Tag Archive for: The Expanse

Beyond the Ring

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<Incoming transmission.>

Beyond the Ring for the Expanse RPG! COMING SOON!

(Cover is not final)

It’s been a long haul, but we’re getting close to sending Beyond the Ring to print. This sourcebook advances The Expanse timeline, taking us to Ring space and the 1000 worlds beyond the rings. This book joins Abzu’s Bounty and Ships of the Expanse as the third major release for The Expanse RPG. While this book focuses primarily on material for GMs it contains a wealth of background material that could be useful to players and of interest to fans of The Expanse novels.

 

Beyond the Ring contains exactly what its name implies―a detailed guide to everything beyond the Sol Ring and much, much more. Besides pages of descriptions and data for new worlds, Ring space, and Medina Station, you’ll find rules for creating your own planets and systems. You’ll also find rules for an entirely new way of playing The Expanse by creating and managing your own colonies.

Before I ramble on too much, I’ll let the book speak for itself with a high-end overview:

Chapter 1: After Venus

This chapter pushes the timeline forward into the months and years after Eros crashes into Venus and launches what becomes the Ring gate at the solar system’s edge. You’ll find details on the Ring, the Ring Space, the Control Station, as well as how each of the factions (Earth, Mars, and the Belt) respond to this new reality.

Chapter 2: Medina Station

Everything you ever wanted to know about Medina Station! You’ll find plenty of details on the history, politics, and layout of the station and a lot of story seeds for running campaigns set on Medina. As a side note, the (upcoming) PDF adventure, Secrets of Lemuria is primarily set on Medina.

Chapter 3: Worlds Beyond

This chapter is split into two sections: Featured Worlds and New Worlds. The Featured Worlds section gives a brief overview of systems described in the novels. New Worlds opens up over twenty brand new worlds, which includes system data, information on the biosphere, alien artifacts, and story hooks for each.

Chapter 4: Colonies

Here, you’ll find new rules everything you need to know about creating and managing your own colonies.

Chapter 5: System and World Creation

Finally, create your own systems and worlds for characters to discover. Either roll randomly or choose from a wide variety of possibilities.

That’s Beyond the Ring in a nutshell. Look for future transmissions where I dig deeper into the colony creation and system creation rules systems and explore some of the new worlds in greater detail.

Over and out!

<Transmission ends.>

 

Rules Tinkering

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Folks who know me know that I am a tinkerer when it comes to rules and game design: I love to play around with different ideas for how something can get done in the context of a game, and I have notebooks and digital files full of ideas and random thoughts jotted down about particular rules and system concepts to try out or experiment with at some point. There are two particular Green Ronin areas of interest with my rules tinkering manifested recently.

Modern AGE Powers! Coming Soon!

Modern AGE Powers! Coming Soon!

The first is in getting to work on sub-systems for extraordinary powers for the AGE System, particularly Modern AGE. Anyone who knows my work gets that super-powers of various sorts are a particular interest, so naturally I jumped at the opportunity to work on power systems for AGE, starting right from the design of the Fantasy AGE and Modern AGE Basic Rulebooks. I wrote the Powers chapter of Modern AGE game, adapting the magic system of Fantasy AGE to present systems of spellcasting and psionic in the core game. Then I got to expand on those systems for the Modern AGE Companion and particularly the Threefold setting, which offered setting-specific examples of magic and psychic powers, along with expanding upon extraordinary powers.

From there, I got to build-out both psychic and extraordinary powers even further for the forthcoming Modern AGE Powers sourcebook, and adapt extraordinary powers and the augmentations sub-system from Threefold for a more general cyberpunk style. That material, it turned out, was useful for The Expanse as well, since we know there are some cybernetics and body augmentations in the setting, so we were able to adapt the core of that material for another AGE System game as well! Most of this development and tinkering went on with manuscripts that haven’t yet seen print, so there were also opportunities to go back and apply later developments to some of the earlier stuff. If you’re going to be working under pandemic conditions where product releases are delayed, at least take advantage of the longer development times!

