A NUELOW Christmas: Day FiveRobert E Howard--A True Christmas Visionary!

Short story writer and poet Robert E. Howard is best known for creating Conan and Solomon Kane and thus laying the foundation for the Sword & Sorcery genre, but his creative vision was of a far greater scope!

In 1927, in a letter to his friend Clyde Tevis, Robert E. Howard created the Elf on the Shelf, something that would go onto becoming a pop culture Christmas sensation some 70 decades after his premature death!


THE WICKED OLD ELF (By Robert E. Howard)
There once was a wicked old elf
Who sat a girl up on a shelf,
In spite of her aunties,
He took down her panties—
But finish this rhyme for yourself.

For more poetry by Robert E. Howard (mostly of the serious variety), check out this collection from NUELOW Games.

'Shadows of Dreams': Our most unusual book yet

The latest entry in NUELOW Games's Robert E. Howard Collection series is also one of the most unusual projects we've released to date--it's part poetry collection, part dual-system RPG supplement.

Shadows of Dreams: Poems and Verse by Robert E. Howard collects a small but broad sample of poetry from the creator of Conan and Solomon Kane, thus offering a look at what is perhaps the most obscure of is output. Poems featured range in length from a couple of lines to a couple of pages, and they range in tone from the humorous through contemplative and into the horrific. Here's a sample page (click to enlarge):

Verse by R.E. Howard. Illo by Derek Stevens.
(Illo Copyright 2012 Otherworld Creations. Used under license.)

 In addition, the book contains "Artifacts of the Eternals", which features four magical items created by NUELOW's lead designer Steve Miller with inspiration drawn from Howard's poetry and the artwork selected to illustrate it. Each of the four items has game stats for OGL d20 Systems and OpenD6.

Click here to read more and to see previews of Shaodows of Dreams at DriveThruFiction... and download your own copy for just $1.25.

While you're checking out the latest offering from NUELOW Games, we want to recommend you consider grabbing a copy of a very excellent roleplaying game from the mind of James Desborough--ImagiNation.

It's been speculated that Robert E. Howard suffered from clinical depression, and that the condition was what caused him to obsess about death and to ultimately take his own life. Desborough has commented that ImagiNation was "made around my experiences with depression and creativity" and that the game was written to help people gain an understanding of what depression is like.

The PDF version of the game is available free of charge. Click here to read more and to get your own copy.