As promised, here’s the Warpcon scenario for Rakehell, The Chimneys of Whiteham (3.4M pdf), breaking new ground in the genre of occult Georgian chimney-sweeping horror. Download, read, play, give feedback!

The previous scenario, The Highwayman’s Lament (2.4M pdf) has also been tweaked slightly. If you haven’t seen it already, please take a look. Both scenarios include five pregenerated player characters and a brief synopsis of the FATE rules. Having a copy of Spirit of the Century to hand might be helpful, but is not strictly required.

There’ll be another Rakehell game this year, probably at Gaelcon. After that, we’ll push towards actually producing a rulebook. These free downloads are explorations of the Rakehell concept – The Highwayman’s Lament was the proof of concept, and The Chimneys of Whiteham tried something other than highwaymen and hellfire. The third scenario will focus on building campaigns and episodic play, as opposed to the occult blood opera of the two previous games.

(The blood opera has been tremendous fun, though. Every Rakehell game so far has involved murder, passionate arguments, stabbings, damnation and emotional compels by the dozen.)

We’ve also overhauled the look of the site, adding shiny new widgets that will make future updates smoother and (hopefully) more frequent.

As was announced last week, I’ve joined Serpent King Games, a new company set up to keep the classic Dragon Warriors in print. There’ll be another annoucement along related lines in the next few weeks, and I’m also regularly freelancing for Pelgrane, Mongoose, Cubicle 7 and other companies. Most of my time is taken up with gaming material for other companies. That doesn’t mean Milkyfish is going anywhere, though – we’re keeping Milkyfish as a separate imprint for projects by Edel & Gar. The lack of significant progress on Rakehell and Anomaly One is unfortunately due to time constraints on both of us. Edel’s in the middle of her college course, and I’ve been freelancing to pay the bills as well as working on some fiction. We’re both fighting for time, but the ‘fish is dear to both of us. It may be seem to be a poor neglected fish, but it will see its day.

Rakehell got another outing at Warpcon – the scenario this time was an experiment in pushing the boundaries of the concept, to see if the game could support something other than highwaymen and running around with pistols. The player characters in the Warpcon scenario, The Chimneys of Whiteham, were a bunch of orphaned chimneysweeps aged between 8 and 15, with not a single flintlock among them. The game worked very well, and got some excellent feedback from players (check out the Adventuring Party podcast, for example – the Rakehell discussion kicks off around the 28:55 mark).

The Whiteham scenario will be made available for download soon.