This is the fourteenth Briefing and this is the scheduled Briefing for September, so time for a quick report across the product lines.
Unified Rolemaster
The new Rolemaster Character Law and Arms Law have been released from the Gamma discussion and playtesting phase. They will receive a very minimal amount of formatting and will then go to Public Playtest. I am waiting impatiently on the new Spell Law similarly emerging. The plan is to release these three products into Public Playtest in quick succession and while GMs and players are digesting these, trying stuff out and making suggestions on the ICE forums, the RMU team will focus on Creature Law and Treasure Law.
There will be an unscheduled Briefing as soon as the first unified Rolemaster product goes live on the OneBookShelf network.
HARP Fantasy goes Electrum and more to come!
We released HARP Fantasy last month with a special time-limited discount coupon offer, which expires on the 15th of September. To recap, use the following link to buy the HARP Fantasy pdf for a mere 5 (yes, FIVE) dollars
http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?discount=91524
(if you prefer www.drivethrurpg.com/index.php?discount=91524 and so on for all the other OBS affiliates) rather than the normal 20 dollars. This offers ends 15th September 2012, so buy right now.
We’ve had some glitches with the HARP Fantasy formatting, but it is being fixed up, so don’t fret or delay taking advantage of the coupon – we’ll let you know when the tidying is complete and you simply redownload the file. Also it will be the clean file that goes to print-on-demand.
For sports fans, this summer has been all about London 2012 in both Olympics and Paralympics, and for many, it has been all about the medals – bronze, silver and gold. On the OneBookShelf network, you could say it is all about the metals – copper, silver, electrum, gold and platinum, which measure paid-for sales on products on their network. HARP Fantasy now has a Copper rating on DriveThruRPG and an Electrum rating on RPGNow. To continue our sporting analogy, think boxing and wrestling associations where individual organisations award their own world championship belts. The OneBookShelf metal rankings are distinct across the various OneBookShelf storefronts with each attracting its own audience – DriveThru mainly the big companies and their fans, RPGNow the “indies†and their fans, WargameVault with wargamers. We do better on RPGNow because we started there and our sales hyperlinks are normally set to there. Reaching Electrum already is very good indeed and HARP Fantasy is the first GCP and indeed ICE product to reach that rating. If you click on the metal ranking image, you will go to a page which shows how many products have achieved each rating in number and percentage for that OneBookShelf site.
In other HARP news, Martial Law is poised to enter layout as soon as HARP Fantasy has received its cleanup and I’ve managed to complete my change document for College of Magics, which is now being checked by the rest of the redesign team. We have opened our list of necessary changes that are required to tweak Loot to be fully consistent with the trio of enhanced HARP Fantasy books (core, Martial Law and College of Magics) and we have a new cover for it as well. You are very welcome to submit requests for tweaking modifications and errata fixes for Loot on the ICE forums. We have also opened a discussion on the ICE forums concerning the future brand-new HARP Bestiary and would like to hear your suggestions for which monsters you’d like to see in it.
Cyradon
For HARP and Rolemaster to thrive again, they need new material and not just rules. They need settings and adventures. So now that the core HARP Fantasy rulebook is available and Martial Law and College of Magics are ready (or nearly so) to hand over to layout, it’s time that we reawakened Cyradon. We’ve started a thread on the ICE forums to explain what changes we will definitely be making and to solicit requests from the fans for extra bits and pieces we could add into the main setting book.
I am awaiting a formal signature from its author (Jason Brisbane) on an agreement to bring back “The Ruins of Kausurâ€, which we will update for compatibility with HARP Fantasy. We are also waiting upon a formal contract with an author for a new adventure module to be set on the continent of Cyradon. Elsewhere for the world of Mithra (for there’s more than just the continent of Cyradon to explore), we are making very good progress on the return of “A Wedding in Axebridgeâ€, which will be fine-tuned such that it and indeed followup modules (that are already in progress!) can be set in one of the landmasses of the Shatterings.
Shadow World
Whisper it softly. Emer III is real. The first draft has arrived from Terry Amthor. It’s huge, it’s fantastic, and Shadow World fans are going to love it.
Next Time
There will be a scheduled Director’s Briefing in October but there also will be a special Briefing to announce the Public Playtest of unified Rolemaster.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
