Gnome Stew and Engine Publishing are partnering with Lone Wolf Development to integrate the content from all three of our books into their forthcoming Realm Works campaign management software.

Backers of the Kickstarter campaign for Realm Works will be able to access Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, and Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters within Realm Works for free.

What’s Realm Works?

Realm Works is a system-neutral tool that enables GMs and players to manage campaigns in a streamlined yet comprehensive way, and by “comprehensive” I mean it does so much that it’s hard to describe it succinctly. Two of the authors of Gnome Stew, Phil Vecchione and Matthew Neagley, got a sneak peek at Realm Works from the developers, and they were so impressed that we closed this licensing deal not long after their demo. (Phil, Matt, and I are also backers of the Realm Works Kickstarter — when it comes to GMing, we put our money where our mouths are.)

The heart of Realm Works is a relational database specific to your campaign, which gives you wiki features like categories (predetermined or custom-made) and automatic hyperlinking between entries, but it’s more than a wiki. Realm Works also offers link webs (maps of how entries relate to each other), timelines of your campaign’s history, relationship webs showing connections between NPCs, the ability to reveal select bits of information to your players, and flows that allow you to create plots, locations, and events and connect them to one another. It also accepts files from other applications, making it a true one-stop shop for campaign management.

Like our books for GMs, we think this is a unique tool that will help you have more fun at the gaming table. Lone Wolf Development has a great track record as a company, offering well-known software tools for gamers like Hero Lab and Army Builder, and we’re confident that Realm Works is going to rock. Combining our system-neutral books for GMs with their campaign management tools makes a lot of sense, and we think the combination will help GMs have more fun at the gaming table.

Get our books for free

If you back the Realm Works Kickstarter, which ends February 24, or if you’re already a backer, you can get our content for free by backing at the $35 level (Never Unprepared), the $50 level (Masks + Never Unprepared), or the $65 level (Masks + Never Unprepared + Eureka). Our content will also be available for purchase in Realm Works after it’s released; we expect the final prices will match those of our PDFs: $9.95 for Never Unprepared, $16.95 each for Masks and Eureka.

If you like the sound of Realm Works combined with Masks, Never Unprepared, and Eureka, backing the Kickstarter is a great way to get all of these tools together in one place for an excellent price.

On a personal note, this is also a big milestone for Engine Publishing. The company is less than four years old, we’ve taken all sorts of gambles by producing material for GMs that some in the industry told us would never sell, and back when we published our first book we never imagined we’d be licensing our content to another company for inclusion in their software. It’s humbling and fantastic and a bit surreal all at the same time. Many thanks to everyone who has supported us and our work, and I hope you’ll check out Realm Works.