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After licensing Thieves’ World® in August of 2004 Green Ronin Publishing put together a publication plan consisting of four products
Thieves’ World® Player’s Manual
Murder at the Vulgar Unicorn
Shadowspawn’s Guide to Sanctuary
The Thieves’ World® Gazetteer
(links above will take you to the appropriate pages at Green Ronin’s site where you’ll find product information, designer journals and interviews, and information on how to order the books)
The first two products were introduced at GenCon 2005 where they were well-received (we sold out of the 100 copies of the Player’s Manual that the company brought with them).
The Player’s Manual, as the title implies, is a source book for “D20” gamers (that is, fantasy-role-playing based on the open-source D20 rules released by Wizards of the Coast) who want to get down and dirty in my favorite city.
Murder at the Vulgar Unicorn is a playable adventure set in and around Sanctuary. It’s especially designed as a reader-friendly introduction to D20 gaming. It’s set in the current (Irrune) era features a Dyareelan plot to infect the city with a plague. To tell you more would be to spoil the fun.
Shadowspawn’s Guide to Sanctuary is a neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to Sanctuary. Although it focuses on the current (Irrune) era, it contains beaucoup information about the Rankan era and ventures outside to describe the points of interest outside the city walls. It also features a list of every (and I do mean every) character ever mentioned in any of the anthologies. It will be available in September 2005
The Thieves’ World® Gazetteer expands both the timeline and the geographic range Thieves’ World® to include the entire Rankan Empire, Ilsig, the exotic west beyond Mrsevada, and many points in between. It also fills out a timeline that reaches back three millennia
Green Ronin assembled experienced design teams for each of these books but they also encouraged me to work with the design team...and I did...up to my armpits and beyond. Every word in each book passed under my watchful eye and I wrote more than a few myself, especially in the gazetteer.
What Green Ronin is publishing is what I call “canonic Thieves’ World®,” as true and valid as any of the short stories. If there are mistakes, they’re my mistakes, not Green Ronin’s because I had to approve everything between the covers.
And I did approve everything, enthusiastically. I didn’t know anyone at Green Ronin before I licensed Thieves’ World® to them. They came highly recommended...but, honestly, after working with them for a year and meeting them (finally) at GenCon 2005, they weren’t recommended highly enough.
Neither Licensor nor Licensee knows what the future holds when they commit to their partnership. Everything depends on finding a market for the product, but if all goes well (and it appeared to be going well at GenCon 2005), then we’re already thinking about additional projects...including an adventure set in Enas Yorl’s wandering house
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