SUATOM! Dungeons and Dragons for Wii U (Concept)

As everyone I’m sure noticed, I didn’t write a new edition of Creative Day yesterday. Honestly the reason is simply that I was damned tired by the time Day 1 of E3 was over. I feel my obsessive tweeting (sorry) and Brad and my conference recaps make up for this, but if it doesn’t then I guess sorry again. Rest assured that Creative Day will be back next week with something theoretically creative and maybe even enjoyable. Fancy that!

Now it’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for another edition of Shut Up and Take Our Money! This week I thought I would change things up and not mentioned something from Kickstarter. Instead I’m going to bring you a special E3 edition of SUATOM!, brought to you by the Twitter feed of Scott Johnson of FrogPants Studios fame:

That sound your hearing is your mind exploding! Seriously, the moment I read that I completely froze and missed everything else being said during the press conference. Now look, I’m not a fan of Dungeons & Dragons; hell you’re more likely to find me mocking people who play it. I have nothing against those who do, hell one of my best friends plays it every weekend. What I am against is the excessive tedium that goes along with playing it. This is actually odd, because anyone who knows my gaming habits knows that I LOVE tedious activities in my games. Sadly that doesn’t seem to transfer over D&D.

Now imagine that some company released a top-notch, AAA game that allowed you to play Dungeons & Dragons with your friends, either online or with couch co-op. The game handles all the stat sheets, character information, and story info in-game, freeing your time up to create and play. Using the Wii U Gamepad to allow dungeon masters the world over to control the action would be phenomenal. All I know is that I have a potential group of five people who would throw down some serious cash for this game.

Someone hammer out a basic concept, put it up on Kickstarter and let me know, because I’m already sold on this!

Shut Up and Take Our Money! Spellbound Magazine

Another Tuesday, another day to yell unto the internets and demand that they take our reasonably hard-earned money. Every Tuesday I scour the internet (or more accurately click the first link I find that looks appealing) to find awesome and possibly amazing things that we should be spending money on. This can be a really cool item from ThinkGeek or a badass t-shirt featured on TeeFury or Threadless. More than likely a lot of stuff featured will be assorted Kickstarters, seeing as my bookmark folder is filled to the brim with campaigns ending every few days over the next two months.

Today will be a SUATOM! of the latter, as we feature and interesting campaign focused around a new children’s fantasy e-zine called Spellbound Magazine. I first became aware of Spellbound Magazine through a tweet from the amazing fantasy author and overall badass, Neil Gaiman. Your should know who Neil Gaiman is if you’re one of our regular readers, or if you have even a partially functioning brain so I’ll leave off the rest of the gushing over the man’s amazingness.

Continuing on, this isn’t about Mr. Gaiman, but about the awesome magazine he alerted me to. Spellbound Magazine was once upon a time a quarterly children’s fantasy magazine that was published from 1999-2003. Due to budgetary concerns they were forced to shut down, but now they’re back and looking to crowd source their way into the competitive world of e-zine publication. The new Spellbound Magazine will continue the original’s quarterly release schedule and they already have up a planned line-up for it’s first year as well as subscription information:

We will be publishing four issues per year in ePub format. Issues will be available from Amazon, B&N and Smashwords for $5.00 each. Subscriptions will be available with issues being e-mailed to subscribers. Subscriptions will be $20.00 a year. We will continue to center each issue around a specific fantasy creature with the first year’s line up being:
• Winter 2012 – Rings and Other Magic Things
• Spring 2013 – Changelings and Doppelgangers
• Summer 2013 – Dragons
• Fall 2013 – Creatures of the Deep Dark Woods
If we get the funding the first issue (Winter 2012) will be published December 2012.

The rewards for funding the project are fairly straightforward: for donating $5 and up to $30 you can get ever-increasing rewards of magazine issues, subscriptions, and a thank you in the inaugural issue. That doesn’t mean you have to stop at the $30 mark of course, but it’s good to know what you’ll get. In the end though, and excuse the schmaltz I’m about to lay down, the best reward is knowing that you helped in resurrecting and spawning a new generation of children’s fantasy magazine.

If this looks like a magazine that you would likely subscribe to, then you should consider donating at least $25 so that they can get on their feet and so you can get a subscription to their magazine. The project only has another 11 days left with just under half their goal of $4000 remaining. Check them out and help bring about another place for fantasy authors and readers to find up and coming work.

If you have or know of a Kickstarter that you would like to see posted in a future issue of SUATOM! you can let us know in the comments, or email us!

Tomorrow we bring you our first issue of Ultimate Back Issue our name still in progress column about comics and my reading of them.