Adam Jury

Just upgraded the blog to Wordpress 2.7—I’ve been playing with the beta version on a site I have in development, and it’s really great.

Personal-work-wise, I’ve been pretty busy with that new site, and hope to launch it early next year … I was hoping for this month, but that’s just not going to happen, with all my work on Eclipse Phase and Shadowrun this month, plus some freelance work. The personal project is a totally new one for me, and has nothing [well, very little] to do with gaming, so that’s pretty exciting.

I took a vacation at the end of November. I don’t think I mentioned that here; I went to Washington, DC, for Thanksgiving. I had a great time chilling out for a week.

Oh, and I bought a copy of Klavika Condensed this week. Isn’t it gorgeous? Watch for it in some upcoming Shadowrun projects.

And that concludes this life update and test post!

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

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 …

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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!

The Print on Demand version of Beyond the Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy is now out. It’s $19.99, and all proceeds [beyond expenses that have to go to LuLu for using their service] go to the Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina disaster relief. A PDF version is also available for $10.

Beyond the Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy is a collection of short stories, essays, art and role-playing game materials inspired by the culture, landscape, and city of New Orleans. With contributions from three continents and from across the spectrum of role-playing, all the proceeds from the sale of the book will go to support Katrina Disaster Relief. Join the authors and artists as they explore the Big Easy as it could have been and how it might be…

Beyond the Storm features contributors from a bunch of industry all-stars and some that will be, including some short stories, material suitable for dropping into superhero and horror games [including HERO and M&M stats], a complete adventure for Shadowrun, Fourth Edition, and several complete RPGs – some experimental, some more conventional. All wrapped around the theme of New Orleans.

Complete contributor list: Aaron Acevedo, Aaron Axelsen, Scott Bennie, Jason L Blair, Leanne Buckley, Heather “Squish” Cornelius, William Edmonds, Crazy Elf, Matt Forbeck, Caz Granberg, Seth Johnson, Adam Jury, Mischa Damon Krilov, Lindsay Labanca, Mur Lafferty, Jason Mical, Veronica Pare, Jeff Preston, Mikko Rautalahti, Sean Riley, S. John Ross, Janice M. Sellers, Angi Shearstone, Geoff Skellams, Adam Tinworth, Ursula Vernon, David ‘Doc Blue’ Wendt, Stacy S. (Niedecker) Wendt, Michael Wendt, and Brook Willeford.

The Ennie nominations are now online.

Very pleased to see Dreaming Cities [which I art directed] nominated for Best Interior Art, and it’s also good to see Authority and Ex Machina nominated for Best Cover Art, plus a best Production Values for Authority.

Some other cool stuff I like was nominated, too — d20SRD.org for Best Fan Site, Vampire: TR for Best Interior Art, Burning Wheel for Best Rules, and World of Darkness Core Book for Best Writing. All good stuff.

Voting is here.