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Happy 2015 everyone! The new year is now thoroughly underway and with the rest and relaxation of the holiday period firmly behind us, the wheels are back in motion here at ICE HQ. We’re making some huge progress and already have a great deal in the works for 2015..
Catch up on what you’ve missed with this month’s Director’s Briefing.
ROLEMASTER
As mentioned in the Director’s Briefing, the new Unified Rolemaster now only requires the examples and the tables to be sorted before the second beta can be released.
We’re not quite there yet but the finish line is in sight. We will of course let you know the second that it is available on the forum for download and thanks again for your patience.
THE ORDER OF THE IRON CROWN
There have been a few changes behind the scenes already this year. After a company meet up, we have rejigged a couple of the responsibilities in the team.
The most exciting of these (for me anyway) is that I (Colin the Marketing Guy) will now be taking care of The Order of the Iron Crown.
Nothing will change for members, it is simply that I will now be the new point of contact. If you’re not already a member, check it out here.
SETTINGS
As always Terry Amthor is hard at work creating yet more brilliant products for Shadow World. He is currently flipping between making the finishing touches to the Eidolon revision and continuing work on the Lethys module.
In addition, ICE is currently in negotiation with the author of Norek to return it as an updated product. A deal is yet to be done, but we will let you know the second it is available once again.
HARP
Things are picking up speed in HARP. The second draft of HARP Folkways is now with Nicholas for the next editing sweep, bringing it one step closer to completion.
The HARP Bestiary is motoring away. Nicholas has just finished the Ghoul Overlay and is now working on the Mummy Overlay with a suitable Curse of the Mummy ability.
The Poseidon Gambit for HARP SF is now under contract. This is an adventure module set in the Tintamar universe. There is still quite a lot of work to do in re-releasing it but we’ll let you know the second it is available again.
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Star Strike now a copper pick on RPGNow!
Star Strike for Spacemaster has just reached ‘Copper Pick’ status on RPGNow.
A huge thanks to everyone who has purchased Star Strike and continues to support ICE products old and new.
For those of you that haven’t purchased or read Star Strike, you can pick it up in pdf format for $8 from RPGNow.
Star Strike allows you to simulate deep-space battles involving any number of vessels. Dogfight with small but lethal SMAC fighters or deploy Line Cruisers to slug it out with a death dealing Dreadnought.
Star Strike allows you to choose the level of detail and realism. Even more detailed Optional Rules can be layered on as you desire. Alternatively you can create your own starcraft using Star Strike’s comprehensive starcraft construction system.
Thanks again to everyone who bought it, we hope you enjoy it!
Director’s Briefing – January 2015
Welcome to 2015
Happy New Year to everyone
Welcome to the forty-third Briefing and the first scheduled Briefing for 2015. My reading this holiday season was the Void space opera (The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void, and The Evolutionary Void) by Peter F Hamilton, which has been patiently waiting on my physical bookshelves for my attention. This is a sequel trilogy to his Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained duology, mixing technothriller, sf, an pseudofantasy medieval extra setting (you will understand this on reading) and galactic threat. I enjoyed this. My Kindle has also had its library boosted by a whole slew of fantasy trilogies by Raymond E Feist so there will be plenty of restful reading for the commutes to come (that is when I am not writing or editing) and I’ve already started rereading the classic Magician. My wife and I did go to the cinema and “The Battle of the Five Armies” was indeed a glorious spectacular retelling of the final portion of The Hobbit. I am feeling reinvigorated.
A retrospective on 2014
As with 2012, 2013, and 2014, let us begin with a look back on what was achieved in 2014. Reality and our plan for 2014 diverged rapidly.
Emer 3 came early and opened up southeastern Emer to exploration. Other Shadow World projects made progress over the year, notably the enhancement of Eidolon and the new Tales from the Green Gryphon Inn adventure module and Wuliris sourcebook, and some third-party modules received initial editing.
