Welcome
Welcome to the eighty-fifth Briefing and sixth scheduled Briefing of 2018. May started well, and then the marking arrived. As I write, I have one full batch of assignments still to mark and then two smaller sets of assignments to moderate. And summer-term teaching starts in the first week of June to encourage me to make haste. Enough of the end-of-year marking rant, time for some actual news.
Gen Con 2018
The countdown is on – Terry has been entering details of his gaming events into the Gen Con system, so hopefully they will already be visible and bookable.
I will be sending copies of all four RM Classic rulebooks for the ICE Gen Con stand.
A reminder to talk to Colin about anything that you would like to do for or about ICE at Gen Con.
Shadow World
Stats are safely in the enhanced Jaiman sourcebook – some stubborn images to sort out. Naturally this will go unpleasantly close to the wire so we may have a very short window of pdf released followed by Gen Con print run and expensive shipping to Aaron to reach the Pointy Hat Games convention convoy in time.
Software and A HARP Game Request
Max has created another RMSS dataset for ERA. This time it is Races & Cultures that receives the ERA upgrade. We will be launching this as soon as we have created the necessary pseudocover – Terry as you might imagine has been rather focused on Jaiman.
Speaking of software, you may recall that ICE (through me in my capacity as Director and my real-world role as person irresponsible for computing degrees at the University of Suffolk) had been in discussion with my real-world computer games lecturer colleagues about Suffolk students becoming involved in developing apps for HARP. A student has been put himself into the frame for potentially writing a HARP character creator app – he would like to gain some actual gaming experience with the system, so anyone running HARP in online format who would like an extra player, let me know asap.
HARP
I said that May had started well. I pursued the refresh of spells for HARP Something Wicked, Something Wondrous, so am very pleased to be able to report that, in terms of the original Something Wicked manuscript, the Sphere of the Warlock and the Witch is now complete (tick), the additional Universal and other Sphere/Circle spells are complete (tick), and the Great Circle of the Mentalist is now complete. I have perused the relevant spells from Codex and other sources, and have a shopping list of extra spells to rebuild or refresh. Once that is complete, I will deem the “Black Magic” chapter to be finished (unless inspiration strikes for yet another spell) and turn my writing attention to the non-mechanics chapters of the book.
Freelancers are hinting that complete drafts of two, possibly even three, other HARP sourcebooks will be arriving in my editorial intray in the next month or so.
Until next time
Finish this marking so that I can get back to writing and editing soon. The next scheduled Briefing will be in July 2018.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Iron Crown Enterprises Ltd
