Shaerdraeth: The New Lands

On June 20th, I discovered that Code Monkey Publishing wasn't dead afterall. Finally having re-registered on their forums, I learned that they are still planning on releasing their New Lands Setting. To recap, the New Lands was an idea announced last year when CMP realized WotC weren't likely to renew the Blackmoor lisence. Rather than scrap all the ideas for what they were planning to do with Blackmoor, the idea was to use that in a new setting called the New Lands. Now the project has been named Shaedraeth. From the CMP forum, I was able to learn the following:

"Blackmoor: We've shifted from the lands of Blackmoor itself to the 'New Lands': Shaedraeth. To avoid licensing issues down the road, we're making this move now rather than later. Integrating those items that are NOT WotC IP from Blackmoor to Shaedraeth requires a bit of care to make sure things mesh smoothly and aren't shoehorned in.

Shaedraeth: Related to the above, the first product is "Dungeons of the Lost Moorlands". It is a massive dungeon crawl, give some hints to what happened to Blackmoor, and set part of the stage of the New Lands. It will be a PDF only product, simply because of the massive size of it. We're talking an outside area leading to the dungeons and then 21 levels with 81 maps of dungeon-y, deadly, tastiness!"

The quote above suggests it would only be a pdf product, but recently the relevant forum has been renamed Print Products.Thanks to Dave L at the Comeback Inn forum, I was able to learn a few more details:

Maps for the WelComeback Inn and the first 4 levels of the dungeons themselves are drawn and ready for computerization

And

Also coming real soon; the Calendar of Shaedraeth - This will include plantary information, moons (yes I meant that to be plural) and their cycles, the seasons, and of course the actual hours, days, weeks, months of each year and their 'common' naming conventions (most normal folk don't call it year 2012, they call it the year of the monkey - education!)

Suggested release date for the product has been rumoured to be around GenCon this year. Only time will tell how this will develop!

(Image: Columbus discovering the New World, used for illustration purposes only)








-Havard