A New Year’s Message From the President, Part Two

Last week I posted a New Year’s message about the state of True20 Adventure Roleplaying. This week I’m going to talk about Mutants & Masterminds, Green Ronin’s superhero RPG. This has been our top line for several years now and the game shows no signs of slowing down. Let’s take a look at what’s coming in 2008 for M&M.
The big Mutants & Masterminds news this year is, of course, Wild Cards. Tor Books kicks off a brand new saga for this distinguished alternate history supers setting this week with Inside Straight, a "mosaic novel" edited by George R.R. Martin. The Dabel Brothers are also starting a Wild Cards comic series in April. Come June, when the new line for Mutants & Masterminds debuts, we will be in very good company indeed. The even better news is that we were able to get original Wild Cards co-author John Jos. Miller to write for us, so we’re getting terrific material from a key source. This summer Wild Cards will take its place alongside Freedom City and Paragons as one of the core campaign settings for Mutants & Masterminds. We will be following up the campaign setting book in the fall with All-In, an anthology of five Wild Cards adventures. This book will ensure that players have plenty to do in their new campaigns. The third book in the series is scheduled for 2009 and we’ll be talking more about that at a later date.
Even before we get to Wild Cards summer, Green Ronin has a lot more M&M goodness coming at you. Up first is Worlds of Freedom, which presents several fun new variants of Freedom City and an expanded look at the Terminus, followed by the long awaited Book of Magic and then a brand new villain book called Freedom’s Most Wanted. Mutants & Masterminds fans knew a bit about these titles already. What we haven’t yet announced is the M&M Deluxe GM Screen. Last year we did a True20 GM screen using the same material as the covers of hardback books. When we held that beauty in our hands, we said, “M&M really deserves a screen as sexy as this one.” So come May you’ll be seeing a new, super sturdy GM screen—but that’s not all. Included with the screen will be a second edition update of the classic M&M adventure Time of Crisis, by stalwart author Christopher McGlothlin. This will give new GMs a great way to kick off their first campaigns.
Surely that’s enough to satisfy most comic lovin’ fans, but there’s more to come. Here at GR HQ we are always talking about new ways to play our games and new genres to explore. That leads us to the last of our major 2008 releases. In these two books we will explore anime/manga and comic book fantasy. The names of these have not been finalized but we’ve been referring to them as "Mecha & Manga" and "Warriors & Warlocks." Each one will explore a new style of M&M game and both titles will give you all the info you need to get these fun genre campaigns going. Look for them in the second half of the year.
That covers the print side of things but we have some exciting plans for e-products as well. Our relationship with Ronin Arts continues and Phil Reed and crew will be doing more support products. We also plan to launch the Freedom City Atlas, our electronic map project. In this series of PDFs, cartographer Phillip Lienau will explore various areas in Freedom City in greater detail. Phillip’s maps for the Freedom City campaign setting book were stellar and these will further bring the setting to life.
So those are our plans for M&M in brief. As you can see, we have some great products lined up and we’re particularly excited to bring Wild Cards back to its roots in RPGs. Now you may be saying to yourself, "That’s all great, but I want even more!" Happy to oblige. We do have more projects to come, but the time isn’t right to announce them. Stay with us, friends, as the World’s Greatest Superhero RPG soars into 2008!
Chris Pramas
January 21, 2008