Mage Hand Press
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Updates and Pivots
🕑 Added 2019-01-18 09:13:56 +0000 UTCIn this post, I'll be quickly apprising you all of what's going on with various projects.
Book Updates
We're still working on updating art for old books, as well as shoring up our art catalog in general, and we've gotten some done already:
Arcane Archive (New art -- cover coming soon)
Men and Monsters (New cover, new art within)
High Seas (New cover, reworked art within)
We're working hard on the Lovecraft Handbook as we speak! After that, we plan to move onto new art for Fey Folio!
The Electric (East) Slide
We need to talk about the modern setting we're working on, tentatively titled Electric East. Long story short: we're pivoting direction, shifting deadlines, and probably renaming the book.
Originally, this book was a way for us to unload more explicitly modern and cyberpunk rules into a urban setting that it's just generic grey American cities. However, the further we dug into the book's rules and themes, it became very hard to balance the 'modern' and 'cyberpunk' ends, especially since Dark Matter sits so near the Cyberpunk influences and takes up much of that territory. How we handle things like the internet and whether or not there's robots and cyborgs was the real sticking point. Moreover, we've learned that Modern is probably the more sorely-needed ruleset.
So, we're shifting this book to a more distinctly Modern Rules approach. But that's not all -- we actually intend to pop out the modern rules into their own book. This means we'll have a solid foundation to build more modern settings, and a generic resource, so you can run whatever modern setting you want.
So that's what you're getting this month and next month: Modern Rules (with a better title, probably). We're starting with equipment, vehicles, and magic rules, then we're moving into archetypes and character options. This new approach has roughly doubled (maybe tripled) the amount of work we need to do for this book (as evidenced by the fact that it's literally two books now), so I'd ask for some patience as we shift Electric East back a little while.
Also, we're probably changing the name to Electric Empire, or something of that variety. We were never completely comfortable with using the term 'East' in this book's context, and the more we work on the project, the less representative it is becoming of the final book. We'll keep you posted on how that develops.
Craftsman Redux
The craftsman redux is on the horizon, but the Complete version might be a bit further out. We're working on a lot of art for this as well.
Comments
Charles Koeppel
To be honsest... I was more interested in a good eastern setting with modern/cyberpunk overtones. The modern rules or cyberpunk was secondary for me.
Thantos
But I am looking forward to reviewing this set of content. It could provide a lot of flexibility to a game that might include both ends of the spectrum, so to speak, including a no- to low-technology society. I'm thinking more along the lines of a Space/Sci-Fi campaign or galaxy within which took place multiple campaigns and could provide the distance for possible co-existence of these disparate types of society make-ups.
Thantos
There's never enough Cyberpunk!
