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

It is the start of a New Year and time for me to talk about what you can expect in 2009 from Green Ronin. I used to do one of these messages that covered everything, but with so many lines these days I’ve taken to doing several and spreading them out over a week. Today I’m going talk about our most established lines, Mutants & Masterminds, Freeport, and True20 Adventure Roleplaying, and say a few words about the future of Green Ronin and D&D/d20.
Mutants & Masterminds continues its reign as our most popular game. A landmark fifth printing of the current rulebook is underway and it will be back in stock next month. We just released Freedom’s Most Wanted, the first new villain book for the game in quite some time. The first half of 2009 we will release three long-awaited books: All-In, Warriors & Warlocks, and Mecha & Manga (in that order). All-In is an adventure collection for the Wild Cards campaign setting. Warriors & Warlocks and Mecha & Manga are genre books covering comic book fantasy and anime/manga, respectively.
In the summertime we’ll be releasing two more sourcebooks. The first, the Supervillain’s Handbook, is a brand new hardback written by none other than M&M designer Steve Kenson. This book is a complete guide to creating and running supervillains and their sinister schemes in M&M, from detailed pre-generated villain archetypes, to different plot archetypes, secret lairs, and Gamemaster advice and guidance. We’ll be following that up with Aces & Jokers, a character book for Wild Cards with even more heroes and villains from the books. Once again series writer John Jos. Miller is penning all the background material, using his encyclopedic knowledge of Wild Cards to great effect.
We close out the M&M year with Supernaturals by Hero High author Lucien Soulban. This is a sourcebook that deals with the paranormal and the strange; the ordinary investigating and confronting the extraordinary. It is horror with costumes, code-names, and super-powers. It’s about a world where the cosmology of Hell or the Old Ones exists, and a stalwart few are there to stem the dark tide, if they can. Some of them might be considered monsters themselves, but at least they’re on our side.
Turning our attention to Freeport and True20, we’ve decided to support both at the same time with two True20 Freeport adventures. Freeport started with adventures but we haven’t done any new ones since Dark Wings Over Freeport so the time seemed right. While sourcebooks like Buccaneers of Freeport can be done without game stats, adventures are a different beast. You really need to give the GM system info for challenges and foes, so it made sense to use True20 Adventure Roleplaying. Since we’ve only ever published two adventures for True20, this should be good news for True20 GMs as well.
We’re also supporting True20 this year with True20 Ancients PDFs, which Highmoon Media Productions is putting together for us. Each PDF looks at a different ancient culture and provides background and gaming info useful to True20 GMs. True20 Rome will kick things off in a couple of months. If you are looking for more campaign setting options for True20, be sure to check out what third party publishers have to offer as well. The True20 community has really stepped up over the past year and there are now many settings to choose from in a wide variety of genres, as well as other support products like adventures and sourcebooks.
Getting back to GR, I should also mention that our foray into D&D 4E support, the Green Ronin Character Record Folio, is landing in our warehouse this week and will be in stores the first week of February. This is an update of our d20 System Character Record Folio and it’s as handy as its predecessor. Maybe even more so, since this one has interior pockets where you can store notes and handouts.
So what of our older d20 material? Well, at the end of last year we announced the creation of a new brand, 3rd Era, which covers all of our d20 products. We are in the process of revising our d20 books to bear the 3rd Era logo instead because Wizards of the Coast is retiring the d20 logo. The books will remain available as PDFs and we’re also setting up a store on Lulu, a print on demand service, so you’ll be able to get print copies as well. We just received a test sample from Lulu of the 3rd Era Book of Fiends, and it looks great. This will let us get titles like the Book of Fiends back into print and allow the release of books like the Advanced Race Codex in the format they were intended for.
That covers our plans for the classic Green Ronin game lines. Stay tuned for part 2, in which I discuss A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. Winter is indeed coming.
Chris Pramas
January 20, 2009