So... GenCon!!!!!

GenCon ROCKED!!!! Totally!!!

It was amazing getting to meet so many of the RedBrick crew in person, as I've only just interacted with them on the developer forums, through e-mails, and the very occasionally chat in text online. We all love working together online (even with arma... who am I kidding, esp. w/ arma ;)), but it was so great to spend so much time with all of them in person. It was like getting back together with a bunch of old best friends you just haven't seen in a while. So, to the RedBrick crew, you all truly ROCK!

Chad, Dammi, and I sat down for two extended brainstorming and development sessions on Equinox, and it was GREAT how much we could cover in person! Too bad we can't do that more often... ;). We came up with some good ideas for Powers and Advancement, keeping things very flexible, but with definite things to strive for! We still need to flesh out powers with specific directions for each Path (read: class/Discipline, but more open), but having some better ideas of framework is quite nice. All awaiting armanation after Dammi gets the typed up.

I also had the pleasure of looking through the layout drafts for Cathay's Player's and GM's Guides, including LOTS of amazing art from Kathy and a few others! And even moreso, I got to see Kathy at her magic sketching and inking even more Cathay art, and loved watching the process and the amazing results!

I currently need to sit down and hammer out an in-game text on one of the Consortium systems, but have a ton of ideas on paper and just get my head back into it. After that is a hybrid in-game text and rules piece on Mystic Energy (read: magic ;)) and various related areas which will be a lot of work, but that I'm really looking forward too!

GenCon was a lot less gaming than I thought it would be, BUT an absolute blast. Hanging out with the RedBrick crew was awesome! I did get to compete in two Dragon Dice events and WON the Sealed Box event!!! Even had an epic 1st turn, grabbing an 8th face on my FIRST turn (undead: Night Moves... which is the ONLY way it's even possible). Saturday was the Dragon Dice World Championships and I got 8th out of 10th... BUT had a blast doing so and gave one of my opponents quite the run for his money ;), thanks for the great game! Casually I also got to play Zombie Dice (Kathy is a horrible zombie) and Beer Money which I picked out at the Con (Steve dominated!!!), as well as fun rounds of Once Upon a Time, Set, and Pieces of Eight. I also got to play in demos of Thunderstone and Ascension, but didn't care as much for Ascension.... Jacque picked up Thunderstone, so I got to play that again as well!

My main two acquisitions were Dominion: Prosperity (it came out!!!) and Defenders of the Realm (which my wife LOVED!!!), and I'm really excited to get to play them so more in the near future.

Other highlights from the Con were Wil Wheaton's speech (awesome guy, step-dad of two kids, fun gaming!), Tracy Hickman's Killer Breakfast (a TON of laughs), the Guild panel (GREAT to see their interaction), boffer combat against some "pros", and meeting Jeff Laubenstein, who was amazing nice and the consummate gentleman, as well as a phenomenal artist! I also made professional contact with a fellow Chemistry professor and gamer... the host of GameGeeks on youtube, which was a real treat as well!

On the homefront, I'm gearing up for my first semester teaching fulltime, ending my time as an itinerant adjunct! Bonzai!!!

Til Next Time on Netherworld News! Raven

So...

Pre-GenCon update...

So... I'll be leaving for GenCon in two days... and I'm ECSTATIC!!! This'll be my first huge gaming con... the smaller ones here in Rochacha (Rochester, NY) don't hold a candle in terms of attendance and breadth of coverage, despite being a lot of fun at the times. Now... I just have to get through a review session, proctoring my Organic Chem final exam, and grading a ton of stuff (which may be saved for that car ;)).

A bunch of us will be converging on one RedBricker's residence for a bit of roadtripping together and I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone and then hanging out on the road! I'm also interested to see how the New Zealander and Germans hold up on a long drive ;-P.... I've done 7.5 hrs at the wheel in a shot, and know many friends (and my dad) who scoff at even that, so it'll be interesting for those in smaller countries ;), but more than willing to take a long turn driving.

With that interlude, I thought it fun to go back on memory lane a bit and share some RB-isms and inside jokes... back when developing for EDC, one particular adventure in the Adventure Compendium stands out... Terror In The Skies... think about it's acronym and join us in a rather juvenile chuckle. Next, the term "giganormous" to describe the size or epicness of something... I think Steven coined this one, but that's more of a guess than a certainty. Third, you may have picked up our jokes in the open forums about Dammi being a Questor of Dis, with resultant cracking whips and us reversing the joke on him when he's "slow" (aka really busy with another project we're not working on atm). Then, one of my favorites is "Stupid English Tricks"... while I applaud the continual gain in and sheer level of skill with English of the non-native speakers in RB, and admire them for that... they still say funny stuff now and again... the most recent was "I say we let them cringe for that sort of stuff." which from the context was supposed to be "scrounge!" not cringe... not the funniest example, but a relatively recent one. Next, being "armanated" and schooled by arma has even lead to a NUMBER of internal emoticons.... "armanated", "Arma said I told you so!", etc. Lastly, there's a bunch of candidates for April Fool's jokes that don't quite make it, but are still a blast to throw around... I won't divulge any of these as who knows if we'll ever use them >:-D

OK... back to GenCon, it seems we may have shifts at the Mongoose booth, and Dawn may be organizing some get togethers, so by all means try and grab us, as we'd all love to meet more fans (and kind critics! ;))! We likely will have some RedBrick t-shirts as well to help you all spot us!

