Posthuman Studios at Gen Con 2014!

Gen Con. The Best Four Days in Gaming. Approaching at breakneck speed.

What's up with Posthuman Studios at Gen Con?

First up, not gonna sugar-coat it: Our booth is wayyyy in the back of the Exhibit Hall. Again. We're booth #559, as seen on the map below! We're worth the trip!

The Booth

We have a bigger booth this year, and a bunch of new signage and all that exciting stuff. We'll be looking better than ever, and that's not even counting how well some of us are aging.

Shinobi Clans

Our new card game debuts at Gen Con. We'll be running demos all day long at the booth, in addition to Game with the Designer games at 3PM on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (sold out!), and also demos in Hall D (Green), at tables 7 and 8 from 10AM to 3PM on Sunday.

The full rules for Shinobi Clans are already available for download, and we'll have copies of the game available for sale.

As a ruthless and cunning shinobi clan master, you lead your team of ninjas on missions that decide between life and death for dangerous ronin, noble daimyos, and powerful shoguns. Recruit the most skilled assassins, arm them with the deadliest weapons, and devise plans that will outwit your rivals on your way to becoming the most feared and prosperous ninja clan of them all!

We're incredibly excited to launch Shinobi Clans with designer Jürgen Mayer, so please stop by and check it out!

Eclipse Phase: Morph Recognition Guide

Our latest Eclipse Phase hardcover, Morph Recognition Guide, should also be available. It's the only major item for the convention that's still in transit as of Saturday afternoon; we'll update this post as we know more information.

Morph Recognition Guide:

  • Includes every Eclipse Phase morph—the most essential gear for every character
  • Morph-related rules compilation
  • New artwork and size comparisons
  • Compiled tables and quick reference material

Eclipse Phase: Sample Character Cardstock Sheets

We're debuting a new accessory, 8x10" cardstock sheets containing the sample characters from the core rulebook, Sunward, and Transhuman. These are ideal for pickup, demo games, or being used as NPCs in your campaigns.

Eclipse Phase: Art Prints

After many requests, we're rolling out high-quality art prints of several pieces of Eclipse Phase art; including the core rulebook cover, Sunward cover, the ever-popular Octomorph, two different takes on Flexbots, and more!

The cover art is available in jaw dropping 24x8" pieces, and all others is 11x17 and A4 formats.

Eclipse Phase: Fourth Printing, Zone Stalkers, and The Devotees

All of these recent releases will be at the show in quantity, as well!

Eclipse Phase: Gaming!

All our scheduled games are fully sold out. Hooray! Please talk to us if you want to volunteer to GM Eclipse Phase at Gen Con 2015 so we can add more games to the schedule next year!

We will also be running short Eclipse Phase demos for new players at our booth, each afternoon, starting at 1PM. Signups will be taken starting when the hall opens.

Seminars and Other Talking

Our What's up with Posthuman & Eclipse Phase? seminar is Saturday, 3PM, in Crowne Plaza, Pennsylvania Station A. Join Rob, Jack, and Adam to hear our year in summary, news about upcoming releases, and maybe an announcement about something new!

Jack Graham is again part of The Campaign Doctors, Friday, 1PM, Crowne Plaza, Pennsylvania Station B

Game designers Luke Crane, Jack Graham, Tracy Hurley, Caleb Stokes, & Amanda Valentine solve your home campaign woes. Bring your questions; the Campaign Doctors will tell you the awful truth!

Rob Boyle speaks on Money is the Root of all Fun: Economics in Games panel, Friday, 3PM, Crowne Plaza, Grand Central A/B.

Designers can talk forever about economies of narrative control and the finances of the RPG industry, but what about the economic structure of your setting? Most RPGs largely ignore the topic, but the basic tenets of economic theory are a great way to immerse players in a story and create conflict. A materialist outlook can make any setting unique and generate numerous plot hooks. This panel is here to show you how. Rob Boyle, Ross Payton, and Caleb Stokes will discuss using economics to engage players.

Adam Jury talks business at Kickstarter 101 on Saturday, 4PM, Crowne Plaza, Pennsylvania Station C.

Want to learn to run Kickstarters? Join veterans Adam Jury, Eloy Lasanta, Mark Diaz Truman, Monica Valentinelli to talk about getting started with crowdfunding roleplaying games.

And finally, Ryan Macklin will be at our booth at Saturday, 4PM to answer questions you may have about the Eclipse Phase Fate Conversion Guide. This is right after the What's up with Posthuman & Eclipse Phase? so after our seminar you can head right to the booth to learn more from Ryan!

Dancing (& Drinking & Dragons)

On Friday night at Sky Bar Live, Boyle will be DJing as part of the Dark Rave 3 / Gen Con Afterparty festivities. It's logical that the other Posthumans will also be out there that night!

Not going to Gen Con?

Please follow us at @ps_pub on Twitter for news from the convention. We'll try to check in on other social media, but Twitter will be the most active!

Category: 
Events

Morph Recognition Guide PDF Online!

Morph Recognition Guide is now available in electronic format! One of the stretch goals from the Transhuman Kickstarter, MRG compiles every morph and a bunch of variants from previous Eclipse Phase books (Eclipse Phase, Sunward: The Inner System, Gatecrashing, Panopticon, Rimward: The Outer System, and Transhuman!) into one book, perfect for "the shopping expedition." It also compiles morph-related rules, essentially making it "The Player's Handbooks for Morphs."

Morph Recognition Guide is 128 pages and will be available in full-color hardcover in the next few months, and the PDF version is available today!

Morph Recognition Guide:

We'll announce the print street date of Morph Recognition Guide when said date is finalized!

Category: 
Releases

Eclipse Phase Bundle of Holding

From June 9th to June 12th we are partnering with [url=https://bundleofholding.com/index/current]Bundle of Holding[/url] for a pay-what-you-want bundle of Eclipse Phase titles. Starting at $8.95 you get copies of Eclipse Phase, Sunward: The Inner System, and NPC File 1: Prime! If you contribute more, you'll unlock additional books: Continuity, Transhuman, and Panopticon. Those books initially unlocked if you pay at least $15.95, but the unlocking dollar figure will change depending on how much other people contribute!

This is a great chance to give the gift of Eclipse Phase to a friend or your gaming group, one easy transaction -- and you pick the price! (If you bought all those PDFs by themselves, they would be $75, so you can steer your purchase based on that figure.) All books will be fulfilled by DriveThruRPG, so you'll be in the loop for future updates to them.

Also included in the bundle is a new version of the Eclipse Phase: Core Sample Characters; formatted as an 8x10" PDF (They're newly available on double-sided cardstock sheets as well!)

10% of the money raised (after transaction fees) from this promotion will be donated to two important organizations: the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Ada Initiative.

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:

 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