Zone Stalkers, Eclipse Phase 4th Printing PDF, and Price Realignment

We are happy to announce the availability of a new book: Zone Stalkers, in print and PDF, the release of the PDF equivalent of the upcoming Fourth Printing of the Eclipse Phase core rulebook, and a re-aligning of our prices of electronic books.

Zone Stalkers

 Zone Stalkers is a gamemaster-focused sourcebook for Eclipse Phase:

  • Send players to the most perilous place on Mars—for Firewall, or for profit!
  • Perimeter Security: How authorities keep the Zone quarantined – and how to get around it.
  • Threats: New monsters, NPCs, and environmental hazards to challenge players.
  • Locations: TITAN facilities, ruined habitats, and denizens' lairs.
  • Plot Hooks: Reasons to visit the second most awful place in the solar system.

 Zone Stalkers is a 19-page adventure presented via Print-on-Demand and as a layered PDF with hyperlinks.

Eclipse Phase, Fourth Printing

The Fourth Printing of Eclipse Phase is currently at the bindery, but the update to the PDF version is available now! If you have already bought it on DriveThruRPG, you will find the updated version in your library, and all new purchasers will have immediate access to the updated version. An errata file is also available.

Price Realignment

As of today, most Eclipse Phase PDFs and ePubs are now priced slightly higher than they used to be; we are re-aligning our prices to better match with the current market. We released Eclipse Phase in 2009 with an aggressive pricing strategy -- at that time, most RPG PDFs (ePubs weren't yet a thing) were priced at least 50% of the print cover price: it wasn't uncommon to see $25-35 as a price point for core book PDFs. At the time, before we were our own publisher, we promised our publisher that if our titles didn't gross the same in PDF as another more expensive title they were offering, we would pay the difference out of our royalties. We didn't end up owing them a thing; Eclipse Phase was very successful at $15.00.

In the years since, many publishers followed our lead, and the price of gaming PDFs has dropped as print prices have risen. However, PDF prices have hit an equilibrium that is slightly higher than the prices we were charging, and we now think that the benefits of our low pricing have paid off and it's no longer as beneficial to keep prices that low.

Specifically, we had been running into two problems over the last year:

* With such low prices to begin with, it is hard to price Eclipse Phase titles at sale prices. As the Eclipse Phase game line moves on, attracting new customers becomes harder, and sales are one tool to do so; a tool that we couldn't use very effectively.

* With our POD/PDF sourcebooks (typically under 32 pages) and our regular sourcebooks (176+ pages) priced at $5.00 and $10.00, respectively, we had little wiggle room for "in-between" books, those that may be 36 or 64 pages.

There's also the intangible factor that, in a crowd of core books that are typically priced at $19.99, would someone assume something is wrong with Eclipse Phase and pass it over based on price?

So, effective immediately, the price re-alignment leads us to these prices:

* Eclipse Phase core rulebook: $19.99
* Large releases like Sunward, Transhuman, and Gatecrashing: $14.99
* Medium releases (32 pages or larger): $9.99 (typically $14.99 for print; 18.98 for print + PDF bundle)
* Small releases (under 32 pages): $4.99 (typically $9.99 for print, 11.98 for print + PDF bundle)
* Hack Packs: $4.99
* Short Stories: $0.99

Now, what hasn't changed?

* If you buy one of our electronic books from DriveThruRPG, you get free updates whenever we revise the book -- and one of those updates happened today, to the Eclipse Phase core rulebook!
* All of our Eclipse Phase titles are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license, which means: you are free to copy, share, and remix the text and artwork within Eclipse Phase Books book under the following conditions: 1) you do so only for noncommercial purposes; 2) you attribute Posthuman Studios; 3) you license any derivatives under the same license.

We understand that nobody likes rising prices, but we trust that you respect the quality and value of our games and books, and we have some great stuff brewing for you in the near future!

April: Not So Cruel at PS+

Here's a quick update on what the Posthumans have been up to over the last month.

