Tag: Castalia

The state of production

  1. If you don’t enjoy the heavy comment moderation on VP, please keep in mind that we’re getting 600 spam comments for every 100 real comments. The spam assault seriously ramped up about two weeks ago. All comments are held for review and approval now, since Blogger’s ability to detect spam is roughly equivalent to a toddler’s ability to grasp that the creepy man with the windowless van offering him candy and a puppy does not have his best interests at heart.
  2. Junior Classics 1-3 (hardcover, ebook) are expected to ship by the end of October. We’re shooting to get 4-6 out before Christmas. The leather editions will be done as a set once the regular hardcovers are shipped. The hardcover illustrations will NOT be color, as color doesn’t look as good as b/w on the high-quality archival paper.
  3. We’re considering doing an Indiegogo campaign for MIDNIGHT’S WAR in September after Indiegogo requested that we put together a campaign. Details on SocialGalactic. Feel free to discuss here.
  4. CDA 1-12 is written and illustrated. AH is written and illustrated through issue 7. AHQ is written through 1-6 and illustrated through issue 4. The RPG rules are done, need to have graphics added. The figure is designed, but I’m not happy with the face, so it needs to be refined.
  5. The cover for THE DIVINE COMEDY is boss. We will show it off soon. The interior for PLUTARCH VOL. I is done and the interior for the second volume will be done soon. The designers just began work on the matching covers.
  6. I have about 50k words left to write on ASOS.

Attention Castalia Subscribers

A message from our sponsor:

During our long months of social distancing we started to realize the value of other humans. After weeks of eating expired dippin’ dots and watching 90’s romcoms alone while talking to a gecko on the wall, being around other humans started to seem like a good idea. Especially once we realized that the gecko had been dead for at least a month, presumably from a bad batch of bat soup.

His name was Bobby. We buried him in a tiny mask.

This was the turning of the tide. It is time to reach out again, as we now realize in our heart that all humans are special, even those that support us at the lowest tier possible. And so, we embrace every patron because we know your real value, and not because we may feel vaguely guilty over completely blowing off last month for perfectly valid medical reasons concerning social and temporal distancing.

So, to all of our patrons, this month we will give you more than you ever asked for. With the gracious permission of the author, for July and August we are giving every patron the download codes for both the ebook and audiobook productions of both The Lawdog Files and The Lawdog Files: African Adventures.

The coupon will expire September 15, 2020, so you still have several weeks left to become a Castalia patron and avail yourself of what Squeaks the pygmy mongoose himself would swear was the most excellent opportunity since that magic day that Ali Cheap-Cheap dropped a burlap bag of “beef” on his personal residence.

Awake Library edition

This is not a mockup, this is a photo of the actual stamped and silver-foiled cowhide from the bindery. The interior cases have been printed for weeks, and I’m told that the bindery expects to ship the third book in the Castalia Library series to both US and international subscribers by the end of the month.

However, we’re still very much delayed on the Libraria versions, as the goatskin tannery went from lockdown to August vacation with barely a few weeks in between. I’m told they expect to ship all the goatskins for The Missionaries, Awake, and The Divine Comedy to the bindery during the third week of September, and we will keep you informed on the progress of those books. This is the downside of working with Italian suppliers; the quality is excellent but they work on Italian time.

The cowhide tannery is on vacation too, so the soonest we can reasonably expect to ship the Library version of The Divine Comedy is the end of September. We’re still finalizing the cover design, but, the interiors have already been printed, and we’re sending the first volume of Plutarch to the printer by the end of this weekend.

Please understand that the production disruptions caused by Corona-chan have not come to an end by any means, and that we are not sitting on our hands, but are actively working to keep routing around them. For example, we had originally planned to produce the Plutarchs in a larger size, but 6 x 9 is the largest paper size that the printer can currently obtain in the quality that we require. So, we adjusted our designs and proceeded accordingly. And, obviously, the delay in producing the Library books has pushed back the Junior Classics, but we’re hoping to at least get the ebook and regular hardcovers out before the end of the year.

In other Library news, the two Plutarch volumes are going to be monsters of around 768 pages each. The covers are going to be very cool and reflective of the dual Graeco-Roman nature of the text. We’ve also decided on Books 7 and 8, although we have not yet decided on the order. They will be Summa Elvetica by Vox Day and Politics by Aristotle. If you have a preference as to which you’d like to see released first, please let us know in the comments.

No challenge, no escape

Alt★Hero Episode 4 is now live on Webtoons.

In other project news, we have decided that the fourth book in the Castalia Library series will be Dante’s The Divine Comedy, complete with woodcuts from the 1491 Venetian edition by Pietro di Piasi Cremonese. While we had originally intended to do Inferno, upon further contemplation of the task at hand, we decided the Library team was ready to tackle a more substantial project.

