So, what is next?
I know everybody's either on an endorphin high or exhausted from GenCon, but I'd figure I'd ask...
What's Next.
I did a site search for the only other product that was announced, Gatecrash and it's on a page but not on the site. So I figured I'd ask and see what's on the agenda for future books and see what was coming down the pike in terms of SourceBooks.
IIRC In some past blogs/posts theres been mention of an Outer System book and a catch all book full of a mix of setting and gear info. (The latter having been describe as a "SotA" book for EP.)
This isn't Gen Con info though so there might be some other goodies that were mentioned there.
There are supposedly a few books in the works. We know about Gatecrashing, which looks like it will be a settings book much like Sunward, but based on the Exoplanets. One of the writers on RPG.net hinted that it has quite a few bits of gear, but not that many new morphs.
We also have an as of yet unnamed general Sourcebook, which hasn't really been discussed much outside of the occasional interview and podcast. Not really sure on the contents but a chapter on Uplifts has been mentioned, and I imagine AGI might get the same treatment.
An Outer System (I am calling it Starward until we get a release name) is almost certainly in the works, again like Sunward/Gatecrashers but for the Outer System.
Other than that we don't really have all that much. I forget when it was, but I believe one of the devs stated that they hope to do four books a year, but that they got bogged down a lot this year because of the Catalyst stuff and having to bootstrap PS+ up to its own independant company. It might of been in the podcast Adam did at GenCon.
Edit: One thing, so far the Devs have been very careful about announcing release dates and such. They are very much of the mind that announcing and constantly pushing dates back is a "Bad Thing", and so much prefer to have a set date in stone before telling us.
Sunward part on Earth and its TITAN hazards mentions that they will be detailed in future product.
So I am guessing a book about TITAN's threats/Earth/dangerous places in Solar System and exoplants.
I would haphazard a guess that that might be either an Adventure, or contained within the "Catch-All" sourcebook. The Devs have stated that there is going to be a metaplot (although one with multiple, seperate arcs) so it could be that the
*SPOILER*
Thing the TITANs are making under the Antarctic ice sheet will be detailed in one of those arcs.
I'd love to see a book dedicated to The Fall and the affect the Virus has on things. A sampling of TITAN war machines, mutated humans/animals, alien life forms that have been touched by it, etc...
Well I hope that metaplot will be in form of seeds-that is ideas and hooks that you can use to determine how the world was shaped by them, rather than changing the world officially.
Hmm I do wonder why they didn't wrap up the solar system first and jumped into the gates that fast. I mean gates have alien worlds and that's very exciting and infinite with room to grow. To use a video game simile it almost seem like they went with the expansion pack before finishing the core.
There was a quote a little while ago (during Origins maybe?) from one of the developers mentioning a modular metaplot structure. Meaning there would be metaplot elements but that instead of stacking on each other, they'd be independent. So you could use one but ignore another without breaking canon. I have no idea if that's still the plan, but it's intriguing.
I'd kinda hoped that one of t he metaplot arcs might have been explored in the GenCon modules. If they were all related to one common Titan (or other) threat or plot and playing through them helped you peel back the conspiracy that would be cool- maybe next year?
SJE
The current plan as far as big books is to release Gatecrashing, followed by "Hotfix," which is a companion book to some of the cultural & technological stuff detailed in Core, digging further into several topics. The writing for these books is in the can but not yet edited. I wrote two of the chapters for "Hotfix," and I hope you'll all be getting to see them soon.
The other thing the guys're working really hard on is getting the modules from the last two seasons of cons out in PDF.
This much I know I can say because we've stated it on these forums before; it's just that the whole mess with Catalyst delayed things a lot. The nice thing about the delay is that it's given us more time to test stuff out in our own campaigns.
We also did make a statement about metaplot in the seminar at Gen Con, which I can repeat here: Yes, metaplot will be modular. You can use it if you want, but all books will be written as if they started in the untouched "base" setting described in Core. Metaplot will be presented as sidebars telling how a given metaplot point would change the stuff being described from the base setting. So it's there if you want it, but if you don't, it won't mess up your campaign. Win win. 
"Hotfix" sounds very general as you described it-could you give any specific example what will it deal with?
As to Gatecrashing-when can we expect first previews like art or table of contents ?

Somewhere someone mentioned writing a chapter on uplifts, I think. I imagine this is something that will probably be part of Hotfix (since it doesn't seem like it'd be part of one of the other books).
EDIT: I think there was some other mention of habitat tech appearing in a future book too.
Somewhere someone mentioned writing a chapter on uplifts, I think. I imagine this is something that will probably be part of Hotfix (since it doesn't seem like it'd be part of one of the other books).
EDIT: I think there was some other mention of habitat tech appearing in a future book too.
Yes & yes. And I don't want to reveal more than I'm supposed to at this point, so I'll now shut up.
Is it likely we'll see an outer system book after Hotfix and the modules, or is it too early to tell?
I have to admit that, to me it's a strange command decision to actually go with Gatecrashers before the Outer System guide. As it stands with Sunward it's now much easier to have a basic idea of what the Inner system is like than the outer and all of a sudden we're being booted out of the solar system and into gates and exoplanets when the second half of possible places where your character can actually come from aren't covered yet...
And now Hotfix sounds about more like a Player's Guide which is more than fine but sounds like it's getting us no where closer to getting a holistic view of our own solar system, the place we actually live in.
I guess it's simply a question that the more time I spend developing my own version of the Titanian Commonwealth the more it is likely to diverge from the RAW as I come up with my own answers. Well I guess as they say in New Quebec: "Les absents ont toujours tort" (He who is missing doesn't get to vote)
Sure! And I'd be happy to see your Jovian version! Just give me some time to get all the ideas down, actually my Nanowrimo project (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) a compilation of short stories set in the EP universe will have some Commonwealth content so I'll have a much better idea of how everything works by the end of November!
could you provide us a direct link to your stuff, please?
I got your profile, I think, but not the text themselves
Oh goodness leave me a bit of time!
I would be happy to give you all that stuff once it's done...honestly at this point I'm just working out the outline for my Nanowrimo project! After all more than a few months back I had no idea EP even existed, the stuff you're seeing probably dates from a transhuman-like thing I worked on two years ago about three different types of "humanity" living in the same orbital elevator
. No no no, discard that, I never finished it because it sucked! (Never ever listen to the adage that if you don't what to do next in a story, kill someone in the book. It turned mine into a disaster!)
.
One of the reasons I got so turned on by EP in the first place is how similar some of my ideas were! The protagonist even had a best friend/shrink AI that bears an uncanny resemblance to a Muse.
In any case I'll note some of the background and conceits about how some of the places work and I'll make a shiny new thread about it when the time comes!
I know what you mean about killing a character.
The fanfiction I'm writing, crossing Harry Potter and Eclipse Phase -don't laugh, the way I set it up, it actually works!- has many character deaths, and each of them has been pondered heavily, for weeks now. I've been working on it since July. Some characters supposed to die won't bite the bulllet, because thinking about it logically, it would hurt the story.
On contrary, some character I though were going to live are going to meet the reaper.
It's really a lot of work, because it involves TWO universes and making them intertwine together can be quite a bitch!
if you played Glory, you'll recognize one of the main six characters
-Harry Potter (d'hu!)
-Dudley Dursley
-Fleur Delacour
-Pansy Parkinson
-Derek Kaplan (an OC)
-Patrona Vasquez
There is a seventh, the main antagonist, but I'm not gonna reveal their name, for it is a major spoiler to give
the title is: Paradigm Shift




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