Hi, everyone!

I'm just getting over this season's second bout of nasty crud (eek), and by
way of returning to life here's an extended executive summary on just about
everything going on at Cumberland Games. Read this and you'll see why I
feel less like a one-man band, nowadays, than a one-man orchestra with
bonus gospel choir ...

After more than two and a half years of weekly campaigning, my Fly From
Evil campaign has concluded (though we may well pick up a "sequel"
campaign someday; we can't let those characters just ride off into the
sunset ... or should I say into the Rising Sun). What this means for Fly
From Evil is that all local playtest necessary for the (final?) blindtest
round is complete, so it's just down, now, to me assembling the resource
package in enough of a shape to send out.

Points in Space 2 is the next CG&D commercial release, following long,
unavoidable, and often amusing delays. No regrets, though; time has served
the book well and it'll be crackerjack. I've also hammered the lead choice
for the "backup game," Don't F*ck With an Earthman, into a shape where I'm
finally satisfied that it's more than ready for prime-time (and by prime
time I mean the final, whole-title blindtest round, which I expect to be a
cakewalk compared to prior rounds).

Lisa Steele's excellent Medieval France will be the All-Systems release
after that; I'm currently shoulder-deep in manuscript preparation
(hand-massaging the ancient WordPerfect 1.0 source files to iron out
formatting quirks, which is doubly interesting when using the extended
French character set!) and map construction. Medieval France is roughly
four times the size of Fief, and explores France as a game setting in
unprecedented detail (unprecedented apart from the long OOP White Rose
editions, of course)!

This year's Uresia: Grave of Heaven release will be Elegy in Ice, an
exploration of specific events and locations in frosty, deathly land of
Yem. It lays out the evidence and lore surrounding a (quietly) celebrated
heist of a famous work of art by an unlikely and decidedly unstable band of
cohorts, and may be used either as an adventure module of sorts, or as a
resource guide to the locations visited by the complex caper-gone-wrong.

Cumberland has also provided some original Uresia material (a piece on the
Siege of Coatestown, as seen from an unusual perspective, and no I don't
mean the dragons') along with the obligatory groovy map, to Battlefield
Press for their Tsunami-Relief title, Gamers for Hope. It's due out Any Day
Now, and also includes stuff from other RPG dudes such as Robin Laws, John
Kovalic, and Steve Kenson.

This year's Risus: The Anything RPG release will be another mind-bendingly
odd campaign adventure in the spirit of last year's A Kringle in Time.
Kringle shocked me by actually getting reviewed a couple of times ...
Cumberland titles are seldom reviewed (I don't provide review copies) and I
never know what will inspire folks to comment and what won't. Apparently,
tossing Jesus overboard to distract a missile draws comment. This year's
adventure is a lot less spiritual in nature though in many ways no less
iconoclastic; it's a space-opera manically blending farce and savage satire
into something inexplicably warm and cuddly. Plus it has a random mutation
table. Those of you familiar with my first ever published book, Weirder
Tales: A Space Opera for Avalon Hill, will find it hauntingly, or even very
specifically, familiar, since it is in fact a new, Risus-ized edition of
that work, which I've purchased in order to mangle, update, and write a new
bunch of stuff for.

My "stealth project" which I've mentioned on and off for a long time now is
my Russian FRPG, with the working title of Troubled Times. Set in a
fairy-tale/horror/adventure version of 15th century Muscovy, this is a
fantasy and satire and (more importantly) a really fun combat and magic
system launched at high speed to wrap around the light pole of history. If
you've always yearned to play a dancing bear, a rebel pagan minstrel, a
sincerely Christian mosquito obsessed with the cause of the heretics, the
child of a Leshii or just a grouchy corpse with some clever combat moves,
then you're very odd, but also, in this case, finally in luck. This is
based in large part on the Troubled Times manuscript I wrote, a few years
back, for Ed Simbalist (who will be sharing the copyright on the new game),
but it's been rebuilt from stove to bathhouse to take broader advantage of
the game systems I've devised for it. I call it a stealth project because
it's almost finished. Yes, this says unfortunate things about the
discipline of my work habits. I'm bad. Spank me.

2005 marks the fifth anniversary of the Pokéthulhu Adventure Game, and by
god I'll think of something to do for it if I have time. If I don't have
time, I'll think of something cute to say, instead.

HexPaper 3.0 will be out this year sometime, with some new glyphs added. As
before, this will be a free upgrade to those already registered for Version
1.x or 2.x ... also likely is a new version of Flagstones with some
wood-floor glyphs added.

In non-Cumberland news, you can catch me peeking into books from both
Guardians of Order and Hero Games this year. No, I haven't returned to
freelancing (Cumberland is home!), but I've done some special-favor
chapter-work for folks I admire.

There are others, too (there are always others, are there not?) but that's
more than enough for right now. Best wishes to everyone!


|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn