My name is Nicholas Caldwell and I am the Director and sole shareholder of Guild Companion Publications Limited, the company licensed by Aurigas Aldebaron LLC to publish Rolemaster, Spacemaster, HARP, Shadow World and Cyradon. This is the second of our Director’s Briefings.
So where are we with the various projects?
Firstly in HARP SF Xtreme, Craig John has been fine-tuning the deck plans that Joel Lovell reconstructed from Dave Cheever’s originals as featured in the beta versions of HARP SciFi. The area of residual fiddliness is getting the deck plan keys to fit appropriately on the relevant pages. That’s the only thing still to finish off and then we can race to release.
Secondly in the Shadow World domain, the RMSSification project continues apace while Terry Amthor continues to toil away on Emer III. In addition to his work on the Shadow World GM Guide, Matt Hanson is looking into the possibility of producing a distinct Shadow World Timeline product. This would have a lightweight layout to make it easy to update as new entries are added to the timeline. By using the OneBookShelf network’s ability to allow customers to redownload their purchased products, customers would be able to get updated versions at no extra charge.
Thirdly, I am personally working on the HARP Fantasy reconstruction with input from a team of long-term HARP experts. We will be ensuring that software creators get early viewings of the changes so that we can minimise the lag between book updates and software support updates.
Fourthly, all bar one of the Spacemaster 2nd Edition products (that are fully owned by Aurigas) have been published as scanned pdfs on the OneBookShelf network during August. The missing Aurigas-owned Spacemaster module is “League of Merchantsâ€. Once we can create a reasonable scan of this product, we will make it available for purchase too.
Fifthly, as has been indicated in prior Aurigas newsletters, one of the work programmes being undertaken by my company is the recovery of products from the Old ICE and indeed Mjolnir eras that have fallen into various states of copyright limbo. We’ve tracked down some authors already and have secured agreements on a number of products. For instance, we’re just completing the paperwork with Kevin Barrett for the classic Spacemaster 2nd Edition adventure module, “Imperial Crisis: House Devon in Turmoilâ€, and will be bringing that back from its post-bankruptcy limbo as a scanned pdf product shortly. We’re also doing the paperwork with Tod Foley (author of Cyberspace and Kingdom of the Desert Jewel) regarding a further three classic Spacemaster 2nd Edition modules, “War on a Distant Moonâ€, “Tales from Deep Spaceâ€, and “Beyond the Coreâ€. There are a number of authors and contributors who we still have to find and we will be publishing a list of these on the ICE forums and asking your assistance in finding them.
Once authors are found and agreement reached, what happens next will depend on the product:
1. For RMSS/RMFRP era products where we have the layout files, we will reconstruct them as bona-fide pdfs that are capable of being made available as print-on-demand products as well.
2. For Rolemaster 2nd Edition products and the handful of Spacemaster 2nd Edition and Cyberspace products still in limbo, which have a single author, we will publish these as scanned pdf products as that is the most efficient and cost-effective way of returning them on-sale.
3. Many of the older products, especially the Rolemaster Companions, had lots of authors and this necessitates a different approach. As we come to agreement with specific authors on their material, we will add their material to a list of content requiring text and table extraction. We will need a small team of people to extract these content items (whether by scan and ocr or manually typing it into a Word document). Once there is sufficient material, we will issue a minimally laid-out product, call it the Rolemaster Companion Compendium, which we will price at 20 dollars. At regular intervals as more material is recovered, we would add more content to this Rolemaster Companion Compendium, which is why the layout will be minimalist to make this as easy as possible. Again, we would utilise the OneBookShelf product update facility so that early-bird purchasers could upgrade their copy for free. Eventually the Compendium will stabilise and then we would make the final version available as a print-on-demand product.
Marc Rosen will be leading the search for authors and will also be in charge of the Compendium construction team. Look for threads about both of these aspects on the ICE forums soon.
Lastly, the next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented at the start of October.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
