Director's Briefing - March 2025

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

Welcome

To the one hundred-and-sixty-fourth Briefing and third scheduled Briefing of 2025.

Website Upgrades

As indicated last month, the updates to the site seem to have calmed down the bot crawlers to a level that does not exceed website capacity. However, there do appear to be some glitches with the forums, notably at least one of the themes seems to misbehave making it difficult to use the website. Expect some additional changes to the website.

DriveThru Printing Changes

As we mentioned last time, DriveThru were upgrading all of the older standard colour printed books to use a heavier paper as a precaution. HARP SF Xtreme and nearly all of the Shadow World products have made it through the upgrade process and are back on sale.

DriveThru have been in touch with all publishers to note that Lightning Source printing costs are increasing. For orders fulfilled by the UK Lightning Source plant, which covers UK, European and global orders, the price rise for black&white and standard colour are 3-4% increases on the minimum print price and on the per page count. For orders fulfilled by the US Lightning Source, which covers the USA, the price rises are more extreme, due to increasing supply costs in the USA. For black&white, the price increases depend on the size of the book, hardcover versus softcover, and page count, but range from 20% to 50%+ on the printing costs. For standard colour, the printing cost increase is approximately 12-13%. The printing cost changes take effect in April.

As our print product prices track the printing costs, you may wish to make an early purchase particularly if you are served by the US Lightning Source plant. We will be looking to make an early print run for Gen Con.

Shadow World

Very pleased with the RMU conversion guide. This is now complete. Jonathan has even added the Seer and Astrologer professions with RMU compliant spell lists. Expect the RMU conversion guide to appear on DriveThru in the very near future as a free pdf.

Software

Related to this, Max is developing a free Shadow World RMU dataset for ERA for Rolemaster. We will keep you posted on his progress.

HARP

Just waiting on the cover for Banecroft: The Mage's Tale and we should be able to send it into its layout phase after the cover artwork arrives.

With regard to HARP Something Wicked Something Wondrous, I have completed a full draft of the new chapter on retrocognition, scrying and divination. This is now consistent with the letter and the spirit of HARP mechanics. I am now back to the chapter on spells, creating new spells for Mentalists in line with the material from the new chapter.

Rolemaster

Aaron has finished what he hopes to be the final set of stat block changes. Nick is deep in the layout-in-progress document for RMU Creature Law volume 1.

Until next time

Please stay safe and keep gaming.
Best wishes,
Nicholas

[nash]

Since Roll20 was omitted; the Roll20 Shadow World Conversion guide is also ready for release.   Seer and Astrologer are already ready to go ;-)

[jdale]

I even have someone playing an Astrologer in my new campaign!

[nash]

As our print product prices track the printing costs, you may wish to make an early purchase particularly if you are served by the US Lightning Source plant. We will be looking to make an early print run for Gen Con.

It would be nice to be able to nab Creature Law at the lower price.

Those increases are going to make it cheaper to import from the UK soon.