As the last quarter of 2014 is upon us, I thought this would be a good time to update you all on the status of some of our announced books. Our release schedule has been something of a moving target this year for a variety of reasons, but many long simmering projects are either finished or close to being finished. Here is the most up to date info that I have right now.
Dragon Age, Set 3: This is printed and in our warehouse. Hooray! We had a few sent here to Seattle, so I had the pleasure of holding it in my hand after a long development cycle. Normally, we’d be releasing it to distributors next week, but this is an usual situation. We’ve printed only 2000 copies of Set 3 and will never be reprinting it (because of the forthcoming Dragon Age Core Rulebook). Naturally, after that initial announcement, direct orders for Set 3 were quite robust. That being the case, we are pausing to make sure that the pre-orders go out properly before releasing books to distributors and game stores. We will likely have no extras to fix screw ups so we want to ensure it’s done right. Distributors then get their chance to order. If there are any left over at that point, we’ll make it available on our webstore again.
The contents of Sets 1 to 3 of Dragon Age will, as previously announced, be compiled into a big, hardback Core Rulebook. We had hoped to release this concurrently with Dragon Age: Inquisition, but the printing delays of Set 3 made that untenable. We are now shooting for a January release.
Advanced Bestiary for the Pathfinder RPG: The Advanced Bestiary was originally a critically-acclaimed d20 book we published 10 years ago. We did a Kickstarter to update the book to the Pathfinder RPG and that was quite successful. The new edition is a big, beautiful full color hardback with all new art. It has been at print for a month or so and ought to be hitting our warehouse by the end of the month. Again, we will pause, this time to ship the book to the Kickstarter backers. Then we’ll handle pre-orders from our website, and release it to distributors in mid-November. It’s a hugely useful book for Pathfinder GMs, so if you missed the Kickstarter, do check it out.
Freeport, The City of Adventure for the Pathfinder RPG: Speaking of Kickstarters, we’ve also been hard at work on the new Freeport book. This is a new core book for our classic city setting, and it too has been customized for the Pathfinder RPG. At 512 pages, it will also be the biggest book we’ve ever published! This is in the final stages of production. Very shortly now, we should be releasing the PDF to Kickstarter backers. Then we’ll release that to the public and put the book up for pre-order. After a final errata check, it will go to print. We’ll announce a final release date when we have something from the printer.
Mutants & Masterminds: For M&M fans there is good and bad news. The good news is that the Atlas of Earth-Prime PDF series is resuming after some delays caused by convention season. They will pick up with the Mediterranean Atlas shortly. The bad news is that we’ve decided to delay the Cosmic Handbook to next year. We would have had to rush the production to get it out before Xmas and we didn’t want to do that. As we like to say, a late book is only late until it comes out, but a bad book is bad forever.
That’s all the news for now. We just had our yearly summit last weekend and we made a lot of important decisions there. We’ll be making some additional announcements about our schedule in November, and then in January I’ll do my traditional message about our plans for the coming year.
We hope you have an awesome Halloween. To help with that, we’ve put the Supernatural Handbook for Mutants & Masterminds on sale for 25% off (both the PDF and the printed book). Enjoy!
Today’s Flesh Treant sample creature comes with the Flesh Plant template: “Flesh treants are too large to hide successfully from prey, so they employ group hunting techniques. Using animated trees to flush prey toward them, flesh treants spread out in a line to strike at forest creatures as they flee by. Any creatures not killed outright by their crushing limbs are tracked through the woods by the trail of blood left behind.”
