In November 2022 we present the Magician’s Skull Quick Deal featuring Tales From the Magician’s Skull from Goodman Publications. Magician’s Skull is a swords-and-sorcery fiction magazine of new adventures full of sword-swinging action, dark magic, and ferocious monsters, in the tradition of Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard, Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, and other Appendix N greats. Each story is beautifully illustrated. Many tales include location maps, and each issue has an appendix that gives Dungeon Crawl Classics game statistics for elements from the stories – creatures, magic items, and more.
The Goodman Games Adventures in Fiction blog shows the company’s love for vintage genre authors. In 2017 Goodman’s Howard Andrew Jones founded the Magician’s Skull magazine and sustained it through successive Kickstarter campaigns in October 2017, July 2019, and November 2021. “Sword-and-sorcery holds a special place in my heart, over and above nearly every other kind of fiction,” he wrote in a campaign updated called “The Pledge of the Sword (reprinted in Issue #0 in this offer).
“I’ve thought long and hard about what it is that makes sword-and-sorcery special to me, and that has an awful lot to do with the qualities I outlined while I was attempting to define the genre at the beginning of this Kickstarter. Great sword-and-sorcery is usually moving at a fast clip. It takes you somewhere interesting in the company of fascinating characters, exposing you along the way to scenes of dread and wonder. There are great action set pieces that actually count for something, entertaining side characters and villains, surprises and sometimes twists, and a conclusion that satisfies. […] Characters are shown overcoming a terrible challenge with wit and brawn. Sword-and-sorcery is part and parcel of the mythic cycles we’ve been sharing around the campfire since the earliest days of our species. We’d hear how our ancestors chased down the elusive stag, or fended off the clawed thing in the dark, or guided the tribe to safety through a land of enemies. In listening, we were inspired to emulate courageous action and to not stand idle when times were dark and all hope seemed lost.”
This Magician’s Skull Quick Deal included eight complete issues of Tales From the Magician’s Skull in .PDF format, plus Cubicles of the Skull, a high-spirited booklet of inter-office memoranda from your host, the Immortal Skull. (All the memos begin, “Heed me, mortal dogs!”) Pay just US$12.95 to get nine titles in our Skull Collection (retail value $70) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including Tales From the Magician’s Skull issue #0, issue #1, issue #2, issue #3, issue #4, issue #5, issue #6, and issue #7, as well as Cubicles of the Skull.
