Tag Archives: logue

Razor Coast Kickstarter

Bethany Razor Works It

Bethany Razor Works It

Razor Coast, the mega-adventure by Paizo fan favorite author Nick Logue, has had a long and checkered past. But Frog God Games has it now and is running a Kickstarter to get it out the door finally! It’s in Pathfinder, but they also have Frank Mentzer (Red Box, fools!) himself working on delivering it for Swords & Wizardry too at the same time.

Razor Coast is set on an untamed coastline, with home base being a colonial power’s city and it surrounding plantations. Just on the land you have slavery, hostile natives, crocodile men, volcanoes, and monster-infested jungle to contend with. But Razor Coast, like Skull & Shackles, has a strong nautical component too.  Ply the waves and fight pirates, or be a pirate and fight the navy – plus weresharks and sahuagin and other demented denizens of the deep! (You can get a sneak preview of the maps for RC on Sean MacDonald’s site!) It wouldn’t be Nick Logue if it didn’t reveal the worst side of human nature and end up in various shrieking bloodbaths.

Pele, Goddess of Fire and Wrack

Pele, Goddess of Fire and Wrack

The good news is that the content is pretty much all done.  I was a volunteer editor originally and still am; this adventure (and all the related Indulgences and extras and whatnot) are in the can and just being fine-tuned.  I just finished another round of editing the various Indulgences to make them even better. So there’s not much standing between this and release, unlike other Kickstarters that are being done completely from scratch.

Yes, it’s pricey.  The hardback level is $110, but you are getting a huge tome and a lot of extras for that.  Lou Agresta explains the value and all what you get on the Paizo boards if you’re interested. FGG uses a very high quality textbook printer, made in the USA, so you are paying more but get a book that won’t fall apart and whose binding isn’t mixed with the tears of child laborers. Check out the higher Kickstarter levels too, they have sweet ship models and other cool swag. They’re 2/3 of their way to goal with 19 days left, now’s the time to get in on it! If you preordered back in the day from Sinister, they’ll honor that preorder, so no worries there. You can pledge some to get other bennies though.

Dajobas, Devourer of Worlds

Dajobas, Devourer of Worlds

I’m going to be running Razor Coast as part of my Pathfinder pirate campaign (“Reavers on the Seas of Fate“) soon! Actually, I already ran one of the Indulgences that were available back originally to kick off the campaign, and you can read the extended session summary here to get a feel for the kind of adventure we’re looking at!  (Well… I did zazz it up a bit myself.) I’ll be setting it south of the Shackles with Port Shaw as a Sargavan expansion port.

Do note that you don’t have to be  a pirate for Razor Coast, unlike with Skull & Shackles – it works for good parties as well. In fact, it starts at level 5 (and goes up through 12+), you could capture and impress your PCs with the first chapter of Skull & Shackles and if they end up being goody-goody and don’t want to go pirate, they could flee to Port Shaw and slot right into Razor Coast!  I actually used the first two chapters of Second Darkness to start my Reavers campaign and went pirate from there, out to Azlant and now to the Razor!

Maybe my PCs will see you there… Kickstart now to become on of their many victims!

Sinister Adventures – Looks Like It’s Finally Dead

Well. Many of us have been waiting, waiting, waiting for Nick Logue’s Sinister Adventures imprint to publish Razor Coast.  He took pre-orders and said it was “close” in 2008. It wasn’t. Then he took a new job and effectively disappeared.

But the early stuff on Razor Coast looked AWESOME. Finally Lou Agresta and some volunteers (including yours truly) pitched in to try to the the manuscript completed, proofread, etc.  Lou did a great job of taking something half finished and pulling it all together. A complete manuscript got handed over to Nick a couple months ago. You can see a bit of the three years of trauma on this Paizo.com thread. You could see it on Sinister Adventures’ site, but as of now the domain name expired and it’s down. Probably for good.

Which is probably for the best.  The forums were overtaken by spammers, which Nick didn’t bother to do anything about (heck, or give the forum mod password to any of the people that would have been happy to do it for him). He dropped in on his own forums once every three to six months to say something chirpy and then disappear again. No answers to most emails. No meaningful updates or responses to customer queries.

Will Razor Coast eventually emerge?  No. No, despite it being completed except for layout and printing, Logue has shown that he really doesn’t care enough to do anything to complete the work required to get it out. Even though e.g. Louis Porter has offered to pick it up, even though I’m sure a quick layout job and then PDFing it would at least get it out there.

Nick Logue really dropped the ball in a completely negligent manner on this whole thing. I don’t think anyone has any legitimate expectation that this product will see the light of day. At least I hear he’s still giving refunds to those who can somehow find him to do so.

Nick – there’s no excuse for how you handled this. If you’re not going to do it, send everyone’s money back and close up shop. If you’re going to do it, then how much work does it take to go make a forum post once every two fucking weeks? Britain may be a shithole but they do have the Internet there and you work at a university. I guarantee you can send emails and access the Internet.  But people who invested in you apparently weren’t worth 15 minutes of your time every couple weeks – or, indeed, every couple months.  With the way you’ve handled this, you’ve effectively been saying “Fuck you” to a bunch of people that liked your work and believed in you, to the point of pre-ordering, a somewhat psychotic thing to do in the incompetence-riddled RPG industry.

Your work for Paizo was great and bought you some apparently ill-deserved credibility, and it’s unfortunate that this reflects back on them as well. Next guy that tries to spin off their own side thing from Paizo, I won’t be able to trust them one single fucking second just because they got stuff out there while working there. You’ve reflected poorly on yourself and degraded confidence in other Paizoites and the industry in general. You’ve reaffirmed that any given RPG company is probably incompetent and you should never give them money in advance, and that the rare exceptions like Open Design are probably just a temporary aberration. You have squandered more good will than most people in the industry ever. Solid work.

Sinister Lives!

Sinister Adventures is a small RPG imprint founded by Nicolas Logue, a fan favorite adventure writer.  He contributed a bunch of Dungeon adventures back in the day, and now is probably best known for authoring the demented ogre hillbilly horror of The Hook Mountain Massacre, third in Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path and various other adventures like Crown of the Kobold King, Hangman’s Noose, and Carnival of Tears (Paizo GameMastery modules),  Edge of Anarchy (first in the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP), Blood of the Gorgon (an Open Design project), and Voyage of the Golden Dragon (an Eberron module).

Well, Sinister showed up, threw out some great ideas, awesome concept art, and some PDF products/previews for some upcoming mega-adventures – and then sank silently beneath the waves for a long time.  Like more than a year long.  Even the forums on the site broke and things went to pot.  Nick would occasionally chime in on the Paizo boards or whatnot but the upshot was that he had way too many other jobs going on.

Luckily for you and I, that has changed, and Nick and Sinister have resurfaced, fixed their site, and are charging towards a date of Sep 1 for their first, Razor Coast, to go into layout!  Pirates, cannibal cultists, shark gods, and more tangle in a blood-soaked orgy of violence.  Many previews and blindingly beautiful art pieces are posted on their site!

And the best part, it’ll be for 3.5 and Pathfinder…  I am psyched.  I was actually getting set to run a Pathfinder Pirates campaign and was dusting off my old Freeport stuff; I had given up hope of Razor Coast ever happening.  But now, it’s on and on for soon!   I do so look forward to watching my players weep in fear.