Thursday, October 9, 2014

The Technology Trilogy

While I'm waiting on art for the Black Bestiary, I decided to work on a smaller project. This last year I've been consolidating all the advanced tech from my various campaign worlds, integrating the core content from the D20 Modern/Future SRD and updating everything fully to Pathfinder.

Earlier this year I released the Advanced Arsenal, which consolidated all the Otherverse America, Psi-Watch and Heavy Future guns in one place. I also put out The Polymer Path,which updated the cybernetics rules for Pathfinder.

I just sent the third book in the triology to Mark for posting: The Advanced Armory. This book consolidates all the special armor (as well as other high tech armor from various other OGL sources) in one place.

I started working on this because I wanted to begin work on an Enchantments of Heavy Future book, similar to the Enchantments of Black Tokyo. Writing Enchantments of Black Tokyo really spurred my creativity- I was able to really dial in my focus on Black Tokyo, really add a lot of flavor to the world with that book's spells and magic items, and I want to do something similar for Heavy Future.

However, unlike Black Tokyo, many of Heavy Future's armors and gear are non-standard. For Black Tokyo, I could model a lot of the enchanted armors as things already found in the Pathfinder PRD, for example, I could stat up enchanted o-yoroi, easily, because o-yoroi are already defined mechanically. I couldn't do that for Heavy Future as easily, because as a sci-fi setting, alot of the characters would be wearing spacesuits, rather than plate mail or other extant armors.

So, publishing the Advanced Armory became a necessary (and hopefully profitable) intermediary step. Plus, defining many of the campaign specific armors in more general terms got me thinking about how to modify them for my signature settings.

Anyway, Advanced Armory will be up in a few days, and I hope you pick it up. It's pretty fun, in that since many of the sources I drew on are super heroic or sci-fi, the resulting armors are heavy on exotic space suits, powered armor and superhero type skinsuits, as well as more realistic tactical military body armor.

Over at the right are the covers for the "Tech Trilogy" books. As you can see, they're all based around John Picot images, and have been designed with a consistent design scheme. I'm proud of how they came out.

Blessed Be,
CHRIS


No comments: