Just a note that from now until November 24th, I’ve taken up the challenge of blogging, daily, about Shadowrun or Catalyst in general on Shadowrun4.com.

Edit: Just a note that the site for Eclipse Phase is now online!

Paparazzi!, the card game of Trash-Celebrity Culture:

and Eclipse Phase, the Roleplaying Game of Transhuman Conspiracy and Horror:

Got back to Seattle last night from the GAMA Trade Show. We had a good time in Vegas, and a very productive show for Catalyst Game Labs — we heard a lot of good things about our current product lines, and a very positive response to the new games that we’ll be releasing later this year. I’m in meetings for the next couple days, and I didn’t get as much of a chance as I would have liked to wander the show floor, but I’ll probably post a bit more about the show soon-ish.

I have been really busy lately; I like keeping busy, but the last month or so has been hectic and stressful, and there’s a lot of stuff going on but it doesn’t feel like anything is getting finished — even though I have two brand new books [Shadowrun's Arsenal and Classic BattleTech's Technical Readout: 3039], released in March, sitting on the floor by my desk.

In good news, I have a new [to us] designer working on some projects now, and he’s churning out great stuff already.

I’m looking forward to the GAMA Trade Show, in April, when we’ll be announcing some new games, including the one that Rob Boyle has been developing for the last couple of years, and a card game that I designed. I’ll be taking some time to hang out with a bunch of the Catalyst Game Labs’ gang in Seattle after GTS, and maybe I’ll even see some sights.

This week I ordered a Time Capsule, and I’m expecting it early next. Just the 500GB model, but I needed a new router badly, and I found that I didn’t really use Time Machine as often as I should, as I don’t like having my laptop tethered to an external drive.

I just updated my Publication List to include a bunch of 2007 products, most noticeably the flood of stuff that Catalyst Game Labs has released since taking over the Shadowrun and Classic BattleTech licenses from FanPro LLC.There’s some seriously awesome stuff here: Shadowrun’s Augmentation is a great book, and the Classic BattleTech Introductory Box Set is the coolest boxed game ever released for BattleTech. That fact has nothing to do with how many times the production of it brought me to near tears, honest. A sleeper in the recent releases is Starterbook: Sword and Dragon, a slim book amid all the fat releases of this year, but a well-tuned introduction to adding campaign-style play and roleplaying elements into Classic BattleTech. It’s been an interesting [and good!] year, both product-wise and company-wise.Technorati Tags:battletechshadowruncatalystgamelabs

Ah, the best four days in gaming. Also, non-stop meetings, seminars, and other crazy stuff.

I had a really great time. First, obviously, I have to mention Catalyst Game Labs — this was our first GC with our new company, and we had a hot booth with new fixtures and all sorts of good stuff, in a damned nice location. We had plenty of space to run demos, and we demoed Degenesis, Shadowrun, and Classic BattleTech regularly at the booth.

Our regular games were a bit of chaos. I’m honestly not sure of all the details, but they were shuffled around a few times and some of them were in very remote locations, and apparently Gen Con also printed up a bunch of tickets that didn’t match any of the previous information … this seemed to be a problem for a lot of companies and their games.

On the product front, I am incredibly thrilled that we had everything we wanted to have to the show there: the new Classic BattleTech Introductory Box Set, Starterbook: Sword and Dragon, TechManual, the Total Warfare reprint, and Technical Readout 3050: Upgrades for Classic BattleTech; Augmentation and Emergence for Shadowrun; new Quick-Start Rules for Shadowrun; and the debut of the Degenesis Quick-Start rules. We also had a new BattleTech t-shirt and a Saeder-Krupp t-shirt for Shadowrun.

All of the books will be in stores by August 31st, except for the ones that are already there.

All of this coming together so well was just… incredible to see. Did we have room for improvement? Absolutely, as always. But it was good. Damned good.

I didn’t get much time to wander the show floor, but I did snag some of Green Ronin’s new Freeport stuff, which looks hot; the 40 Years of Gen Con book, Post-Apocalyptic Hero from Hero Games, a copy of jim pinto’s new wrestling RPG, and a few other things.

The mood of the show seemed upbeat, too. Obviously there was a lot of talk about D&D Fourth Edition, which I haven’t done enough reading about yet to have any sort of useful opinion except “I’m not afraid of it putting Catalyst out of business.”

We won a couple ENnies — a gold and a silver — for the free pack of Classic BattleTech Introductory ceremony. I arrived at the ceremony just a few minutes before those awards were given out, so it was great to get to hoot and holller at Randall. I hope this leads to more recognition of minis games at the ENnies. Also, from what I saw, the ENnies ceremony itself was very well done this year, and was in a very nice location.

I have to give some mad props to Davidson, Seth, and Klaus for how much they busted their butts promoting Degenesis at the booth, running demos, and getting fans interested in this crazy-cool game. By the end of Friday we had given out all the Quick-Start Rules we brought, so with some quick help we printed up some new 4 page flyers the next morning so the information stream didn’t trickle to nothing.

Beyond that, it was great to catch up with and spend some quality time with people I haven’t seen for awhile, and I met some new people who are pretty damned cool, too. So that’s all pluses!

And of course, thanks to the fans that came out to the show, to our booth, seminars, and games — Gen Con is the four days of the year where I love my job the most, and it’s due to you guys.

TechManual for Classic BattleTech is available as an eBook, and the print version is at press overseas.

This is a whopper; 352 pages that cover building every kind of ‘Mech imaginable, plus infantry units, combat and support vehicles, battle armor, and other units.

I’m pretty sure this title has more tables, more math, and more numbers than any book I’ve ever worked on; it’s packed solid with info, but well-organized and has examples for building every type of unit in the book. Both of the BattleTech developers — Randall Bills and Herb Beas — really pushed themselves to make this book the ultimate resource for BattleTech construction.

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battletech

I updated my Publication List to include BESM Third Edition, the last book I worked on as a freelancer for Guardians of Order. I finished the book nearly a year ago, and started it nearly two years ago, so it really feels like forever has passed. I haven’t seen my copies yet and long-ago burned the files to DVD — I can barely remember what it looks like.

Mark MacKinnon has been blogging about the game. I hope that BESM/Tri-Stat fans enjoy it, and I’m glad that the WW/Arthaus team picked up the rights to it.

Well, that’s the first of my books out this year — next up are Handbook: House Davion, Classic BattleTech TechManual, Classic BattleTech Tactical Operations, Jihad Hot Spots: 3072 [With a freakin' awesome cover by Klaus Scherwinski], the Classic BattleTech Box Set [come hell or high water!] and some stuff that’s cool but I can’t talk about yet. Plus, probably a few other things that I’ll get roped into doing … who knows, I might even get to work on some Shadowrun stuff this year!

Handbook: House Davion for Classic BattleTech is finally available as an eBook, and the print version is at press. Talk about a project that sucked the life out of me … I wasn’t originally scheduled to handle the interior layout, but I had a free few days in my schedule so I offered to zip through it ASAP, which I did. Then we decided to cut the book down to keep it in the same page-count ballpark as the other books in the Handbook series, but it still ended up being 204 pages once the author took the knife to it and I squeezed it into the layout.

Then rounds of proofings, working on a ton of TechManual in-between time, all the crazy weather in Seattle keeping the BattleTech developer knocked offline/without power for awhile, the holiday season … argh!

On the bright side, the book is finished and so far well-recieved, and I’m getting very good at cranking out the first draft of an entire BattleTech book “over the weekend,” literally. That should prove handy in the coming months …

Technorati Tags:
battletech, fanpro

GenCon 2006 was tons of awesome. In brief:

• FanPro had our largest booth ever, shared with Iron Wind Metals, and we also had a couple of the Virtual World Entertainment BattleTech pods there. We got to talk to a ton of fans, and ran a successful instance of our “Booth Runner” game for the second year in a row.
• We had awesome sales of our new products, including Street Magic for Shadowrun and Total Warfare for Classic BattleTech.
• Total Warfare looks really, really awesome. It’s so gratifying to see something that we worked so hard on come out in a virtually flawless manner. The hardcopy is gorgeous, the best-looking book FanPro has ever done, and it totally brings Classic BattleTech up to — and maybe above — the production values of other modern miniature games.
• Shadowrun, Fourth Edition had brisk sales and won two ENnie Awards, for Best Rules and Best Product.
• We pimped Degenesis as much as possible, with limited resources, and a lot of people seem enthusiastic about it.
• Our Dodgeball team won two 3AM games, including a victory over the White Wolf team.
• We had great service and fabulous rooms at the Hilton, had some good meals, productive meetings, and good times during the evening.
• Guardians of Order’s A Game of Thrones RPG got a bunch of 2nd place ENnies — and deserved first place in at least one, but was almost certainly hurt by GoO’s lack of support for the game over the year.

A super successful show!