One of the most exciting projects I have worked on for a long time is one that we launched earlier this year and are moving steadily ahead with, and that is the "Swords of Kos" shared-world fiction line. The first title in this series of books was my own "Swords of Kos: Necropolis," which we released in May, and the next will be "Swords of Kos: Hekaton," an anthology featuring the works of a dozen authors and an equal number of artists. These stories are all set in the world that Skirmisher Publishing has used for playtesting its game materials since 2002. 

As part of helping many talented writers explore this shared world, the Skirmisher Publishing staff has been compiling a detailed "bible" of all the significant people, places and events associated with the Swords of Kos campaign setting. With more than a decade of playtesting and development behind its contents, this document is, in fact, an exciting and comprehensive campaign sourcebook in its own right, and it struck me that many game masters and players alike would appreciate and make good use of it. 

We certainly could just finish refining this sourcebook and make available to the public what we were planning on providing for our writers, a text-only document that describes our campaign setting. If there is any book that deserves to be treated as a flagship title, however, it is this one, and we decided that it needed to be fully supported with custom illustrations and professionally rendered maps. A project of that scale, however, went far beyond anything we had on our publishing schedule for the foreseeable future. 

And that is how we came to launch the "Swords of Kos Campaign Setting" Kickstarter campaign, as a means of raising the funds necessary to commission the artists, cartographers, and designers needed to create this book at the highest possible standards. When it is completed, this will be a 250 page, fully illustrated sourcebook compatible with any fantasy game system. And in order to encourage people to come on board as backers for this project, we are offering a generous suite of rewards, at levels starting at just $1. 

So please check out our Kickstarter project! And, if it looks as appealing to you as we hope it will, come on board as a backer and help us make the  "Swords of Kos Campaign Setting" Kickstarter campaign setting a reality!