In HARP, the HARP Bestiary made slow but solid progress. I have personally playtested some of the new monsters appearing from the chapter drafts and they are very good. Updates from HARP Bestiary have been finding their way into TGA#4 which has rather too diverse a set of monsters requiring adjustments for its own good. Cyradon continued to acquire complete manuscripts of adventures but also remained in a waiting limbo on Bestiary progress. HARP Folkways, which has no dependencies at all on HARP Bestiary, reached full first draft, has already received a full edit and Terry’s imprimatur for its Shadow World section. It is back with Jon Cassie for his amendments.
2014 was a great year for Rolemaster support software, seeing the release of the Rolemaster Combat Minion for both RM Classic and RMSS/FRP, and later in the year ERA for Rolemaster Classic.
2014 was not a good year for RMU. We were not able to deliver the second beta in 2014 and this was a major disappointment for us.
As 2014 drew to a close, ICE and GCP attended the Dragonmeet convention for the first time as traders. This turned out to be the largest Dragonmeet ever and we have compiled our lessons learned so that our next Dragonmeet will be even more successful.
GCP remained a frequent entrant on the top 15 publisher listing on RPGNow. We were in the top 2-3% of publishers over the year across all OneBookShelf sites, routinely in the top 20 for printed products and in the top 5 for software products across OneBookShelf.
2015
Let us begin with some really good news. I have the edited RMU Arms Law and Character Law complete rules sans final examples in my inbox. The examples are still being written but that is a finite set of work to be done as is putting the tables in the text (so that Terry can trivially see where to import them from the master spreadsheets). Finally the path is clear for second beta. As I said, really good news.
In HARP, we will see HARP Folkways this year. We will also have a major push on HARP Bestiary as it is currently the logjam for HARP, Cyradon and TGA#4. Even as we press on with Bestiary, I will be commissioning additional adventure modules for Cyradon so that when the Bestiary manuscript and the Bestiary chapter in the revitalised Cyradon chapter are complete, we can back fill those and other modules with compatible monster stats. I will also be formally commissioning a HARP SF adventure module set in the Tintamar universe.
In Spacemaster, we will have a major drive to complete the text extraction of the Imperium setting from old second-edition Spacemaster products ahead of a future HARP SF setting sourcebook and unified Spacemaster.
In Shadow World, art is flowing inward to complete Tales from the Green Gryphon Inn and Terry is within a couple of weeks of handing me the complete refreshed Eidolon manuscript. (If the timing is right, Terry will be handing me the Eidolon manuscript to edit in return for me giving him the second beta of RMU Arms and Character Law for layout) We should see the brand-new Wuliris sourcebook in 2015 and other refreshed sourcebooks are likely (exactly which ones depends on how Terry is inspired.) The author of Norek has been found and I hope to see it make a very welcome escape from IP limbo this year. Lethys will continue to be edited and a second editing pass will be triggered on Priest-King of Shade once its author is able to send us more detailed drawings of some of the adventure sites.
We fully expect to be at Dragonmeet in 2015 and we will be booking our stand as soon as the organisers are ready. We are hoping to be able to scout out UK Games Expo this year, in order to evaluate it as a future convention that we may attend as traders. If we can send an ICE rep such as John or Thom to either Origins or GenCon this year, this will help pave the way for an ICE/GCP stand in the future.
Until next time
The next scheduled Briefing will be in February 2015.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
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Races and Cultures now a copper pick!
Races and Cultures for Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing (RMFRP) has just reached ‘Copper Pick’ status on RPGNow.
A huge thanks to everyone who has purchased this product and continues to support Rolemaster and Iron Crown Enterprises.
For those of you that still haven’t purchased it, you can pick it up in pdf format for $15 from RPGNow.
Created for Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing and Shadow World, Races & Cultures gives you everything you need to design unique, exciting and diverse characters for your Rolemaster and Shadow World adventures.
It includes all the core races as well as many humanoid (including centaurs), and fey races (like the Dwelf and the Pech). Also included are unusual races from Creatures & Monsters, and the monster races as well.
Thanks again to everyone who bought it, we hope you enjoy it!
Director’s Briefing – December 2014
Welcome to the forty-second Briefing and the twelfth scheduled Briefing for 2014. Christmas and the holiday season are nearly upon us, and the final instalment of The Hobbit movies in the form of “The Battle of the Five Armies” will soon be in cinemas everywhere. I look forward to seeing Peter Jackson’s audiovisual spectacular – I am sure that the tale has once more grown in the telling.
