For those who don’t know, 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 fourth of our Director’s Briefings.
The big news is that HARP SF Xtreme has now been formally released as a pdf on the OneBookShelf network. I have sent a wave of emails to purchasers of the HARP SciFi Beta so that they can receive their complimentary PDF copy.
One of the issues that we have been addressing in the HARP Fantasy reconstruction is the limited number of Influence skills. We have added four extra skills to the Influence category, namely Charm, Diplomacy, Interrogation (already available in HARP SF), and Leadership. One of our goals is to maximise the compatibility between HARP Fantasy and HARP SF. Craig John was able to perform a minor miracle of layout adjustment for us and we added Charm, Diplomacy and Leadership to HARP SF. Purchasers of HARP SF can simply download an updated version via their account on OneBookShelf. This is the only expected retrofitting back into HARP SF from the HARP Fantasy reconstruction.
Speaking of the HARP Fantasy reconstruction, the major area of rework still to be completed is the monster creation system. We want to provide more variation than is available using the current scheme of having all monsters be members of the Fighter profession with all stats of 75. We also need to provide a more systematic underpinning to species abilities and replace Survival Instinct with more justifiable alternatives. This new monster creation system will be used to generate the creatures in the HARP Fantasy core rulebook and our new planned HARP Bestiary sourcebook.
Our rebranding programme successfully released RMFRP Arms Law (1999 Edition), RMFRP Races & Cultures, RMFRP Mentalism Companion and RMFRP Fire & Ice: The Elemental Companion during October. We took the opportunity of including the Fire & Ice Addendum as part of our rebranded edition and applied as many of errata as possible to the product. The next set of products to be rebranded are the entire Spacemaster: Privateers range – and we are very grateful to Robert Defendi for being willing to come to an IP arrangement for the Spacemaster: Privateers core rulebook, Equipment Manual and Robotics Manual as that has essentially made the reissuing of the entire line possible.
We continue to have success in finding authors and contributors from previous incarnations of ICE. There will be a set of Spacemaster modules returning – we are just awaiting the completion of the scanning of “Beyond the Core†– and we have also reached agreement with William van Horn, regarding the classic Sea Law supplement. Expect to see Sea Law in pdf for the first time very soon.
In the Shadow World domain, Terry Amthor continues to tease all of us with hints about what will be in Emer III. Our next task, however, is getting the Shadow World Player’s Guide available in print-on-demand as our first foray into printed products.
The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented at the start of December.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
