Gearing Up for the Journey

 The Hero's Journey, Second Edition is beginning to build a lot of supplements. We've got the core book, The Hero's Companion, The Hero's Grimiore, Of Beasts Brave and True already out there with Adventures & Interludes, By Feather and Coop, Betwixt and Between: A Book of Fairie Lore, and Mischief and Merriment announced. That's seven supplements, plus a core book - not to mention Skaldic Sagas: Heroic Journeys in the Viking Age, which uses the same rules set to tell stories set in a mythopoetic pre-Christian Scandinavian cultures. We've also got more planned for the future.

Some material is repeated in these supplements and that is intentional. One of my favorite roleplaying games and one that was formative for my love of the hobby was West End Games' The Star Wars Roleplaying Game. They were famous for reprinting stats and info across many books and it was often seen as padding or filling pages, but in hindsight I don't think that was the case and its certainly not the case for my own product line.

I loathe when a game supplement refers a reader to another supplement. It makes me feel like they're trying redirect me to spend more money on top of the game's core book and the supplement I'm currently reading. As if I'm some how out of the loop if I don't have all the books. But with West End Games' Star Wars, I never felt like I was somehow missing out. I was part of the game, part of the community, and part of the fun, regardless of what books I did or didn't own. I was included.

I wanted to promote this ethos in The Hero's Journey. That's why the Pugilist alternate for the Swordsman Archetype appears in Of Beasts Brave and True. That way if you don't have The Hero's Companion in which it originally appears you still get full use of the product you've already purchased. The spell Cold Both Fierce and Fell appears originally in The Hero's Companion and is reprinted in Betwixt and Between, as is the Knight Archetype variant Feysworn. 

This is intentional and by design. If you play The Hero's Journey, Second Edition, then you're a part of the game, the community, and you have my thanks and you most certainly have a place at the table. So grab the gear at hand and maybe you'll pick up a new treasure or two along the way. Let's have an adventure.