As for me, I'm also excited about competing in two Dragon Dice events... one, sealed box which should be fun, and two... :drum roll, please: the World Championships!!! I have an army I'm raring to throw at the best of the best... and hopefully win at least one match, or have as much fun as I can trying! We'll see how the dice land!

Now, Dammi has already spilled the beans on the Earthdawn activity and upcomings, and I've done very little there of late, so I'll let that lie. I've bbeen focused on Equinox of late, and just finished an "in character" chapter on the fusion of magic and techonology in the game, called Nethertech with it's variants spiritech and hybrid tech ;), which was a lot of fun to write up. I also coined the phrase (in a joke): Synths: They're made of people!!! Now, I'm working on the fiction for one particular planetary system with an ancient past and on a big chapter about mystic energy (aka magic) and the various aspects it touches on in the setting. Meanwhile, I'm commenting and in the loop on arma and Dammi's excellent revamp of the rules, going over everything from the ground up and tightening things up and refining them. It's coming together great so far and I'm really excited to just PLAY the darn thing. Chad also finished a bunch of great fictional pieces from each of the "races" in the game hitting on their stereotypes quite well, and there are quite a few I'd love to play AS, while ALL of them seem great fodder for NPCs! It's taking shape and we're all working hard!

Lastly RB-wise, there has been a bunch of playtesting on Vampire City and feedback and editing has been coming in still... even resulting in one addition to the RedBrick team! HAZZAH! Fresh Meat!

For me, I've finally tried and now fallen in love with Puerto Rico! Great game! I've even won 5 out of my 27 plays now (all online), so I'm getting there! I'm also drooling over Defenders of the Realm, esp. as my wife and mother-in-law LOVE Pandemic. On a less gamey note, my daughter just turned 4 last week, and my nearly 2 year old son has taken to full contact wrestling, providing a lot of fun and busyness around the house as well. My wife and I (I got her HOOKED!) have been watching Castle, having just finished S02 E14 on a run up to the start of next season, and I've been really enjoying Warehouse 13, the Guild season 5, and The Legend of Neil's season 3 one ep. debut.

I'll leave you with my games list for what I'm bringing to GenCon, note the "travel" games for the car ;)...

Once Upon a Time, Set, Zombie Dice, Werewolf, Pieces of Eight, Nanuk, Pandemic, and my lab top chock full'o'gaming PDFs!!! I'm still debating about any ED, SR, Dresden Files, or other core books.... we'll see... ;)

See you at or after GenCon!

Raven

So... it's been longer than I'd like so here goes! Some news from the netherworlds!

Earthdawn-wise, I've been thoroughly enjoying the internal art previews for the Cathay books! These are gonna rock, both in content and look! Kathy and Dammi really got a great team of artists together... and there's a surprise waiting in one of them ;), so keep a close eye on the art credits when these come out. Incidentally, this seems on track for the end of this year, but it'll be done when its done. My efforts the past months haven't been on much else Earthdawn, but...

Vampire City is in playtest now, I finished up some editing and additional writing, as well as some sample characters, and this was sent out to the wild. The feedback so far has been enthusiastic! That and some of the ideas for extra bits and clarifications have been really helpful, and I can't wait to hear back from more of the playtesters! We're really proud of this... and who knows, there may be more ".... City"-ies coming out at some point IF this is well received ;) ...only time will tell.

Equinox has been taking up more of my time, and things are moving! Arma, Dammi, and I had a pow-wow on the Path system and the skill system and came up with a nice, tight system! The skill system intentionally has broad skills to keep things simple, but also has custom specialization for players to refine their expertise into exactly the areas they want.

We're also changing the way modifiers work across the Equinox system to again keep it simple and avoid lots of table look-ups, but still offer enough fine-grained differences to be interesting. While I had thoughts along these lines before, arma really made it come together quite well, though there's still work to implement it all.

There's also been a lot of work writing "in game" fiction for the game, I recently finished a chapter called "the Vagrant's Guide" to give players an idea what it's like to be a Vagrant in the setting. It took me awhile, but I'm really proud of it. I'm now working on the Technology chapter after some initial work by Grinder and Dammi... this'll be an interesting challenge to intergrate all the ideas there! In addition, I've been editing pieces here and there. Still a lot of work, but lots of us working on it now!

I'm gearing up for GenCon, and it sounds as if some of the developers will be taking turns representing RedBrick at the Mongoose Publishing booth, so look us up and hopefully we'll be there to meet, greet, and talk all things RedBrick! I'm super exctied to meet everyone else in person myself, so come on down!

