Director’s Briefing – June 2014

 
Welcome to the thirty-sixth Briefing and the sixth scheduled Briefing for 2014.
 
Marking and Grading
 
The teaching portion of the academic year is now complete. The nightmare that is marking and grading is already underway. Fortunately all the materials that I have to mark are word-processed (even the exam scripts) so I don’t have to decrypt illegible scrawls, but unfortunately there’s a lot of it to mark – sixty research essays, forty programming assignments, and 150,000 words across a dozen dissertations. (I have already cleared the exam scripts.) I expect most of my June will be spent in the marking process. My commiserations to all my fellow academics who are similarly burdened.
 
Progress on the ToDo List
 
Despite the marking mountain and despite the home broadband dropping out again for over a week (two simultaneous faults, now fixed), there has been progress on the todo list.
 
The financial data for 2013 was duly assembled and sent to the company accountant. At some point this month, he will report on how much profit GCP made last year and how much corporation tax needs to be paid. Why do you care? A profitable GCP means that in addition to being able to pay all our freelancers without quibble (which means happy freelancers who will continue to work for us in the future), we can invest the profits into additional product development and marketing and take a longer view of return on investment, without worries of cash flow crunches. Which translates into we can produce better books, even if these get delayed by events outside our control and pay the freelancers even before income has been generated by the first sale, and we can keep on doing this.
 
Complete Guild Adventurer #4. The introduction has been updated and I have been in contact with the contributors to ensure that I have their most recent payment details. Still to be done is an update of the HARP stats in the adventures and conversations with Terry regarding the cartography. We know a lot more about what works for OBS/LS printing than when we started TGA#4 and I would like to ensure that the maps will look right in OBS/LS standard colour.
 
Shadow World: I have sent a review of the Tales from the Green Gryphon Inn draft to Terry and have ongoing email conversations on a number of projects.
 
For HARP Bestiary, all of the other contributors have reported in and are making steady progress on their current assigned chapters.
 
For HARP Folkways, Jonathan Cassie is quietly working away on the project and I have a projected draft delivery date.
 
In Cyradon, I completed my review of the “M is for Murder” adventure module draft by Phillip Ellis. Really good, only a few minor things for Phillip to adjust. We will need a better name than the original adventure idea title as listed in the Cyradon setting book. Suggestions welcomed.
 
For the Spacemaster Imperium setting project, I went through all of the old products currently owned by Aurigas / ICE and the list of desired text is now on the forums. The first recovered text has already arrived and the process of recovery is ongoing.
 
Maximiliano Tabacman’s ERA software continues a successful public playtest.
 
In Unified Rolemaster, I continue to nag “Are we there yet?”.
 
Until next time
 
Time for more marking and more GCP work. The next scheduled Briefing will be in July.
 
Best wishes,
Nicholas
 
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
 
 
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