Hello everyone!

Of all the Goodman Games products that "aren't Dungeon Crawl Classics," the one that receives the most attention to this day is DragonMech. It is, in a nutshell, "medieval fantasy mechs." As the back cover blurb says:

After an age of destruction, the Second Age of Walkers is now at hand. Explore the ruins of the surface world in sturdy iron mechs powered by steam, magic, or the labor of a thousand slaves!

In today's update, we will dive into DragonMech. But first: Phil Reed recently visited the Goodman Games offices and we recorded a video on the art book. If you are wondering what The Fantastic Art of Goodman Games will include, this video tells all about it!

One more preamble. Thanks for an awesome Gamehole Con!

Now, back to...

DragonMech

Where Zeitgeist designed Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor and Goodman Games published it, for Dragonmech (2004), Joe wanted to try it the other way around. He’d act as the design studio and have it published through White Wolf’s Sword & Sorcery imprint. “I provided a complete layout, ready to publish, ready to package,” says Goodman, “There was a complicated formula where I got some percentage of all the sales that went through distribution. And I did it because I assumed that White Wolf would have much better distribution than Goodman Games.” The game was also one of Joe’s first experiments with outsourcing the layout, art direction and graphic design, which was handled by Eric Mona’s Super Unicorn, who had previously worked on Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds.

The game was based on Joe’s home campaign at the time with his high school friends, “My brother Mike, Alan, Garrick, Stephen, “the other Steven” Pellicer, Ben Rhoades. I dedicated the book to my wife.” It was another of his cross-genre concoctions, with city-sized steampunk mechs housing thousands of people stomping across a post-apocalyptic fantasy landscape. “I built the whole thing from scratch,” he says, “I ran the group through several homebrew adventures; the first two, maybe two-and-a-half books were 95% generated by me and that gaming group. Some of the appeal was the gameplay, but the look and feel was amazing in that first edition, and I attribute that to Super Unicorn. They got the credit for it.”

Sales were good. After the core book, the arrangement continued for five more supplements, and Goodman Games published a sixth before d20 gave up the ghost. “It still comes up, people still remember it. Once a month somebody asks me to bring back Dragonmech.”

Yes, that art was AMAZING. Here is a random assortment of interior art...

One of these days, we should bring this back. One of these days...

That gaming group was one of the high points of those days. Such a great group, that held together for years. Only one photo remains of those times - this one:

Ah, DragonMech. I know some fans want to bring it back (hi Dieter!). Anybody else interested in a modernization of it at some point?