about the universe forum commander Shop Now Commanders Circle
Product List FAQs home Links Contact Us

Sunday, May 22, 2011

TWO NEW PRODUCTS TO SHIP

Steve Cole remarks:

Tomorrow marks a special day. We will send two major new products to mail orders, and each of them marks a special moment in the company's history and product line.
=

GURPS Federation is the GURPS version of the Federation book (by John Sickels) that we did for PD20M a year ago. (This is the way we do our Prime Directive RPGs. We take our background and make books for existing RPG systems, rather than inventing an entirely new RPG system.) Jean Sexton and her staff of Jim Goodrich, Gary Plana, Bob Gilson, and John Sickels did the conversions of the character stats into the GURPS system, and rigorously edited the book to pass Steve Jackson Game's exhaustive standards. I had some things to do with this book, but most of the work was Jean's and John's. (I had to approve the historical text, and I wrote maybe 25 or so of the pages.) What marks this product as a special moment is that most of it was done by Jean's team (which has really come into their own).
=

Star Fleet Battles Module C3A The Andromedan Threat File: Boy, that's a mouthful of a product title, isn't it? It's funny that so many of our products end up having several interchangeable titles. This one is know as "C3A" in the office, but most customers know it as the "Andromedan Threat File." This is another major product done almost entirely by Steven P. Petrick (his first was R10), pulling together suggestions and submissions from a lot of players and sources. It's special not just for that reason, but because it is the most unusual book (and in some ways the most realistic, because everything it in never happened, even in the fiction universe.) It is difficult for players who read the rulebooks and know everything there is to know about the Andromedans to realize that the people who fought against the Andromedans never knew any of that. For entire decades, no one even realized they were from another galaxy. No one ever knew how Andromedan technology worked (they could only calculate approximations based on what they saw Andromedan ships do. This books is a combination of what they thought the Andros were doing and what they thought the Andros were likely to start doing. The book includes historical data on the Andromedan destruction of the LDR, as well as the alternative timeline (where the Andros won) that was revealed by the time-traveling starship Darwin. Remember that only one Star Fleet Marine ever met an Andromedan face to face. The experience turned his hair white, and he never spoke of the encounter. That made him the most interesting man in the galaxy (who got to visit museums and touch the art).