Dragonmeet
Our own ICE/GCP fellowship gathered at Dragonmeet on the 6th December. This turned out to be the largest Dragonmeet ever at over 1600 attendees. Chris Seal ran a successful Rolemaster scenario, while Colin, John and myself were on hand at the GCP/ICE table to chat with attendees, invite them to enter our raffle, and to sell product (in terms of print copies of HARP/HARP SF and Shadow World). Many people had fond memories of playing MERP, Rolemaster, Spacemaster and more, and were pleased to see that the games are still alive and resurging. With ICE listed in 10,000 Dragonmeet flyers and a full-page advertisement in the programme book, the word will continue to spread.
So our first-ever Dragonmeet as traders was a success. We are compiling our lessons learned list so that our next Dragonmeet will be even better. The experience gained will also feed into how ICE / GCP can make a success of GenCon or Origins in the future. Yes, ICE / GCP does plan on being at future GenCons and/or Origins, but the earliest this can be is 2016.
The waiting game
One of the downsides of being a small publisher is that everything depends on freelancers – writing, artwork, maps, editing and layout. Even as far back as the original 1980s and 1990s incarnation of ICE, freelancers were contributing significantly across multiple gaming lines. The problem is that all freelancers are at the mercy of events in their lives and we’re enduring a thoroughly awful and prolonged period where multiple freelancers are taking hits. The related problem is that creative tasks do not readily allow for swapping people in and out of projects – two artists given the same topic will draw very different illustrations, writers cannot easily carry on where someone else has left off, and so forth. The software industry has had its mythical man-month issue crystallised for decades. Nevertheless on several projects, we are moving into the position where Plan B actions must shortly be executed.
HARP Folkways
HARP Folkways has, however, proven itself to be exceptional. Jon Cassie has delivered a full draft of his manuscript for this brand-new sourcebook, and I have begun my editing sweep. Once I have completed this sweep, I will be soliciting artwork while Jon makes any amendments and additions that I feel are required.
Until next time
The next scheduled Briefing will be in January 2015, so all that remains for me to do is to wish you all a Merry Christmas (or other holiday of your choosing) and a Happy New Year.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
If you would like to receive the Director’s Briefing straight to your inbox each month, you can sign up to our mailing list HERE.
Dragonmeet Round-up
What a day it was at this year’s Dragonmeet! Let me start by saying a huge thanks to everyone involved in running the convention and everyone who attended and took the time to come and see us, talk to us and buy from us. Special mention to Order of the Iron Crown member Chris Seal who came down all the way from Manchester to run a game and help out.
This year’s convention saw over 1,500 attendees and, as Iron Crown Enterprises’ first convention in a very long time, was incredibly successful. There were of course areas that we’d look to improve upon for the next convention we attend, but all in all it was a really great day.
Chris Seal’s Rolemaster game was fully booked and really well received by all who played. The Iron Crown Enterprises raffle was also a huge success with one lucky winner walking away with a complete set of Rolemaster Classic rulebooks.
It was nice to see so many ICE fans and so many people with memories of playing ICE roleplaying games. A number of people commented how nice it was to see ICE so active in the market and back at conventions. It was really great to hear and we’re now thinking about next year’s Dragonmeet and a sustainable way of extending our convention attendance.
I had a great day at Dragonmeet. It wasn’t all the games, the stalls or the competitions that made it great for me, it was the people. Everyone (even those with no previous experience or interest in Iron Crown) was so nice and friendly that the day whizzed past. It reaffirmed what I already knew (but sometimes forget) that the gaming industry is an amazing industry to work in. Fans, publishers and retailers, really are some of the nicest people I have ever met.
Dragonmeet here I come!
As I’m sure you all know by now (I’ve been talking about it for the past few months), this weekend some of the Iron Crown Enterprises team (including myself) will be heading off to Dragonmeet at the Ibis hotel Earls Court and ILEC convention center, London.
I’m excited about it for a number of reasons. Personally I’m pretty new to the convention game. I attended Dragonmeet two years ago with a couple of the Iron Crown team to scope it out, run some games and get a feel for what the convention was like. I have to admit, for my first ever convention, it didn’t disappoint. It took all my energy not to run around like a child buying everything in sight.