Similarly, our conversations on Mutants & Masterminds Mondays sometimes inspire the desire to tinker with particular aspects of the game rules. That’s where an article on what I called “Challenge Points” came from for the M&M Patreon: We discussed the concept of first edition’s “Villain Points” and some similar mechanics introduced in more recent M&M adventures to provide Gamemasters with different balancing tools to make encounters sufficiently challenging and interesting. I summed-up a lot of what we discussed in writing, added a few extra details, and presented it to our patrons for their feedback and use. Seems to have gone over well, so chances are we’ll look to share some other rules-tinkering ideas on the Patreon in the future. Who knows? Maybe some of those ideas will find their way into official game releases at some point. I know that both M&M Developer Crystal Frasier and I have already written additional articles along those lines and have some ideas for others.

Do you like to tinker with the rules of your favorite RPGs? Do you enjoy designer speculation and ideas for variant rules or optional systems? Drop us a line at letsplay@greenronin.com and let us know about it or about the sorts of things you’d like to see. You might well inspire us to go in and tinker with something new!

Weapons and Tech in the Expanse RPG

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Amos Burton has some thoughts on Weapons in the Expanse“The Expanse RPG is designed to tell stories in the universe of The Expanse novels, not to be a tactical simulator.” I can’t count how many times I’ve written or uttered this phrase since becoming the line developer.  It’s the best answer I can give when people ask why The Expanse RPG doesn’t have a more detailed space combat system, long lists of the different guns, or pages filled with wonderous technological devices. The AGE system and The Expanse novels are focused on the narrative and characters, not the tech. The tech is there to support the story, not the focus of the story. I discussed this in a previous RRT Here. So today, rather than going on further about that, I’m going to offer a few ideas on ways you can bring the tech to the foreground if that’s what you want for your campaign.

First, lets talk guns. This is an easy one. If you want to track ammo, you can certainly do that. All you need to do is look up some basic gun types and list the ammo capacity for each. The rulebook already states that reloading a gun is a minor action, so that’s already covered. If you decide to track ammo, you may want to ignore the Weapon Capacity rules, although you could still use this to indicate that the weapon jams. Then you need to decide how many rounds are expended for different stunts. Probably four for a short burst or suppressive fire and maybe double that for a long burst or spray and pray. Ultimately this is up to you and what works best for your campaign, but if you’re going to track ammo, you’ll want to set something definitive so that players know what to expect.

There are plenty of resources online for how many rounds different types of weapons carry. Also, some other sci-fi and futuristic RPGs have extensive lists of gun types. They often even have cool names that you could easily co-opt for your Expanse game. The core rulebook provides all of the tools necessary to create unique weapons and ammo.  The Item Qualities and Flaws and Weapons Qualities and Flaws sections in Chapter 4: Technology and Equipment can be used to flesh out individual weapons to make one pistol different from another.

Weapons aboard Ships of the Expanse

These guidelines work well for Ships and their weapons as well. Even the Qualities could be applied to different ship weapons or ammo to create a wider diversity for the players to choose from and something for characters to spend their Income on. For ammo, it is up to you to decide how many PDC bursts a ship can fire and how many railgun rounds and torpedoes they carry. Some details are mentioned in the novels, and real-life naval ships can also be used as a guide. Modern submarines generally carry from 12-38 torpedoes, so that can give you a starting point. Keeping PDCs and railguns somewhere in line with that makes a certain amount of sense. (Although PDCs fire thousands of rounds per minute so ites probably best to just determine how many “bursts” they can fire rather than worry about the exact number of rounds.) The important thing to remember if you decide to track rounds instead of using the narrative system is to make sure that it adds to the fun and doesn’t diminish it. Limiting rounds should be used to enhance the tension but never to punish players. It also adds another step of bookkeeping that many players might not find enjoyable. Read your table and make sure everyone is having fun.

Ultimately it is up to you and your players to decide what works for you. We’ve designed a game that we believe is fun to play. And while we occasionally add some more detailed optional rules, our focus will always be on the story. Speaking of story, look for the PDF adventure Secrets of Lemuria, coming soon!

The AGE of Wonderful (and Misfit) Toys

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So, backstage, we developers have been talking about the different properties of AGE as a system, and how they might be tweaked, expanded, streamlined, and generally fooled around with. This is a conversation that builds up when it interests us, or when various projects demand it, and it’s responsible for a lot of the work we do with the Adventure Game Engine in its various forms: Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, The Expanse, and Blue Rose—and of course these evolved from concepts devised by Chris Pramas for the Dragon Age roleplaying game.

