CUBICLE SEVEN HEADS INTO THE FAR WEST
MAY 8th, 2013
Oxford, UK – Cubicle 7 Entertainment, Ltd., creators of high quality roleplaying and card games such as The Doctor Who Card Game, The One Ring, Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, Primeval, The Laundry, Victoriana and Cthulhu Britannica, have entered into an agreement with Adamant Entertainment to be the exclusive publisher of tabletop games released as part of Adamant’s FAR WEST transmedia project.

FAR WEST is a Wuxia-Western Mash-up – a fictional setting that combines elements of Spaghetti Westerns, Chinese Wuxia, and Steampunk, and is explored via multiple media: Fiction, games, art, music, webseries, and more. A fantasy world that’s The Gunslinger meets Storm Riders meets Deadwood meets Afro Samurai meets The Wild Wild West meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets Django meets Brisco County meets House of Flying Daggers and more. A fantasy world that is constantly shaped by its own fan community, The Far West Society – whose membership collaborate with the developers on the canon of the setting.

Cubicle 7 will be publishing and distributing tabletop games set in the FAR WEST universe, beginning with the FAR WEST Adventure Game, the long-awaited RPG. Adamant Entertainment will continue to produce all other FAR WEST releases, and FAR WEST Creator Gareth-Michael Skarka will act as the Line Developer for the releases at Cubicle 7, orchestrating the interconnectivity between all of the different explorations of this unique setting.

“Cubicle 7 really understand what we’re doing with FAR WEST,” said Skarka, “and they bring to the table such a dedication to quality and an enthusiasm for creation that I cannot think of a better match for us.”

“FAR WEST is such an exciting project to be involved with”, added Dominic McDowall, CEO of Cubicle 7. “I love the genuine involvement that The Far West Society has in shaping the setting, and it’s always fun collaborating with Gareth – one of the pioneers of the digital format in roleplaying games. Our first priority will be helping Adamant get the RPG into the hands of the Kickstarter backers, closely followed by work on additional material for the game.”

The FAR WEST Adventure Game core rulebook will be released this Summer, first to backers of the 2011 FAR WEST Kickstarter, and then to distribution world-wide. Additional releases in the FAR WEST game line will be announced soon.

For more information on FAR WEST, including other currently-available products, visit the official website at http://intothefarwest.com.

For more information on Cubicle 7 and its game lines, visit http://www.cubicle7.co.uk.
 
 

Experience preferred — although _commercial_ experience not strictly necessary. If you’ve got stuff we can use to gauge your ability, we’ll look at it.

Folks hired will also form the bullpen for eventual work on other Adamant Properties as well, including *Far West* and *Buckaroo Banzai*.

Contact us with an overview of your experience and a brief statement about what sort of gaming release has always been your “dream project” — email at submissions@adamantentertainment.com. If we like what we see, we’ll ask for samples of your existing work.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

In short, 2012 was Adamant’s worst year. There were many reasons for this, both professional and personal, which I won’t be going into publicly. Divulging some of the professional reasons would require me to speak ill of others, a meaningless exercise which will not change the circumstances; and the personal reasons are, frankly, nobody’s business. Regardless of the nature of the causes, as owner and director of the company, I bear the final responsibility for our failings — and the sole responsibility for rebuilding the faith in our brand that we squandered this year.

Our biggest issue, of course, was delays. With that in mind, I’d like to give you a rundown on where things stand with our delayed products:

• WARLORDS OF THE APOCALYPSE: We have transferred ownership of this property to Super Genius Games, who are far better able to do it justice. They will be honoring the existing pre-orders, and are sure to produce a brilliant game of post-apocalyptic science fantasy.




• ICONS TEAM-UP: Earlier this year, ICONS designer Steve Kenson exercised his contractual right to bring our involvement in ICONS to a close, and take it under his new imprint, Ad Infinitum Adventures. In fact, their first release, With Great Power, is currently in the final three days of its Kickstarter fundraiser, and looks stellar!

