Started work on transforming this old sketch (featuring a battle royale of sorts between monsters and heroic figures) into a coloured splash image for the currently in-active Paper Mages site, Paper Mages will be the home for Steamshaft (when it is finished) and is also going to be the web home for Anno Geometrica and a few other British authored roleplay items.
Those of us behind Paper Mages come from a background of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, wargaming (Games Workshop), Advanced Fighting Fantasy and other very Britishy products… No shock then that we enjoy keeping alive the things that made those products so great for us. Fairly early on when I was drafting the steamshaft I realised that I was making an upside down Necromunda in many ways, what a shame that Games Workshop never considered making Mordheim a more direct fantasy imagining of Necromunda… part of me hopes it would be much like the Steamshaft. 
We’re not going to get rich doing this but we do get to put out our work and hopefully see it get used, that is a reward in itself. We’re still going to have fun setting games in our own worlds whatever happens. Generally we’re giving stuff away free in a wiki format, as a word document or PDF. Sometimes (at great struggle) we will have a print release on the table, the first such release is likely to be the ‘Anno Geometrica’ core rules and will be via the likes of Lulu. With a print copy we’re putting in effort to produce the best possible version of the freebie we can, normally in the form of art or exclusive material, so it will only happen if we have demand. The good thing with a print copy is that you can stroke it lovingly and we might get a few bob to spend on a pint or a packet of crisps, we also get to buy our own copies and pretend we’re real game designers… But this is talk for a later time!
The finished image is now up on http://www.papermages.co.uk/
-Tom
Tags: Anno Geometrica, Paper Mages, Pen & Paper RPG, Roleplay, The Steamshaft Chronicles