Personally, the major focus has been split between teaching Organic Chemistry this summer and finding a permanent job. The good news is... I just landed a tenure-track chemistry professorship for the Fall!!! I'm pysched, and starting in mid-August (conveniently after GenCon by 1.5 weeks.. phew)! There's the GOOD NEWS for me! ;)

Gaming-wise, I've still been reading through and loving Dresden Files, and just picked up Legends of Anglerre. I also spent a chunk of the birthday money on Dominion: Alchemy, Nanuk, and Stone Age. I broke out Alchemy with my wife and mother-in-law and it was a blast! I can't wait to try out the rest!

Also, I have to say that the Doctor Who season 5 finale rocked! That and the Mistborn trilogy is now my favorite fantasy series except for LotRs! Great stuff! Anyway...

Back to the Astral Planes (err... netherworlds ;)),
Raven

So... it's over been two months since my last update... well, better late than never right?!?

First, Cathay's disciplines are basically done now!!! Whoot! Lots of armination, but it came out with some great changes and I'm really happy with what we have now! Thanks to Hank and Steve on these too! I have one more chapter I went to squeeze in a pass on, but Dammi has already started laying it out. We've also been leaked a few nice treats and all I have to say is the book should look AWESOME!

Second, Vampire City got complete overhauls by Dammi and Angus to reorganize it and then I just finished an in-depth pass of the whole book. This one is really coming together as well, and hopefully one we might get to playtest at GenCon together!!!

Third, Equinox! I'm able to throw myself more at this now that my semester is done. I've been brainstorming on a bunch of new Mystic Powers for characters and that has been quite fun. Also, we're working out systems to design weapons, armor, physical enhancements, and the like. I editted the introduction a bit and have been brainstorming on Vehicles and Ships a bunch. Right now, I'm working on a fun chapter on what it's like to be the type of characters the PCs are.... rebels against the Consortium basically, and hope to have that done in just a few days! Still a lot to go, but things are taking more defined shapes as we're chipping away!

That's all the time I've had for RedBrick as the end of the semester crunch time has been in full swing, but thankfully is done now. It's a whole different animal having to correct final exams for days afterwards, then taking one for 3 hours. I also got the bad news of not getting a full time position for the Fall semester from where I thought I would... none of my initial four opportunities panned out. So scrambling to apply other places has also slowed me down, but I have another battery of solid prospects so I'm in a more comfortable place.

While I have a two semester's worth of Organic Chemistry to teach in 3 months over the summer, I am VERY much looking forward to the carrot at the end of that stick... GENCON!!! I'll be there, along with a relatively large contingent of RedBrick developers, so if you can join us and look us up!

As for other games, Dresden Files RPG is ROCKIN'! That and Diaspora have finally helped me GET the FATE system, and I really like it's implementation in both systems. I'm eagerly awaiting the hard copy of Dresden Files in June!

As for board games, Dominion has continued to be a favorite and one my wife enjoys playing two player quite a bit, as well as one my mother-in-law humors us with when in town. I also can't wait until my copy of Forbidden Island arrives. I found a new game that sounds awesome and I hope to get for my birthday... Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation! I can hardly wait to play it!

Lastly, I also had my debut in the pulpit at my church giving a sermon on suffering. You can see the link here if you're curious: http://www.cbfchurch.org/messages.html (Dr. Raven... erm, Wallace, right....)

Keep on gaming!
Raven

So... it's the beginning of March already.... YIPE! that went quick!!!

So, I got my shiny copy of Nations of Barsaive I and am waiting with bated breathe for Namegivers of Barsaive! It should be any day now... I also can't wait to hear people's feedback on the ED3 versions of these Disciplines, as a lot of work went into these. So, let us have it ;).

For Cathay, I mentioned in my blog forum post that I did finish all the re-designing for the ED3 Disciplines, as far as an initial draft of all of them. I'm awaiting "armation" as we call it on the inside... i.e. for arma to have a go at them and tweak them, but am really happy with how they came out for my first effort there.

Also, I redid the new Races and Creating Cathayan Characters chapters to bring them in line with ED3 rules, so that was another nice touch. There's still some Cathayan things on my personal to do list, but it's nice to see it getting shorter!

Equinox has seen a lot of attention mechanics-wise and I had fun brainstorming new names for the Attributes, some of which hit a chord and stuck! (i.e. everybody else liked.... for now at least). I love Naming things... the ED Namegiver in me!!!! muahaha! um... so, the damage system has been revamped and simplified. There's a very cool set list of "Paths" which are rather open-ended but do provide some specializations/niche-protection while still allowing lots of room for two characters in the same Path to function noticeably differently. Dammi has also done a great job on the various Mystic Powers providing LOTS of cool options and abilities for everyone. We've re-visited the issue of space combat and dogfights briefly, as the focus has been on personal combat so far, and while I have a few neat ideas I've been hashing out on paper, there's still a lot of work to make space combat feel how we want with the new core mechanic... the playtesting version with the previous mechanic was good, but needs overhauling to fit the more recent core mechanic. Setting-wise things have been slower, but I hope to get into that more again soon... things have just been a bit crazy for me, good, but crazy, as I'll mention more at the end.

