Allan T. Grohe, Jr (aka, 'the grodog')

[grodog]

The last question for Allan was:

Hello New here. I recently got a copy of Swords of the Middle Kingdom which I have been reading over preparatory to running. One thing I read has me intensely curious; there was reference made to a Kumite event at Gen Con '98 that pointed up certain weaknesses in the HKAT combat system. I have not been able to find any info on that event so I was wondering what the issues were and how SMK fixed them, as I hope to run some HKAT soon as well and knowing the pitfalls (and how to steal from SMK to fix them) would be helpful Thanks

Unfortunately, Allen, I don't recall any details about that. My old partner John Phythyon worked up the Kumite tournament for GenCon IIRC, so he would be the one to ask for more specifics.

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How are things with Black Blade, why did you pick Bottle City for GaryCon VI, and what products are on the horizon for you?

We selected Bottle City to reprint since it seemed like there was quite a bit of pen-up demand for the book, and since it was the only reprint title by Rob that was stand-alone.

We'll reprint Cairn of the Skeleton King and Tower of Blood later this year, and have a fiction collection coming out, as well as perhaps one of my castle levels. We'll see....

How do we acquire the small size edition of OSRIC and why was it made?

The A5 OSRIC edition was put together by Jim Kramer at Usherwood Publishing; Jim did all of the layout work on the OSRIC rulebooks. BBP sells the A5 OSRIC directly at conventions. We could probably add it to our web site as well: I'll talk to Jon about that, thanks for the suggestion.

Why hasn't SMK been re-released? When is the last time you played it?

Matt and I haven't talked about reprinting SMK in quite awhile---just not a lot of demand I suppose. I haven't played the game since 1999 or perhaps even 1998 (IIRC we published it for the GAMA trade show in March 1999).