One false move. One bad deal. One broken promise. That’s all that stands between you and a one-way trip off the nearest skyscraper.

You manage to navigate the ins and outs, you’ll find yourself on the top of the heap. You stumble, you’ll spend the rest of your short life sucking wind until the concrete comes up to kiss you.

At least you’ll have lived a story worth telling, yeah?
Because in the end that’s what we’re all doing here.
Telling stories.

Five-Story Drop is a collection of episodes for Streets of Bedlam: A Savage World of Crime + Corruption.
Within these pages, you’ll run across a suburban cannibal cult, gun-running streetracers, a precinct-wide conspiracy, a sadist with a taste for young girls, and a man who simply refuses to stay dead.

Five-Story Drop includes:

“Does a Body Good”
“Life in the Fast Lane”
“The Burial Plot”
“That Man’s Got a Real Backscratcher”
“Eli Mendoza is a Dead Man”

Coming October 2012 in Print + PDF.

Well, folks, it’s come to this. Also, it’s come to this.

I’m confident I can get the Streets of Bedlam book done by Friday but I was confident I’d have the PDF out today so make of that what you will so let’s stick a stake in the ground: Streets of Bedlam will be out in PDF on Wednesday, June 6th. Finito. That’s the big D deadline right there. You backers and PDF pre-orderers will have the coupon code from DriveThruRPG in your hot little lands inside seven days.

I feel terrible about pushing this back one more week. I really do. I feel as though I’ve been bombarded since the Kickstarter ended in January will illness, surgery, breaking my arm, possibly moving to Canada, and now definitely moving next month to start a new (awesome) job in a new city and new state.

I’ve referred to 2012 as a cat pawing me back and forth like a toy. Unfortunately, Streets of Bedlam, which had an optimistic release date to begin with, has paid the price.

But I want to assure you this isn’t vaporware. I currently have the first four chapters out to select readers who may or may not pop up on here to tell just how wonderful it is. And I’ll be releasing PDF previews of the book every day from now until the PDF goes live, Wednesday, June 6th.

And you know this is true because, man, I am sick of writing these updates. I want to move on to reading your impressions, actual play reports, hear about your characters, and field your questions about the rules options and Archetypes. I want this done. So it will be. Until next week, click the picture below to download the intro chapter to Streets of Bedlam: Life in the Big City.

Without further ado, and pending any final tweaks, Shawn and I present the cover to Streets of Bedlam: A Savage World of Crime + Corruption. We hope you like it.

Shawn Gaston already laid down the science in the previous two installments. Let’s see how he brings it home.

From Shawn:

Step 8: I scan in a very rough background image. This was actually drawn in negative, and then I inverted it. Originally all of the black areas were white and all of the white areas were black. It’s a trick I used now and then on Doors and Windows, and I thought could be fun here.

Step 9: I detail the background. This consists of two slightly contradictory steps, cleaning up a lot of the lines from the original, and also adding a lot of distortion/roughness to the whole thing.

Step 10: I paste in a distorted version of the cityscape from our logo in to the background. This will mostly get covered up by the figure in the center, but it’s a fun detail that amuses me. At this stage I also shade in the windows on the buildings.

Step 11: I widen things out a little bit, to make room for our hero. I also distort the background a little bit more here.

Step 12: I unhide Fallon, our Bulldog. You can notice a very obvious flaw here, where the black shadows on Fallon cause him to disappear on the black background behind him.

Step 13: I experiment with a few things, and in the end settle on a combination of adding a slight glow behind Fallon as well as a solid white/grey outline around him. Now all that’s left are a few details and slight tweaks, so I send the whole thing off to Jason to get his opinion.

(And I liked it! Shawn and I then discussed how to bring it home. — Jason)

Step 14: Final touches! I lowered the horizon line, to enhance the idea that we’re looking up at this as opposed to being at normal eye level. I also switched the side the store front window is on and added some posters to the walls and some broken windows to some of the buildings. I added a moon and stars to the night sky, placed so that when we have the red band across the moon will be mostly covered. The moonlight meant I needed a bit more of a highlight on our hero. I also tweaked the cigarette and gun smoke, and made a handful of other minor changes.

Shawn then sent it to me for final placement and trade dress. What he didn’t know is that I made a few changes to my original idea.

So what’s the final cover look like?

Stay tuned.

Today, we continue Shawn Gaston’s process of illustrating the cover.

From Shawn Gaston:

Step 4: Shading! To get that really angular look, I set up another layer beneath the line art in Photoshop, and used the polygon lasso tool to block out areas that I then filled in with a very large brush.

Step 5: I finished shading in the smoke, as well as added our two textures. The rough scratchy layer covers many of the Streets of Bedlam illustrations, and I knew I wanted that same look for the cover. The blood splatter is the cover’s one dash of color, along with Fallon’s lit cigarette. I also tweaked the shading a bit, lightened his face somewhat, and darkened the coat.

Step 6: At this point he’s mostly finished, so I brought back the mock up of the cover’s trade dress to get an idea of how our hero will look on the book itself.

Step 7: I decided he was too low, and not angled enough. Comparing the current version to the original pencil sketch mock up, I shrink him down a bit, move him up, and then angle him to the right a bit This is an advantage of making the cover in Photoshop as opposed to creating an entire painting that is then scanned in or something.

So there you have it. My next steps are to draw the background buildings, scan them in to the computer and then tie the whole thing together. Being as the titular Streets of Bedlam are in many ways the real star of this picture, I expect to put in a lot of work and detail on the buildings. I want them to ooze menace and character.

Come back tomorrow to see this whole thing come together.

Leading up to Thursday’s reveal, Streets of Bedlam illustrator Shawn Gaston gives us a look into the process of creating the cover:

From Shawn:

Step 1: Jason and I tossed many ideas and variations back and forth, eventually settling on on a close up of Fallon, our Bulldog, standing over the viewer, smoking gun pointed at you and buildings crowding overhead. I went with a kind of distorted, fish-eye look that I think we both really liked.

Step 2: Once we had the final cover idea down, I went back and inked the same line art from Step 1, focusing only on the character at the center of the cover. I kept the rough pencils of the background on the page, just for reference for myself.

Step 3: I cleaned up the line art in Photoshop, adding a few hard edges and making things a bit sharper. At this stage I realized our central figure was much too head on, so in Photoshop I distorted and tweaked him somewhat, to give more of an extreme, unnatural angle.

So far, so good. Swing by tomorrow to see Fallon come to life.

Work continues on Streets of Bedlam, Sounds of Bedlam, and Five-Story Drop. The more things come together, the more excited I am. I’ve provided some glimpses into the book already so this time I’m peeling back the skin on the soundtrack. I’ll have a final release date for Sounds of Bedlam soon. In the mean time, take a look at the track list and enjoy the sample linked below. I can’t wait for you guys to hear the rest of this. I’ve been writing to it all week, and it’s really got the juices flowing.

1. A Tale of Two Cities
2. Take a Look
3. Let’s Take It From the Top
4. Step On It
5. One In the Head
6. Bricktown Bordello Blues
7. River of Artifice
8. Two in the Chest
9. Watch Your Rep, Kid
10. Walk With Me (Bedlam Remix)

I’ve talked a lot about Archetypes. As I see it, they’re a big part of the book and setting. The world of Bedlam is very character-focused, event-focused. As I write the text, the question “Does this facilitate story?” echoes in my head. Giving you all tools to create your own world, your own characters, your own stories is hugely important to me. And some of the best tools I can give are great Archetypes.

So, I’ve decided I want to start showing you all what I’m doing when it comes to character. Click the image below to check out the 4pp-spread for one of my favorite Archetypes, The Bulldog. The first step in character creation is picking an Archetype. (If you don’t like any of the pre-fab, you go off the Citizen Archetype as the “build-your-own” option.) The Archetypes are designed to help you create an interesting character who’s ready to play.

For those familiar with Savage Worlds, the nuts and bolts of character creation are identical. Points are earned and spent the same, with the same limitations. But Bedlam goes beyond that as well with drama- and story-driven Edges, Hindrances, and Skills.

Anyway, enough preamble. Check out the pdf below, and let me know what you think in the comments.

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The initial plan, as listed on the Streets of Bedlam Kickstarter, was to release the corebook in April. As it is now the first weekday of that month, let’s take a look at where things stand.

Text
The text is going well. As of today, the parts of the book are in the following state:

Introduction (Premise and Basics): Written, Edited, Laid Out—COMPLETE
Chapter One (Setting): Written, Edited, Laid Out—COMPLETE
Chapter Two (Characters): 75% Written, Initial Stages of Layout (To give some context, this is a BIG chapter. It covers all the Archetypes.)
Chapter Three (Setting Rules): 50% Written
Chapter Four (NPCs): 20% Written (Still compiling backer data, speaking with high-level backers to get more info. This will go smoothly once I put my back into it.)
Chapter Five (Plot Point and Orphan Stories): 0% Written (But the backbone is there.)

Art
Shawn continues to crank out images. They look great. Being the only artist on a book carries a heavy burden but Shawn’s taking it in stride. All the character archetypes are in, along with most of the chapter intro images, about a dozen interiors, and a handful of “filler” pieces (standalone images for end-of-chapter white space).

In sum
That’s the state of the book. If the unfinished parts look scary to you, please don’t be alarmed. I’ll have a lot of time the next two weeks to focus on this book. I plan to finish both the writing and layout for Chapter Two and Three this week (I tend to do those stages in tandem) and get them over to the editor. I’ll knock out Chapter Four in a weekend, which will leave me with Chapter Five. That should take another week or so.

I wish I was farther along but some medical issues (including a broken elbow/sprained left wrist/bruised right hand following a fall and an outpatient surgery slated for tomorrow) and a sudden influx of job opportunities (one of which I accepted) pushed me well off-track. I’m not offering these as excuses, just a look at what’s happening behind the scenes.

Once the PDF is up, I want to give folks a week or so to find all the typos and errors that escaped our attention and make the corrections to the corebook. The corebook will take about a week and a half to get to me in print. I’ll ship them out immediately. I’ll keep everyone abreast of that process as well.

Soundtrack
The tracklist and intent/mood/tone of all the pieces have been finalized. We’ve gone over the broad strokes so now it’s on Ed. He is currently working his magic and I hope to have some preview tracks up this month.

Five-Story Drop
The first supplement is slated for June but I will try to pull it forward, if at all possible, so that I can get it out before my impending move (see “accepting a job” above). I will begin that immediately after finishing the corebook. If that experiences any hiccups, I will let you all know immediately.

Next Update
I will update again next Monday to let you all know how things are going. I like to be transparent and honest with folks so nobody’s wondering or making bad assumptions. I’ll keep updating as the book wraps up so everybody knows their money isn’t vanishing into thin air. In the mean time, if you have any questions, please get a hold of me at jasonlblair@gmail.com.

Good morning! It’s all Streets of Bedlam all the time for Shawn and Ed and I (well, at least for me) so I don’t have a lot of time for updates. Still, I want to get you all something, so let’s take another look at what I’m spending all my time doing:

I hope you dig what you see! It’s really exciting seeing this all come together.

Remember: If you are a Kickstarter backer, be sure to make sure you double-check your name as it appears on the credits. See this post here for details.