13 April 2010

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net

ROGUE FEED In addition a few changes have taken place with the pricing on our
eBooks/PDFs. Namely our lowest price point is now $.99.
Formatting like a madman
APR 12, 2010 09:13P.M. Yes. $.99.

Actually I should title this, Formatting Until My Eyes Bleed.
“What is Richard talking about again?” I hear you thinking.
eBooks.
For the past few weeks I have been fixing the eBooks we released, and
formating the books for not only the Kindle (for those interested this is
.mobi), but for:
• Epub — Industry Standard and this is the format Apple’s
iBookstore uses
• LFR — For the Sony Reader
We’ve done this, because some vendors will not take the $1 eBooks, so
we had to drop prices. This $.99 is now in place for PDFs as well.
Simply, our prices are consistent across the board no matter who you
buy your digital copy from.
As for the PDF Guarantee that is still in place. No decision has been
made about applying the guarantee to the Kindle, and other eReaders. I
am still thinking about it, but right now, I am not sure.
So there you go. Any questions let me know. BTW, I ran my group
through an adventure this past weekend. Said adventure was a ePub file
conversion. It took me a little while to get use to it, but once I did, I like
it. It might not be for everyone, but it is possible to run an adventure off
a eReader.

• Palm Doc — For Palm Reading devices

For close to a year now, I’ve been working to get our books up and ROGUE FEED
available for other reading devices. The release of the iPad, spurred this
on even more so, and I decided on something radical: toss everything I A Shield-Brother for Donald?
have done, and start over. I am glad I did this, but it has been a APR 12, 2010 08:22P.M.
headache.

Why? Unlike PDFs — which you can make as graphic intensive as you
want — when dealing with a eReader, you are limited to a few things,
namely: font size, layout tricks, and graphics. You are also limited to
color, but since we print in black and white, this is not a issue. To add to
the frustrations, what works good for the Kindle does not necessarily
work good for a Epub, LFR and Palm Doc file.

Since early last month, I’ve started from scratch and have been slowly
redoing all the files so that they work on the Kindle, the Nook, the
iPad, and any other device. Each book I do, I learn more, and then go
back and apply those lessons to what I’ve done before. Tedious, but
worth it. The eBook versions look good. I’ve even discovered a way to
make adventures work using the Kindle and ePub.

All of the above is to say, that yes, the non PDF eBooks look better, and
are slowly coming online for sale. You can now purchase Kindle versions
of the books at Amazon. ePub, is slowly making its’ way to iBooks, B&N
ebooks, Kobo and Sony. For those who want them now, you can get all of
the various formats at Smashwords.com. I plan on updating all the
various purchase links shortly, to make this easier.