In addition to wandering about in wide eyed amazement at how awesome everything was, I also got the chance to sit down and play a game of HARP GMd by none other than Guild Companion Publications Director Nicholas Caldwell. It was brilliant fun. Everyone at the table enjoyed it (despite running over the allotted time by quite some way) and it was good to get some thoughts and opinions from people who had never played HARP before.
This year however is a completely different kettle of fish. This year we’re not just turning up for a stroll around the stalls and some gaming. This year we mean business. As a testament to just how serious we are about this year’s Dragonmeet, we’ve been holding weekly team catch ups for the past month to check that we have everything. I myself have a stack of merchandise, table furnishings and other trinkets so high that it is threatening to engulf my tiny work space.
This year we’re running a stool, selling hardcover, softcover and pdf products, running a raffle, handing out a few cool giveaways, selling ICE merchandise and running a really cool competition with our friends from Arion games. I can’t wait!
Needless to say, it has been a long journey to get everything prepared and ready for this weekend but I’ve really enjoyed it and I have a sneaking suspicion I’m going to enjoy Dragonmeet even more. If you’re in London this Saturday, why not pop by and say hello, peruse our products and enter our competitions. If you’re not in London, don’t feel too left out. I’ll be tweeting throughout the day and I’ll post a blog with all the pictures at the end of it.
Hope to see you there.
Iron Crown Enterprises Newsletter – November 2014
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It has been another busy month this month. We currently have a number of big projects on the go and everyone has been knuckling down and working hard to get things finished. While there’s no huge announcements yet, we’re edging ever closer to our next release..
Catch up on what you’ve missed with this month’s Director’s Briefing.
ROLEMASTER
Unified Rolemaster continues to edge towards handover into rapid layout and second beta release.
Everyone is itching to get at the next phase; no one wants to awaken the dread curse of Murphy. We will let you know the second it has been added to the forum for download.
THE ORDER OF THE IRON CROWN
We are now a matter of weeks away from attending Dragonmeet and I for one could not be more excited.
We have all sorts of goodies to take with us including products and merchandise to sell and to offer as prizes for a number of brilliant competitions.
If you’re in the UK and fancy popping in to say hello, Dragonmeet will be at the Ibis hotel Earths Court and ILEC Convention Centre on Saturday 6th December from 10am – Midnight.
SETTINGS
The brand new adventure module ‘Tales from the Green Gryphon Inn’ is still awaiting a few final pieces of artwork before being sent to RPGNow ready for sale.
We fully expect to make the pdf available in the not too distant future with hardcover and softcover formats following soon after.
Terry continues his work on Eidolon and Emer II revisions as well as editing a Lethys city module.
HARP
We now have a complete draft of HARP Folkways and Nicholas is looking forward to a very enjoyable read and editing pass.
Work on the bestiary continues with John Duffield making Dragons anew for HARP and Nicholas working on power levels for classic Undead and how many variant power levels will be presented for Wraiths and Wights, etc.
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The Order of the Iron Crown in Fresno, CA
Recently a member of the Order of the Iron Crown ran a Rolemaster demo game in the crazy squirrel game store in Fresno, CA for charity. Here’s what he had to say about the event:
“Things Went well the turnout was amazing. I had 5 players for the demo. We went through the whole character creation process in the first session then did a nice adventure. Things went so well I am now running a RM2 game every Thursday evening at The Crazy Squirrel. The event raised a lot of cash for the Valley Children’s Hospital. The Owner of the store is very community oriented. Over all it was a rousing success even GMing over the people dancing to The Y.M.C.A. Not my choice of songs 🙂 I found many folks who were familiar with ICE products and were delighted to see us playing RM. I am sure when and if ICE products are more available the store will gladly stock them.”
A huge thanks to MikeG for organising and running the game and to everyone who attended the event, played Rolemaster and contributed time and money to a very worthy cause. If you are interested in running an ICE game at a local event or would like the chance to earn rewards for promoting ICE and our products by becoming a member of the Order of the Iron Crown, check out the Order webpage for details.
