March 17th edit: Internet scuttlebutt makes me want to clarify this—leaving IMR was my choice. I wasn’t fired, asked to leave, or any way “negotiated out” of the company. I had and have no ownership stake in the company.

I am no longer an employee of Catalyst Game Labs / InMediaRes LLC, nor a contractor/freelancer for them. A few more books will come out in the next few months with my name in them, but please don’t ask me questions about release dates or any other Catalyst matters; the answers are out of my hands. This is sad: I love the games I worked on and they’ve been a large part of my life for a long time, as a fan and a professional. Leaving something you love is rarely easy.

Shadowrun fans: thanks for years and years of fun and feistyness. Last year, when Jason Hardy took over as Shadowrun Line Developer, I told him simply: “If you kill the one thing I’ve loved my entire adult life, I will kill you.” As of today, you’re off the hook no matter what, Jase.

BattleTech fans: thanks for letting me mess around in your playground for awhile. I hope you enjoy the Total Warfare line of core rulebooks and my work on them.

Colleagues: I’m looking for interesting opportunities, in or out of hobby gaming. If you have some or know of some, please drop me a line.

People I’ve Worked With: It’s been a pleasure to work with you crazy-talented and just plain crazy people. I look forward to doing so again.

I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be blogging at adamjury.com, still be posting on Twitter, and life continues on. If you wish to reach me, please send me an email to adam at adamjury dot com — or use my Contact Form.

We released our first small, PDF-only project for Shadowrun on Friday; an 18-page supplement that offers some magical expansions, new traditions, spells, adept powers, magical groups, etc.

It’s an interesting little book, and a fun experiment … I wrote the BCC text to be quite explicit about what you get with the book, so people don’t buy it expecting a dozen magical groups; nope, there are three, and the BCC tells you exactly which three. I think that’s the correct way to handle short projects like this. I think four bucks is an awesome price — if you use *one* thing in the PDF a few times in your game, you have your money’s worth. Compared to some PDF books that are two bucks for 4-6 pages, we might actually be a little underpriced, but we’ll see how things shake out during the experiment.

Digital Grimoire on BattleCorps.com

Digital Grimoire on DriveThruRPG.com

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.

Voting in the ENnie Awards is now open. The publisher I work for, Catalyst Game Labs, is nominated for Fan Choice Best Publisher, and the Shadowrun Quick-Start Rules — the best RPG Quick-Start Rules ever, you know! — are up for Best Free Product.

No press release, just a HELL YEAH for the Shadowrun, Fourth Edition Quick-Start Rules getting nominated for an ENnie Award this year. We really busted ass last year to design and deliver what I think is a tremendous set of Quick-Start Rules and an overall great [and free!] booklet aimed at introducing gamers into Shadowrun or back into Shadowrun.

Voting on the ENnies will be open later this month.

Plus, the 2008 Diana Jones Award nominations were just announced. No nominations for anything I even so much as sneezed nearby, but myself and Posthuman Studios are one of the sponsors of the awards this year. The awards ceremony will be Wednesday the 13th — the day before Gen Con — at that uber-secret location in Indianapolis.

w00t!

The
Classic BattleTech Introductory Boxed Set won Miniatures Rules of the Year at the 34th Annual Origins Awards.

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