For grognards only

I have to say, I, for one, am really enjoying what Task Force Wargames has been doing over at Castalia. Reading Alex’s post on the old Avalon Hill game, Air Assault on Crete, is the first time I have ever wanted to play that game. The unusual zone control rules sound fascinating, and frankly, superior to the norm.

This game is hard. Very hard. Part of why it is hard is because it is rules heavy even for a wargame, but it is doubly so because it is so different from most war games I’ve played. This difficulty is a bit asymmetrical, as many of the special rules apply only to the German player (such as conveys, paratrooper drift and air power) but you’ll find in the options of the advanced game plenty of fiddly bits to keep the Allied player scratching their head and checking the rulebook. You also can’t bring with you any mechanical assumptions you may have based on other similar wargames because so many of those assumptions would be wrong in the case of Air Assault on Crete.

In several games, fog of war rules may be limited or optional, but I can’t imagine the Allies having a chance in this without the facedown setup. The Germans have to land, take and hold at least one of the three air bases at Maleme, Heraklion and Retimo. In the basic game, the Allies win by preventing this (an almost impossible task). In the advanced game, the Allied player wins by putting up a decent fight and successfully evacuating a sizable portion of their forces. The fog of war effect is continuous throughout the game, in that any Allied units that are not adjacent to German forces or actively being targeted by German bombardment are kept face down. This allows the Allied player to mask his strength and shuffle non-combat units to evac points, but can sometimes be a bit of a hassle, as one will constantly be checking their piles for AA units and defensive artillery anytime anything happens.

This sort of thing isn’t for everyone, or even very many gamers, let alone normal readers, but it is illustrate of the depth to which we intend the Castalia posts to increasingly go. If Wargame Wednesdays aren’t your cup of tea, one of the other days will be. And the newly discovered HP Lovecraft letter that Jeffro posted which mentions A. Merritt’s work is intriguing for any fan of the writer.

In barely tangential news, I am having a great time reading through the Domains of War rules that I acquired as part of the Sinister Stone of Sakkara kickstarter that I backed last year. If they’d been around when I was in junior high, I probably would have played a lot more RPGs. Forget role-playing as an adventurer wandering through caves and dungeons, it’s a lot more interesting to role-play military campaigns and battles.

New Castalia blogger: Morgan

We’re pleased to welcome the first of FOUR new Castalia House bloggers today, as Morgan makes his debut with a post on what he describes as the Sword & Sorcery Extinction Event:

In the early 1980s, if you were new to the sword and sorcery genre, you
could go to your local chain bookstore, generally B. Dalton or Walden
Books and get the core library in short order. Robert E. Howard’s Conan,
Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock’s Elric
were all there. There was a period around 1983 that you could get Karl
Edward Wagner’s Kane books, C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, and Timescape
editions of Clark Ashton Smith. Sword and sorcery in paperback form went
back to 1966 with the Lancer editions of Conan. There was a post-Conan
sword and sorcery boom in the late 1960s where you had Brak, Thongor,
Kothar with eye catching covers painted by Frank Frazetta or Jeff Jones.
That died out around 1971.

There was a second boom in the late 1970s
fueled by Zebra Books reissues of Robert E. Howard non-Conan material
and Berkley Medallion issuing of nine collections and one novel and
another six reissues of previous Zebra paperbacks with new covers. All this created a coat tails effect with new sword and sorcery novels
and anthologies published. Many of them were bad. Some of the books were
really science fiction disguised to look like sword and sorcery. The
minor publishers such as Manor, Zebra, and Tower were looking for
anything to slap a barbarian with a sword on the cover. Those publishers
were gone in the early 80s leaving Ace, D.A.W., Bantam, Del Rey, and
the new Tor Books as the main publishers.

Morgan will be blogging on Sundays; we’ll be introducing the other new bloggers in the coming weeks.

Of books and games

Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games chimes in:

So, one of my other gigs – beyond making Cool Space Combat Games, is
being a science checker for SF writers for Baen.  I got asked by Vox Day
to write a science article for their new anthology series “Riding the
Red Horse” – which released yesterday. In its first day of
release, it’s done impressively – it’s climbing up the paid Kindle
listings and is a category leader in Military SF and SF in general.

Ken’s “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military Science Fiction” is a must-read for any science fiction author. And check this out… Ad Astra is about to come out with the Traveller version of Squadron Strike!

From the most recent review of RIDING THE RED HORSE: “I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of mil sci-fi short stories and essays on war. Each
story left me wanting more of the universe in which it takes place (my
favourite of the shorts was the last one: “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa,),
and each essay made me marvel at the genius of the respective author. I
wouldn’t consider myself a military theory buff, but the essays in this
collections certainly awakened a hunger in me to find out more and
explore the world of war-gaming.”