"The modern master of the gamebook format" (Rob Sanders)... "Can do dark very well" (Jonathan Oliver)... "Green gets mileage out of his monsters" (SFX Magazine)... "It takes a firm editorial hand and a keen understanding of the tone of each piece to make a collection this diverse work, and Green makes it look effortless" (Starburst Magazine)... "A charming blend of camp creatures, humour, and genuine horror" (Set the Tape)
All profits from sales on DriveThruRPG.com during May will go to help fund an autism assistance dog for 16-year-old Skye.
🐾 HELP SKYE GET HER AUTISM ASSISTANCE DOG 🐾
My friends Jeremy and Rebecca really need your help. Their 16-year-old daughter Skye has recently received an autism diagnosis, and an assistance dog could transform her life - giving her independence, reducing anxiety, and helping her return to education.
They have secured her place on the Autism Assistance Dog Programme (at a cost of several thousand pounds!) but they now need to raise £10,995 for the training stage.
Every share and donation brings Skye closer to her life-changing companion.
🐾 WHAT MAKES AN AUTISM ASSISTANCE DOG SO SPECIAL? 🐾
These aren't ordinary pets or even typical therapy dogs:
Specialised training - These dogs receive extensive training specifically for autistic individuals.
Legal public access rights - They can accompany Skye everywhere - into shops, colleges, cafes, and all public places.
Life-changing interventions - They're trained to recognise signs of distress and provide immediate help by performing deep pressure therapy during anxiety attacks, disrupting self-harming behaviours, creating a physical barrier in overwhelming situations, and providing stability and routine in daily life.
Organise a fundraiser, such as a bake sale, sponsored event, etc.
Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving - they'll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they withdraw funds directly.
If you can do nothing else, please share this blog post and the Justgiving page with all your contacts.
If you were in Jeremy and Becky's position, wouldn't you do all you could to help your daughter?
Last year I donated some prizes to the Con+2 online convention. This year's convention has been brought forward from October to now, because of the coronavirus pandemic. Here's a wizard to tell you more...
The Butterfly Project is going the extra mile to provide basic necessities for the nearby slum districts during their COVID-19 lockdown. However, due to Ugandan laws The Butterfly Project is really struggling with this. Currently there is no one else supplying aid to these people, so the need for donations really is urgent this year.
To help raise money for The Butterfly Project people and companies within the gaming industry have donated prizes for the Con+3 giveaway. If you check out the sponsors page you will see that I have donated three ACE Gamebooks prizes.
Con+3 is running all this weekend, 16th-17th May, so make sure you check it out and find out how to take part here.
ConPlus is an annual online 24-hour tabletop RPG convention which is raising funds for renowned charity The Butterfly Project. This year's convention, Con+2, will take place on 11th October - 13th October 2019 (UTC time).
340 Prizes from 57 sponsors across the world of gaming are all being given away for free to Con+2 attendees. To win prizes all you have to do is tune in to their 24-hour World's Biggest RPG Prize Giveaway stream on YouTube and take part in the chat. You will be able to find the stream hosted here.
The livestream begins on Saturday, 12th October, at midday UTC (1:00pm in the UK, 2:00pm in Europe, 8:00am East Coast America, and 5:00am on the West Coast), although all times are approximate and subject to change.
I have donated a couple of ACE Gamebooks to the cause, and they are going to be up for grabs at 19:00 UTC on Saturday.
Do you know your Calacorms from your Clawbeasts? Do you know the difference between a Krell and a Krell? Can you find your way around a map of north-western Allansia?
We are raising money for the men's health charity Prostate Cancer UK, in memory of Freeway Fighter illustrator Kevin Bulmer. Once costs have been covered, all proceeds will be donated to Prostate Cancer UK.
So here's an extract from my seventh Ulysses Quicksilver Pax Britannia novel Anno Frankenstein...
Amiens, France,
1943
General
Sir Henry Stamford Raffles raised a large pair of brass-rimmed binoculars to
his eyes and scanned the enemy lines in front of him on the other side of the
battlefield.
