We are letting the domain expire within the next few weeks but you can still reach us here at Google Sites.

We may not be actively trying to promote No Dice any more but we should still be popping into Mondo in Nottingham from time to time and will be happy to welcome new No Dicers into a game.

It's been a hell of a challenge to pull together all the No Dice stuff over the last few years and we couldn't have done it without the support of some great gamers here in Notts and some equally fantastic ones in London. We've really enjoyed visiting some conventions and running our events, we've had a whale of a time buying our own t-shirts to proudly emblazon upon our chests.

The wiki will live on and we're going to keep role-playing in our own idiosyncratic, iconoclastic and narrative driven way. If such a thing may be achieved we will set up a gmail account to replace the domain one. No Dice isn't going anywhere, but in the sense that we're trying to get people involved and interested in our way of doing things we're... well, we're not going anywhere.

We're happy that we've achieved so much in our time of tilting at windmills, but we're sad that a few small things never happened. We're sorry that no one ever appeared to try No Dice outside of people we actually met. We're sorry we never did get to tour the country running sessions as that never seemed to gel together. We're also sorry that people were less enthusiastic about the products than we hoped because we still believe them to be fresh, innovative and great value for money.

We all believe that No Dice was definitely a thing better done than not done and we're immensely pleased about that. We're going to give our hard work and effort a bit of a send off with the production of our final product the revised Core Book later this year.

Thanks to all those people who are reading this because I have no doubt that it is you who kept us going this long.

When the No Dice team began all this back in 2009 we did not really know what it is we were aiming to do. We wanted to write some role-playing games, we wanted to sell them and run them and go to conventions. We wouldn't, at the beginning, have minded being a company of some sort, like an actual business. We did know that the latter was a long shot. In fact I think more important to us was the question: "Why should it only be a role playing company that produces a role playing game in these modern days"?

As it happens the original core book was a compendium of bits and bobs that attempted to formalise the idea of "rolling your own" narrative game and a few concepts popular in the free form community. It was a nice thing, but it wasn't, in all honesty, a system. Back in 2009 we didn't give two hoots about that. We just wanted to get the thing done. We rolled straight on with Random Encounters, a mini-system outlined by example that you can now view as a sort of proto-PULP.

After that we got a bit stuck in the mud. Leo wrote Levercastle, but the written work requires some level of illustration that we just cannot muster. So it remains, waiting for the right time to be released. Leo wrote Shadow Cities and then assembled it with the aid of a vast number of commons licensed photographs assembled into a kind of "mad man's scrapbook" which has given SC its distinctive look. That was a huge project and so was the only release in 2010. Here we are in late 2011 and we've put out PULP Vol 1 with PULP Vol 2 to follow before Christmas.

We haven't got a back catalogue to rival any major publisher but for three people with day jobs we've done a lot. Factor in the wiki, the podcasts and the events and No Dice represents a major commitment for all that time.

We're at an important point in the lifetime of the No Dice project. PULP RP is what could properly be identified as the pinnacle of our efforts in what we have lovingly termed "Phase One" of the project. Phase One is made up of the following items: A Core Book, Shadow Cities, PULP RP

The Phases started as a kind of way of measuring what kind of work we could hold in our heads simultaneously. Over time they've come to mean something else. Basically they represent how much work we an do whilst our relationship with the outside world remains as a constant value. In Phase One our relationship to the outside world is that, mostly, no one realy cares about the project or acknowledges it. We're not quite at that state but very nearly. We have a few devoted fans, a mailing list with under 100 people on it, a facebook page with 34 fans and we run events which are often the "hard core" plus one or two others (not exclusively but often).

Phase One represents the exact amount of work and effort we are willing to expend while this remains our community base. Essentially it represents the amount of work needed so that Leo can run whatever he likes from attractively packaged products in perpetuity. Nobody else needs to like us in phase one, to a certain degree it's all about making materials for Leo to work from.

Having said this, we are putting a little more effort into it than Leo strictly speaking needs. Leo doesn't need Justin's artwork, although it is lovely, Leo doesn't need to make t-shirts and Leo doesn't need to record podcasts. All of that is an effort to make No Dice grow into Phase Two. In Phase Two No Dice is a steadily ticking cottage industry with a small but loyal fanbase of maybe 30 to 40 individuals and regular events happening in a few locations nationwide. In Phase Two Leo is less directly involved in the playing of all No Dice games that happen anywhere. In Phase Two the team have to deal with more correspondence. In Phase Two the team would have a think about getting some more systems written and polished and then getting themselves a trade stand for the UK Games Expo right at the tipping point with the heady heights of Phase Three.

The alternative is that this doesn't happen. In which case we would invoke what's called the Endgame (trust gamers to make the phases of a project sound like the evolution of a board game). In the Endgame we finish PULP Vols 1-4, the updated Core Book, we visit some more cons next Spring and Summer and then in Autumn 2012 we stick a fork in it. No Dice will be done.

What makes the difference between going into Phase Two and enacting the Endgame is you people, the current No Dice community, those of you who are interested in the project on some level. We do absolutely as much as we can to run events, to meet new players and to make the games rich, rewarding and affordable. In order to grow we need your help. In the weekend just gone we held an event to pre-release our new book PULP RP Vol 1, we had books on sale before they were released worldwide and one copy to give away free in an on the day competition. We were excited, particularly as this was our first time to play the game as it was intended, from the book as opposed to from notes and random bits of paper.

Nobody showed. Although one person did buy a copy from us.

We discussed the reasons why this might have been after the fact and we're aware that other factors had come into play apart from general gamer ennui. But the ennui stuck it to us as well. We're using your feedback, your enthusiasm and your support for us as an entity to gauge what our next move should be. At this stage we don't need a lot but we do need a little. Otherwise at the end of Phase One it will be time for us to shut it all down.

Let's be clear here, the products will never "go out of print". The Google Site will probably exist forever. There will never be a time where you can't get hold of a No Dice game. But the time when you can spur us on to create more and to invest our lives into it is finite. We are all looking at the prospect of the endgame, ironically, with some relish. What no one tells you when you start a cool project like this is that while you're in the middle of the work it will command you, it will prevent you doing things you'd rather do like kill a couple of hours playing a computer game, it will compel you to do things you would rather not do like crop images and stick them up on the website so they look just right. The prospect of getting to June 2012 and drawing a line under it makes us both sad and happy at this stage.

To finish up would make us sad because one of the unwavering goals of the No Dice project was to produce some stuff that blew your mind but didn't force you to get an overdraft. Something reasonable. Something narrative. Something new. This year we completely cracked it. Our new core system and the PULP ruleset are both fun, light and narratively driven. If you ever wanted to run a game but felt a lack of imagination we are confident we will have something for you within the next few months (if we haven't already). As much as we'd love to have a wind up party, chow down on a bit of cake and go our separate ways, we'd be just as happy to have a PULP release party and follow it up with a meeting about what projects were going to go on the slate for 2013 and how we could better manage all of our correspondence etc.

Which of those scenarios matures is, as in any great RPG, entirely in your hands.

We await your instructions.

The pilot will run until the end of conference season 2012 which will be after Free RPG Day 2012 at that time the store will either be discontinued or upgraded. In the meanwhile reach us at rpg@nodicerpg.com to ask any questions, make enquiries or get some customer service.

All are available now in our UK Shop.

After the enormously satisfying one-hit mega-campaign that brought new realms of horror and excitement to the police procedural genre that was Shadow Cities we've taken a completely different tack with our new game. Everything you need to play all of the genres from a game mechanic point of view is, essentially, in this first volume. After that you can pick and choose genres you'd like to have available to you.

There will be a prestige hardback compendium of all six of the part-work volumes which we're aiming to have out in late 2012, that will include a wealth of extra material in addition to collecting all the volumes. The innovation with the part works is that they're more than just books, they're reference tools.

