So, like I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve been planning to put out an omnibus of the Ancient Dreams trilogy this year. So everyone is aware, it will not just be me copying pasting the three books into a single whole. To do so would be somewhat disrespectful to all of you, and to the books themselves, at least in my opinion.

When I begin work on the omnibus, I’m going to start by including the Halls of Power Extended Ending. I freely admit I wrapped up the book a little too quickly, and this was an attempt to fix the issues there. Furthermore, I intend to go through all three books with an eye to what can be expanded on or improved. I don’t know how many changes I’ll make in the end, but it will happen this year, and depending on my schedule will be in spring or summer.

With that in mind, I’ve been toying with new software to try to get a cover put together for the omnibus, which I’m simply going to title Ancient Dreams. This is partially because I didn’t like the way Omnibus fit on the cover, but we’ll see how things work out in the end. Here’s my rough draft of the cover, as the art has been up on the site for quite some time.

Now, on to the second half of what I had to say today. I’m a fan of tabletop roleplaying games, as I’ve no doubt betrayed several times. Most of the time I’ve been the Game Master of these games, something that’s come up in regards to how I wrote the book a number of times. I wish that I could say that Ancient Dreams was based on a game that I ran, but alas it wasn’t.

The reason I bring this up is that before I even started on Ancient Ruins, I was working on a project for the Pathfinder RPG. It wasn’t intended to be published, but for a year I spent a little time each day creating at least one magic item for the game, trying to make interesting items and the like. Still, last February this wrapped up, and I was just sitting on a pile of over 400 magic items. I probably still would be sitting on them if I hadn’t seen a publisher who was taking submissions for a project he was putting together. I ended up not taking his particular offer, as I didn’t have the right items for it, but I mentioned that I had created over 400 magic items to people, and someone else was interested in publishing it.

That was quite some time ago, but the project has been progressing since then. Likely as not, later this year I’ll have another game product published, if everything goes right. It isn’t anything impressive, as the tabletop industry is nowhere near as large as the audience for novels, but it amuses me to no end.

It’s just funny because in many ways, I think that it’s my experience telling stories in RPGs that got me to actually finish my books in the end. Maybe I’ll occasionally dabble in gaming stuff in the future, but that’s for then, not now.