Modding AGE games is half the fun!

If at first you don’t get the gameplay you want, mod, mod again. From the upcoming Modern AGE Mastery Guide

The wonderful thing about this process is that everybody has their own interpretations of how and why the rules work, and this sometimes helps with creative logjams. I may have talked about how it happens before, but hey, I forgot if I did, so why not talk about it anyway in the perishable blogging medium?

Churning Collaboration

Take the example of the Churn, devised for The Expanse—sort of. When I was working on the Modern AGE Companion, I got a look at the initial draft of the Churn. I liked it a whole lot, but I was also aware that as a game without a setting intended to serve a broad set of players, my “Churn” needed to generate more specific challenges from a rules perspective, because the GM couldn’t necessarily pull something from a well-defined setting. I renamed it Complications and added a bit of specificity in terms of the adversity it generates, and associated game systems like target numbers.

Then, of course, it turned out that Steve Kenson wanted to nail down the Churn a bit more. Handily, I had my draft in hand and sent it to him. So that’s how the Churn bounced between two games and came out with a redesign in both.

Another example of this is the invention of what we call breaching tests in Modern AGE and challenge tests in The Expanse: advanced tests that may have specific requirements and can impose special consequences for failure. As breaching tests, these were originally invented by Crystal Frasier for the World of Lazarus supplement, not the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook (both were written and developed at the same time). But the rules were so great I asked for them to be ported into core game systems. Steve Kenson picked it up for The Expanse, renamed it, and integrated it with the chase rules sourced from Modern AGE to streamline the latter.

Dubious Notions

However, not everything we produce makes it all the way to print or public pixels, for assorted reasons. The first is that the idea doesn’t really have a home in a new or upcoming game or supplement. They’re just free-floating notions. For example, at the time of writing we’ve just bandied about ideas for utilizing breaching/challenge tests where characters accumulate degrees of success with the ordinary combat system. Is there a place for it? Not yet, but much of the time we’ll keep these ideas in our back pockets, so to speak, until the right occasion comes up.

Then you have ideas which are great on paper but would just be too weird or dismal looking for people to get into. Here’s one I came up with. Hard Mode Stunts.

Hard Mode Stunts: Instead of setting the Stunt Die apart with a distinctive design or color than the other two of your 3d6, the Stunt Die is always the lowest die you roll. If you tie where two dice have the same number as a die with a higher result, it doesn’t matter which die you pick as your Stunt Die, since they’ll have the same value.

(Don’t know AGE? In our system we roll 3d6 + bonuses against a target number. One die is distinctive, and if any two dice have the same number on the face, that special die—called the Stunt Die or Drama Die—generates the number on its face in stunt points, which can be used to buy special effects like knocking an enemy down or getting your way with a particularly clever quip in social interactions.)

Now this seems like a logical rule. Stunt point totals tend to be high because matches happen in the set of rolls that are successes, and successful rolls will naturally be higher. With Hard Mode Stunts, you’re more likely to get fewer stunt points unless your entire roll is high—in fact, since you can’t get 6 stunt points unless 6 is the lowest die, you can only get that when you roll a natural 18 on 3d6. So logically, scales consistently, and…is no fun. In Modern AGE you might use it for the grittiest of Gritty Mode games. But AGE thrives on stunts! So, no—with one exception.

If there was a version of the AGE system that provided powerful tools to alter dice rolls or generate stunt points without relying on doubles, Hard Mode Stunts might work, with the understanding that you’ll usually be buying the big stunts, perhaps with something like The Expanse’s Fortune system. There’s a thought—but is there a place for it? Hmmm….

Gen Con Report 2021

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Another Gen Con is in the books, and what an unusual Gen Con it was, in many regards.

Green Ronin booth at Gen Con 2021!As folks may know, this year Gen Con held a “hybrid” event, consisting of online and “pop-up” Gen Con events hosted by local game stores, in addition to the traditional in-person event at the convention center in downtown Indianapolis, where Gen Con has been hosted for over twenty years now. In-person Gen Con observed a number of restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including a cap on attendance, a mask requirement for all indoor and crowded outdoor areas of the con, and closing the convention center overnight for a complete cleaning. Along with reduced attendance came a reduced number of exhibitors: Many Gen Con stalwarts did not attend, and many others cancelled their plans to do so.