1
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net
ROGUE FEED
Pulp Fantasy Library: The
Enchantress of Sylaire
APR 12, 2010 09:45A.M.
Robert E. Howard died in 1936 and H.P. Lovecraft followed him a year
later. By some reports, Clark Ashton Smith was deeply — and adversely
— affected by the deaths of his colleagues and frequent correspondents,
which encouraged him largely to withdraw from the field of weird fiction.
He made a few exceptions, one of the more memorable being 1941’s The
Enchantress of Sylaire, which, while not explicitly intended as such,
proved to be the last tale of medieval Averoigne that he’d ever write.
Interesting, The Enchantress of Sylaire represents something of a
departure from previous Averoigne stories. Unlike the majority of its
predecessors, it’s notably lacking in cynicism. Indeed, it’s a strangely
positive, even optimistic fantasy that verges on fairy tale romance in both
its content and presentation. It tells of an idealistic, love-besotted young
man named Anselme, the object of whose current affections is a beautiful
but empty-headed woman named Dorothée des Flèches, who does not
share his feelings.
“Why, you big ninny! I could never marry you,” declared the
demoiselle Dorothée, only daughter of the Sieur des Flèches.
Her lips pouted at Anselme like two ripe berries. Her voice
was honey — but honey filled with bee-stings.
“You are not so ill-looking. And your manners are fair. But I
wish I had a mirror that could show you to yourself for the
fool that you really are.”
“Why?” queried Anselme, hurt and puzzled.
“Because you are just an addle-headed dreamer, pouring over
books like a monk. You care for nothing but silly old
romances and legends. People say that you even write verses.
It is lucky that you are at least the second son of the Comte du
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13 April 2010
Framboisier — for you will never be anything more than
that.”
“But you loved me a little yesterday,” said Anselme, bitterly. A
woman finds nothing good in the man she has ceased to love.
“Dolt! Donkey!” cried Dorothée, tossing her blonde ringlets in
pettish arrogance. “If you were not all that I have said, you
would never remind me of yesterday. Go, idiot — and do not
return.”
Dejected, Anselme resolves to leave the world — and women — behind
by becoming a hermit in the woods of Averoigne. A year into his new life,
he spies a mysterious woman bathing in a forest pool. Though taken with
her beautiful nakedness, he is not so distracted that he fails to notice “a
huge wolf, appearing furtively as a shadow from the thicket” making its
way toward her. Fearing more for the woman’s safety than his own
embarrassment at being a voyeur, Anselme reveals himself and cries out
to her. Showing no signs of concern, the woman turns to answer him:
“‘There is nothing to fear,’ she said, in a voice like the pouring of warm
honey. ‘One wolf, or two, will hardly attack me.’”
The woman dresses and introduces herself to Anselme as Sephora, an
enchantress who dwells in a magical Otherworld known as Sylaire,
reachable through an ancient collection of standing stones. She asks that
Anselme accompany her there, to which he agrees and finds
the grass on which they lay was not the sparse and sun-dried
grass of the moor, but was deep, verdant and filled with tiny
vernal blossoms! Oaks and beeches, huger even than those of
the familiar forest, loomed umbrageously on every hand with
masses of new, golden-green leafage, where he had thought
to see the open upland. Looking back, he saw that the gray,
lichened slabs of the cromlech itself alone rearmed of that
former landscape.
Even the sun had changed its position. It had hung at
Anselme’s left, still fairly low in the east, when he and
Sephora had reached the moorland. But now, shining with
amber rays through a rift in the forest, it had almost touched
the horizon on his right.
The pair make their way to Sephora’s tower, where she departs to rest.
While she is asleep, Anselme takes the opportunity to explore Sylaire and
again encounters the wolf he’d seen earlier. As it turns out, he is no wolf
but rather a sorcerer cursed by Sephora to take the form of an animal —
or so he claims, as Anselme finds it hard to believe that the enchantress
could ever be so cruel. The wolf-man, whose name is Malachie du
Marais, says that he was once, like Anselme, a favorite of Sephora and
became her lover but she grew tired of him and used dark magic to
transform him into a wolf. Malachie further claims that Sephora is not a
woman at all but a foul lamia and her servants are vampires; a bad end
will come to Anselme if he does not flee Sylaire now and never return.
Anselme, of course, does not wish to believe Malachie’s claims but the
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net 13 April 2010

werewolf has nevertheless sowed the seeds of doubt in his mind. If

Saphora’s servants were not vampires who only appear at night, where
were they? Likewise, Malachie claimed that, as a lamia, Saphora is afraid
of mirrors, which reveal her true face to the world. If she is not the evil
creature he claims, then why is that there are no mirrors anywhere in
Saphora’s home or among her possessions? And once Anselme returns to
Sephora’s home, her attitude toward Malachie has changed from her
earlier nonchalance to genuine concern, saying that the werewolf is in
fact a threat to her, as Anselme had suggested earlier — a threat about
which something must be done.

I won’t spoil the ending of The Enchantress of Sylaire except to say that
it’s conclusion is at once quite different than those of most CAS tales and
yet still very much in line with the worldview espoused in most of his
fiction and poetry. Both Sephora and Malachie du Marais appears as
NPCs in Tom Moldvay’s Castle Amber, although Sylaire itself is
portrayed not as a fey otherworld but merely as a location with the
province of Averoigne.