  Adamant’s final ICONS core release, ICONS TEAM-UP, is massively late, and will be delivered within a week of this post. I wanted to give a brief explanation of the reason for part of this delay: When we parted ways with a team member earlier this year, a shared folder (on Dropbox) was deleted — unfortunately it was one being *hosted* by this person, and so when Dropbox synced, it deleted the folder on my machine as well. This folder contained the project files, including the nearly-completed layout. Since that time, I’ve been rebuilding it, using the copies of the artwork that I still had in another location from when (ICONS Line Artist) Dan Houser had sent them to me, copies of Steve’s portion of the manuscript that he had emailed to me, and (this has been the time-consuming part) re-writing my material from scratch, since the manuscript had been in that folder. So yes, slow-going…. especially on top of the earlier delays. I’m far from proud of this, and will be doing my best to make it up to pre-order customers in the coming year, with free copies of our additional ICONS-compatible releases through 2013. (More on that later — we’ll announce after releasing TEAM-UP.)




• BUCKAROO BANZAI: The main failing here was in my own beginner status in managing a licensed product. I failed to take into account those portions of the production schedule that lay outside of our control. The upshot of this is: We’re in approvals, and we’ll be releasing immediately upon receiving the final thumbs-up. I’m estimating that we should be shipping in the first quarter.




• TALES OF NEW CROBUZON: This isn’t something we started pre-orders on, but it something that many of you have been waiting for since 2008/2009 — and the lesson here is that I need to keep quiet about licenses, even ones that I’m thrilled about, until we’re further along in the process. It will be released in the latter half of 2013.




• FAR WEST: I’ve been keeping our backers up to date on our progress (the most recent update can be found here.), and have already released other products in the line (fiction, etc.) — but the Adventure Game will be released in the first quarter of 2013, followed by many other products. Currently underway are adventures, sourcebooks, more fiction, and a card game — with more in the early stages of development.

So there you go. That’s the status of the things that are late. We’ve got other things underway as well, but if I learned any lessons in 2012, perhaps “keep quiet until the project is ready to release” is one of the bigger ones. Watch this space for more news.

I realize that we’ve done damage to the good faith we’d built up since 2003. For some of you, perhaps the damage is irreparable. I will still spend our tenth anniversary year (and beyond) doing my level best to make Adamant worthy of your custom again. If there is anything specific that we can do to make things right by you, please don’t hesitate to let us know — drop a comment below, or if you prefer, send me a private email.

May the new year be a happy one for you and yours.

Gareth-Michael Skarka
Lawrence, Kansas
31st December, 2012

December18, 2012

Super Genius Games, critically-acclaimed publisher of supplemental material for the Pathfinder, Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu role-playing game systems, has acquired the rights to the Pathfinder-compatible WARLORDS OF THE APOCALYPSE game setting from original developer Adamant Entertainment.

WARLORDS OF THE APOCALYPSE, first announced in 2010, brings the gonzo, over-the-top world of classic post-apocalypse science-fantasy to the Pathfinder rules system, featuring mutants, psychic powers, radioactive beasts and warriors of the wasteland.

“The game ran into some major snags during development,” says Gareth-Michael Skarka, director of Adamant Entertainment. “We soldiered on, trying to pull it together, but it became apparent that the property would be far better in the hands of Pathfinder experts like the crew at Super Genius. We’re very glad they expressed an interest and that we were able to come to an agreement that honors not only WOTA, but the existing pre-order customers, who were our primary concern.”

Customers who had pre-ordered WARLORDS OF THE APOCALYPSE will see those orders fulfilled by Super Genius Games. “We are well aware folks have already been waiting a very long time, and shown amazing patience,” says Owen K.C. Stephens, the Line Developer for WOTA at Super Genius. “We’ll be outlining our full plans soon, and setting up a forum for open discussions. We know we’ll eventually put the book in the hands of the pre–order customers, and we’re working out how the general public can get involved. Since we want the biggest, best release possible for Warlords of the Apocalypse, we’re even considering a Kickstarter campaign.”

Stephens and Skarka both expressed enthusiasm for the project and it’s future in the hands of Super Genius Games. “It’s such a fun genre, and Super Genius has strongly established themselves as seriously excellent developers,” said Skarka. “I look forward to seeing WARLORDS OF THE APOCALYPSE in its final form. I’m sure it will be brilliant!”

