Announcement: Eldritch Commercial Release From: "Juggernaut Press" <pbm@gamesbymail.com> Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 00:00:00 +0000 After many months and many thousands of playtest turns, Eldritch is ready for commercial release on July 1. Now is a good time to reserve a position and get in on the ground floor of a huge open-ended fantasy game. For more information, please read the rulebook (the playtest rests are available at http://www.clark.net/pub/thomas/eldritch.htm), or glance through the deathless prose I've pasted below. Further details will be available on the Juggernaut Press web site in mid-June; I'll let everyone know exactly when and where. In the meantime, if you think you'd like to join the game, please drop me a line <pbm@gamesbymail.com> and I'll keep you updated privately. ELDRITCH Brief Intro In the heart of your bustling, mercantile empire you can hear them: the war horns of the Ogre troops, the stealthy footfalls of the Ratton slayers, the guttural incantations of the Fiend wizards, the tramp of the Hobgoblin hordes. From the frontier come chilling reports of battle, bloodshed, butchery. Your people perish. Your prosperous, peaceful people... You send envoys to other empires: the sea-faring Serpent Men, the reclusive Ice Gnomes, the fierce Mantids. When your envoys don't return, you know the final battle will be yours... But is there time? For years your empire has grown rich from taxation and trade. Your champions serve as the marshalls, priests, and mayors of a bountiful land. Your convoys bring wheat, barley, grapes, and olives from the fertile plains; stone, silver, and gold from the hills and mountains; timber from the forests; strange herbs and relics from the deserts, tundra, and wastes. But now you need iron and charcoal to make steel for swords, pikes, and mauls; yew for longbows; plorn roots for the summoning of earth elementals. Your people must turn from the study of ranching, weaving, construction, brewing; instead, they must master tactics, blades, leadership, siege craft. Your sorcerors must learn how to blast the foe not bless the land... Before it's too late... Eldritch is a complex computer-run play-by-mail game of fantasy exploration, adventure, and empire-building. As the leader of your people, you will be able to: * Choose from 16 major races when you start the game * Study more than 35 different craft, combat, and arcane skills * Cast over 300 unique spells from 18 major and minor spheres of magic * Construct scores of different buildings, vessels, weapons, artifacts * Contend with over 100 types of fearsome creatures and races * Explore lairs, caves, keeps, ruins, and other monster-haunted areas of the world * Develop your empire's unique agricultural and economic potential * Endure realistic climate and weather conditions * Walk, ride, fly, and swim across a vast world with over 15 terrain types * Recruit, train, and equip a multi-racial army for pillage, defense, or conquest * Determine the best weapons, armor, tactics, and battle magic for your units * Deal with the military challenges of logistics, upkeep, and morale * Control the tactical placement of your units on the battlefield * Enjoy big turn reports with exciting results and easy-to-use order templates Eldritch is an open-ended game: there are no victory conditions apart from those you set for yourself. Develop a peaceful mercantile empire, a rapacious mercenary kingdom, a doom-shrouded magical realm, a vast imperial regime. Or venture into the wilds as a footloose adventurer seeking monsters to battle, treasure to steal, rare items to sell, champions to slay. You'll meet hundreds of other players pursuing similar goals. In addition to the open-ended version of Eldritch, where potentially hundreds of players compete for power and glory, we will soon offer numerous closed-ended scenarios, each one pitting a small number of players against one another and against powerful emperors, sorcerors, even gods. Eldritch is available worldwide from Juggernaut Press by email for $2.00/turn, with the set-up report and the first two turns FREE. For further details, contact Juggernaut Press at <pbm@gamesbymail.com>, or watch for the debut of the Eldritch Web Site in mid-June. In the meantime, you can join the Eldritch Mailing List and read what the playtesters think about the game: send email to 'eldritch-list-request@tightbeam.com' with the single unquoted word 'subscribe' in the body of the message. Be among the first to join Eldritch when it opens for public play on July 1! ------------- Up