December, 2008
What we were doing when we weren't hunting turkeys with sharpened Q-Tips...

Well, we were kind of busy over here at Occult Entertainment this month. Especially with our Tidbits. For starters, we darkened the four graph paper types, then re-uploaded them to Tidbits. We tried printing them out, but they were way to light for our printers. We also uploaded a 1024 x 768 overview map of the world of Zymph - you can find it in the Zymph section of our web site. (Or, you can simply download it from the product bar on the right). We also added the DM Data Sheet - something to use when your playing away from a computer. Think of it as a paper version of DM Secretary. And we can't forget about the Dice Sheet we added to Tidbits - when you don't want to use dice (or can't, or forgot to bring them), these sheets work pretty well as a substitute. We use them in our game currently because we haven't gotten of our lazy arses and bought new dice to replace the ones we lost during our last move. Anyway, there's one for each die type, and they generate new random numbers each time the file is open. You can use either Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice to read the file. And, last but not least, weadded the NPC Data Sheet to Tidbits - it's a way to easily keep important NPC information on hand during a game. It's mainly intended for players for NPCs or animals / familiars under their care, but DMs can use it also. We're about to use it in our game - we'll change it up if the players feel something else needs to be added or taken away (or if one of you shoots an interesting comment about something you would like to see added to it or removed.) It's pretty basic, we know, but it's also useful.

We also played catch-up a bit. We uploaded the source code (as promised) for DM Secretary - we know, it's not version 5, but it's a start. From now on, every version of DM Secretary we create will also have the source code downloadable from our web site. We are also looking into SourceForge, but for now our web site will have to do.

And we still have some catching-up to do. Zymph 3rd Edition is due out, but we haven't finished it yet. This is due to our hard drive crashing, and having to wait until we could afford to buy a whole new computer. Problem solved, and production is back to normal. Expect it out sometime this month.

On The Horizon...
Straight from the fingers of the OE staff

Well, we are going to completely redo the newsletter format for 2009 - something much slicker and graphically appeasing. DM Secretary 5 is coming to a close - we're going to put it through the ringer a little before we release it to the masses, however. Stay tuned - the wait will be worth it! We also plan on expanding all our worlds with supplemental material. You'll see what we mean soon...