A low mist drifted across the black
water craters between the barbed wire lines. Beyond the pitted, churned-up grey
muddy mess of No Man’s Land the men and machines of the Third Reich were
arrayed; everything from standard troopers and Jotun-class tanks to clanking
units of bipedal Landsknechts and even the occasional remade abomination.
The Nazi menace was persistent, he’d
give them that.
Raffles lowered his binoculars,
placing them on the silver tea tray his batman was holding out ready beside him
and picking up the cooling cup of tea next to them. He took a sip, the leather
armchair creaking as he eased his bulk back into it, crossed his ankles on a
footstool in front of him and took in the Magna Britannia forces, of which he
was commander-in-chief, with a proud, rosy-cheeked grin.
To
his left stood the massed ranks of the Galahad and Gawain regiments, ten
thousand automata strong. To his right were arrayed the combined might of
Lancelot and Percival; another ten thousand head of robo-infantry. Supporting
them were the gigantic land battleships Samson
and Atlas, their arms replaced with
mighty cannon and mortars, Gatling guns and iron spear-firing ballistae. He
could hear the mighty roar of their engines as their crews stoked their
boilers, thick black smoke and geysers of white steam rising from their towering
smokestacks. The land battleships of the Wellington Dreadnought Brigade were
indeed a sight to behold, the Britannian flag snapping from the banner-poles in
the chill autumnal wind.
And
there were men of flesh and blood amongst the forces too – weapons crews,
engine teams, stokers, droid handlers, engineers, tacticians, not to mention
the trusted Tommy foot soldier and those men piloting the stalker tanks and
Trojan support vehicles that followed the automaton infantry – but there
weren’t many. Only a couple of hundred compared to the twenty thousand
grunt-bots. And, as General Kensington Gore, the oft quoted First Great
European War general and all round hero, was famously remembered for saying,
“Give me one hundred droids or, failing that, a thousand ordinary men.” But
then he had been virtually half-automaton himself.
It
was a sign of Raffles’ status and rank that he had been afforded the privilege
of leading the Magna Britannian forces at Amiens into battle from atop his own
personalised pachyderm-droid Hannibal.
Before freedom-threatening war had come to the heartlands of Europe for a
second time, he had served in India, where the vision of the monstrous
robo-phant charging the gates of Bombay had sent many a revolutionary fleeing
for his life.
The howdah shading Raffles and his
batman from the weak rays of the milky sun – the commander-in-chief’s command
post might have looked out of place, had it not been for the Magna Britannian
iconography that had been worked into the ornate scrollwork of the giant droid’s
flanks.
Raffles
eased himself back into his chair. He could feel the comforting rumble of the
boiler bubbling in the guts of the metal beast as its own engines were stoked
with coke, ready for action. He was going to enjoy this. It was going to be a
walk in the park, but he was looking forward to it anyway.
Putting
the china cup to his lips at last, he took a sip. He grimaced; the tea was
cold. With a flick of the wrist he sent the contents of the cup raining down
over the side of the pachyderm onto an unsuspecting automaton below. He rattled
the teacup and its saucer back onto the tray.
“Is
the pot still warm?” he asked of his batman, without once taking his eyes from
the battlefield vista in front of him.
He could see sinister airborne
shapes – something like birds and something like flying bombs – circling and
wheeling above the enemy lines. He was comforted by knowledge of the fact that
above his own forces the Darwin Corps’ tamed
Pterosaurshung
from the airborne eyries of the airship Harridan,
ready to swoop down and rend any enemy aerial forces wing from wing.
Lister
put a hand to the silvered teapot sitting on the small stove at the back of the
howdah, testing the temperature. “Yes, sir.”
“Then
poor me another cup.”
“Right
away, sir,” Lister replied dutifully.
“Do you think we’ll win, sir?”
Lister asked as he passed the general a steaming cup. It only remained for the
general to add the cream or lemon as he saw fit.
Raffles turned a withering gaze upon
his batman.
“The Germans are losing this war,
Lister, their resources are stretched to the limit and this is a last ditch
attempt devised by the Führer and his lackeys to hold back the inevitable. Show
some backbone, man! Whatever happened to your stiff upper lip, and all that?