Green Ronin, like many exhibitors, reduced our presence at the convention: smaller booth space and minimal staff, just four of us, the smallest Gen Con staff we’ve had since I started working for Green Ronin back in 2003! We still managed to include our full lines of product on the tables that we had, and were pleased to be able to offer a limited number of copies of the new Ships of the Expanse, along with other new offerings like the Envoys to the Mount campaign for Blue Rose. We cleared out our remaining copies of The Expanse Quick-Start by giving a free copy with any purchase of $25 or more. They were all gone by Friday!

Ships of the Expanse was available in print for Gen Con!

While Gen Con 2021 was by no means an ordinary Gen Con, it was still a success. Sales justified our costs for being there and attendees expressed their gratitude at seeing us and having the opportunity to check out our products, both new and new-to-them. We saw lots of interest in The Expanse, Blue Rose, Mutants & Masterminds, and the AGE System, as we expected, but were also pleased to see to see interest in both our 5e products like The Lost Citadel, Book of Fiends, and The Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide as well as our older Pathfinder products for Freeport.

Mask discipline in the exhibit hall and within the convention was generally excellent. While I occasionally saw a few noses hanging out, I didn’t see anyone unmasked anywhere they weren’t supposed to be. We generally took a cautious approach, avoiding a lot of the crowded events and areas, and combining taking our meals in our hotel rooms and visiting less crowded restaurants, especially those offering outdoor seating. Hand sanitizer was our constant companion and Nicole implemented a barcode scanner for sales checkout to help minimize the handling and passing back-and-forth of products. Because of our minimal staffing, and ownership’s preference not to ask anything of volunteers this year, we didn’t run any in-person events or games ourselves. As it was, we barely got away from the booth to walk the show floor (although we did all manage it).

Gen Con classics from the AGE system games.In spite of all of the differences, the heart of Gen Con remained very much the same: People were excited to be there and happy to see us, and enthused about their favorite games, while curious about what was new and coming next. We even met more than a few attendees who told us it was their first Gen Con ever! Certainly, we’re looking forward to welcoming them back to the show under better conditions in the years to come. We certainly appreciate everyone who visited the booth and who shopped or took the time to offer their kind comments.

We’ll have an even smaller presence at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, in just two weeks: Two staff members are scheduled to be there, but will be there nonetheless. We’ll have a similar-sized booth and all of the same product and are looking forward to greeting our friends, old and new.

Chris Pramas also recorded a quick interview with 1-2-3 D&D History at Gen Con. Check it out!

Ships of the Expanse: Torpedoes Away!

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Ships of the Expanse<Incoming transmission.>

<URGENT! Imminent contact detected!>

Ships of the Expanse is so close we won’t even experience any time delay on this transmission. Ty has signed off on the book, and it’s off to the printers. Since we’re so close, I thought now would be a good time to talk about combat.

Let’s begin with stunts. We added a bunch of new command stunts to the original list to allow for some even crazier maneuvers, including my favorite, Burn Them, which allows a ship to use its Epstein drive as a weapon. (I know I mentioned this in a previous RRT, but I think it bears repeating.) There is also Down with the Ship, which allows the commander to expend their own Fortune to remove damage taken by other characters (as the result of a Collateral Loss) onboard the ship. Or, Rapid Reload which lets you launch an extra torpedo. We’ve also added fleet command stunts and individual crew stunts, allowing the commander to give their generated stunt points to individual crew members to be used on their action. Crew stunts like Not My Ship! permit the engineer to sacrifice their own Fortune to protect the ship, or Steady as She Goes, which allows the pilot to lessen damage from a high-G maneuver.

Next up, the expanded electronic warfare section goes into things like hacking another ship’s systems or even wresting control of a torpedo that is being manually guided. The ship’s gunner gets a little love with systems for trick shots, firing weapons without an automated targeting system, and new rules for targeting specific systems. There is also an extensive section on all the different ways you can hide in space as well as more details on stealth technology.