Super Genius Games was founded in fall 2007 by game industry veterans Hyrum Savage and Stan!, SGG is dedicated to publishing quality PDF and print products for a wide range of games and game systems. For more information contact owen@supergeniusgames.com.

Adamant Entertainment is a digital media company founded in 2003 by Gareth-Michael Skarka. For more information, visit http://www.adamantentertainment.com.

Ad Infinitum Adventures Acquires Icons Superpowered Roleplaying

September 5, 2012 – Ad Infinitum Adventures, a new publisher of tabletop roleplaying (RPG) content announces the acquisition of the Icons Superpowered Roleplaying game from previous publisher Adamant Entertainment.

“Icons is a phenomenal game, and one that deserves far more focus and attention than Adamant is currently able to devote to it,” says Gareth-Michael Skarka, director of Adamant Entertainment. “With our growing focus on transmedia development for projects like FAR WEST, and the constraints of both the size of our staff and the fact that nobody has yet to invent a time machine allowing us the freedom to do as much as we’d like to, we felt that ICONS would be better served as the main focus of a new venture.”

First published in 2010, Icons is described as “…inspired by fast-playing old-school games and the new generation of narrative role-play…” It has been supported with over a dozen adventures and two sourcebooks—The Villainomicon and Icons Team-Up—as well as a robust third-party publishing program featuring dozens of offerings, from deep space cosmic adventure to the Golden Age comics of World War II. It was nominated for three EN World Awards in 2011: Best Rules, Best Game, and Best New Game.

Ad Infinitium Adventures is owned and operated by Icons designer Steve Kenson, also known for the design of the Mutants & Masterminds and DC Adventures games for Green Ronin Publishing. “Icons is a different sort of superhero game,” Kenson says, “based on the sheer fun of making some die rolls and coming up with a random collection of powers and abilities, and then building a superhero around them. It’s a fast-playing game with an emphasis on character, easy to put something together on the spur of the moment.”

Ad Infinitium plans for a seemless transition of the game line, keeping existing product on-sale and continuing to support Icons with source material, adventures, and third-party licensing, such as the Stark City setting from Fainting Goat Games (for which Mr. Kenson wrote setting creation guidelines for Icons). “As Icons fans,” Mr. Skarka says, “we eagerly await the new developments from Ad Infinitum Adventures!”

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The seminar, “Far West: Western, Wuxia, Wild!” was an informational overview and Q&A on all aspects of Adamant’s transmedia property — how it was developed, what’s been released, what’s still coming, and what is planned.

For those people who were unable to attend GenCon 2012 in Indianapolis this summer, we’ve recorded the entire seminar, and present it here for your enjoyment.
 
 

Adamant Entertainment is proud to be participating in DriveThruRPG’s Christmas in July promotion — for the next 7 days, our entire line of PDF products (including the ENnie-Award-Nominated Tales from the Far West) are 25% Off!

We’re not the only ones, either — check the main sale page at DriveThruRPG for sale items from dozens of publishers (and follow the links there to sales at DriveThruComics and DriveThruFiction as well).

Featuring short stories in our wuxia-western mashup setting by acclaimed and award-winning authors Scott Lynch, Aaron Rosenberg, Chuck Wendig, Gareth-Michael Skarka, Tessa Gratton, Eddy Webb, Will Hindmarch, Ari Marmell, Matt Forbeck, T.S. Luikart, Jason L. Blair and Dave Gross, Tales of the Far West is available in Kindle and print from Amazon.com, on ebook format for Nook at Barnes and Noble, available in print via bookstores world-wide, and in digital and print formats from RPGNow, DriveThruRPG, DriveThruFiction, and via the official FAR WEST webstore.

Public voting on the nominees will take place from July 20th through July 29th on the ENnies web site.

Drop in and say hello!

The Far West Adventure Game will still feature his wonderful illustrations — especially the Backer portraits — but we will be supplementing it with work from other artists as well, and as such, release of the game will be delayed by another month. Our Kickstarter Backers will receive the game in late July — but the general retail edition will not make a GenCon release and will be pushed back until September.

We’re sorry to beg the continued patience of our fans and supporters as we work to react to this bit of sand in the gears — we’ll adjust as fast as we can.