This is the tenth of our scheduled Director’s Briefings.

Normally John Seal of Aurigas gets to talk about the business aspects and the cool software tools that have already arrived or are being built to support ICE games, and I focus on upcoming books. So to mix things up a bit, I thought I would say a few words about the business end and about software.

On the business end of things, I am very pleased to report that our accountant has crunched the numbers and Guild Companion Publications Ltd made a reasonable operating profit in 2011. (Of course, I already knew that we had made a profit but the accountant’s job is to ensure that all the numbers are reported in a way that conforms to how the UK taxman wants to read them.) These profits will be and are being ploughed straight back into the business to finance the next waves of new products across multiple game lines. That’s the good news. There isn’t any bad news.

Onto cool software tools and the Rolemaster Classic Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop. I’ve never used any virtual tabletop software, being fortunate enough still to be a participant in an active local gaming group, so the demo I had of the software in April was a real eye-opener. Prior to the demo, I had downloaded all the necessary software and had a ten-minute go at trying to do something with the trial version, but really hadn’t made significant progress. An hour and a half later in the company of two very experienced users/developers and I could see how it worked and how to use it. This is a fantastic package for running distributed games where the gaming group is scattered across a country. It is also a great package for running a face-to-face game where the GM and the players want the computer to do the legwork. I hope that we’ll see a HARP/HARP SF edition in the future.

Speaking of software for HARP, Aurigas has licensed the creator of AutoHARP to commercialise his character creator and support tools for HARP. We are currently testing AutoHARP to check the character reconstructions for HARP Martial Law. Expect to see a version of AutoHARP that is wholly compliant with the new HARP Fantasy to be released in the near future. This will be sold through our presence in the OneBookShelf network.

And back to news about product development.

HARP Fantasy has now entered its layout phase – we expect to see it emerge in both pdf and print-on-demand versions in a couple of months. We also hope that we’ll be able to put HARP Fantasy into distribution (and hence game stores) via an imprint partner perhaps later this year. A quick reminder about the time-limited discount coupon for the HARP Fantasy pdf – once we release it as pdf, there’ll be announcements via a newsletter and the forums about how to get the discount. Keep watching so you don’t miss out. In terms of its revision, work is underway to make the characters at the back of HARP Martial Law consistent with HARP Fantasy. Once that is complete and that’s all we have to do, then Martial Law will go into the layout queue as its new artwork is already finished. HARP College of Magics and Loot: a Field Guide are next on the revision queue and we will be commissioning a similar enhancement of Cyradon and the new HARP Bestiary.

Last month, we noted that we might speed up the pdf return of some RMSS products where we had secured agreement to rescue them from copyright limbo. Peter Mork’s School of Hard Knocks was duly returned as a searchable scanned pdf in April. With Cyber Europe, we’re simply waiting on confirmation that its author can access his royalties via OneBookShelf.

Rebranding of the Spacemaster: Privateers products continues slowly but surely. As they emerge, we will put them back on sale directly.

The authors working on the seven Rolemaster projects continue to toil away to finalise their drafts. I expect to be talking in detail about some of these projects next month.

The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early June.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

This is the ninth of our scheduled Director’s Briefings.

Firstly, we’ve consistently stated that our tweaking of HARP Fantasy is not a new edition of HARP, but rather an enhancement of the existing design to fix issues that have been identified through years of gaming experience. HARP Fantasy does not need a full reboot – the system as a whole is not broken, and there were so few full book supplements published for the system that we are not out of ideas for financially viable expansion products. So if you consider the original 160-page HARP to be version 1.0 and the 192-page sequel to be version 1.2, then our enhanced HARP Fantasy will be version 1.5. Now from a financial business perspective, we would like our fans to buy our enhanced HARP Fantasy because we are running GCP Ltd as a business and products should make a profit, and from a gaming/business perspective, we want our fans to be using enhanced HARP Fantasy because it will make supporting you easier in all respects. Of course in troubled financial times, finding $20 USD for a version 1.5 might discourage fans from an immediate purchase. It’s not a gaming business secret that the majority of a product’s sales typically happen in the first few months after release, which means that most of our fans will have purchased the original and 192-page pdf editions from very defunct incarnations of the Mjolnir store and probably won’t have their receipts.

