Publishing Tales: Gods & Legends

The Making of Gods and Legends

Our recently released RPG manual, Gods & Legends, has its genesis in a previously published title, Of Gods & Monsters by James M. Ward. That latter title was selling out and would need updating and reprinted or replaced. In long talks with one of TLG’s editors, Steve Ege, the idea of updating the manuscript by greatly expanding the idea behind the deity avatars dominated my thinking. That changed however as I dug deeper into the content.

About this time our Thursday night game took on a whole new direction. Davis’ cleric, long calling himself the Mouth of Gods, started proselytizing about bringing back an ancient forest (the Uthvold) and with that the power of the Og Aust (ancient gods of the Darkenfold and Uthvold, see Aihrde material). Mac Golden’s character, Ki, took up the cause with gusto. Ki served the god Amunet, one of the Og Aust, as a knight of sorts, so joining Davis’ crusade proved an easy transition. The two led the rest of the party in an ever-growing interaction with the gods.

This led to more nuanced play and design from my point, as some type of consistent reaction from the gods proved necessary. This in turn led me to begin thinking about the gods and their role at the table.

Come along the C&C Players Handbook 7^th printing Kickstarter. This madcap project proved a winner on that platform and in the waning days of it, having run out of stretch rewards I foolishly offered up the Gods and Monsters, 2^nd Edition (not printing as it would be a massive rewrite) as a stretch reward. Everyone loved the idea, though I did put a heavy caveat on the reward that it was only in the earliest of conception phases. Well, we hit the reward and it landed in the pile of books on the schedule.

And there it languished. It languished for many years as I went through several writers and an ever-evolving concept of what I wanted out of the book. Despite this, I never fully forgot about the project, largely because a few backers on the KS kept reminding me and I kept needing more deity material for my Thursday game. It lingered on the edge of my mind.

Fast forward to 2019/2020.

As we finalized work on the Codex Egyptium by Brian Young, I had the sudden and final revelation of what I wanted this book to be, of its place in the TLG library. I saw it as a bookend to Young’s Mythos series (Celtarum, Nordica, Germania, Slavorum, Classicum, and Egyptium) but not one that had monsters in it, just Gods. Gods and how to play them. Here we are with an open-ended series of Mythos books but no real instruction on how to use them. Gods & Monsters, 2^nd edition would be that instruction manual. I furthered the thought by pulling the monsters out, with the plan to move those to another book entirely. A second bookend. The Gods book, rapidly dropping its title, would be one bookend to the mythos series, the monster book the other. With no clear title, but finally a clear agenda I began looking for an author (third time’s the charm my mother always says).

 Davis was hard at work on the Inzae mythos (his world setting, see Dragon’s Crucible) when it occurred to me that he could write the Gods & Monsters, 2^nd Edition. He likes to work on multiple projects so I posed it to him and he said sure, give me a Table of Contents and an outline of what you want. Whipping that up I sent it to him and without much comment, he dove into it. The proposed idea was to make the gods more playable at the table, to give guidance and new ideas on what to do with the gods and how they interact. He loves this type of content as the gods play a heavy role in his world of Inzae. I enlisted Zoe DeVos to join Peter and Jason Walton in doing the art and the book at long last began to take shape.

Davis began hammering it out in the next half year. Writing up scores of gods for monsters and demi-humans and humans, fleshing out sections on how to play the gods, and creating all manner of minor myths. As it developed I took his manuscripts and began weaving them into the forthcoming Planescapes books so that we could line the products up.

As I began rambling through his text the mountain of tiny stories stood out. All these legends about these gods were cool and gave plenty of context for the gods themselves.

Then it hit me. The title wouldn’t work. I pulled the monsters out. It was Gods & Monsters no more, just gods and how-to’s. After some long debate with Davis, who frankly didn’t care what the title was as he never does, I settled on the title Gods & Legends. There were plenty of gods, but the book abounded with legends as well. It seemed to fit perfectly.

The book suffered some more delays as other projects consumed my time and GL was knocked about. But by early 2021 it took shape. The art poured in and proved amazing. I settled on a cover I had purchased from Doug Kovacs many years ago and at last, moved the whole project to layout. Peter Bradley hammered this together and I rolled back through and touched it up and then it went off to the printers.

At long last, after many, many years (this is our second-longest-running project, coming in after the first printing of the Castle Keepers Guide), Gods & Legends shipped to the backers of that almost forgotten Kickstarter (we are already on an 8^th printing of the PHB) and went up in the store, where you can find it now.

Another wild ride in the annals of TLG publishing… and now work begins on Monsters of Legend…