In anticipation of those of you who may read our news feed at www.nodicerpg.com and are 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!

The No Dice Team