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Suddenly, we have a positive plethora of Transhuman Space publications. David Chart's Wings of the Rising Sun (edited by yours truly) is now available from e23.

It represents, I think, a cool extension of the setting. I sold the demo game I ran at conventions using this material as "Transhuman Space meets anime, with a touch of Supermarionation", and I think that I'd stand by that. It also offers the possibility of extended campaigns where the objective is to help people, rather than the RPG-traditional picking of fights. Though you still get to pilot hypersonic ramjets down from orbit.

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Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention. The final edit of David Chart's Transhuman Space: Wings of the Rising Sun went in a few days ago. This should be an interesting addition to the Transhuman Space setting. I don't think that David intended it to play too excessively to western stereotypes about Japan, and I'm trying to keep that impulse under control myself, but ... well, the convention demo scenario I'm sketching out to tie up with it will have the tagline "Transhuman Space Meets Anime (with a hint of Supermarionation)".

Anyway, I should get back to the project proposal I'm trying to pull into shape now.

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Oh yeah, I hadn't mentioned... If anyone who's interested hadn't heard, revised drafts of the new edition of the Discworld Roleplaying Game (by me) and Transhuman Space: Wings of the Rising Sun (by David Chart) are both in and currently being subjected to various sorts of playtesting and review.

Which is the kind of thing that's been keeping me busy these last few months, and so providing me with an excuse for not keeping this blog at all up to date.

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I'm not getting a huge amount of writing or editing done myself at the moment, largely because I've got a whole bunch of stuff to do towards Consternation next month. However, Sean Punch has now made entirely public something that I thought wasn't a very secure secret; that my big project of the last few months (and next year or so) is a new edition of the Discworld RPG.

(About which, I am happy to talk a bit. However, I'd prefer to avoid games of Twenty Questions with obsessive fans who are trying to extract the entire content of the planned 400-page book from me a paragraph at a time.)

Also, I have been fielding a few questions from the author of a new Transhuman Space supplement which hasn't been announced yet. Ah, the fine art of fitting GURPS rules to a high-tech setting and getting character creation to look right...

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Just one thing this time; Bill Stoddard's Transhuman Mysteries, which I edited (and which is in a line of which I am the line editor) has just been published on e23.

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Just a note in passing - the first draft of my latest (big) project finally went in on Monday. So now I'm catching up on a whole stack of non-writing, non-games stuff that had been pushed aside.

Hopefully, another (small) Transhuman Space editing project will be along fairly soon.

Sorry I can't really say much more about this stuff just now.

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Just a quick mention; Transhuman Space: Cities on the Edge, one of my little editing/line-editing jobs, has now made it out the electronic door. Being co-written by Anders Sandberg should give this one a bit of extra cred, I hope. Anyway, I think it's good.

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And yeah! The finished edit of Transhuman Mysteries is off to e23. I don't know when exactly it'll appear, but it's off my hands now. Good book, by the way.

So it's back to a couple of my own writing projects now...

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Oh yeah - Transhuman Mysteries is now in editing.

Other stuff (that I may have mentioned in the past) is waiting on various necessary administrative things. Further updates will probably be posted when those bottlenecks are cleared (and not before). There are also some possible major projects coming into view; if they come together, they'll take much of my time for months, and I won't be able to say anything about them for a while. So don't worry if these posts turn infrequent.

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Oh yeah, it's been a while... But anyway, Steve Jackson Games have recently cleared a bottleneck in the contractual process. So I'm just signing a contract, which I think means that things are advanced enough for me to mention; said contract is for Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100.

And talking of the Transhuman Space line, I can probably also safely mention the Bill Stoddard's Transhuman Mysteries has now completed playtest and is into final draft work - I'll be editing this in due course.

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Well, I've just turned in an outline for a 50 page GURPS (non-Transhuman Space) book, and received the very first draft for someone else's Transhuman Space book that I'll doubtless be editing in due course. And I'm about to get back to working on a Pyramid article that I've promised to get done soon. So I guess my writing work is rolling along.

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For those attempting to keep track of my work - latest news of many of the e23 projects I've got in hand or completed is that they're waiting in the queue for review and (especially, as it seems) production time and effort at Steve Jackson Games. More on some of these (fairly) soon, I hope.

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By way of a follow-up to the previous post, I should say that the first draft of the 10,000 words of fiction was completed and uploaded by the contracted date - a little while ago now, actually. No feedback yet on that.

Which left me free to tackle the editing job - specifically, Cities on the Edge, by the esteemed Anders Sandberg. And despite a slight delay in my receiving the actual contract, that was delivered by the agreed delivery date (i.e. yesterday). So, assuming that we can keep this moving forward, the restarted Transhuman Space line should acquire a nifty book on cities in 2100, complete with Stockholm as a developed example. And now I'm waiting to see how some of my own, slightly less substantial efforts progress.

Hmm. Somewhere on my personal to-do list is a set of notes on Stuff I'd Like To See Proposed For Transhuman Space. Maybe I ought to put that together this week.

Oh, and GURPS Thaumatology can now be said to have paid out its advance. Which is nice.

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Anyone with a bizarre urge to follow my career might presumably like to know that I've recently signed a contract to provide 10,000 words of fiction for a new hard SF RPG on a fairly tight timescale, while working on a significant editing job for another RPG line (contract still awaited, strictly speaking, but I've started the work anyway). And I've got two other writing projects (or five, depending how you count them) in varying stages of completeness and contractedness, which may descend on me as more work at any time in the fairly near future.

All of which is good, I guess. But those who merely have to talk to me from time to time may recognise a tendency to distraction, pensiveness, and heaping curses on displacement activities.

Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things

At this point, I can actually announce for certain something which has been teetering on the brink for a little while; I am now officially the Line Editor for the Steve Jackson Games Transhuman Space product line.

I promise not to let the power go to my head.