now it can be told

[whswhs]

I've alluded once or twice to working on a new book project, for which I didn't have the signed contract in hand. Now I have it, and I've been told that this makes it okay to discuss it with you all.

What I'm working on is a 4/e Transhuman Space supplement, the first one not by line editor Phil Masters, I believe: Transhuman Mysteries, a guide to running mystery scenarios and campaigns in the Transhuman Space setting, based partly on my experience with Whispers, my first Transhuman Space campaign.

This is going to be a mid-sized book, aimed at 32 pages, which comes to around 27K words. I've been putting in some work while the contracts made its way back and forth; at this point I have it about 2/3 written: all of Chapters 1 and 5 and nearly all of Chapter 3. I could well get it done by the end of the month, which would be well ahead of schedule.

I found that mystery plots were ideally suited for making use of ideas from Transhuman Space. I hope this book will help other people come up with campaigns they want to run. I expect to make use of it in running my second Transhuman Space campaign next year!

Bill Stoddard

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Though Transhuman Space is generally something I'm content to admire from a distance, I may have to buy this. I'm hesitant to run mysteries at the best of times, and in a society where secrets are hard to keep...well, any guidance would be most welcome.

[Rocket Man]

Congratulations, Bill. I've been intrigued by TS for a long time; this may be what gets me to take my first steps into a larger world.

(Of course, the other reason I haven't come into the TS universe yet is that I also need to take my first steps into a larger bank account. But by the time this is out, I should be ready, willing and able.)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Rocket Man

Congratulations, Bill. I've been intrigued by TS for a long time; this may be what gets me to take my first steps into a larger world.

If this project helps a few more people figure out how to run THS campaigns, it will have served its purpose. It grows out of my own initial puzzlement about that question, and the solution I eventually came up with. I just hope that the core book becomes available again, either through e23 or in an updated 4/e version. Changing Times is an excellent book, but it doesn't give you the complete background.

Bill Stoddard

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If this project helps a few more people figure out how to run THS campaigns, it will have served its purpose. It grows out of my own initial puzzlement about that question, and the solution I eventually came up with. I just hope that the core book becomes available again, either through e23 or in an updated 4/e version. Changing Times is an excellent book, but it doesn't give you the complete background.

Bill Stoddard

GREAT!

THS is an excellent setting, but rather troublesome to run. my problems usually come from not really knowing what sort of adventures do the setting justice. I own ever printed book, but not the e23 adventures, since my gaming preferences now run in DF land.

Changing times is excellent, but it fell short of the goal of explaining what to do with the setting. Oh, and getting a 4th ed THS by Bill Stoddard definitively pushes me to get back into the setting, and try my luck again.

[Phil Masters]

I'm very much looking forward to editing this one, and I'm glad to hear that the contract is now signed off.

It may or may not actually be the first 4e TS book not by me, in fact; that depends on how far David Pulver has progressed with Spaceships 8.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

I'm very much looking forward to editing this one, and I'm glad to hear that the contract is now signed off.

It may or may not actually be the first 4e TS book not by me, in fact; that depends on how far David Pulver has progressed with Spaceships 8.

Well, spaceships doesn't interest me (to me, vehicles are a way to get from A to B. Vehicle-like cybershells still have to be build with points). A guide to running mystery games in THS would be invaluable. I can't wait to own (or even better, playtest, though it seems that not every e23 PDF goes through a public playtest. I assume that they go through a private playtest with selected individuals. No problems there, as doing a cal for playtesters, getting them into the list, yada yada takes a significant amount of time, and might not be worth for every short PDF) it.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

THS is an excellent setting, but rather troublesome to run. my problems usually come from not really knowing what sort of adventures do the setting justice. I own ever printed book, but not the e23 adventures, since my gaming preferences now run in DF land.

Changing times is excellent, but it fell short of the goal of explaining what to do with the setting.

Right, you're being more precise than most people who say that they "can't see what to do with" some RPG setting, and thank you for that. It's a very frustrating line to hear, because it's usually used of settings which are stuffed full of clear and obvious story options, and trying to make them even clearer somehow doesn't change the response.

What it generally actually seems to mean, I've recently determined, is "I can't see any story options in this setting that I personally want to play, but I can see that the setting is well-designed in the abstract" - more or less what you say. Some people seem to be nervous about saying that, for some reason, or don't want to seem unimaginative want to transfer some kind of blame to the setting.

But in this case, all I can say is you don't have to "do justice" to the setting, you just have to play with it. Refusing to do so is much more of an injustice to the setting.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Right, you're being more precise than most people who say that they "can't see what to do with" some RPG setting, and thank you for that. It's a very frustrating line to hear, because it's usually used of settings which are stuffed full of clear and obvious story options, and trying to make them even clearer somehow doesn't change the response.

What it generally actually seems to mean, I've recently determined, is "I can't see any story options in this setting that I personally want to play, but I can see that the setting is well-designed in the abstract" - more or less what you say. Some people seem to be nervous about saying that, for some reason, or don't want to seem unimaginative want to transfer some kind of blame to the setting.

But in this case, all I can say is you don't have to "do justice" to the setting, you just have to play with it. Refusing to do so is much more of an injustice to the setting.

The issue here, is that I love THS so much, that I don't feel that I'm a good enough GM to run it. I'm a hard sci-fi fan, and love that the setting is targeted to my demographic. I'm, however, a fantasy GM, and I get better ideas for fantasy adventures that I get for non-fantasy games.

Part of the problem is that I wish my THS games to be memorable, interesting, and distinct, and include something of what makes THS memorable, and not just Standard Sci-Fi setting nr 27. It is specially dificult, when players refuse to read more than a couple of pages of background information (Changing Times was great in this aspect). The issue that most people have, and that I used to have, is that they try to cram everything THS into a single adventure, sometimes into a single session. For one shots, on theme driven settings, it works. THS is so rich, that it doesn't. It's Too Much (tm), same as trying to run GURPS with all the switches on, while being a novice to GURPS. GURPS comes with many prebuilt option-sets, that help in this regard, but THS does not. THS thus lacks a GM guide (mainly because THS is so vast, so diverse, that any GM guide that tried to be all encompassing would fail. Now, individual GMs that try to build their all encompassing mental GM guide for THS will also fail, and declare that they don't know what to do with the setting).

I'm also not good enougn, IMHO, to run Mystery games, that require many orders of magnitude more prep than I'm used to. Mysteries was great in this aspect, but it's too generic for me. I need a worked example of how to run mysteries for a given setting, let alone genre. I think I can build from there.

Bill product could serve to introduce me into Mystery games, and THS games. I need it!

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

I'm also not good enougn, IMHO, to run Mystery games, that require many orders of magnitude more prep than I'm used to. Mysteries was great in this aspect, but it's too generic for me. I need a worked example of how to run mysteries for a given setting, let alone genre. I think I can build from there.

Bill product could serve to introduce me into Mystery games, and THS games. I need it!

You aren't quite going to get a worked example out of Transhuman Mysteries; I don't have the pagecount to do a proper campaign starting point. But you will get a chapter on the method of designing a mystery scenario, and half a dozen sketches of premises for mystery campaigns in different genres, from GRA police procedural to teenage detectives in Islandia.

I'm willing to share the campaign log of my first THS campaign, if you want to see how I did it; e-mail to clockpunk@mindspring.com if you'd like to request it.

Bill Stoddard