So... the Pro Indie project I've been trying to get time for, got A LOT of my attention this past month and I re-organized some things and wrote in some more rules and options, and now Dammi is going through it all for Angus and I to respond. I'm really excited about this one, and hope we'll see some enthusiasm as it comes out (hopefully) later this year. So, to not tease much more... this project is called: "Vampire City"!!! It's an adaption of the rules for Western City to cover the use of Vampires as the predators (read "heroes"), and will include a sytstem to hash out a unified vampire mythology and setting among the players before creating each player's Vampire character. Joerg (the author of Western City) has been playing a version of Western City with vampires and so we're mining his experiences and doing extra design work to make this all come together. Angus is doing an awesome job on the tone, and I've had fun with some bits myself as well as some neat tricks to include some of the complexity fo vampires will still staying light and true to the spirit of Western City. I really love how this works out, and how going GM-less can actually HELP and ALLOw for intentional conflicts among the group of players... say including a player playing Blade hunting the other player's vampires! The possibilities are just awesome, I think, and we hope you agree! It's still a ways off, but the progress of late has been very encouraging with this one!

So... other than the usual internal heckling and camaraderie, that's been RedBrick for me this past month... I'm looking forward to hashing through Vampire City with Angus and Dammi to polish it off in the near future. Cathay is moving along, and I have a few things I want to look at and add where needed. I also hear the art direction and calls have gone out for Cathay (and maybe there's more, not the teams thing... this is Dammi and Kathy's territory), so things are looking on target, but... "It's done when it's done." Lastly for future plans, I do hope to write up a last story and then get more heavily into the mechanics and fluff for EQUINOX!!!

As for the craziness, I've been correcting lab reports, exams, and quizzes like mad. I've also had an informal interview at a big research lab with a possible jbo which was very cool and went quite well... business card in hand to get my resume' fast tracked once the position it officially posted. Also, the chair of the department at one of the college's I'm an adjunct professor at is leaving.... which leaves a vacancy for next year! So... I'll be tossing my hat in the ring for that. Hopefully, I'll have a full time job in the Fall one way or another! So family-wise my oldest son is having trouble swallowing and leaving us to resort to his feeding tube more which has been rough going, but at least it's already in place now that it's REALLY needed.

Other gaming wise, Dominion has continued to be much played, including online at BSW (a German site... at this rate I really WILL have to learn German soon ;)). I'm also excited about Forbidden Island coming out soon from the designer of Pandemic (another fav of my wife and I). Also, a pre-order of DnD4e's PHB 3 should be shipping soon... I have a soft spot for Psionics, having loved messing with them in AD&D 2e a lot, as a player and a GM back in the day...

I also found out Castle is back from it's midseason break and have been loving catching up! Nathan Fillion is the MAN! That and Legend of the Seeker has been a lot of fun lately too... Hunger was a personal fav recently... seeing how far one of the party would go to both stay "right" and stay alive... very well done!

Anywho, that's the News from the Netherworld for February 2010...

Hang in there flapheads! (EX perjorative ;-P)
Raven

OK... sticking with it....

Namegivers got a sanity checking and joyously went out the door! I'm excited to see the initial reactions and can't wait until people see what we've done with the Disciplines now! Helping with the dev stuff on those was a lot of fun!

As for Cathay, I FINALLY got into the Discipline re-Design for ED3 for them in earnest. The Beastlord and Daughters of Heaven I tweaked from an earlier ED3 version, and I'm really happy with them. I also did the Monk up with a great idea from arma bought Technique Pools. These will replace the Talent Options Pools at some of the status levels to change their focus and add some neat flexibility. The change really adds to the feel of the Discipline and matches the fluff while still fitting into the ED3 rough idea quite well. I like how it turned out! I also did the Sorcerer up for ED3.... I LOVE magicians! (couldn't ya tell). I also updated the Gar Warrior to ED3, and am working on the Guardian of Cathay currently.

As an insider note on the "Gar Warrior", I really love this Discipline... a very cool combo of Archer Cavalryman, and Warrior! A very nice tip of the hat to Mongols... with very different origins. However, the Name had been an issue of discussion and complication... the gar are a people group and subrace basically, so you could be a gar Gar Warrior, but what if an outsider became accepted, they'd be a human Gar Warrior for instance, which is also odd. Lastly, what about a gar who practices the Warrior Discipline... a gar Warrior... so it seems we've finally come up with a decent Name, but it was interesting...

Cathay will be split into a Player's and GM's Guide just due to the sheer amount of writing Hank and his co-authors put together! Bravo!