But, who really wants to hide? Would you rather blow things up? We’ve got you covered with a whole section on alternative weapons. This includes flinging asteroids, making debris screens from shattered asteroids, and we get into the versatility of a torpedo. No longer are these just “fire and forget” weapons. We cover using torpedoes as mines, proximity torpedoes, and even using a torpedo as a point defense weapon. PDCs down? Fire a torpedo at that incoming torpedo! Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t revisit the nuke and get down and dirty discussing the absolute devastation these weapons can cause.

Torpedoes Away!

Information can often be the best weapon and now you’re armed with details about the expanded combat rules. The countdown has begun; deploy PDCs and get ready to make contact. Yes, that means the PDF should be out sometime THIS WEEK, with the print copies coming as fast as we can. As I’m sure most of you know, printing and shipping is still a little wonky due to COVID-19, but I promise we’ll have them in your hands as fast as we can.

Over and out!

< Transmission ends.>

If you pre-order a print copy, you can add a PDF for just $5 in our Online Store! You can also pre-order the book from your Friendly Local Game Store if shipping fees, or changing customs regulations has made getting the book difficult in your neck of the woods. We can even send $5 PDF codes to your local game store as well!

Ships of the Expanse: The Ships and Deck Plans

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<Incoming transmission.>

Ships of the ExpanseAlthough they come in the final chapter, the deck plans are very much the centerpiece in Ships of the Expanse. It is also, in part, the reason this book took so long to get out. Although the pandemic can take most of the blame there, making all these plans involved an incredible amount of time. We know it took a while, but a lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into this project. We apologize for the delay, but I think you’re really going to enjoy this book!

There are 28 ships detailed in this book, and we took a lot of time and care to get every one right. We wanted to make them useful for gameplay and make sure that they were as realistic as possible. You might be surprised how long it takes to figure out exactly what goes on each deck: how many crash couches are needed for the crew, how many bunks, where does the galley go, does this ship have a med bay, how many cargo holds, how can you access the cargo holds, and so on. Needless to say, it gets complicated.

Today, you get to see a preview of one of the deck plans, the UNN Monroe-class Light Destroyer, and I’ll break down what all you’ll find in the ships section of Ships of the Expanse. They are in the order of UNN, MCRN, Independents, and finally, a few unique ships such as the Anne Bonny from Abzu’s Bounty. Then they are then listed in alphabetical order. We debated organizing them by size class, but in the end, alphabetical seemed best for easy reference.

PDF PREVIEW for the Munroe-class Light Destroyer

Each ship opens with the ship’s specifications, which is very similar to how they are presented in the Expanse core rulebook, but these are a littleMunroe-Class Light Destroyer more detailed. They also feature the new qualities and flaws that are included earlier in this book. Following that are a few paragraphs that talk about the ship’s origins and history as well as its purpose within the military fleet or as a civilian vessel, followed by a story hook that presents how the ship might appear in an adventure. I think the story hooks will be especially useful for inspiration (and to give you an excuse to use your new deck plans) since it isn’t always easy to figure out how a group of PCs might end up interacting with some of these beasts.

Following the text, you get two silhouettes from different perspectives. One of these shows the actual decks as well as elevator or ladder shafts.  And then you get to the good stuff―the deck plans! For each individual ship you get deck plans for each type of deck. However, if there are four decks of crew quarters, we only provide one plan for that since they are going to be identical in most cases. There is also a key that indicates which decks are on which level.

So, let’s talk deck plans. One of the choices I can see being controversial is the decision to include cargo and the like on the schematics. We felt that it added visual interest and also gave a better idea of space and scale. If you’re using the deck plans on a VTT or the like, you can just ignore the cargo if you want your cargo bay to be empty. I know everyone is going to have their own opinions on certain details. In the end, we had to make our own choices, often with very little actual information to go on. Though, I think you’ll agree that these things look fantastic and will be a wonderful addition to any Expanse game, not to mention just being a lot of fun to pour over.

Over and out.

< Transmission ends.>

Ships of The Expanse: Expanding How You Play

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<Incoming transmission.>

Ships of the ExpanseShips of the Expanse is coming to a spaceport near you soon! In my last transmission, I presented overview of what all is in the book, but now I’m going to get into some of  the nuts and bolts.

