The Five-Story Drop proof came in Friday! Here’s an action shot:

The interior looks good but, unfortunately, there’s an issue with the cover. As you can see, the red spinal column overlaps part of the front cover. Not the biggest of big deals but it’s enough of an issue that I’m going to upload a new version of the cover. Since everything else works, I’ll do a digital proof this time which will cut the processing time down severely. As soon as this issue is fixed, I’ll order the books!

Out in PDF this Friday:

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, drug-running streetracers, a precinct-wide conspiracy, the return of a notorious serial killer, 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”

Five-Story Drop hits in PDF this Friday, June 14th. Hardcopy is due out mid-July.

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.

Work continues per usual. Words are going down, being revised, art is coming in, going into the text, the surgeon’s cutting in, my gallbladder is coming out.

Yeah, hadn’t worked that last one into the schedule. I’ve been fighting gallbladder issues for months now. The original surgery got bumped due to an out-of-country move that didn’t happen. Potential impending circumstances dictate I get the procedure done sooner than later so I’m going under the knife tomorrow. This is an in-and-out procedure that I sincerely hope won’t impact things too much but, well, it might.

So I’m running full steam ahead, trying to get as much done as possible before and after. I’ll keep you all in the loop.

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)