ship equivalent to the latest American and Japanese cruisers. With twelve 6-inch guns and a 4.5”

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Surface Action Opening Salvo, Part 2

Welcome back! This week we’ll continue our Opening Salvo previews for Surface Action, the sixth set for the Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures game. Surface Action releases on 25 October 2011, and consists of 40 models. Last week we took a look at the carriers HMS Eagle and Taiho; this time around, we’ll debut two unit types never before seen in War at Sea, a minesweeper and a landing ship tank (or LST).

 

LST

The LST, or Landing Ship Tank, is one representative of a class of amphibious assault ships deployed in great numbers by the United States and Britain during the war. Based on a shallow-water tanker originally designed for service in Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, the LST was designed to beach itself and discharge its cargo of heavy

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Hi, folks!

It’s been a busy summer! I skipped GenCon this year in order to take my family out East for a nice long visit with our relatives. While we were out there, I made a point of taking my kids to Washington DC in order to see the memorials. Since I’ve been living in Washington state for fourteen years now, my kids haven’t ever seen DC before. It’s one of those things that every kid should have a chance to see, I think. We also visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Capitol, and the National Archives (which was very cool, by the way). We also had the chance to visit some of the historical sites around Richmond, Virginia, including the Confederate White House and the Richmond National Battlefield—specifically, Cold Harbor and the Tredegar

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Hi there, folks! Thanks for stopping by.

It’s been a very busy few weeks for me, since I was working hard on our new Elemental book (due out in 2012) and pushing toward a deadline on a new Forgotten Realms novel on my weekends and evenings. Whew! I will be glad when this month is over. Anyway, here’s what is on my mind this time around.

Conquest of Nerath On My Desk

I received my copy of Conquest of Nerath yesterday, and I am delighted with how it’s turned out. This is a high-quality production with excellent playing pieces, good cardstock markers and tokens, a bunch of cards, and hopefully many, many entertaining hours of play for all you D&D fans who ever wanted to conquer the world. I have a Design & Development article coming up in the next couple of weeks on the

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Looks like the Wildcat is out of the bag! Longtime readers might remember a blog post a few months back in which I remarked on the fact that I was working on a number of very cool secret projects all at the same time. Well, we’ve now announced one of them in our 2011 Fall Catalog, so I can finally talk a little bit about our brand-new Axis & Allies miniatures game: Axis & Allies Air Force Miniatures. We’re planning on two offerings at the end of this year: a Battle of Britain-themed Starter Set, and the Angels 20 booster set.

(I expect that like AANM/War at Sea, folks might use the names more or less interchangeably. I tend to refer to it as AAAFM, Angels 20, or sometimes just “the air game.” Whatever works for you. We thought about just calling it AA Air Miniatures,

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Hello again!

It’s been a busy start to the year already! I’m now engaged in writing the first draft of a new Jack Ravenwild novel, and I’m trying to reestablish the work habits that let me find a few thousand words a week in my evenings and weekends. So far, so good: I just finished Chapter 2 last night. Good football games over the last few weeks haven’t been helping much!

Anyway, I thought I’d take a few minutes and share a few more of the cool or interesting things I’m involved with that are coming up. So here goes:

Gamma World: Legion of Gold

I just received my office copy of the Legion of Gold expansion pack, and I’m very happy with it. In the GWRPG box, Bruce Cordell tackled the adventure, and I handled some other parts of the book, such

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And now, a little seasonal surprise for you A&A fans out there... A number of folks have begged for a slightly early peek at the set list for WaS V. After checking around with a couple of the stakeholders here at Wizards, I'm happy to oblige. I guess I'm just a big softie.

Without further ado, I present the set list for Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures, Set V:

1/39       HMAS Australia

2/39       HMCS St. Laurent

3/39       Algérie

4/39       ORP Blyskawica

5/39       ORP Orzel

6/39       HMS Euryalus

7/39       HMS Glorious

8/39      

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