The Expanse RPG presents  a solid basis for spaceship rules. There is more than enough information provided to set the stage for exciting adventures in space and breathtaking ship combat. Ships of the Expanse takes the framework laid out in the core rulebook and builds upon it to give the players and Game Masters more options for play and more opportunity for drama. Ships provides players and GMs with a lot of new styles of play, including being merchants, smugglers, prospectors, or even pirates.

Players interested in being merchants will be excited to find in-depth rules for buying and selling (and smuggling) cargo. There are charts, tables, and guidelines for buying and selling cargo and taking on passengers. These include Income modifiers and possible risks and complications. You’ll also find rules and details for prospecting for those who want to search the belt for ice and ore minerals. Of course, everything in this book is entirely optional, and players and GMs can pick and choose which rules they want to add to their campaign and which they want to ignore and keeping in line with the core philosophy of The Expanse RPG, these rules aren’t overly cumbersome and are intended to enhance rather than bog down gameplay.

Ships of the Expanse gives you costs and details for making post-market modifications to your ship. There are also Income rules for purchasing and repairing ships as well as selling salvage. Now you know exactly how much it costs to add hull plating or install a torpedo launcher. There’s also quite an extensive list of new Qualities and Flaws for ships. Here are a few to wet your appetite: Increased Acceleration (makes it easier to increase or decrease range), Gourmet Galley (might as well eat well on those long journeys), Drone Bays (keep drones on hand for ship repair, reconnaissance, or even combat), High-Charged Rail Guns (you know you want one), Advanced Security Systems (to keep nosy spies off your ship), Advanced Targeting Systems (make sure you hit your target), and much more.

Expanded rules for all your spaceship needs!

You’ll find many and expanded rules for combat. There’s a greatly expanded list of command stunts as well as the inclusion of fleet stunts and the option for individual crew (pilot, engineer, electronic warfare, etc.) stunts, and guidelines for creating stunts on the fly. Fire up your Epstein and go in weapons hot with new ship maneuvers, including using debris as a shield, skimming planetary atmospheres to shake pursuers, hacking other ships, and utilizing torpedoes for point defense. All of this only begins to scratch the surface, so this is a book that Expanse players are not going to want to miss.

And don’t worry, I didn’t forget the most important part – the new ships! Keep your comms open for my next broadcast, where I’ll get into details on all the cool new ships and deckplans!

< Transmission ends.>

Ships of the Expanse – Welcome Aboard

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Ships of the Expanse<Incoming transmission.>

This is the book you’ve all been waiting for! The first major supplement for The Expanse RPG is all about ships and the dangers and rewards of space travel. So, strap into your crash couch–we’re in for a wild ride.

The focal point of many Expanse games is the characters’ ship. Characters are likely to spend most of their time on board a ship, and in many ways, the ship is a character in and of itself.  Ships of the Expanse features everything you’ll need to bring your spaceships to life. The book is packed full of new details and rules for ship construction and combat and also explores what life is like during long voyages throughout the solar system to the hazards and dangers of space travel. This transmission gives you a chapter-by-chapter overview of what all you can expect to find in Ships of the Expanse, but keep your comms open since there’s more to come.

Chapter 1 explores the various shipbuilding facilities throughout the solar system and offers rules for ship construction, repair, maintenance, and salvage. There are also tons of new vehicles, including drones, ground vehicles, mechs, rovers, and thruster packs for when you need to get around a space station or explore the surface of an alien world. For the ships themselves, there is an expanded list of Qualities and Flaws and detailed rules for upgrading your ship. You’re gonna need that new rail gun to fend off OPA pirates, after all. You’ll also find some guidelines for ship reputations, honorifics, and even ship Bonds.

Chapter 2 offers a ton of new rules for ship combat and operation. It’s full of new stunts, including cool things like Burn Them, which lets your turn your Epstein drive into a weapon. There are also new maneuvers and expanded rules for torpedoes and stealth technologies. A section on ship tactics covers things like hiding in space, using asteroid debris to shield yourself from incoming torpedoes, and expanded torpedo rules. You’ll also find new information on acquiring and carrying cargo and passengers, as well as smuggling and piracy. There are also a bunch of new hazards Game Masters can use to torment their players.

Chapter 3 is an in-depth look at life onboard a spaceship. What do the crew members do between the long passages between ports? What’s it like to live in micro-gravity? What do you eat in space? All these questions and more are answered here. There are also rules for Interludes while traveling between worlds, and guidelines for telling stories set entirely onboard a ship.