The intention is that in order to run a PULP session you will, necessarily, thumb through your genre guide for the resources at the time that you're assembling your PULP plot, which is, of course, when you turn up to run the game. Trying to locate things in a massive book is sometimes a challenge that requires you to make thorough notes before you play. With only 80 pages to flick through, and fairly clearly typeset ones at that, a momentary pause is all that's required if you need to consult a detail.

Not only that but at a price point of £7 (roughly $10.50 USD) you could batter the hell out of one running sessions and then just buy another one. If you're quick and purchase before October 15th you'll also get £1 ($1.50ish USD) off that price as a release special offer.

We're also running PULP events throughout the Autumn so check out the calendar to see where we'll be and when. 

We're also going to use it as an avenue to give exclusive competitions, downloads and offers. So if you want to be informed about ways in which we're trying to make something different in the world of Role Play sign up today!

We've been doing a lot of playing and playtesting recently, and having a whale of a time thanks for asking. We've covered the ground from the deep development of a Shadow Cities Chicago campaign, the blossoming of a new Arthurian romance system, some tinkering with an extremely high-concept Victorian setting from Antipod-Ian and enjoying some time with a hack of a steampunk graphic novel that Justin's been working on.

I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that all of this activity should culminate in something (not to mention the continuing illustration of Levercastle and the slow build up of materials in the Dreamtime Stories section of the No Dice Wiki both taking shape nicely in the wings). We have to collectively gasp in amazement however at quite how quickly this paradigm shift has taken hold.

The fact of it is that we always knew when we started that this whole No Dice business would be an adventure in and of itself. What started life as an attempt to discipline, formalise and make accessible the world of freeform Role Play has become something else. It has become the foundation of a new type of Role Play altogether. It has become Narrative Role Play.

To your casual observer it won't look so much terribly different from a Role Playing Game. The difference is more than just word juggling. Over and over again we have stated and re-stated that the purpose of No Dice was to create a new form of narrative entertainment. A regular RPG can be narratively entertaining but is still a game. Your character can still die at any time, in the most ignominious of fashions. In Narrative Role Play it is the job of the Host to provide drama for the players in the same manner as a television series or movie, the question of arbitrary character death is a pointless one.

You may as well wonder if Luke Skywalker will turn to the dark side permanently, or if the Green Goblin will actually manage to kill Spiderman. We know that any dark side episode in Luke Skywalker's life would be brief and entirely in the service of narrative. We know that death is about as likely to stick to Spiderman as bits of burnt egg to a non-stick frying pan. If handled skilfully, it doesn't mean we won't enjoy the ride.

And that, in a nutshell, is what we've always wanted to create. Thrilling narrative drama in which the players and the characters are one. Let's face it, it's been a quest of Role Playing since the beginning but nobody's been willing to throw everything out and start again from scratch, until now.

At first, of course, we just swapped dice for cards (which remains an innovation whose importance is yet to be recognised), tossed out every rule we couldn't see the point in (we tried to throw away Hit Points but they just wouldn't go) and we started it all again, from scratch, slowly accruing rules that managed to make it past the bouncers we'd hired to turn away every rule that hampered the delivery of narrative excellence in role playing.

We haven't always succeeded, sometimes our experiments have taken a distinct turn for the Frankenstein. Sometimes (often) we've succeeded but haven't quite known why. It's been a fascinating and thrilling few years, I can tell you.

And then, a few weeks ago, it all resolved. We realised that just throwing away all the rules had been a start but that sometimes things were more helpfully resolved, explained, portrayed and played with a certain rule than without it. Suddenly we noticed that certain rules barely ever go away. Suddenly it came to us that we had form, structure, direction. All of the things we'd been doing that had succeeded had common traits. All of the things that failed had common failings. Generally speaking the number one failure has been the encroachment of vague.