So we’re going to do something different. We will make a time-limited discount coupon available on OneBookShelf and all its affiliates, which will allow anyone to buy HARP Fantasy as a pdf at a mere 5 USD. We will publish the coupon on the ICE forums and through the mailing list. There will be a time limit to redeem this coupon, so please do not procrastinate. This is a headsup so that you all know this is what we are going to do.

Secondly, speaking of discount coupons, the feedback is that most people don’t have receipts for previously purchased pdf products and some folk have lost their access details to the still-existing but dormant Mjolnir store. So we’re going to make things easier still – open your pdf products to page 11 and take a screenshot. Then email the screenshot(s) to me at gcp.store.transition@gmail.com and I will issue the appropriate coupons.

Thirdly, negotiations continue with a number of freelance authors of products lost in the copyright limbo. We have secured agreement for the return of Cyber Europe and it will go back on sale as a searchable scanned pdf soon as the contract receives all the necessary signatures. To speed up the return of some RMSS products where we already have agreement, we may release these as searchable scanned pdfs in the short-term so that they are not stuck in the rebranding queue.

Fourthly, I’ve deliberately delayed this Briefing until after April 1st so that I can surprise you with the genuine news (and no fooling) that seven new Rolemaster products are well underway and the first full drafts of some of these are scheduled to arrive very shortly on editorial desks in the very near future. That’s all I am going to say in this Briefing about them; stay tuned for more information.

The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early May.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

Dear Friends and Fans:

We are looking for someone to help us with our marketing and PR efforts. It would be a part time job and could be managed remotely. If you have skills and experience in this area, please download and read the job description attached to this posting. Please note that just being a fan of ICE is not enough – you need to have the time, skills and experience to be considered for the job and if you do not meet the requirements it would be helpful if you did not contact us on this topic.

John Seal
John@ironcrown.com

Link with more information

This is the eighth of our scheduled Director’s Briefings.

First off, thanks to those good folk who responded to our call for assistance on the very messy Quark Spacemaster:Privateers. They have given us a glimmer of hope that we may yet be able to achieve rebranding of those products without resorting to brutal Photoshop and Adobe tactics. One way or another we will get the Privateers line released again, at least in pdf and hopefully in print-on-demand too.

Secondly, in the December Briefing, we described our discount coupon offer to enable purchasers of various scanned products via the diverse incarnations of the Mjolnir store to acquire upgraded searchable pdfs of those vintage RM2 and Spacemaster products. We also indicated that we would be extending this offer to other products in due course. That “in due course” has arrived for the rebranded RMFRP products. Here’s what you need to do: Visit the ICE forums and see which products are on the discount coupon list. Customers who have purchased pdfs from the Mjolnir store between Feb 2008 and Dec 2010 should log into that store and make screenshots of the relevant parts of their order history. Email those screenshots to the following address gcp.store.transition@gmail.com and you will receive RPGNow discount coupons to purchase the rebranded pdfs at a nominal price of one US dollar per product. Customers who purchased the pdfs from the much older Mjolnir store (i.e. before Feb 2008) should have a rummage around in their email archives for receipts, as we will accept those receipts as proof of purchase.

Thirdly, those who follow these Director’s Briefings and/or the ICE forums will know that HARP Fantasy is being worked on. As indicated in the January Briefing, we needed to replace the HARP monster creation system. We’ve now created a new and better monster creation system and we’ve used it to restat the monsters and monstrous races of the HARP Fantasy core rulebook. As soon as I’ve integrated the new stats into the HARP Fantasy core rulebook and the final editorial sweep has been made over the work, we will be handing HARP Fantasy, complete with a whole gallery of fantastic new interior illustrations from Maria Duffield, Raymond Gaustadnes, Rick Hansen and Craig John, over into layout. In terms of remaining changes to HARP Martial Law, only the character stats at the back need to become consistent with the enhanced HARP Fantasy rules; new artwork has been commissioned and is already underway. In terms of HARP College of Magics, all of the spells have been processed through the enhanced spell creation system. We still have to propagate the changes made to the spell creation system into other areas of the book. New artwork is also being commissioned. We will very shortly be able to turn our attention to bringing Loot: a Field Guide into alignment with the other principal products and get the ball rolling on the writing of the new HARP Bestiary.

The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early April, and will cover updates from across the product lines.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

This is the seventh of our scheduled Director’s Briefings. It’s a little later than normal this month as I was on holiday for the latter part of January and have had to perform the necessary catchup.