Director’s Briefing – November 2014
Welcome to the forty-first Briefing and the eleventh scheduled Briefing for 2014.
Missing cats
At one of the stations on my morning commute, there is an advertising stand for the regional daily newspaper, which displays the headline for the day in an effort to drum up sales. Usually these are of a parochial nature but one caught my eye – “Dozens of cats missing” – and this is a headline that has reappeared a couple of times. Apparently in one of the local towns, lots of domestic cats have gone missing. Now doubtless there is a prosaic explanation for this (which I have no interest in) but I was reminded of Tolkien’s minor comment about “the cats of Queen Beruthiel” which in Unfinished Tales were described as being her spies, and also of the adventure seed involving an errant shapeshifting Maia and a religious cult in one Middle-Earth supplement. Transposing the disappearance of pets to a fantasy setting, there are possibilities for low-level adventures involving strange predators, were-creatures drawing animals to their rule, one or more mages / witches requiring the creatures for magical rituals or searching for the perfect familiar, and so on. I offer this as an instance where a GM can use the odd in the contemporary world as a spark of creativity for scenario writing.
ERA for Rolemaster
At the start of October, we were able to launch ERA (Electronic Roleplaying Assistant) for Rolemaster by Maximiliano Tabacman. This character management software package provides the ability to create characters at any level, add them to the ERA campaign dataset, enabling players and GMs to monitor and manage all aspects of the characters including skills, resistances, spells, abilities and gear, and to resolve maneuvers and actions. The base software package is available for free and you can purchase prebuilt data sets for RMC Arms Law, Spell Law, and Character Law. An update to all three platform-specific (Windows, Mac, Linux) packages has been recently made which will make the process of installing data set files easier. If you have any difficulties with any part of ERA, please post your queries on the Rolemaster Software discussion board.
ERA’s base package has had almost five hundred downloads so far from RPGNow, so thanks to everyone who has tried it out, and even more thanks to those customers who have purchased data files. With ERA joining AutoHARP and Rolemaster Combat Minion in our commercial software offerings, GCP moved into the #2 spot for computer software sales in October across OneBookShelf. For comparison, we are routinely in the top 20 for print-on-demand sales, and in the top 30 when sales of everything are considered. Note there are over 1700 active publishers across OneBookShelf.
HARP
HARP Bestiary continues to make incremental progress and we are accumulating ever more animals and monsters. We are by no means complete yet, but we do now have a greater selection of material to support module writers. I am also going to formally pull in the rewriting of the Bestiary chapter for the Cyradon main book into the HARP Bestiary team’s remit as that is the key chapter still needing fixing there.
The consequence of delays in second drafts of Bestiary chapters is that The Guild Adventurer #4 is still in a holding pattern.
Some really good news is that Jonathan Cassie has been making great progress with HARP Folkways. He is currently working on example culture writeups for Shadow World and Cyradon, and then only has two more chapters to write.
Tales from the Green Gryphon Inn
Unfortunately some of the artwork has yet to arrive for “Tales from the Green Gryphon Inn”, so we were not able to release it in pdf last month. The moment it does arrive, Terry and I will get it prepped and safely out as pdf. It is now looking much less likely that it will be ready as a print edition for Dragonmeet.
Terry is not twiddling his thumbs – he’s writing and editing on other manuscripts.
Unified Rolemaster
Edited manuscripts are still not ready to hand over to me. I hope that the team will be able to deliver material in a fit state to me that I have time to deploy it in the Rolemaster mini-game at Dragonmeet next month. If not, we will use RMC combat rules instead.
Dragonmeet 2014
Colin continues to run around doing some of our logistical preparation, the card payment reader is on order, and the print inventory is with John Seal for transport to the convention site. We expect to also be able to burn cds with pdfs for people who’d like to purchase our products in pdf.
John Seal has a HARP scenario to run, Chris Seal will be running Rolemaster, and I will either run HARP SF or a Cyradon adventure. We would love to see lots of ICE fans at Dragonmeet and UK members of the Order of the Iron Crown are very welcome to participate.
Full details on Dragonmeet are available on their website at www.dragonmeet.co.uk
Until next time
Back to work for me. The next scheduled Briefing will be in December.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
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