That's it for me for Earthdawn, but others are going through the Serpent River again and the Shards Collection, vol. II for the near term. A series of Adventures is Kratas is coming along as well from the author of the Kratas sourcebook, which should be fine from the outlines of the plots... hm.... maybe I should take a look soon, myself as they're getting mostly done.

One of Hank Woon's other submissions is being worked on as well as Grinder's secret project (With a few other helping hands now) and another secret project that I had the pleasure of brainstorming some Names for things and places for!!!

I also need to get back to the Pro Indie project I had been involved in some... gotta dig out a little more free time...

Now... unto Equinox! Dammi has outdone himself once again, coming out with yet another burst of rules magic, and keepin us busy commenting and helping him refine it. Soon I hope to be writing up rules sections and other background information. I'm excited to finally get to bigger and closer to final pieces.... even if they are in early stages! We even have some nice nods to Earthdawn and Shadowrun with yet another variation on Karma! ;) ... I also really like how the advancement is turning out and while there's still some discussion to be had, it seems to be coming together even more. Unfortunately I lost half a short story to my laptop harddrive DYING... ggrrr unrecoverably even by a professional company (and the second at my house to DIE in a month), but I do plan on re-writing it again shortly!

Internally GenCon plans are really shaping up and I can't WAIT to be there and meet a great contingent of the RB Dev team there in person for the first time.... let alone going to my first GenCon!!!

Lately, I've been HOOKED on a card game called Dominion... even tried to make my own version using A LOT fewer cards with plastic cards bought off of Amazon, but that experiment failed (long story) and I should receive the real game TOMORROW!!!! No more JUST playing online on BSW with a limited set, now I get to get my wife to play and have ALL of the cards available! (:waves: farewell to the rest of my Christmas money).

I'm also EAGERLY awaiting the finale of Dollhouse and am continuing to enjoy Legend of the Seeker, although I really hope Richard can become a Wizard again somehow... (sorry for the spoiler, but I don't know how else to say it).

Well, I'm gonna get back to the Guardian of Cathay Discipline now... Earthdawn Forever baby! with Equinox to the future!!!

Red Five signing out,
Jason

So, here it is in effort to keep these updates coming each month.

First, some Earthdawn updates. Since my last update, work here has been small for me, but still fun. The three Disciplines for Cathay I did some work on and thinking about were the Daughter of Heaven, the Beastlord, and the Monk. Steve mentioned the Monk particularly benefiting from the pool system we use now in ED3, and I couldn't agree more. We had wanted to make the Monk focus on certain styles, like the Tiger, similar to varieties of kung fu. Now that we have Talent Option pools changing how and when these are used, really helped to bring some cool mechanical back up to those styles and stylistic choices... it wasn't my idea (although I love it), but I did throw in some ideas and suggestions on what goes where, and such. Next, I laid out a bunch of pool ideas to Hank's redo of the Daughter of Heaven for ED3... I still love this Discipline, esp. for how faithful I feel it is to the main character in Hank's novels that IS a Daughter of Heaven... seeing the actual Talents they get (and Discipline abilities) that really fit what she did in those two novels is awesome, and I hope well received! The backstory and limitation of such healing abilities to DoH's (as we often call them internally) also really fits the world and magic of Earthdawn. So, I'm excited to see the reception this Discipline in particular gets. Lastly, I weighed in with my thoughts on Hank's redesign of the Talent Progression for the Beastlord. While their will be Beastmasters in Cathay, I really like the difference in feel and mechanics of the Beastlord... they are far more internal and on a spiritual journey and use beasts more as extensions of themselves then as companions, at least in contrast to Beastmasters... the distinction comes with a number of new Talents to help express this, and I feel again expresses the various animal mythologies and styles present in Eastern cultures. There's still a lot of Cathayan Disciplines to go, but I hope to personally start tackling some of these soon, as my schedule should be opening up some soon (see below)!

Next, there's been some planning and murmuring about GenCon, and I am PUMPED that I'll be going this year, AND be able to meet quite a few of the other developers in person! We may even get a "retreat day" to hang out, talk RB, and maybe even playtest something AT THE SAME TABLE!!! (my vote is EX ;)... if we get to). We're all going as civilians, but may be wearing RedBrick shirts and stopping by the Mongoose table... if you see us, feel free to say "Hi!" we'd love to hear from you guys too!

Namegiver's of Barsaive is still in layout and ramping up to a sanity check, so when Dammi gets that back to us, we'll all have one last go before it goes out to Mongoose for printing. It should be on schedule at this point... the lead for printing with Mongoose is longer, so while we'd love to have this out tomorrow, it'll be a little longer. Some Shards, Nations of Barsaive II: The Serpent River, an adventure of Hank Woon's in Barsaive this time, and Grinder's secret project are all being worked on by a few people each (not myself at all right now, too busy), so we do have plenty in the pipeline for 2010... at least 2 "re-prints" of FASA/EDC's stuff and 2 totally new things, with it being extremely likely we bring the total ED3 releases to 6 or 7. There also was yet another newly authored novel submitted, that's just opened up in the Dev Forums, that I hope to be reading through soon... the last novel (Hank's 2nd) I read in like 3 or 4 days, so we'll see how this one goes! ;) That's it for Earthdawn for the moment.

