It’s official! Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas is shipping this week to distributors. If you want the print book, visit the Buried Tales site for a list of online retailers or ask your FLGS to order TWL6001.

Today also marks the release of the Buried Tales ebook. At the moment, you’ll find Buried Tales on the Midnight Cellar and the OneBookShelf family of sites, including RPGNow, DriveThruRPG, and DriveThruHorror. From those sites, you can download a PDF. Within the next couple of days we’ll be adding a second file in EPUB format, which is the relatively new universal ebook format. That format, which is reflowable, makes for a better reading experience on portable e-ink devices. We also have a Kindle edition in the works, which will be available through Amazon.com (naturally). We hope to have that up by the end of the weekend.

There’s one thing I’d like to mention about the e-book. We’re pricing it low–only $4.99–compared to the print price. At that price, we’re not making much money on the ebook. We priced it low because we really want y’all to give Buried Tales a try. We have faith that if you try it, you’ll like it enough to buy it in print. If (or rather when) you read and enjoy the Buried Tales ebook, please consider picking up a print copy for your shelves.

Remember that fiction anthology, Buried Tales of Pinebox, TX, we mentioned a few months ago? It’ll be hitting game stores next month! Ask your friendly local game store to pre-order TWL6001. It’s 174 pages of Pinebox chills.

In support of the book, we’ve created a dedicated page that will be seeded with lots of cool stuff. We’ve got bios on all 12 authors, titles and summaries of each story, plus bonus audio content! Visit http://buriedtales.12tomidnight.com and let us know what you think!

Oh, I almost forgot! Starting today and for the next few weeks, some of news articles at The Raven’s Report will be related to stories you’ll see in Buried Tales.

In thanks for all the support our fans have shown us over the years, on April 30th Fabled Environments released a free map in their Modern Floorplans line. Download the Rooftop Gardens for a unique locale to hold hostage negotiations, a clandestine meeting, or to question a wealthy witness. These gardens are designed to fit atop the Highrise maps, but work just fine without them.

Download your free maps today from the Midnight Cellar, and be sure to drop by the forums and shout out some thanks to Fabled Environments.

In anticipation of ETU’s completion, the we’ve has put together a little website to give you a taste of what it’s like living in Pinebox day in and day out. To that end, we offer The Raven’s Report.

The Report contains various news articles written by the university’s newspaper staff and is slated to release new stories every week. While written specifically with ETU, Savage Worlds and Pinebox in mind, they are presented in a system neutral fashion so their elements can be added to any existing modern role playing campaign, or just read for fun. As time progresses, we anticipate adding follow-up stories, character stats, adventure seeds and GM tips on how to incorporate Report articles into your game. All of this for free, from all of us at 12 to Midnight.

We want Pinebox and ETU to grow and live, and part of that will rely on help from you! There are a handful of ways you can help expand ETU and Pinebox:

First, every page has a contact link that will allow you guys to send us ideas for news that you’d like to see investigated by our reporters. Feeling creative? Write us a story from the point of view of an ETU student witnessing it first-hand!

Every posted article can be commented on if you’ve uncovered a piece of information that our reporters missed. Did you take one of the stories and incorporate it into your game? Write to us and tell us how it went! We’d love to hear about it and might even base a follow up on it including your group’s adventures into ETU canon! Help shape Pinebox!

GO RAVENS!

Okay, I’m just going come right out and say it. I wish I lived in this house.

It’s got a big basement, 1 bedroom on the ground floor and three more on the second floor. It has separate dining, “sitting”, and living rooms. It has a wrap-around porch. This house is, in a word, awesome! It’s also perfect for your next roleplaying adventure. It would make a great headquarters for your heroes, a dangerous location for a hostage crisis, or even a pulse-pounding, room-by-room search for a kidnapping scenario. Whether your campaign is of the action, mystery, pulp, crime, or horror variety, you can’t go wrong with having a multifuction house floorplan like Modern Floorplans: Craftsman Style Bungalow.

Remember, this floorplan, like all our others, comes in a variety of styles and configurations. Within the PDF you’ll find versions that are tiled, scaled to a single 8.5×11 page, or full size “plotter-ready”. You’ll find versions with furniture or without, with grids or without. For a measly $2.95, you get this map in just about any format you could want.

Modern Floorplans: Craftsman Style Bungalow is available at Midnight Cellar and RPGNow.