Mark my words, we’ll have this all wrapped up in time for Tiffin. Then we’ll be
in Paris in time for cocktails and Berlin for a little hair of the dog
tomorrow. You mark my words!”
General Sir Henry Stamford Raffles
took a sip. “Ah, that’s much better.” Satisfied, he placed the cup carefully
back on its saucer on the tray, exchanging it for the speaking tube hung on its
trunk-like hose in the bracket on the other side of his chair. He raised the
speaking horn to his mouth.
“Men and automatons of the Magna
Britannian Fourth Cybernetic Expeditionary Company, we march to war, that we
might eradicate the Nazi menace once and for all. We march for Queen and
country! We march for freedom from oppression! The command is given, and that
command is – atta–”
But Sir Raffles’ command to engage
was drowned by a scream of burning air and boiling mist as a beam of
retina-searing light, like fire from heaven, streaked down out of the sky. It
hit the front row of Galahad regiment which vanished in a blinding flash of
concentrated sunlight. The crump of the explosions that followed in the wake of
the beam’s unkind caresses reached Raffles a moment later.
The
flaming spear vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving Raffles blinking
grey supernovae from before his eyes and seeing nothing of the automaton
infantry line but a mass of fused and burning wreckage that might once have
been man-shaped droids.
The beam came again, a sustained
blast this time, taking out the entire front line of Lancelot to his right.
Raffles
was out of his chair now, panic rendering him silent.
The
giant Atlas was the next target of
the devastating death ray, the British colours cooking off its hull plating
under its fiery fury, the Britannia flags flapping from its exhaust stacks
reduced to blackened cinders that were then carried away as glowing orange
embers on the firestorm wind following the beam’s onslaught.
Two
seconds later, the shells inside the giant’s right arm cannon touched off.
The
force of the explosion flattened almost all of Gawain regiment and even
threatened to send the Hannibal
crashing over onto its side, but the pachyderm stood firm, all ten tons of it.
“By
all the saints!” Raffles spluttered as he picked himself up off the floor of
the howdah, his ears ringing. The tray beside his seat was swimming in hot tea
now, the cup tossed over by the force of the explosion. “What the blazes was
th-”
His sentence remained unfinished as
the super-heated death ray found its next target.
If you are interested in owning a copy of the very rare, cloth-bound Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland collector's edition and the hardback collector's edition of The Wicked Wizard of Oz, and would like to do your bit for charity in the process, please check out my auction lot on Authors for Grenfell.
DETAILS: Jonathan will sign and personalise a hardback copy of each of the choose your path adventure gamebooks Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland and The Wicked Wizard of Oz, dedicated to you or the person of your choice. You will also receive one set of collectible Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland playing cards and a set of The Wicked Wizard of Oz playing cards.
Today, seeing as how it is Christmas Eve and the season of giving, Barnaby Eaton-Jones announced the total raised for charity by the Robin of Sherwood: The Knights of the Apocalypse Indiegogo campaign. And that total is...
£18,000!
That's £9,000 each for The Sherwood Forest Trust and The British Red Cross, Richard 'Kip' Carpenter's two favourite charities.
Congratulations to all involved, and a special thank you to everyone who purchased my novelisation of the script perk.
I'm joining the likes of Kim Marsh, and thousands of others, by challenging myself to a DECHOX and giving up chocolate for March to raise money for lifesaving heart research.
In November 2001 my father passed away as the result of a sudden and massive heart attack. The following year my sister-in-law ran the London Marathon, raising money for the British Heart Foundation and, quite frankly, it's about time I did something big in the hope of helping to make a big difference for the charity too.
As anyone who knows me will realise (especially people who've sat beside me in the dealers' room at a convention), giving up chocolate in all its forms is going to be no mean feat. That said, the benefits could be huge - I might lose some weight, for a start. But it's not going to be easy, and that's where you come in.
Please consider sponsoring me. Any donation is most welcome, no matter how small (or how large for that matter). You can do so very simply here, through my JustGiving page.
I'll finish by letting you check out the advert for the campaign, which, bizarrely, features my godson as Terry, a very well-spoken policeman. (And yes, I believe he is available to work on new projects.)
