clarence

Excellent work Paolo.

Excellent news! Looking forward to reading them.

It's the talented Matthias Utomo; he did the interior plates for the rulebook : )

The Constellate never fell. It faded. The year is Y3260. The Ocath subsector is free, after many years under The Constellate’s brutal rule. Free, but in turmoil. REFLUX is a scenario for M-SPACE to be released early in 2017. It introduces The Weaver setting, telling an epic story about a dying empire called The Constellate. A starship fleeing from the The Constellate's armed forces disappeared 170 years ago, and now the characters must go to the world Qioria to search for it. But time is short. The planet is on a slow but deliberate course for destruction from aggressive extraction of omeril gas, and the hell holes of ignited subterranean gas grow every day. Their only hope seems to emanate from the long forgotten teachings of The Weavers. –––––––– I would also like to thank everyone for the amazing support since M-SPACE was released. It has been very inspiring to get such positive feedback from all of you, and there are several new books in the works, with REFLUX being the first follow-up release.

Excellent news!

Sounds interesting. A visit from the author would be terrific.

Ah yes, I can see it now! I must say the booth looks very nifty.

That's cool : ) I just may have to go there next year... It's always good to have a reason for a trip to London. I hope Aeon got the M-Space package in time.

Yes, Järn is Swedish only. At least at the moment. One of the reasons I wanted to interview Krister here, was that he had expressed a wish to translate the game into English. If and when is not currently clear. I realize you can't judge the result of Krister's ideas without reading Järn, but I hope the interview gave you some insights into its inner workings. And it has been very well received here in Sweden, both by critics, hard core gamers and casual roleplayers.

I met Krister at a book signing two months ago and asked him about it. Nothing had been done by then, as he had been too busy with other projects. There are new Järn books coming out soonish and my guess is they keep Krister quite busy. On the other hand, more and more new RPGs made here in Sweden are published both in Swedish and English (for example Coriolis and Tales from the Loop by the Free League). I'm sure Krister is aware of that.

Thank you Colin! I'm happy you like it.

Yes, there's always that struggle in cultural production: finding the perfect mix between the all-new and the habitual. There's of course not one solution to this, as players are everything from casual consumers to prosumers to professionals. Perhaps RPGs need to go the "casual consumer" path quite a lot? They are after all completely dependent on the player's ability to envision a setting/world/scene, and falling back on common ideas makes that easier.

Yes, shameless infringement right? : ) I'm thinking more and more that Star Wars is for sci-fi what Tolkien is for fantasy. It's such a widespread reference that you don't have to explain anything about it. Makes life a little easier for RPG players & writers...

There's a new review of M-SPACE on RPG.net, written by Joakim Waern. He gives it five stars out of five : ) Read it here: https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/17/17010.phtml

Having read an early version of this I can warmly recommend it. It's creepy, takes a good deal of thinking, and brings some hard sci-fi goodness to Mythras.

Yes, I also wondered about the title. Laureline is in many ways driving the story in the comics, with Valerian mostly getting into trouble. Otherwise the trailer looks very promising. And as you say, what can go wrong when they have The Fifth Element on their CVs? Back on topic, or slightly less OT at least, I read up on the Saga comic. It seems the creators, Vaughn & Staples, have declared they're not very interested in porting to other types of media. Not ruling it out completely, as they did initially though.

Speaking of Valerian & Laureline, Luc Besson released the first trailer for the Valerian movie yesterday (based on the comic): http://io9.gizmodo.com/luc-bessons-valerian-looks-like-all-your-scifi-dreams-c-1788781880

Excellent Paolo!

Valerian and Laureline would be an excellent choice. One of my favorite comics of all time. The basic premises may be too similar to Luther Arkwright though. Or why not Saga (the comic)? (OT: I spent a couple of hours in a comic book store in Paris a few weeks ago. The number of high quality comics I had never heard of was staggering...)

Here's a new review of M-SPACE posted by UbiquitousRat: http://ubiquitousrat.net/?p=3685 Short version: He enjoyed the systems for alien creation, starship design and organizations. He disliked that the chapter on weapons and equipment was so short. Follow the link above to get the whole picture! And while you're there, check out his enthustiastic play tests of Classic Fantasy and Mythic GM Emulator if you haven't already.

Aha, I see. Perhaps this kind of formula isn't as useful here either, as we have very few real world energy weapons. Still enjoyed your reasoning though : )

Interesting. How would it translate to (fictional) energy weapons?

Good start. To me, drawing starship plans is much more fun, but also slightly more difficult, than I imagined. Looking forward to see how your design develops.

Well, the tech in M-SPACE is well beyond near future - but it is shaped from a classic sci-fi standpoint, ie. before computers, smartphones and networks became ubiquitous. So, the short answer is no, it doesn't really cover near future high tech. But it's quite simple to update the gear list to work for that. Otherwise, River of Heaven is closer to the tech seen in for example "The Expanse".

Obviously I read too much tech news. My impression was that AIs already had solved automated translation - in the coffee breaks between self-driving cars and image recognition...