In last month’s Briefing, we indicated that the entire Spacemaster: Privateers product line was in our sights for rebranding. Our layout gurus have reported that in addition to having font problems, at least some of the Spacemaster: Privateers products were created as multi-language files using Quark Passport, and their build files are steadfastly refusing to open in anything other than that extremely expensive piece of software. As these products have been on sale for up to a decade, the number of expected sales in a reasonable time frame (say one to two years) does not justify anyone buying Quark Passport, I have applied triage and instructed our gurus to do the rebranding of pdf versions by careful application of Photoshop and Adobe. This means that we won’t be able to apply the errata to the Spacemaster products. It is still possible (barely) that we may be able to get the rebranded products into print-on-demand if the interior illustrations have sufficient resolution.

Note, if anyone reading this does own Quark Passport already and has some free time, please do get in touch.

Speaking of print-on-demand, we have three products currently available via OneBookShelf’s print-on-demand arrangement with Lightning Source, namely the Shadow World Player’s Guide, HARP SF and HARP SF Xtreme. From comments in various places, it is clear that there is some confusion as to what this means and some reticence about being the first to order copies.

So what does print-on-demand entail? Let’s compare this with standard pdfs from both the publisher and the customer perspective. When we produce a pdf version of a product, it will typically be a single pdf file and various optimisations will have been performed to keep the file size down. When we produce a print-on-demand version, there will be at least two pdfs. One of those will be the interior of the product with all of the artwork having more than enough resolution so that it looks right at the higher dpi of printing than the 72dpi of screens. The pagecount of this pdf may well differ from that of the screen pdf as there is a requirement that OBS/LS products have interior page counts that are divisible by four (or six in some formats) modulo one – i.e. 127 pages is fine, 131 pages is fine, etc. You will have noted that for HARP SF and HARP SF Xtreme, I solicited opinions on which tables might be usefully repeated on extra end pages that we added to achieve the divisibility modulo one page count.
The other file will be the pdf of the wraparound cover, which will have very high-resolution cover art, a blank area for the ISBN and bar code, and extremely precise dimensions. In a screen pdf, you have the front cover and the back cover. For a printed book, you also have the spine if it is to be perfectbound, and this spine width will vary according to the number of interior pages and indeed whether the book is hardcover, softcover etc. If the dimensions are wrong, you would get a terminally cramped book or one where the pages don’t fill the binding. OBS and Lightning Source are experts at this and have templates that layout experts are required to follow and a series of checks that catch problems like this before any copies of the book are ever printed. For each product, I then upload the appropriate pdf files with separate pairs for each edition (so for HARP SF Xtreme which we offer in four distinct formats, I had four upload sets to do), and these are checked first by OBS and then by Lightning Source. The checking process can take up to a week – if there’s a problem, the files are bounced back with a terse error message that the layout guru will understand, the files are then adjusted and reuploaded to be tested again. If all is well, and only if all is well, Lightning Source will approve the product for printing and the publisher is then invited to get a test copy (in each approved format) printed for themselves before they put it on sale. As we believe in a safety-first approach, I’ve had 4 test copies of each approved print-on-demand version of a product made – one comes to me, one goes to John Seal at Aurigas, one goes to the responsible layout guru (Craig John) for his professional opinion and the fourth goes to Thom Jones also at Aurigas. Lightning Source uses two of their facilities to manufacture rpg books in partnership with OneBookShelf. Craig, John and I get our copies from the UK facility, Thom being based in the USA gets his from the American plant. When we are all happy, I then toggle the switch in the publisher interface at OneBookShelf and the books go on sale in print-on-demand formats.

That’s the perspective from the publisher, so let’s look at things from the customer view. If you are buying one or more pdfs through OneBookShelf, you put them into the shopping cart, pay your money at the checkout, and download the product files at your convenience. So what’s different for print-on-demand. You pick the product(s) that you are interested in, select from the available hardcopy format(s) – softcover versus hardcover, black&white versus colour, and proceed to checkout. You provide a delivery address and choose a shipping method, then pay your money. Then what happens?

OneBookShelf transmits your order to Lightning Source. If your delivery address is the USA, your order goes to the US plant. If the address is anywhere else, your order goes to the UK plant. Lightning Source is true print-on-demand, which means that your copy of a product does not exist in physical form until they print it for you. There’s no huge pile of preprinted copies that they pluck copies from and ship out. You have your own individual print run just for your order. So your order has arrived at the Lightning Source plant and gets queued for printing. The interior of the book and the covers are manufactured separately. The printers roll and generate a block of printed paper that is the inside contents of your requested book. You will remember that the interior page count is divisible by four modulo one. At the end of printing the innards of the product, Lightning Source prints an almost blank page, which has their address and a bar code at the bottom of the page. This identifies your block of paper and enables it to be united with the cover that has been separately printed with a bar code and ISBN that Lightning Source have placed on the cover in the blank area our layout guru prepared for them. Bar codes are matched and innards and cover are suitably bound together and the product is packed and shipped to you. At various stages in the process, you can log into OneBookShelf and see the status of your order – sent to Lightning Source, printed, shipped and/or shipped with a tracking number. In due course, the postman delivers a parcel to your door.

Depending on the format, the manufacturing time is two working days for softcover products that have black&white interiors up to five working days for products with colour interiors. If your order has products in a mixture of formats, Lightning Source may split the order and ship the books as two or more parcels (just like Amazon and some of the other big Internet retailers). If this happens, the status notices in your OneBookShelf account will reflect it and the delivery note in the parcels will make it clear that the order has been split.

Both GCP and Aurigas are aware that many ICE customers did not receive printed books that they ordered from Mjolnir in a timely fashion. In addition to sending test copies, we’ve also had a number of complimentary copies printed and shipped to GCP freelancers who’ve been involved in the various products, so we can confirm that the process works reliably and that products have already reached these individuals in the UK, USA, Canada and even as far away as Australia. From the notices that I get from OneBookShelf, we also know that copies have been purchased by early adopter customers and shipped to these nations and various countries in mainland Europe. You do not have to take my word for it – you’ll find posts on the ICE forums from happy satisfied customers. For those who have already taken the plunge, do let us know what you think about the print-on-demand service.

The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early March.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

Happy New Year from Guild Companion Publications Limited!

Let us begin with Rolemaster. 2011 was the year of rebranding existing products. We still have a residual trio of RMSS/FRP products that we wish to rebrand – namely Arcane Companion, Channeling Companion and School of Hard Knocks, all of which date from an era when Old ICE used more fonts than is sane and software did not preserve these rare fonts, and that is why they’ve been left to last. The next major stage of our Rolemaster progress will be to get as many as possible of the rebranded products into print-on-demand via OneBookShelf. I say “possible” because the risk is always that the state of the archives will not permit us to get particular products into print-on-demand in a timely or cost-effective fashion. Looking further out when our layout experts have cleared the rebranding/printing queues, we will have the fourth issue of The Guild Adventurer and additional adventure products – for example, we have one author who is currently writing a ten-scenario campaign. We will also be seeking to conclude our recovery of copyright limbo products that resulted from the original Old ICE bankruptcy.

Turning to Spacemaster, 2011 saw the pdf rerelease of almost all the Spacemaster 2nd Edition materials, including a set of classic adventures never before legally available in pdf. Our layout gurus are already attempting the rebranding of the Spacemaster Privateers. The aim is to rerelease in pdf and print-on-demand and to apply various errata fixes. The archives are, unfortunately, in a fonts mess, so triage may be necessary here. If we can get the whole of the Privateers line into print-on-demand, then we will seek to produce a compendium of the DataNets as a single pdf and print-on-demand product.

And onward to the Shadow World setting, which saw the release of the Shadow World Player’s Guide in print-on-demand as a full-colour softcover product. Behind the scenes, Terry Amthor has been toiling away on Emer 3 (120+ pages now complete), and we expect to see it in both pdf and print-on-demand this year. We will also be complementing this with Xa-ar in print-on-demand, the Shadow World GM Guide, one or more regional modules (approved by Terry Amthor but written by other authors), and all being well, the first of the system-specific rulebooks, the Shadow World HARP Handbook.

