Announcing: Book of Extinction

We're working with a good friend of ours, Lucas Zellers (@SparkOtter), to craft a new book that gives life to extinct animals through Dungeons and Dragons: the Book of Extinction. It's about history, conservation, and some of the coolest animals that have ever lived, but you've never heard of. 

Every animal gets two sets of stats and lore: its historical story with real-world appropriate stats, and its lore as a D&D monster, with magical powers and cool stats. We're also going to be adding new races, subclasses, magic items, and an adventure. This is shaping up to be an extremely cool project launching in 2022, and I hope you'll join us as we craft this book largely in the public eye.

Preview Out Now

We're developing this project, three monsters at a time, on our Patreon. Right now, however, you can get the first three monsters on the Mage Hand Press store for Pay What You Want (including free). We're giving all the proceeds of this preview to conservation organizations working to preserve endangered species.

Making a Monster: Extinction Podcast!

But we're also doing something totally new: we're making a companion podcast as we create this book. We'll be interviewing experts and getting their insights into the history, biology, and stories of the animals-turned-monsters we feature in the book. Each entry in the book only gets about a thousand words of text, and their stories and far too interesting to fit entirely into that space. So this podcast is going to expand on what we highlight in the book, reveal some interesting glimpses into our game design, and hopefully just be super fun to listen to!

 The introduction episode of Making a Monster: Extinction is out now (and embedded below).

Mousefolk

Race
Comments from the Finger: We're around the last 48 hours or so of Valda's Spire of Secrets! This is the coolest thing we've ever made, it's reached over half a million on Kickstarter, and you should go pledge to it right now!

Mousefolk

"You laughed when I said I would repay you," said the Mouse. "Now you see that even a Mouse can help a Lion."

—Aesop, The Lion and the Mouse

Never to be looked down upon, the slight, unassuming mousefolk are kindhearted to a fault and possess courage greater than most giants.

Hoard Golem

Monster

Comments from the Finger: The terrible lich Valda takes great pride in how many adventurers he has slain, so much so that he has constructed an assistant made entirely out of magic items. If you like what you see, go support Valda's Spire of Secrets on Kickstarter today!

Also, I'm experimenting with a new square format of PDFs. Let me know what you think!

Hoard Golem

Sequestered in his Spire of Secrets, the mad lich Valda has devised the ultimate minion: the Hoard Golem, made entirely from discarded magic items. Nothing is more singularly valuable or deadly to adventures.

Magical Blades and Baubles. Seasoned adventuring companies have sought out the Spire of Secrets for centuries, which is rumored to be a stockpile of priceless treasures. Unbeknownst to most of them, the tower is a sinister death trap constructed by the lich Valda from which no one ever returns. Those who would perish inside the tower’s walls are even petrified in solid marble, so that its victims can’t be resurrected. Valda is perhaps single-handedly responsible for more slain adventurers than any other individual, a fact which delights him greatly.

However, as marble adventurers began to crowd the Spire’s multi-planar floors, the lich realized that the heroes brought more magic items than they could even carry. Their bags of holding, dancing swords, and spare suits of magical armor just piled up near the entrance. That wouldn’t do! Ever resourceful, the lich realized that he could thwart intruding heroes and clean up their mess in one fell swoop. Thus, the first ever Hoard Golem, which Valda dubbed “Dross,” was constructed.

Necromantic Construction. Even beyond its exotic and magical materials, the design of Dross is unique among golems. The hulking mountain of magic items is as much an enormous phylactery as it is a mechanical magical servant. As such, it can absorb spells wholesale, store them like a battery, and unleash them back at unwary spellcasters. 

Pledge Today! Spire of Secrets

In the flurry of the last couple days, I neglected to update our blog! 

Valda's Spire of Secrets is live! Go pledge!

Spire of Secrets | One Week Away!

The recent lack of posts are because I'm hard at work getting ready for the Valda's Spire of Secrets Kickstarter, which launches in about a week on the 31st! In this post, I'm going to tell you everything there is to know about the book itself, with a separate post letting you know about everything else in the Kickstarter later in the week. 

Click here and press the "Notify Me on Launch" button!

Valda's Spire of Secrets is a definitive expansion for DnD 5e. Coming in at 384 pages long, it contains 10 of our base classes, over 150 subclasses, and a ton of other stuff you'd expect from us at this point, including 130+ spells, dozens of feats, a mountain of exotic weapons and magic items, and a lot more.

If you're a regular around here, this is a chance to get the very best Mage Hand Press stuff in print in one place, so you can point at it and say "this is canon" at your table. If all of this is new to you, I'll break down the classes we're including in more detail.

Way of the Flagellant

Monastic Tradition

Comments from the Finger: If this looks familiar, it's because it's a redux of Way of the Wheel! And this will probably be the last redux post for a while, as our new book,

Valda's Spire of Secrets

is finally done! We're launching a Kickstarter for it starting on August 31st. Save the date, tell your friends. This is the Mage Hand Press Player's Handbook you've all been waiting for. We'll talk about it more in the coming weeks, but here's the elevator pitch: 380 pages, 10 base classes, 150+ subclasses. Get hyped.

Way of the Flagellant

The Way of the Flagellant teaches an extreme, sometimes heretical, view of asceticism: peace comes through suffering, purity through pain. Its practitioners shun all indulgences and embrace pain to harness their ki and isolate themselves further from the material world. As such, these monks often carry their eponymous flails and whips, both to use on themselves and their foes. Their pain is a mortal penitence and an act of focusing, letting them block out all else and manipulate their ki with expert intent.