Director’s Briefing – May 2018

 
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Welcome
 
Welcome to the eighty-fourth Briefing and the fifth scheduled Briefing of 2018. April seemed to disappear very quickly – I suspect some of that was being away in the Philippines followed by returning far too abruptly to teaching duties and the inevitable panic of students as final assignments and exams loom large in their horizons. The evil spectre of marking comes all too soon and the summer term teaching in June forestalls an early end to the academic year at Suffolk. I can but hope that all the students will have the good sense to pass their exams and their assignments first-time round.
 
 
GenCon 2018
 
It is coming closer. If you are up for running games or helping out in any way, please let Colin know as soon as possible.
 
It will soon be time for me to order new stock to supplement the existing material held in trust by Aaron for ICE. I will relent this year and have some RM Classic core rulebooks printed as there has been high demand by fans for these.
 
 
RMU
 
The RMU singularity did not happen or I would have been less willing to relent.
 
 
Shadow World
 
I have seen the cover image for Jaiman – it is looking very nice indeed. It’s illustration placement; it’s beating off stray tabs and newlines and other assorted nonsense that hides itself in the Excel spreadsheets only to bite in the InDesign version. Terry is having “fun”. Hang in there, Terry, it will all be worth it come GenCon.
 
 
HARP
 
One of the many useful things that John Duffield created as part of his work on multiple chapters of HARP Bestiary was to reconstruct the Cone concept using the enhanced College of Magics spell creation rules. I have been happily able to take this and use it to build (or more correctly refresh) Hellfire Cone for the Great Circle of the Demonologist. Other Cone spells will be appearing in HARP Something Wicked, Something Wondrous.
 
So where am I with the refresh of spells? The additional Cantrips have been revised (tick). The High Magic spells have been revised (tick). The Great Circle of the Demonologist (38 or is it 39? spells) has been fully revised (although I reserve the right to add more spells if some occur to me or someone makes a helpful suggestion) but this is still tick. The Sphere of the Witch and the Warlock is about two-thirds revised with the major block of spells still requiring attention being the Soulcharm spells (think a variation on a voodoo doll). The additional Universal and other extra spells for other Spheres and Circles are about halfway there. At the moment, however, I am going through the spells of the Mystic from the original College of Magics and transforming them into the Great Circle of the Mentalist. Once the Mentalist Circle is complete and the other waifs and strays have been revised, I will look closely at the additional spells in Codex and see what is sensible to recover. I will also look at the long-lost HARPer’s Grimoire and see if we should rescue any from there – if so, I will drop Chris Adams a note and ask permission to reuse them.
 
There are hints that another HARP manuscript will soon be coming my way in full draft, so while I find spell updating quite relaxing, I will not be lingering in this activity for any longer than necessary.
 
 
Until next time
 
More writing, more editing soon and generally more fun for me. The next scheduled Briefing will be in June 2018.
 
Best wishes,
Nicholas
 
Director, Iron Crown Enterprises Ltd
 
 
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