This brings us neatly to HARP & HARP SF. We opened 2011 with the release of HARP SF as a pdf product. We closed 2011 with the release of both HARP SF and HARP SF Xtreme in print-on-demand in multiple formats via OneBookShelf. Behind the scenes in 2011, we were and have been working to reconstruct the HARP Fantasy line, which was complicated by the fact that two major sourcebooks, Monsters: a Field Guide and Loot: a Field Guide, were in a copyright limbo. We were able to reach agreement with the author of Loot, and it will return in due course; we were unsuccessful with Monsters. This has had the knock-on consequences that we have needed to develop a new monster creation system (which we are still working on) and will also need to produce a new Bestiary product. It also has impacts on other unreleased products. As those who followed the progress of the Something Wicked project in my old Guild Companion editorials may remember, there are almost as many Demons, Undead and Elemental beings in that work as there were monsters of any sort in Monsters: a Field Guide. These were all designed using the MaFG rules set and so all need to be reworked to conform to the new emergent monster creation system. Our plan is that we will move most of these out of Something Wicked into our new HARP Bestiary product. We will move the Mystic profession, which was originally part of my College of Magics manuscript, into a reshaped Something Wicked. HARP Codex and the various HARPer’s Bazaar issues will not be returning as these have too many balance issues. Instead there will be future themed sourcebooks on divine magic, martial arts, and other topics; as the year progresses, expect to see calls for proposals on these. Construct Toolkit will also be brought into conformance with the new monster creation rules and concepts matured in HARP SF Xtreme. HARP SF will also see calls for proposals for expansions and adventures for it.

And finally to Cyradon, our second setting, which was on hold during 2011, due to its need for the completion of the HARP Fantasy reconstruction. Once all the improvements have been made to HARP Fantasy, we expect to be able to make the HARP version of Cyradon conform relatively easy, which will pave the way for new Cyradon adventure modules, which are already in progress.

That completes our rapid review of the product lines as they were in 2011 and as they will be in 2012. The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early February.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

Ho, Ho, Ho!

It is the season to be jolly, and the season to be giving gifts to friends and family. And perhaps if you have been a good gamer to give a gift to yourself as a reward! Well, Santa may have just the present for you …

Yes, the postman has been busy delivering test copies of HARP SF, HARP SF Xtreme and the Shadow World Player’s Guide to GCP and Aurigas reps in both the UK and the US. On my desk, I have a hardcover and a softcover version of HARP SF, four different versions of HARP SF Xtreme (softcover versus hardcover, full black&white interior versus part colour/part black&white interior), and the full in-colour softcover Shadow World Player’s Guide. They all look fantastic. I have now activated all of the various editions for public sale.

All of these are available from OneBookShelf. You choose the version(s) that suits your tastes (and your budget!), the shipping method that works best for you, Lightning Source will print your order and ship it to you. It really is that easy.

HARP SF

HARP SF Xtreme

Shadow World Player’s Guide

Now treat yourself! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

All best wishes,

Nicholas

Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

My name is Nicholas Caldwell and I am the Director and sole shareholder of Guild Companion Publications Limited, the company licensed by Aurigas Aldebaron LLC to publish Rolemaster, Spacemaster, HARP, Shadow World and Cyradon. This is the fifth of our Director’s Briefings.

During the last month, we released a veritable library of classic products that we had recovered from the mists of copyright limbo following agreement with the original authors. Thus November saw the return of Sea Law, the original Spacemaster Companion, and all of the rest of the Spacemaster Imperium setting modules – League of Merchants, Beyond the Core, Tales from Deep Space, War on a Distant Moon and Imperial Crisis: House Devon in Turmoil. Expect to see Islands of the Oracle, a Shadow World adventure module by John Crowdis, appear as a commercial searchable pdf in early December.

Although all of these are scanned pdfs, they are searchable pdfs (barring covers). A request was made some time ago on the ICE forums regarding the possibility of having the back catalogue of scanned pdfs made searchable; a more recent request wondered whether it would be possible for customers who had purchased non-searchable pdfs on the various Mjolnir-run ecommerce stores.

GCP and Aurigas considered these requests, and having consulted with Bruce of Mjolnir who indicated that there was no easy way of extracting the sales records from the old stores, have come to the following solution. Customers who have purchased scanned pdfs from the Mjolnir store between Feb 2008 and Dec 2010 should log into that store and make screenshots of the relevant parts of their order history. Email those screenshots to the following address gcp.store.transition@gmail.com and you will receive RPGNow discount coupons to purchase the updated pdfs at a nominal price of one US dollar per product. Customers who purchased the pdfs from the much older Mjolnir store (i.e. before Feb 2008) should have a rummage around in their email archives for receipts, as we will accept those receipts as proof of purchase.

I’ve worked my way through the older scanned pdfs – some were already searchable, a handful could not be made searchable (as the scan resolution was too low), but the rest have been upgraded and the new files already uploaded onto the OneBookShelf system. All the necessary discount coupons have also been created on the OneBookShelf system. A definitive list of the scan pdfs will be posted on the ICE forums.

