Every winter as the old year is in its final weeks on Colosia Prime, the Colosian aristocracy bid farewell to the old year and celebrate the coming new year with their annual Turkducken Festival. This is a very Colosian period of celebration, with much merrymaking, joyful family gatherings, feasting, and “unfortunate accidents” and a few cases of “bad luck” involving too much champagne and balconies on high rise buildings.

The pinnacle of the celebration is the opening of the annual Turducken Shoot held in Duke Colos’s personal game preserve. There the best, brightest, and most fearless members of the top Colosian aristocratic families lay aside their differences and together hunt the native Turducken to be the centerpiece of the traditional holiday feast. To commemorate this august tradition of festive cheer and dagger-in-the-back enhanced family gatherings, we’re launching our first annual House Colos Turducken Festival Sale!

All miniatures in our Metal Express webstore are 20% off. Just use the following code at checkout to do your part to help celebrate this fine old Colosian tradition (and do so without risking any “hunting accidents” that more than a few Colosian bluebloods succumb to each year):  turduckenshoot2017

 

Long past time for some catch-up before Fall is formally upon us! So. Let us begin… with a FALL SALE!!! Yup. 20% off through October 31, Midnight, PST!! So now is the time to build up those squadrons, replenish the ranks, and make life Hell for your noisy neighbors in House No-Good-So-in-So!! Just use the following code when you check out:  fallsale2017

In other news, we’ve added a half dozen kitbashed escort vessel models to the store as well. Two of each of a corvette, frigate, and destroyer built and finished ready to serve your House to defend its territory or go raiding your neighbors for loot and glory! Here’s a sneak peak at these fancy painted terrors of the void:

 

 

Yes, space possums, these are all my doing, and I will gladly spill the beans about what inspired their racy paint jobs and how I bashed them all together on the Forum, don’t you all worry! Now, for a quick update…

To begin with, Life as you can all well imagine, got firmly in the way of life for both Sheldon and I. We both wear some very real world professional hats, and they will be served as surely as Darwin expected his bangers and mash for breakfast on time and done correctly.

That being said, we have not been as completely idle on the Silent Death front as our radio silence these past months would indicate. I have managed to snipe away at the next iteration of the Night Brood update based upon playtester feedback. I am a Colosian rat’s whisker away from having a workable set of new rules governing everybody’s favorite galactic juvenile delinquents, the Night Brood Gammas! So stay tuned on that front for the heads up from the Night Brood hive mind…

Besides bashing out those custom new escorts, I have been researching sources for good quality space combat hex mats. Quite simply, I need a replacement for my much abused, long serving original official Silent Death cloth mat made by Geo-Hex so long ago when the Terran Empire was still in its infancy. I will be adding links to these various makers of fancy mats to our Links section shortly.

Some progress also on the reworking of the Core Rules Ship Design System; it’s really just a matter of fiddling with the numbers a bit more, then reworking the Core Ship display sheets. This is a task that I have long wanted to see to completion, as it has never sat well with Sheldon or I that the Core Ships did not line up with the published design system. We are aiming for consistency, however we are also aiming squarely at keeping as much of the quirky flavor of the original Core Ship designs as possible.

Finally, we’d like to acknowledge some very devoted and talented fans of Silent Death who in the past year have jumped on board out of sheer love of this classic game to lend their time and talents to stoke the flames!

We really do appreciate the efforts of Timothy Sung and his Magnificent Flying Marsupials down in Australia, who took it upon themselves to pick up Silent Death and promote it down under. Other individuals have done the same up here in North America, and we have a splendid supporter in Denmark (Thank you, Steen!) who keeps the flame burning in Europe. We really do appreciate all of you helping us keep this classic game alive and kicking!

As you who lurk and participate in our Forum already know, the master painter and artist who is the man of mystery behind Third Fate Creations has joined our forum community with his considerable talents. Callsign: Karpav1 has established himself in the Techniques section of the Forum under Karpav’s Painting Blog. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you are in for a treat, as the man is a master artist, photographer, and experienced gamer who knows how to get the most out of a gaggle of Mk. 10 torpedoes!

So don’t just sit there, space possums! Kick those tires and light those fires! It’s time to launch!

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!

It is with a heavy heart that the team here at Metal Express received the  news this morning of the passing of actress Carrie Fisher, age 60. Her spirit of courage and good humor on screen and off inspired and endeared Carrie Fisher to millions, most tellingly for the ages with her portrayal of Princess Leia Organa in Star Wars: A New Hope. We mourn her loss, and can only console ourselves with the legacy she leaves us all both as a courageous advocate for those who struggle with the sickness of addiction, and as a member of the iconic, timeless band of heroes who fought to bring freedom and justice to a galaxy so long ago and far, far away…

For more details on her passing and the reaction of Star Wars fans : http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/only-princess-i-ever-wanted-to-be-grieving-fans-pay-tribute-to-carrie-fisher-online/

 

UPDATE: It was just announced earlier this evening that actress Debbie Reynolds, the mother of Carrie Fisher, has passed away at the age of 84: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/debbie-reynolds-rushed-to-the-hospital-after-possible-stroke/

That’s right, Space Possums! We’re BACK! We’re LIVE! And to celebrate this glorious turn of events we’re having a 20% Off SALE through January 2, 2017!!

So, to begin with, things are still in a work in progress stage with the Forum and other bits, but the online store is live, the RPGNow! shop is live, and so is our new and much improved (and improving!) website! In the coming weeks we’re going to keep piling in the content, and picking up as best we can from the loss of our previous site that served us so well for so long, keeping the flame burning for Silent Death!

So let the word go forth! Let your friends, colleagues, best frenemies you love to blow to atoms over a game of Silent Death, and random strangers alike know that we’re back, Silent Death is still kickin’ it, and to make things even crazier, we rediscovered some lost treasures that have us dusting off an unpublished manuscript, and starting up some very serious machinations to build upon the trend started by the successful release of Bladestorm! 2nd edition, and bring out the first new Silent Death product in over a decade!

So without further ado and just in time for the holidays, here’s the sale code to use on checkout:    sdgrandreopening

Well don’t just stand there, people! Grab yer helmets and scramble!