The other project I'm working on for Pro-Indie has been in a public hiatus, though I imagine the other author is working on things privately as that's his style... I expect to see some drafts soon, but if his other big project is taking up too much time (which it may be), then I'd love to get writing on this soon myself! We'll see!

The last RedBrick area is EQUINOX!!! Dammi has been a real machine in hacking through the mechanics, and with arma's, mine, and two other devs chiming in, they've really been taking shape nicely! The core engine is a dice pool mechanic of sorts, but uses a single type of dice. It also has some neat opportunities for narration built in, both good and bad in terms of some things we've coined "mishaps" and "exploits", which should be cool. We've also been hashing through various versions and design goals of a character advancement and generation system. We really want things to be accessible for one shots, moderate-length adventures, and long epic campaigns... we want things to start and STAY interesting, with options and goals. While originally Dammi and I were guilty of making proposed that we rather complicated and constraining, the most recent version is more open and flexible in your choices and not so bound to a level system. However, there still are paths to follow and develop within, just flexibility without as well. There also is a very nice handling of the more powerful abilities without resorting to levels per se, or XP totals, or laundry lists of trees and pre-reqs upon pre-reqs... while those have their place in various games, I like how the current hybrid systems allows for freedom while still preventing a level 1 character from getting immediate access to Mastery Powers, and offers flavorful paths without being as constraining as a Class. The other area I want to mention is that of spells. You are going to be able to throw a fireball on a space ship! Hands down baby! Dammi had some great ideas on how to make spells really hang together well with the power system and with mishaps, and while there are still some details to be hashed out, it really seems like this is the right groundwork! Personally, I've been tinkering with a few more short stories, and have one in the hopper right now I'm calling "Saved by Drowning" (working title) that I hope should highlight some of the oppression of the Consortium against those Mystics who manipulate the mystical forces of the world (read: adepts for all those ED peeps ;)). I have one more "story" idea about a race we call Synths which are a really cool magic/tech hybrid race of sorts, that will be more an in-character lecture about their nature... I'm still not sure if it'll sound right or if I'll finish it, but I'm gonna try! Bits and pieces of the Equinox core book are being worked on by other team members, and the new input of ideas has been great. Hopefully, things will pick up some speed soon, and I hope to put a lot of effort in here myself! Equinox in 2010, I HOPE! I HOPE! (but it's still a LOT of work to go! so we'll see). RB's motto still applies, "It's done when it's done!" and we want to do this awesome world RIGHT!

Personally, I'm finishing up my last 2-3 days or work as a postdoctoral researcher (aka "postdoc") and am looking forward to being an adjunct professor, teaching 3 labs and 1 lecture at 2 different local colleges. My schedule should be more open, hence my intent to put in some hardcore RedBrick time!!! Bring it! The Christmas season was great, especially seeing the kids enjoying their presents. While James, as you all likely know, was hit by the largest tragedy among the RB team, myself and one other RB dev were hit by major tragedies in our families, as well as hard things for others... so we're all looking toward a brighter year in 2010, in our families and in terms of pushing through more great stuff at RedBrick!

Well, I hope you learned something from my longwindedness... and that I didn't spill too many beans ;) Keep gaming and keep chiming in here! We love hearing from you all, both praise and constructive criticism/feedback! Keep it coming!

Red(Brick) Five signing out!
Jason

YIKES! It's been two months... my apologies...

So what have I been up to in RedBrick-land, you ask?

First, lots of work on the re-designed Disciplines in the former EDC Namegiver's Compendium. I throw in lots of ideas before the great arminator (aka "arma") did a sweep through all of them, and then helped edit and very occasionally polish those. I'm really happy with how they turned out, and hope you will be too! For those interested there were slight shifts in emphasis or specialization and lots of reworking of what they actually got. This means for Disciplines like the Shaman, there wasn't a drastic overhaul of everything they do, nor for their spell list. Note: I personally have designed a number of Shaman only spells (as have others too) that should make it into the Earthdawn Codex or whatever its incarnation ends up as. We also spent a lot of time and effort designing new Discipline abilities for many of them, trying to emphasize their uniqueness as we did with the new Discipline abilities of the "Core 15" Disciplines. This showed up most prominently in the re-worked Journeyman Discipline, which was again changed in some of its workings, but I think is better for it!

I also participated in a Sanity check of Nations of Barsaive: Throal which to my understanding is now off to FASA and Mongoose for approval and printing, respectively. It's great to see this great book back in print and updated for those who don't have earlier versions of it.

