Transhuman Kickstarter Launches!

The Kickstarter campaign for Transhuman has launched!

We are hard at work on Transhuman, the Player's Guide for Eclipse Phase. Transhuman is a player's handbook for Eclipse Phase, full of optional and additional rules and advice. Most importantly, It features two new alternative and simplified character generation systems for Eclipse Phase. One of these uses pre-created packages to build characters, and the other builds off that system but uses random elements to add twists. These systems are designed to make it quick and easy to create a new character or for gamemasters to whip up NPCs as needed.

Transhuman covers different types of Eclipse Phase characters in detail: AGIs, asyncs, infomorphs, uplifts, infugees, and indentures. In addition to roleplaying advice and optional rules for these specific character types, other elements of the game that affect characters such as insanity, death and memory loss, psychosurgery, nanofabrication, and reputation are explored.

The final section goes in depth on morphs. It starts with rules for creating your own morphs and then goes on to cover some brand new morphs to Eclipse Phase. It closes with a section on exotic and specialized morphs, such as flexbots, swarmanoids, aquatic morphs, and using bots, vehicles, habitats, and other non-traditional constructs as morphs.

We have already publicly released some of the material as part of the free Transhuman Open Playtest, and more is coming soon.

We have a base goal of $14,000 for this Kickstarter project, and the funding period runs until Wednesday, May 22nd. We are funding this project through Kickstarter to help us grow our company this year -- we are releasing our first card game, Shinobi Clans, this year, and we're also reprinting Eclipse Phase titles as a long-term investment in the game line. We've been steadily setting money aside to print Shinobi Clans and Transhuman and those titles are on schedule. However, a successful Kickstarter campaign will give us some breathing room and help us make Transhuman an even better book!

There are some great rewards for backers, including copies of Transhuman and other Eclipse Phase titles, art in Transhuman based on you or your character, online and in-person games with the creators, and even the chance to have us create a small Eclipse Phase sourcebook or adventure customized for you and your gaming group!

Transhuman will be 176-200 pages and available as a full-color hardcover book through fine gaming stores. Like our previous Eclipse Phase titles, it will be published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. We estimate that Transhuman, once available in stores, will cost $45 in print and $10 for the PDF.

Thanks for checking out our Transhuman Kickstarter, and we look forward to your support!

Eclipse Phase – April Updates

As we near the launch of our kickstarter campaign for our next book, Transhuman, we have a few news items we wanted to catch everyone up on.

First up, Sunward The Inner System is now back in stock and in stores once again. This is our second printing of the sourcebook and we're glad to have it available again! Note that we raised the cover price to $44.99.

Second, Rimward: The Outer System has been nominated for an Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement! We're glad to see it get some recognition. If you're attending the Origins Game Fair this summer, please consider voting for it!

The open playtest for Transhuman has begun and is doing well. So far we've posted drafts for morph creation rules, new morphs, new traits, and extreme morphology. There's more coming soon, including alternative character creation systems and new infomorph rules. Thanks to everyone who has been participating so far -- we really appreciate the feedback!

The slip-cases for the collector's edition of the French-translation are finally in, and they look amazing! We hope to have some of these at Gen Con.

While we're here, we also wanted to pass along two recent reviews of Eclipse Phase: one from SciFi Ideas, and another from Cardboard Republic.

Robert Derie's daily post of Eclipse Phase material on the Farcast yearblog has been going strong for over 3 months now! If you haven't seen it, check it out!

Finally, some sad news. Iain Banks, author of the celebrated Culture series, recently announced that he has cancer. Banks is one of the authors who inspired Eclipse Phase, particularly with his visions of a post-scarcity, AI-enabled society. A website has been set up for updates and to leave him messages.

Transhuman Open Playtest and Kickstarter!

We have two major announcements regarding Transhuman, our upcoming Player's Guide for Eclipse Phase. First off, we had previously said that Transhuman material will be subject to an open playtest, and that open playtest starts today!

We have created the Transhuman Playtest section on our forums, and the first material available for playtesting -- part of the Traits chapter -- is already posted! Everyone is free to participate in the playtest, all it takes is an account on our forums and some of your time and effort towards polishing Transhuman!

Each chapter also has specific questions from us. Please read the chapter with the eye towards answering those questions. There are two threads in the Transhuman Playtest Forum for each chapter -- one for answering those questions, and another for all other discussion about that chapter.

Beyond that, we are announcing that we will be using Kickstarter to fund the production of Transhuman. Our Kickstarter campaign will go live early in April, and we have some great rewards lined up to help make Transhuman a smash success. We'll be posting more news about it very soon!

Transhuamn

Sunward Set to Reprint and Electronic Updates!

We're pleased to announce that we sent Sunward back to the printer yesterday for a modest reprint! Sunward sold out of its original print run last year, and we've pulled the trigger on a corrected reprint (mostly to bring it in line with the 3rd Printing of the Eclipse Phase core rulebook). To bring Sunward in line with our other books, we have raised the cover price to $44.99. We'll announce the date that the reprint will be available in stores as soon as we know it!

Reprinting a sourcebook -- especially a full-color hardcover one -- in today's RPG marketplace is a risk, but we think it is a properly-measured one. If you have Sunward in electronic format only (or maybe you borrowed a print copy from your GM and he'd like it back), the reprint is a great chance for you to get an updated rulebook and to help us prove that reprints are viable! The success of the Sunward reprint will determine our course of action for future reprints (and the stock of at least one of our other sourcebooks is already running low...)

Of course, we've also made some changes and updates to the electronic versions of Sunward:

  • The Resources page has been updated with the new errata file; the Second Printing of Sunward is version 1.2.
  • The Sunward PDF on DriveThruRPG has been updated. If you have already bought it, this is a free update for you!
  • The Melt (fiction from Sunward) ePub/Mobi/PDF on DriveThruRPG has been updated. If you have already bought it, this is a free update for you!
  • The Melt Amazon Kindle Edition has been updated. Unfortunately, we cannot provide free updates if you bought it on the Amazon store.
  • We have changed the Sunward Hack Pack on DriveThruRPG to match how we are distributing Hack Packs now, as $5 downloads that do not contain the PDF file. Everyone who bought the Hack Pack before February 1st 2013 is, of course, eligible for a free copy of the Sunward PDF. If you did not get a coupon in your mailbox offering you this download, please email Adam at adam@posthumanstudios.com.

Thanks to everyone who has bought, read, used, and shared Sunward!

Eclipse Phase in French Out This Week!

The long-awaited French translation of Eclipse Phase is out this week in France, courtesy of Black Book Editions! The standard books will be in stores and available for order via Black Book's site on Thursday. A slip-cased limited run collector's edition is also coming out, and Black Book tells us they still have some copies of that available for order. (The pic just shows the book; we don't have a pic of the final slip case just yet.)

https://eclipsephase.com/downloads/EP_French_Cover.jpg

https://eclipsephase.com/downloads/EP_French_LE_Cover.jpg

This is the first translation of Eclipse Phase into another language (translation is currently underway to translate EP into Japanese via Arclight and Polish via Galmadrin), and we're excited to check it out. Both Sunward and the EP Gamemaster Pack are going through translation into French now. Major thanks go out to the Black Book crew for making it happen, as well as all the French fans that provided translation feedback! You can order the French translation of Eclipse Phase here.

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