Bloodstained stars -- summer secret surprise 09

[luke]

Bloodstained Stars
An Old Warrior’s Meditations on the Art of Killing in the Iron Empires, Addressed to My Most Warlike Prince.

Written by Sydney Freedberg
Illustrated by Christopher Moeller
Edited by Luke Crane, Thor Olavsrud, Alexander Newman and Lance R Blyth

Bloodstained Stars contains expanded source material for waging war and combatting the Vaylen threat in Christopher Moeller's Iron Empires universe. It is also a setting book for the Burning Empires roleplaying game (but contains no mechanics).

The book itself is 144 Pages, hard cover, digest sized. The cover is cloth-wrapped, debossed with a foil-stamped wheel.

Click here for a seven-page preview.

Preorder Information
Preorders for this book will begin on July 1st.
Preorders will be completely handled by BWHQ -- we will take your orders, process them and fulfill them ourselves. No third party fucking shit up.

• Preorders will be limited to 100 books. Each preordered book comes with a limited edition embroidered COTAR FOMAS/BURNING WHEEL patch.
  
• There will be 15 custom book plate illustrations available for $25 each. You may tell Chris what you'd like to him to illustrate.
  
• We will also offer a sweet limited edition t-shirt deal -- one of the sketches from the book on a gun metal gray shirt. (Hopefully not American Apparell.)

The preorder cannot and will not incorporate signed and numbered copies or a PDF. Sorry kids, but that stuff is just not feasible this time out.

I invite Chris, Syd and Lance to comment in this thread. Questions are welcome too as well.

[Thor]

I'd just like to say that Syd and Chris really outdid themselves on this one. If you dig the Iron Empires or the Burning Empires game, you'll want this book!

[stormsweeper]

HOT.

I had been wondering where Freedberg had gone off to.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Heh. I've been toiling away quietly....

Big thanks to everyone who contributed to the various Tech Burner and "Art of War" threads on the forum, especially to Lance Blyth, who peer-reviewed the manuscript.

[mtiru]

Congrats, Sydney, this looks like amazing work! Tell us how you came up with the idea.

Very cool surprise this year, gang! I want a patch.

[wanderer]

It looks awesome--that cover with the guy in red Iron is sweet. I can't wait.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Congrats, Sydney, this looks like amazing work! Tell us how you came up with the idea....

Thanks. Chris and Luke approached me sometime during my obsessive participation in military tech threads about writing a military sourcebook of some kind, with Chris's illustrations. From very early on, we all thought it'd be better to have at least some of it written from the perspective of various people in the Iron Empires setting, which gelled into the idea of writing, in essence, an I.E. version of Machiavelli's The Prince or Art of War, written by a first-person narrator who, like Machiavelli, had been a major political figure but was now in exile with an axe to grind. From there, as I started actually drafting, the character of Iosif Drake took shape and took over. I'd originally meant to write every evening and accumulate short snippets, but I found that it took a while to get into character as Drake and then, once I got inside his head -- or he in mine... -- it was damned hard to get him out again. He's a charismatic monster and I heartily disavow most of his opinions.... So in essence this was the longest sustained act of roleplaying I've ever done.

[Paul B]

So, to be clear: This book contains gameworld fiction and materials, and nothing mechanical or procedural. Correct?

p.

[luke]

So, to be clear: This book contains gameworld fiction and materials, and nothing mechanical or procedural. Correct?

p.

Yes.

[Paul B]

Yes.

A'ight, then.

p.