2011 Books 4

4) Savage Species: I got a copy of the out of print 3E rulebook for handling Monster characters and I am _very_ impressed. It takes the concept and approaches it three different ways in the rules, giving step by step instruction and fleshing each of them out with extensive worked examples. This was a solid addition to the 3E cannon and I'm kind of bummed that I hadn't picked it up sooner. Personally I'll be instituting parts of this into my next Fasaad expedition at the very least, but clearly any new campaign I put together will be influenced by these options. If I have any complaints it's the silly inclusion of new magic spells in it (apparently a requirement for each sourcebook) that, as usual, range from the useless to the OK for this specific text to the neat general things that I hesitate to add because they're in an unusual place. 

Prospectus Voting Complete

Got the last of the votes in on the prospectus - or at least the last I'm willing to accept - with some unexpected results.  I sent the prospectus to thirteen players; two responded that they weren't interested in 2013, three never got back to me. That left 8 players. 

Of those, five (!) voted Mech & Matrimony as their first choice: two - Asha and Emily - as their sole first choice and three - Tom, Jim and Diane - as one of a spread of similarly voted games. I was flabbergasted by the response for what last round was such a niche game, but am more than happy to buckle down and finish work on the system and setting. Expect more notes of etiquette for corset and chain gun over the course of the year. 

For the remaining three voters, all three of them 0'd out Mech & Matrimony, and two - Karen and Rachel - put Gaslamp Melodrama as their first choice. Since the third has a solid, if not not first choice game, and the only other point of overlap was a) the other Gaslamp game and b) a worse voting for the other players made it clear that Gaslamp Melodrama was the right route for the other two. So sometime in the near future I have to make some tweaks to the Buffy The Vampire Slayer game for character creation purposes - which should be easy - and then work out the exact location of the game and crime for which our protagonist's parents were accused. I'm seeing this as taking place in the Balkans, in the political no mans land between Techo-Tsarist Russia and the Baron's realms, so it's both familiar to the players and just different enough so that I'm not treading all over the published works.