So. What a year 2016 was, and what a year 2017 has been already! And yet, we go forward as we all must, and for us here at Metal Express, that means moving ahead even if it’s a millimeter at a time with Silent Death and other related projects, do or die in a blaze of fusion fire glory trying!
What we are aiming for by end of this august year of 2017, is twofold, with the potential for some other wonders thrown in along the way if we can get away with it all!
The first big thing is the Night Brood revision. Quite simply, the wonderful playtesting feedback we received on the old forum was both informative, and much to our dismay and frustration, lost to us due to the unexpected and thoroughly unwelcome loss of our old host domain! (insert every profanity in every known language from across Terran Space)
Even so, we learned a great deal, and with that accumulated feedback, an updated Night Brood 2.0 playtesting module is under construction. Most things will not be changing, except in one significant aspect, and that is how the Gamma Brood are handled. Long story short for now: they’re maggots, meaning immature Grubs, and they will be significantly modified to reflect this in the newest iteration of the Night Brood playtesting document. They’ll be moving in groups under the direction of the swarm Alpha, fight as a group, and react as essentially a semi-intelligent biological weapon system. Individually weaker and less resilient than they are at present, they’ll still be very much the menace as a group, relentless in the attack, and still dangerous even if no longer controlled by an Alpha Brood.
The second big project for 2017 might actually prove far easier to accomplish in the long run. This is the production and publication of a revised and updated Core Rulebook by end of the fourth quarter in 2017. The single and only real bugaboo with Silent Death: The Next Millennium has been the Ship Design Rules ship templates when it comes to the slot costs of Damage Reduction (armor). As matters now stand, the slot costs of Damage Reduction in most of the ship design templates are such that Damage Reduction is very costly in terms of the number of slots it takes up, and this directly affects the outcome of designing new ships to integrate into the game.
The original Core Ship designs representing Imperial-era craft especially the twelve ships that make up the plastic ship sprue simply cannot be back engineered using the existing Ship Design Rules templates. The penultimate goal therefore will be to revise the Ship Design templates to match as precisely as possible the Core Ships, and then adjust the ship display sheets accordingly of other designs to bring everyone into a consistent level playing field, while making every possible effort to keep the original Core Ship designs as close to their present forms as possible.
Clearly this will result in most of the Core Ships being altered in some fashion, but the emphasis will be on a degree of consistency simply lacking in the original product design.
We will also be updating the House profiles and background materials provided in the Core Rulebook at present. The team will be drawing from our combined knowledge base of a wide variety of academic disciplines including that of strategic security, espionage, history, the discipline of warfighting, and military history. We’ll also be consulting even more intensively than we have in the past with our personal and professional networks for feedback and ideas to craft a more sophisticated, more mature, and we hope a much more interesting iteration of the vast and dangerous place that is Terran Space in the post-Grub War era of the Successor Houses.
The added bonus to this effort is that thanks to the hard work of Sebastian Klapdor in bringing Bladestorm! into the 21st century in a 2nd edition form, we will be able to offer not simply a PDF version of the revised rulebook through our RPGNow online store, but the option will also be in place for purchasing a hard cover version as well!
That’s right, my fine Space Possums! A hard cover version of an updated Silent Death Core Rulebook with expanded faction background materials, new scenarios, all in a single tome! Its been a long road as you all know, and at last we can see some truly exciting prospects topping our horizon as the year moves along!
Cheers!