Adam Jury

I’m not going to fib: 2009 was a rough year, work-wise. Catalyst experienced turnovers and hardships and growing pains, and we also did a lot of awesome things, but we also didn’t get all of the awesome things finished that we wanted to. That leaves us with plenty of things to do in 2010, of course!

One particular thing I found troubling about 2009 was developing the design and layout for Eclipse Phase and the 20th Anniversary Edition of Shadowrun at the same time: it was a lot of work, and I would have liked to have seen how one book [either one!] fared in the eyes of gamers before I turned my attention to another book. I used my gut a lot when designing both books; in the end, I think my gut was right more often than not.

My highlights of 2009 are easy:

Eclipse Phase

Eclipse Phase

Not only am I very pleased with how Eclipse Phase ended up looking and working as a book and game artifact, but our gang at Posthuman Studios pushed Catalyst hard for things we wanted: Creative Commons licensing & inexpensive PDF pricing being the prime two. Those decisions have so far turned out to be wise, and Catalyst will be be publishing at least one more game—Leviathans—using a Creative Commons license. The development team’s work on Eclipse Phase—game, setting, book—fills me with pride.

Shadowrun, 4th Ed. 20th Anniversary Core Rulebook

What can I say? It was a thrill to work on this book, and aside from minor nitpicks it’s been enthusiastically received by new and returning Shadowrun fans alike. Highlights: the huge color-coded master index, the streamlining of character generation, and the revised skills chapter. Each time I pick up this book to use is better than any time picking up the previous Fourth Edition book.

Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition

Seattle 2072

Through weird twists of fate, I actually ended up being the developer on this project. My goal was simple: meld the best of Seattle Sourcebook’s “bite-sized” design with the best of New Seattle’s, throw in a major shakeup, and set up some future plots so people can keep ‘running in the Sixth World’s signature city. Steve Kenson rocked the main writing tasks and we pulled in a bunch of others to write short fiction pieces.

Seattle 2072

The project that has taken so much of my time and energy over the last few months has now been announced, and is available as a PDF: Catalyst Game Labs Celebrates 20 Years of Shadowrun!

[I will try to have some actual thoughts about this, when I am finished being exhausted and stressed. I hope you all like it.]

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.

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.

A lot of people are happy about Jordan Weisman’s new venture Smith & Tinker acquiring the electronic licenses for ex-FASA Corporation properties [such as Shadowrun, Classic BattleTech, and Crimson Skies], leading to a lot of speculation about future MMORPGs or alternate reality games. I think the smart money is some sort of alternate reality game/experience; since Microsoft still appears to own the electronic gaming rights and is merely licensing them to Smith & Tinker, I doubt S&T would be investing in a MMORPG, especially given the current [known] size of their team and their MMORPG experience.

Great to see that Shadowrun’s electronic rights have gone to a team that understands that there are 5 major metahuman races in the Sixth World, though!

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.