In July 2018 we once again marked America’s Independence Day holiday by resurrecting our July 2017 Colonial Gothic Bundle, featuring the supernatural flintlock-horror RPG from Rogue Games. In Colonial Gothic you uncover the secret history of America’s 18th-Century frontier, where monsters stalk the woods and ghosts haunt every sleepy hollow. As with its original run, this bargain-priced revival gathered almost the entire Colonial Gothic gaming line — everything you need for a complete campaign of magic and mayhem in the shadows of early America. In 2018 Rogue Games added recent major supplements to the lineup — and, as always, all previous purchasers of the original July 2017 offer also received the newly added books automatically.
Colonial Gothic uses the fast and cinematic “12 Degree System” (Thousand Suns and Shadow, Sword, and Spell), described on the Rogue Games website. In its cinematic context the game supports a wide range of historical approaches, from plausible “High Action” (Last of the Mohicans, Dances With Wolves) to “Occult & Mystery” (Sleepy Hollow) to outright “Supernatural” (Brotherhood of the Wolf, Pirates of the Caribbean, Van Helsing).
There were seven titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $47) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Colonial Gothic Third Edition rulebook (retail price $10), three essential supplements (Gamemaster, Adventure, and The Player Companion, total retail $21), the adventures The Landlord’s Daughter (retail $7) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (retail $1), and the 174-page Beginnings adventure (retail $8) that kicks off the Flames of Freedom campaign about the American Revolution.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price, which was set at $17.76 to start, also got our entire Bonus Collection with eleven more titles worth an additional $82:
- New in this revival! Colonial Gothic Atlas (retail $10): A comprehensive 290-page guide to the Thirteen Colonies, the Province of Maine, New France, the Caribbean Islands, and East and West Florida. (And if you purchased this offer last July, you get the Atlas automatically on your Wizard’s Cabinet download page.)
- New! Journey to Norumbega (retail $8): A Lovecraftian mega-adventure set in the pre-colonial New World well before the American Revolution. (Another automatic addition to the Cabinets of earlier customers.)
- Five sourcebooks and setting guides: The Grimoire (retail $6), Bestiary (retail $7), The Templars (retail $5), Settings (retail $8), and The French & Indian War (retail $8).
- Lovecraft (retail $7): Bring the Cthulhu Mythos onto the American frontier.
- New! Colonial Gothic Gamemaster Screen (retail $10): Useful reference charts.
- The Defeated Dead (retail $8): A ghost story of vengeful soldiers at the site of the US Army’s greatest defeat.
- New! Heart in a Jar (retail $5): A brand-new haunted house adventure presented exclusively in this offer and available nowhere else.
As with the original run, the entire Rogue Games share of this revival’s proceeds was donated to the charity selected by Rogue Games owner Richard Iorio II, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “Over the weekend of June 12-14, 2015 I lost three friends in succession to suicide,” Richard writes. “The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention helps you understand why this event happened and, more important, they offer comfort. They cannot take away the pain, but they can help you deal with it.” Richard wrote about the AFSP on this blog: “The Colonial Gothic Bundle and the ASFP“.
