While there will be undoubtedly be hard days ahead in the world at large due to the coronavirus, and likely further temporary restrictions on our lives, the arrival of multiple vaccines brings hope that there will be a return to genuine normal lives for all of us at some point this year.
We have become increasingly exasperated by the website outages, so a secondary website with a different hosting provider is being set up (see www.ironcrown.co.uk) which gives us the opportunity to have an up-to-date underlying platform and we will be recreating or migrating content and the forums to the new web site. At some point, there will be some domain magic employed and ironcrown.com and ironcrown.co.uk will become one entity.
The next step is an expansion of the core ICE team. If you remember the eleventy-first Briefing (Sept 2020), you may also remember the number sixteen, being the number of manuscripts that have already made it to first draft or beyond. To avoid being victims of our own success, whether it being through an editing logjam with me or Terry being so flooded with layout requests that he cannot write a single new word for Shadow World, we need to expand our team, so Colin, Terry and myself will be joined by Jonathan Dale, Nick Morawitz and Suzanne Campbell. Jonathan becomes System and Line Editor for Rolemaster, having more than demonstrated his mastery of RMU in bringing Arms & Character Law and Spell Law to final versions. Nick, whom some of you may remember from an older incarnation of ICE (you can track his ICE staff credits in various Rolemaster products) and a select few of you will have seen his layout for a RMU Lite for GenCon 2020, joins us as a layout guru to support the layout phases of RMU and other products. Suzanne, whom some of you will remember from her long tenure as an editor for The Guild Companion, joins as an occasional freelance editor to support the other product lines and will have the unenviable task of editing me!
Looking to our hopes for 2021 in terms of new products:
Rescued from nonstop layout, we definitely want to see Emer IV reach completion from Terry. There may well be some small mini-adventures as well. Priest-King of Shade will be handed over to Colin for artwork commissioning soon. I hope to see progress on the HARP Handbook for Shadow World and I would hope we can commission a RMU Handbook for Shadow World as well.
In HARP, the goal is to publish HARP Subterfuge and HARP Bestiary as a minimum, and ideally also see HARP Garden of Rain, HARP Beyond the Veil and HARP SF The Poseidon Gambit be published.
In Cyradon, we will continue to progress the refresh of the adventure modules but nothing will be released until we have a sufficient pipeline of products ready. There should come a point where it will be sensible to solicit new adventures and sourcebooks for Cyradon.
In RMU, Colin is already commissioning artwork for Arms and Character Law as well as Spell Law, and as soon as the art is underway for those two books, I will give him Treasure Law. Aaron is nearly done on the stats triple-checking and then needs to ensure the text still matches with the stats for the first volume of Creature Law. Jonathan is working hard on “Character Companion” for RMU. Max and Dakadin are laboring incredibly hard so they can ensure ERA and Fantasy Grounds support RMU. If someone would like to port the Rolemaster Combat Minion to RMU, please let me or Colin know.
With a following wind, some of the other projects for HARP and Rolemaster (that we have mentioned in other Briefings) will reach full draft status at various points across 2021 and duly enter editing and beyond.
On the convention front, 2021 is likely to be very uncertain. Even with mass vaccination running at full tilt across the planet (and we don’t have that happening yet), the physical versus virtual nature of the 2021 convention season is anybody’s guess. We will support any fans who are willing to run games at conventions, through prizes and other assistance. |