And finally, Chapter 4 is the section you’ve all been asking for: new ships! This chapter features expanded details on some of the ships provided in The Expanse RPG as well as a boatload of new ships from The Expanse novels. Not only are there stats and descriptions but also scaled deckplans. The deckplans are perfect for use if you like to use miniatures in your games or if you just want to get a better idea what these ships look like on the inside.

Check your seals and hang in there podnas! Ships of the Expanse is coming soon!

< Transmission ends.>

Living in Dev-Time

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Dev-Time is a lot like Time Travel

Dev-Time is a lot like Time Travel!

“When is that book going to be done? When?”

It can be strange living in what I call “dev-time” (or “development time”) because eagerly-awaited projects are often not just yesterday’s news for me as a writer but most likely last year’s news at times. The development cycle of a book, much less an entire game, is a fairly long one, and getting all of the words written is among the very first steps. Typically, I may get to see a project at the concept stage, getting in on discussion of whether or not to do it at all, along with what it might look like, contain, and so forth. More often, I get involved at or after the outline stage, when the overall concept of the book is pretty well established, and the developer is looking for someone to write stuff. That’s me.

Now, these days, I don’t write too many entire books for RPG publishers, including Green Ronin. While product development time for a book is long, actual writing time is relatively short. So unless I’m publishing a book myself (as I do with Icons Superpowered Roleplaying) and can take 4 to 6 months to write it all, or I’m working with an extended publisher timeline that allows me to write sixty to eighty thousand words or more, chances are I’m only writing a part of a book, a chapter or two (maybe three). Solo projects tend to be short: adventures, Patreon write-ups, articles, and the like, and many of those also get incorporated into larger books or collections.

I get my assignment, write it, and (ideally) hand it off at the appointed deadline. There’s feedback, development, revisions, new drafts, and then I hand over a final version of the text. Typically, that’s where my involvement ends. Sure, an editor might have the occasional “what were you thinking here?” question (tinged with varying degrees of frustration) or an art director might need notes or “does it look like this?” confirmation but, for the most part, my text sails off to those other shores to continue the rest of its journey towards becoming a finished book without me. That can sometimes be a long journey, even under the best of conditions. When conditions look like they have over the past year or so … even longer.

Thus the eagerly-awaited book someone is looking forward to is already in my rear-view mirror, often several exits back behind other recent projects I have handed off, some of which the public hasn’t even heard about yet. There’s a running joke in the freelance business that sometimes the only answer to a polite inquiry of “So what are you working on these days?” is “Upholding my non-disclosure agreement.” Dev-time is such that many projects aren’t even announced publicly at the time when people are writing them, although there may be rumors (the tabletop game industry being quite small and tight-knit).

While I have moved-on to other projects, the words I’ve already written are sailing through development, editing, layout, illustration, and proofreading. If they’re destined to see print, there will also be preflight checks, print buying and quotes, print proofs, and more before the book is finally handed-off to the printer. Even then, there’s printing, binding, shipping, warehousing, and distribution before it finds its way to a game store or gets shipped off to the buyer. In every one of those steps there is both margin for error and the potential for things to go wrong. I mentioned before about “ideally” handing off my text by the agreed-upon deadline. I pride myself on getting my work in on time, but life happens. This past summer, I took a fall off my bicycle and fractured my hip. While my recuperation didn’t overly impact my ability to work, allowances still needed to be made. Multiply that times all of the people who touch a project before it sees print and you magnify those allowances accordingly. People get injured, sick, divorced, married, pregnant, quit or take on new jobs, lose loved ones, run into financial problems, and all of life’s other challenges, to say nothing of encountering global pandemics, political upheavals, and more—all in the same year!

So if anyone involved in the publishing process of a book or product ever looks vaguely bewildered concerning its eagerly-anticipated release, it is quite possible that they exist in “dev-time.” From their perspective, that project has been “done” for some time, and it’s not that they’re not eager to see the finished products (believe me, there are several of my projects I’m looking forward to actually holding in my hands), it’s just that they’ve had to move on to other things in the meanwhile. Patience and understanding that there is more going on behind the scenes than you know will always get you a kinder response.