As an advance notice, once the rebranding programme is complete, we will be extending this offer to other pdf products that were previously available on the various Mjolnir stores.

The other big news is that our layout gurus have created the requisite layout files for HARP SF, HARP SF Xtreme and Shadow World Player Guide – The World. OneBookShelf have already validated both the hardcover and softcover editions of HARP SF, the softcover Shadow World Player Guide (which will be in full colour), and two versions of HARP SF Xtreme (hardcover with colour interior, softcover with black&white interior). The other two editions of HARP SF Xtreme (hardcover with black&white interior, softcover with colour interior) are still working their way through the system. As part of the final quality checks, we will be ordering copies from both the UK and the US printing facilities. Assuming no problems are discovered, we will then activate the products for actual sale.

The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early January, and will discuss the progress made across the various project lines.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

Founded in 2007, we published our first German Rolemaster book on 07/07/2007, which was the “Rolemaster Grundregelwerk” (RMFRP, the base rule book from Rolemaster Fantasy). Located in Duesseldorf, Germany, our company published several more books under the Rolemaster license. This year the “Handbuch für Spielleiter” is hitting the big game fair in Essen, the “Spiel!”, completing the translation of the core rulebooks of Rolemaster. Next we will complete the translations of the companions (the Channeling Companion is already available).

Right from the start we have made a name for ourselves by producing the Rolemaster line in full color, hardbound editions. This has been a first for Rolemaster world-wide. The German Rolemaster books can hold their own when compared to industry leaders like the D&D books. Also, we are producing a line of soft-cover adventure modules set of the world of Aborea. Apart from Rolemaster, 13Mann also has the German license for Traveller, and we publish two lines of original games, the dark futuristic “Heredium” and the easy-to-learn Fantasy game “Aborea”. Aborea was presented to the public at the beginning of this year, it is a box containing a player’s book, a GM book, two great maps (one of the world Aborea in DinA0) and two D10 (all for 19,95 Euros). The game is designed to introduce new people to our great hobby.

The founding members of 13Mann have been playing Rolemaster themselves for years and years. The company’s CEO, Bernd Blecha (who is also writing this text), is looking back on the embarrassingly long time of over 25 years with Rolemaster. But that is also a credit to the game, since it is able to keep players interested for such a long time. A game cannot hold players if it is not good, and Rolemaster most certainly is very good. People in Germany enjoy the possibilities the character creation offers – only with Rolemaster you can create the character you had in your head exactly the way he or she should be. Here’s to 25 more years!

Aurigas Aldebaron’s Address

Well, the train is finally starting to leave the station! We had to work on a bit of “stoking the furnace” which makes it look like we were not getting anywhere, but behind the scenes, a lot has been done. All the legal agreements with third party licensees are now in place, and Nicholas at Guild Companion has made extraordinarily good progress in recovering “lost works” from bygone days and making those available for download. At the same time, we are going through all the works and making some decisions about what is “intellectual property held in good title”. In a very few cases (fortunately) we have found some game product does not fit this definition and we will no longer offer that product for sale, though we may use some of the untainted material contained within in a future product. In a couple cases, we have found that the quality of the material does not meet the bar we have set for ourselves and those products will no longer be for sale, or again, may be re-worked into new products. Fortunately, this clean-up is coming to an end. The penultimate stage is getting the full, approved product array up on RPGNow.com, with the final stage getting the key legacy products in print-on-demand format. This final stage will take some time, but progress is being made. What’s next? Well, I’m hopeful we can continue to make progress with our international partners to forge closer ties in working together, mainly by sharing the fruits of our collective labour across a wider audience. For example, if there is an adventure series tailored to Rolemaster authored by our German friends at 13Mann, we will work with them to get an English translation of that and get it up for sale, providing more support product for RM. We are planning some new links on the main ICE website to our international partners as well, and are looking to share resources, like art work. I’m really excited about our plans for the future. HARP is a great product, but due for an update. Fortunately, not much will be changing, but the changes proposed should add considerable value in terms of game balance, playability and infusing the game with more “High Adventure”. In addition to HARP, the team is developing long range plans for Rolemaster, Cyradon and Shadow World, as well as looking at adding new support product lines and will do so if the right opportunity comes along. In closing, I hope this all sounds exciting for you, our fans and customers. Many thanks for your support. And, a special thanks to our moderators, web people, authors, artists and licensees for making the effort to help ICE keep moving forward.