There are a number of cool projects now being worked on, including Grinder's secret project (which he's chipping away at REALLY nicely now), a sweet adventure I've skimmed over written by our own Hank Woon, and the buddings of another area/city book that I can't say anything else about yet. Also, high on my list of things to get to next is Cathay! Hank's doing some extensive tinkering now and I'm really busy until January 1st, but I can't wait to dive into re-working the Cathayan Disciplines for ED3, as well as editing and adding new ideas to it after a hiatus on working on it. This is one I'm really excited about, and know many fans are to! We'll get it out there SOON, and likely as two books due to the sheer size (a Player's Guide and GM's Guide type division IF that's the route taken... it's still very much in development).

As for Equinox, Dammi and the rest of us continue to hammer through the mechanics and are really liking the direction things are taking. There's still a lot of details to be worked out, and it is modified somewhat even from the last dice mechanic, but is nice in that it now allows more for advancement and higher levels of play, while still starting around the same initial level we wanted. The locations in the settings, tone of the Consortium, and racial descriptions and cultural mixes have also undergone some cool changes with the aid of the whole team now (one race has black teeth now!). One such "race" worth highlighting is a cool change from an AI based thing that's now much more focused on the mystical side of things, involving more nethertech and mystical origins.

I've also been having fun writing (or updating/rewriting) a number of short stories for Equinox, one of which I hope will be the prologue (and which started as a draft from Dammi to bait us all on his idea of Equinox). I'm still working on two other short pieces for it, but can't wait to dive into the meat of the chapters as time is freed up from getting ED stuff out the door and my personal time is more open.

I'm also excited about a neat project for the ProIndie line that is a really cool opportunity, BOTH for the line and for me! It's only three of us for the initial writing stage (and at the speed one of the guys goes, I might not get a chance to write much myself!!! ;), but it looks to be a great addition, and one that should be a blast to play! We're hoping to get this out by GenCon.... but it's realy early and a long way away!

A cool development for RedBrick this year is that a lot of us should be going to GenCon Indy 2010!!! We'll likely just be going as "civilians" to hang out, brainstorm, meet each other (for those volunteer dev's who weren't around for Origins 2005 or fortunate enough to live in Germany), and other secret business ;). I'm really excited as this will be my first HUGE gaming con (and not a local one), and my first time to meet any of the team in person!!!

So, lastly the personal bit... I'm nearly done with my postdoc which ends January 1st, and have only a week left of lectures in the Chemistry class I'm teaching... the Spring semester will have me teaching two labs and lecture, which SHOULD leave me with a lot more time for REDBRICK!!! and family, as they like to see me too. I'm also applying for a few full-time tenure-track positions around where I live, so hopefully I'll actually start making some reasonable money one of these years... graduate stipends and adjunct work don't pay the best... However, I found I LOVE teaching, so have been over all on the up in mood, despite some really hard news about a family member having cancer. Her surgery went really well (they got it all), but her chemo starts soon, so that'll be rough too, as is thoughts of the future.

To end on a much lighter personal note, I've been loving the shows I'm following lately... Castle continues to impress me with its involved plots and funny jibes ("I'm giving you the bird"), Merlin's second season is just awesome!, SGU has been fun for me at least, Dollhouse has been even better than 1st season (although sadly will be concluding for good with season 2... need the rest of the episodes! Starting again this weekend!), the Guild's third season was GREAT (my wife even liked it) with a shocking twist at the very end, and Legend of the Seeker has been great to see again. I'm also looking forward to seeing Ninja Assassin, Red Cliff (gotta find it somewhere!), and the upcoming Avatar (which hopefully won't suck).

Well, I'm looking forward to a great close to the year, and great potential for next year!!! Lots of great stuff to work on, and more time to do it (at least for half the year for me). A bit of uncertainty job-wise, but some good leads, so wish me luck!!

As James always says, Take Kaer! Jason / ~Raven~

Equinox was opened up to the full team, with the addition of some new faces inside the 'Brick. It's been great to see everyone's reactions and enthusiasm, and great ideas and new directions have already been thrown into the pot and incorporated.

I spent a fair amount of time explaining how various bits worked and the original thoughts on certain ideas, as we didn't get to clean everything up as completely as we hoped before bringing everyone in. This actually brought attention to areas we needed to explain better in the final product.

I also had the fun of adapting one of Dammi's original short stories about the Equinox world, as some of the workings of things, including an entire TYPE of character, had been changed since he wrote it YEARS (YIKES!!!) ago. It looks like this might even make the Prologue which would be quite cool!!! I also still have to dust off and revamp some old short stories I wrote for other sci fi worlds that I think would fit quite well in Equinox with the appropriate tweaking... that and a few outlined ideas for other stories, leaves me with a lot of work to do there.

Mechanically, we're also tweaking things, and with some excellent (and VERY constructive) criticism from everyone, we polished some of the warts and bumps out of our latest idea... the majority of which weathered the storm. Some of the subsystems were too much, and an elegant way to drop them came up. In addition, some ingenious ways to leverage one of its core concepts really helped bring it to life even more. While, we're still working out A LOT of details on things ranging from character creation to weapon design, a lot of the framework, even for those, is there to build on.