The big news for April was the release of The Devotees, the longest scenario we've released to date for Eclipse Phase. Caleb Stokes took on some of the darkest subject matter in EP -- the trade in stolen egos -- and built a densely twisting story of x-risks and gangland double-crossing. The scenario features art by Andy Wright, Nathan Geppert, and Mark Molnar. And this book was my first outing as a developer (although Rob did jump in & save my potatoes a few times).

If you didn't back our Kickstarter last year, you can get print and PDF copies of Devotees at Drivethru RPG. As usual, it's Creative Commons licensed, so there's probably a torrent somewhere out there, too.

Work continues on Firewall, the Morph Recognition Guide, Singularity, and other backer rewards. Work also continues on the Fate Conversion Guide, which we expect to playtest in the coming months.

We've fixed all of the major bugs reported on the forums in Singularity and are currently in the process of entering all of the gear/morph/etc. data from other books. We don't have a definitive date for the first production release yet, but we're definitely in the home stretch.

Finally, we can confirm that our next book will be Zone Stalkers, a GM-oriented supplement about the TITAN Quarantine Zone on Mars. Zone Stalkers is not a scenario, but more of an encounter cookbook for GMs using the Zone in their adventures. It covers many of the situational risks of missions into the Zone, from sneaking past the Martian Ranger cordons that patrol its edges, to surviving environmental hazards, to dealing with its denizens. Monsters, gear, locations, and adventure hooks give GMs all they need to use this setting as a backdrop for missions. We're not ready to publicize a street date yet, but expect one soon!

Category: 
EP News

The Devotees available in Print and PDF!

Posthuman Studios is pleased to announce the public release of The Devotees, written by Caleb Stokes. This Eclipse Phase adventure was funded by the Transhuman Kickstarter as a stretch goal, and is now available in print and PDF at DriveThruRPG.

The Devotees is a scenario for Eclipse Phase:

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Awesome Stuff We’ve Been Up To In March

As March draws to a close, an update, forsooth!

[i]The Devotees,[/i] the first stretch goal PDF from our Kickstarter, should be in backer hands soon, and available to non-backers not long thereafter. This scenario came in at double the length budgeted for in the Kickstarter, so backers who've been eagerly awaiting it won't be disappointed.

The next PDFs after that will be [i]Zone Stalkers,[/i] a sourcebook about missions into the TITAN Quarantine Zone on Mars, followed by [i]Million Year Echo,[/i] a scenario set in the TQZ.

In other news, our new card game, Shinobi Clans, is off to press, and we're now hard at work on the [i]Morph Recognition Guide[/i] and cards, and our next hardback, [i]Firewall[/i].

As those who've been following the forums already know, we've wrapped up the beta test for Singularity, our chargen software. The major bugs in the software have been fixed, and we're now in the process of working as many of your requests for new features as we can into the first production release.

We'll announce street dates on all of the above in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Finally, work continues on the Fate conversion. We're gearing up to begin internal playtesting, but we've got some months to go until we're ready to announce release of the book. That said, we will be running one Fate event at Gen Con this year. Fate fans, be sure to look for it when Gen Con event pre-reg opens.

A Time of Eclipse ePub Now Available!

We're pleased to announce that A Time of Eclipse ePub is now available on DriveThruRPG! A Time of Eclipse is roughly pages 6-111 of the Eclipse Phase core rulebook, converted to ePub and Mobi formats. It's also available on the Kindle Store if that's your preferred experience.

This was one of the stretch goals from the Transhuman Kickstarter, and we're excited to release part of Eclipse Phase in a way that's more accessible to cel phone readers and other small screens. ePubs, unlike PDFs, feature reflowable and resizable text, so you can tweak things to your taste while reading it!

Work continues on turning the rest of the Eclipse Phase core rulebook into ePub format, and the rules portion will be released as a distinct download sometime in the future!

Category: 
Releases