This week while you’re making your commute to and from work, listen to 12 to Midnight president Preston DuBose’s interview on The Writing Show podcast. During the almost one and a half hour long interview, Preston talks about e-books both from an RPG perspective and from the impact on the broader publishing and reading world.

You can download the episode to your iPod, burn it to CD to play in the car, or listen on your desktop computer. Don’t bother if you’re on dialup though– the MP3 is 65 MB.

Some of you who keep tabs in the RPG online community might have heard that ENWorld is getting into the business of selling PDFs. To date, 12 to Midnight products can be found at RPGNow and Great White Games. What do you think? Do you plan on shopping at the ENWorld Game Store? Would you prefer to buy our products there? Let us know by taking our forum poll.

A lot of you out there use RPGNow’s wish list like a bookmark. It’s okay, we do it too. You see something cool, something that you want to be able to find again, but you’re not ready to buy it until you read a review. But did you know that publishers can see when you add their product to your wish list? It’s true! Don’t worry, they can’t see what else you added–only their own titles. Why is this important? Because sometimes it can help you score a deal on something you wanted to buy anyway! If a publisher is having a sale, he can let those who have it in their wish list know about it by sending them an e-mail.

But what about your privacy? What if you don’t want to get e-mails from publishers? RPGNow has privacy settings that allow you to customize who can contact you and who can not. The thing is, if you have it turned off, then we can’t let you know that the ten dollar title you’ve had on your wish list for six months is on sale right now for five dollars. We can’t e-mail you coupons for new releases because you’ve been a loyal customer. In short, we can’t help you save money. The system is carefully protected by RPGNow, and if they get a complaint about a publisher sending spam they take it very seriously. We use it very infrequently because we know you don’t like getting a lot of unsolicited e-mail. But every once in a while –like right now–we have a great deal that we genuinely think would interest you. Help us help you by allowing us to let you know about it.

Howdy! We at 12 to Midnight have been hammering away behind the scenes to bring you more terror, horror, and mayhem. And then there’s our adventures… Seriously, we’re still plugging away at several projects that you’ll see come to fruition over the next few weeks and months.

• The subtitle for Modern Dispatch # 41 is Fallen, and in addition to offering up a complete (albeit short) adventure, it introduces an interesting new creature to the Pinebox campaign setting. Fallen is currently in the editing cycle and is well on track for its May 23 release date.
• The adventure that will be bundled with Ed Wetterman’s horror rule system is called Intervention and is being written by Preston DuBose. The gist of the plot hook is that the heroes have been asked to intervene on behalf of a concerned parent who believes his college-aged son has joined a Branch Davidian-style cult. The outline is complete and writing is underway. We have no solid estimate on when the combined horror rules/adventure will be released, but our official goal is “soon.”
• Jerry Blakemore’s Skinwalker is still coming along nicely. It is a big adventure with a page count to match. It is our second longest adventure to date. That means it will be in the editing cycle for the next month or so before going to layout. It’s a cool, unique adventure that’ll definitely be worth the wait.
• We have a fourth, as yet untitled, adventure in the works as well. This one is by freelancer Mike DeSanto, and it promises to be lots of fun. This was the adventure we playtested a few weeks ago at AggieCon. The revised draft is nearing completion, and we expect it to enter the editing cycle behind Skinwalker.
• Ed Wetterman’s new haunted house adventure is shaping up to be a doozy. He’s taken everything that made Last Rites of the Black Guard so spooky and cranked it up several notches. He anticipates completing his first draft early this summer, so we expect it to enter the production cycle after Mike’s adventure. This is NOT a Last Rites sequel, but something entirely new.
• However, a we ARE working on a Last Rites II outline, which we hope to have finalized in a month or so. After the outline is complete, writing the adventure will just be a matter of following the map.

Still can’t get enough 12 to Midnight? Did you know that three of us also publish our own blogs? The amount of gaming info varies from blog to blog (and day to day), but if you were ever curious at the “behind the scenes” stuff that goes on at a RPG Publisher, check us out.

Jerry Blakemore — Simple American
Preston P. Dubose — Flametoad
Ed Wetterman — Ed’s World