As for Earthdawn, I've been helping comment on and refine the new ED3 Talent progressions for the Namegiver's Compendium Disciplines. It has been a lot of fun to revisit there, and they are all very nearly done!

Also, I just received my shiny copy of Kratas: the City of Thieves yesterday!!!! WOOT! The cover is beautiful, Kathy and Dammi did an AWESOME layout, blending in the great style of the former Kratas (pdf only for EDC) with the new layout of ED3, creating something I think is even BETTER!!! I can't wait to see how this one is received out there, so let us know what you think!!!

On a personal note, I am now officially "Docta' J", having defended my Ph. D. thesis successfully almost two weeks ago... (in Chemical Engineering, FYI). Inside da 'Brick, it's been "Doctor Raven" as well ;-P....

I'm finally over being shell-shocked by it all, and excited that a cool job prospect is actually materializing and promising to be a long term career! It looks like I'll be teaching Chemistry for a living if all keeps going as it is!

Red(Brick) Five Over and Out!

So, I'd better get this one out now while I can.

First, the reaction to ED3 has been great. Thanks to everyone for their enthusiasm... keep it coming! And all those questions that help us explain, errata, and think about things.

Second, personally, I'm in for a crazy Fall season... I'll be defending my thesis in mid-September, am doing full-time research, and will be teaching one section of Freshman Chemistry this fall (starting in less than 2 weeks!!!). That and a bunch of writing, both technically for work (2 papers to get out the door to journals) and for RedBrick.

Third, development continues on a bunch of Earthdawn stuff... Kratas is off to the printers after a sanity check, and looks beautiful. I think even better than Kathy's EDC version last time! Ardanyan's Revenge, NoB1 and NoB2, a secret project of Grinder's ;), the Namegiver's Compendium, and others are all seeing conversions to ED3 to keep up a prompt publication rate! I'm personally keeping an eye on the Namegiver's Compendium Disciplines (though I've just been watching and commenting on them so far), and Cathay, as my time is more limited lately, partially by the above busyness and partially by..

Equinox!!! So, EX Month... Dammi did a great job laying out the initial set up and chapters for the Equinox Corebook. The EX Team has been hashing over system-wide preliminary concerns to help nail things down and be able to specify desired approaches and want-not, in addition to rough word counts desired to be able to bring in more people to speed its development soon. It's been a lot of fun to get back into this in earnest, and get quick feedback and thoughts from everyone. Already things have been tweaked and tightened up, and brought closer to the themes we want to bring out. I also had fun throwing together some initial thoughts on how to approach equipment/tech, cyberware-type enhancements, spells, and character generation in terms of point-based systems and working on various packages for these. I've spent more time than I intended on this lately, as I get into it and the time just flies by.

As for design goals on some of those systems... I want to allow for interesting mechanical options, but keep things straightforward and simple. Allow for flexibility and different trappings and all, but provide enough mechanical options to be able to some meat to those differences. We'll see how it works out!

I have some rules tweaks and such that I'm retyping (in DOG) for Dammi and the others to better digest, and after that I have a bunch of short stories and "in-character" pieces I get to update, revise, and write from scratch to fill in some places. Some were written (by Dammi for example) when EX was in a more nascient stage, others I wrote for something else and saw the potential to adapt, one I started into but need to finish now, and a couple others need to start at the drawing board.

All in all, I'm excited to see it progressing again, and we hope to bring in a larger team on it soon after we finish more of the groundwork. Hopefully, we can leak (intentionally) a little preview or hint here or there, but we'll see... there's a lot of work to do, and never enough time to do it as fast as we want....

Back to lab work at the moment... trying the brute force approach to average out some noise on a spectral response measurement... might need to upgrade to the hammer approach soon... gggrrrr

So.... my books arrived on Thursday, two nice shiny ED3 books.... both the Guides. WOOT! The covers are gorgeous! Go Kathy!!!

My first impression of the interiors is these look great! It's a little darker looking than I'd like (the dark grays are dark), but the contrast is phenomenal and everything is sharp. Kathy mentioned she liked it this way, so as I expected it's just a stylistic preference of mine.

The map however on the inside of the front and back covers is AWESOME (and in full color!!!). It is really vivid and jumps at ya! Great way to sell the game and fun to look at too.

Having seen (and sanity checked) the PDFs, it is interesting to see the differences in some things. Most things look better in print, but a few seemed better to me in the PDF, but fortunately only a few... and none of these look bad per se, just not as cool as they looked in the PDF.

Now I plan on sitting down and doing something I haven't done out of a core book for ED in a while... make a character for myself JUST FOR FUN! (the ED sample characters just aren't the same). I want backstory and odd stuff (com'n bolas!) and other odds and ends...

I can't wait to see the feedback from the full version as the new forums open. We're excited to hear what you have to say, and hope it has surpassed your expectations!!!