The second edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, our semi-legendary game of tall tales and empty wineglasses, has been reprinted and is now available from fine retailers all over the internet. A third edition is in the works, for release before Christmas 2013, featuring an entirely new section co-written by Alexandr Munchausen, a descendant of Baron Munchausen himself.
As of 1st April 2011 Magnum Opus Press no longer publishes the Dragon Warriors RPG. The rights have transferred to Serpent King Games, whose website you will find by clicking here:
But we’re still publishing some cool and interesting stuff, and we have new projects in the pipeline, so check us out.
People have been asking what Magnum Opus is going to do now that we’re not publishing Dragon Warriors any more. The simple answer: we’re not going away. We will continue to release games, books and interesting things that blur the lines between the two.
Case in point: AFTERLIVES, our latest PDF-only title. AFTERLIVES is a meta-RPG (or a systemless scenario for any fantasy RPG, if you prefer to call it that) which asks: do player-characters have souls, and if so what happens to them when the PC dies? Do they go to their religion’s version of heaven or hell? And can you influence that?
It’s a 22-page one-shot by acclaimed author/designer James Wallis with art by Gustave Dore (known for illustrating The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the Bible). Dragon Warriors creator Dave Morris says that it “bears the sure touch of Wallis genius”.
AFTERLIVES is available as a DRM-free PDF from DriveThruRPG, for $4.95 (click here to visit the site). Later in the year we’ll make it available as a limited-edition chapbook.
And there will be more to follow. You can rely on it.
At midnight on 31st March Magnum Opus Press loses the right to publish and sell Dragon Warriors books, so this is literally your last chance to buy copies from us.
Buy the e-Books here as DRM-free PDFs.
There are terrific offers and bundles to be had, and it all goes off sale in a few hours, so dive in now.
The new home for Dragon Warriors is Serpent King Games, a new British company founded by Ian Sturrock, Jon Hodgson and Gareth Hanrahan. Ian edited many of the Magnum Opus titles and Jon provided amazing cover art and interiors for them, so you can rest assured that the game is in good hands. There’s a press release at their website above.
Meanwhile as we approach the hand-over dates we’re clearing out the warehouses of the old Magnum Opus stocks of ebooks and print titles.
At our store on DriveThruRPG we’ve cut the price of every single Dragon Warriors PDF to less than half the recommended price of the print edition, and there are some amazing bundles on offer as well—including a copy of every single book we released for the game for less than US$90.
The guys at Mongoose have followed our example and made some huge reductions on the prices of the print edition of Dragon Warriors and its supplements. Unlike the PDFs there are limited stocks of those and when they’re gone they’re gone. And everything comes off sale on 1st April anyway, so don’t waste time.
Meanwhile work progresses on Alas Vegas. It’s looking good.
You come back to consciousness. Your mouth is full of dirt. Your body is covered with it, the weight pressing you down into the earth. As your mind claws back to the surface your arms are instinctively doing the same, digging frantically through the soil to the air above you.
You break through, exploding into the cold night like a body reborn, your lungs burning for oxygen, pulling yourself out of the shallow grave beneath you.
You’re in the desert. The soulless moon gives faint light to the scene. There are other people here. Naked like you, dirt-stained, silently watching. Behind you in the grave another body lurches upright, another one returning to life.
Who buried you for dead here, in the wilderness? How did you get here? Why can’t you remember? Why can’t you remember anything?
On the horizon there is a glow of colours, pulsing like some great city ablaze, and a red beam stretches between the land and the infinity of the night sky, reaching to the stars. Sometimes it flickers.
There will be answers there.
Magnum Opus Press is proud to announce that its next release will be the role-playing game Alas Vegas by James Wallis, the award-winning creator of Once Upon a Time and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and progenitor of the ‘Story Game’ genre.
Alas Vegas is Wallis’s first new RPG design since 1998’s Baron Munchausen, which was translated into five languages and nominated for two Origins Awards and an Ennie Award.
