Shrimp cocktails are my anti-drug [Monday Meeting Notes]

Monday Meeting

Hi, folks. Rose here. ^_^

Rich is out this week on vacation (note to self: find out what that is), so I’m your hostess for the weekly update.

Today’s post title is a tribute to our dear absent creative director, who took me out for shrimp cocktails three whole actual times during the course of Gen Con. There’s a steakhouse in Indy that makes the things with an insane amount of fresh horseradish. They’re painful and delightful in a way you usually have to go to a whole different kind of convention to experience.

I know we’ve been talking about the con a lot, but it really is the most wonderful time of the year. I spend most of my workdays sitting at a desk interfacing with the world as a swarm of glowing dots. Getting out and actually meeting real live players once a year is a blast, and it’s particularly nice to see people returning from year to year and hear about how their games have been going. This year, a few people I’m used to seeing as attendees were there as professionals, and that was really awesome.

Speaking of players becoming pros, this was the first year we did a freelancing for Onyx Path panel, and I was pleasantly surprised to have a full room. We got a lot of great questions, and I’m going to be revising our submission guidelines and re-posting our all-calls over the next few months to address them. Our last all-call was mainly aimed at the Worlds of Darkness, but we’ve got a lot of other worlds in our care, so I may break those out some. Any thoughts on that?

It’s also great to see some of our writers, developers, and editors. While the OP freelancer community is generally a chatty bunch, there’s something distinctly nice about crowding us all into a hotel bar to tell old war stories and discuss who among us has in fact dated a dragon. I also enjoy the opportunity to actually game with some of the crew.

This year, the game I ran was Cavaliers of Mars. I had a brand new system iteration to try out, and since we’re getting close to the next major stage of writing on the book, it was important to get those ideas out into the field. The game went quite wonderfully off the rails… I set up a scene to introduce the characters to each other before they got press-ganged into solving one of the city of Vance’s myriad intrigues… and they all got themselves arrested before I could do that. So instead of solving the murder of a street preacher who may have tweaked the nose of the establishment once too often, we ended up following their adventures as they broke out of jail and made their escape on an airship full of contraband.

I love it when that happens. One of the things Cavaliers does well is picaresque adventure, so following a band of misfits getting into trouble was delightful. I’m sure next session we’ll be all serious and grown-up and noir. 😉

Getting back from the con was all about getting people on deck for the next round of books. In that spirit, here’s the project roundup.

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM ROLLICKING… UH…ME:

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Book of Secrets (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

M20 Anthology (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

CtL anthology (Changeling: the Lost 2nd Edition)

Dark Eras Expansions (nWod Dark Eras)

Pugmire Early Access

Dark Eras Companion (nWod Dark Eras)

VtM Lore of the Bloodlines (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

WtA Kinfolk (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition

V20 Ready Made Characters (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

Beast Ready Made Characters (Beast: the Primordial)

Beast Fiction Anthology (Beast: the Primordial)