To say that this Core System was discovered by accident would be over-egging the pudding, after all we've been deliberately poking around this subject for three years now. We didn't expect it to suddenly appear, clear and bright, as the great cosmic focus ring snapped everything into clarity. Then, just yesterday, we all sat, ran through what we'd come up with, had a serious think about things and concluded that, yes, this was it. This was what we'd been looking for all along.

This left us with one small problem. The Core Book, and Random Encounters, both had features of where we were headed, those were clear now, but they also had a whole bunch of vague which didn't really do us any favours.

So, as of right now, these books have been officially "retired" for the time being until we have time to fix them, re-orient them and release them back into the world in their full glory. In the case of the Core Book we will continue to offer the old version as a free PDF for historical purposes and for the continued enjoyment of those who find us in the meanwhile. We felt it was wrong to continue to allow things to be sold which we knew were going to be, if not obsolete, at least a little behind the times within the next eighteen months.

Shadow Cities, being one example of the kind of thing we're aiming for, remains on sale and available for e-download. Levercastle and PULP will be following in the next few months and, for those impatient to know what the big story is you can look to Dreamtime Stories as that will rely on the new system for the mundane aspects of character creation in the core game.

As we head out on the road in the next couple of weeks we'll be offering Shadow Cities for sale (and a worthy purchase it will prove to be!) and we'll be allowing the new system to do its work with a variety of gaming experiences on offer. More than anywhere else I would say that this action, this news bulletin and this moment is definitely the end of the beginning for No Dice.

We all hope that you're ready, willing and able to join us as we enter the main phase!

All the best,

Leo, Sue and Justin

This means that people from all over the world (time zones notwithstanding) have an opportunity to take part in a session and the first one is planned for Thursday 3rd of March between 7pm and 10pm GMT. If you are interested in taking part please drop us a line to rpg@nodicerpg.com and we'll send you details of how you can get involved.

For more details check out the event calendar.

All products likely to turn up in 2011 will have gamer beards stroked furiously. We're looking to expand the very boundaries of the hobby this year as some really exciting ideas surface in the world of No Dice.

We're going to have a couple of what I'd classify as "regular" No Dice events to start the year off and then we're going to start expanding into new territory. Watch this space for details.

For now though, Happy New Year and start working on that beard!

For those of you who may be thinking that it is still December 5th we would answer that in the land of our antipodean correspondent Ian (regular on the podcast and co-author of Random Encounters) he lives by Eastern Daylight Time where it has been December 6th for over five hours at this time. So I would say that we said that Shadow Cities would be released on 6th December and we decided not to be Euro-centric in our definition of when December 6th would begin.

Therefore, it gives us enormous pleasure to present unto you the entirely free electronic version of Shadow Cities and its slightly pricier printed counterpart (£19.99 including delivery inside the  UK). The electronic version is free because we wanted to acknowledge the huge part that creative commons licensed materials have played in the book's creation.

The system itself is a narratively focused police procedural game with a massive dose of Lovecraftian horror to keep things interesting. The ruleset has attempted to do something a bit different with the investigation RPG genre. Games are focused on a number of small investigations within a single session making the game fast paced and involving.

The influences on the game run from the obvious H.P. Lovecraft to the less obvious such as cop serials like The Shield, Homicide Life on the Streets or CSI, traditional investigative SF like Supernatural and the X Files and also the Lovecraftian writings of authors like Robert E. Howard.

The book contains everything you will ever need to play the main Shadow Cities campaign and some amusing spin offs. The moody atmosphere is offset by the high rate of player reward for succesful investigations carried out and the system has been a firm favourite with our players throughout development.

In addition to the book we're also going to be running events and trying to get the system out on the road in 2011, we're also going to be talking about the system and answering questions in our podcast.

Lulu have stopped telling us how many people are downloading our free electronic books so if you do download and enjoy the system please feel free to drop us a line telling us about it at rpg@nodicerpg.com

We hope you enjoy the Shadow Cities experience.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!