Set in a hyper-real casino city ruled by a secretive ‘Rat Pack’, the player-characters have a set time to work out why they were left for dead in the desert, who did this to them, and how to set things right. If they fail, much more then their lives is at stake. Alas Vegas is a story of memory, self, sin, redemption and gambling that plays out over four game-sessions, each with a different games-master (‘Dealer’). The games mechanics are simple, fast-moving and, says Wallis, ‘possibly the best thing I’ve ever designed. I am ridiculously proud of how well this game has come together.’
At present Alas Vegas has no fixed release date or page-length. The cover illustration is being created by 2000AD artist Graeme Neil Reid.
The game will be available as an ebook or softcover release, a ‘Minor Arcana’ signed hardcover in an edition of 56 copies, a ‘Major Arcana’ hyper-limited hardcover edition of 22 copies, and a one-off ‘art release’ of the first printed copy of the game transformed into a unique piece of themed sculpture, priced at US$999/UK£666.
More details and information on how to preorder will be released as soon as they are confirmed.
As you may have heard from other sources, Magnum Opus Press will cease publishing the Dragon Warriors RPG on 1st April 2011. All books and PDFs will no longer be purchasable from  the publisher or its business partners (Mongoose Publishing and DriveThruRPG) after then..
Despite the date, this is not a joke. This is a mutual agreement between Fabled Lands LLC, the legal owners of the Dragon Warriors game, and Magnum Opus Press.
As you can imagine there are all kinds of reasons and bits of background to this decision, but this isn’t the place to get into them. Buy James Wallis a couple of drinks the next time you see him at a convention and he’ll probably tell you.
It’s not all bad news, however. Â A new company is ready to take up the reins of the game, and if things go according to plan you won’t even notice a bump between the end of the Magnum Opus reign and the start of the new era. We can’t give you any more details until they’re formally announced, but updates and links will be posted here as soon as we have clearance to release them. And we can say that we have it on good authority that they’ve restarted work on the long-awaited Players’ Book.
Maybe they’ll update their blog more often than we did. One can only hope.
Our latest release is a delightful and extraordinary piece of historical footnotery: a facsimile of a pamphlet printed in the UK in 1669, entitled The Flying Serpent, or Strange News Out of Essex. It concerns the appearance of a monstrous winged snake in a village close to the market-town of Saffron Walden and describes the reactions of the locals to it. The anonymous author 
then details other extraordinary serpents that have been recorded as appearing in England, with particular reference to a Cockatrice that was killed near Saffron Walden itself, and describes other strange snake-like beings known to the ancients, including the scorpion and the rhinocerote.
Yes. The Flying Serpent is a bit mad.
Mad, that is, by the standards of the modern day. We think of 1669 as a time of post-Cromwellian enlightenment—after all people had, mostly, stopped burning each other at stakes—but the concepts of science and the scientific process were in their infancy, the great bulk of information was still passed by word of mouth and almost everybody took mythology and folklore at face value. This is a charming example of that: the details of the serpent are mixed in with verses and quotations, and there’s no clear division between what is real and what’s conjecture, or even fact and fiction.
It’s a fascinating and funny piece of historial trivia—there’s even a joke about lawyers in it—and we’re proud to make it available again after so long. Even if it does lead to yet more jokes about people from East Anglia.
You can read more about The Flying Serpent by clicking here or buy a copy from DriveThruRPG for a modest $1.50 by clicking here.
In From the Cold, a 112-page collection of Dave Morris’s classic articles and adventures from the golden age of White Dwarf magazine, will be appearing on shelves in the first week of November, and in ebook form around the same time. You can find out more about it here, order a print copy from our publishing partners here, or check out our range of ebooks at DriveThruRPG here.
We’ve finally got a page up for In From The Cold, our November release of the best of Dave Morris’s work for White Dwarf magazine in the 1980s—all lovingly retooled for Dragon Warriors.
Some of the contents: complete information on Demonologists and how to create them as player-characters or vile NPCs; a new chapter of demons and another of demon-princes, and how to summon them. Ideas on how to use undead in your game without them becoming the tedious cannon-fodder they are in some other RPGs. And loads of adventures—six in all— including the much demanded ‘A Box of Old Bones’, now expanded with three new endings.