Right now we have the 2E Campaign Guide in a near final draft state. There are three pieces of the rules that are awaiting some final playtest feedback before they are finalized and set in stone. Almost all of the rest of the text in the book is finished. Trimming the proverbial fat from the 2E working drafts has left us sitting at just over 100 pages of rules. Once all of the tables and charts are added to the Scenarios chapter I expect we should end up around 120-130 pages, or about the same size as the 1E Campaign Guide.
My personal timeline for completing this project is as follows:
By April 30 the book will be completed in its entirety. Full stop. I've taken several days off of work this month to make sure that happens. I actually fully expect the draft to be done by this Sunday, but I know that the best laid plans can always run into minor disasters and we have to account for that.
What will happen then is that I'm going to send out a copy of the rules to the usual suspects for a final review to see whether or not they can spot any glaring issues that we may not have caught during this last round of playtests. The VBAM crew will be running a final series of internal playtests (solo and multiplayer) to run through about 2-3 years of turns to double check on our end that all of the rules we need are there and find any remaining rule conflicts or hangers-on from previous drafts that no longer apply to the current build of the rules.
That playtesting is going to happen over the course of the month of May. During that time I'm going to be taking the draft and laying it out in InDesign and getting everything ready for release. I'm shooting tentatively for June 1, but unless something dire happens it will be out that first month in June.
I know, I know, you're heard it all before. This has been as frustrating for us as it has been for you. We spent way too much time trying to get this new edition just right because it is going to serve as the foundation for everything else that we're going to be releasing for the next 5-6 years. We have a large backlog of projects from the last few years that have been waiting for this book to be completed so that we could move forward with them. The long drought is going to give way to veritable tsunami.
Now, what about the rest of the VBAM campaign system rules? With the Campaign Guide completed we can begin adapting the rules that we already had developed to the new edition. Right now we're getting a feeling for where everything is going to go. We have the documents shared and are collaborating to decide where everything is going to end up. Right now it looks like the best guess is that we're going to concentrate on three products after the Campaign Guide's release:
FIRST CONTACT, the spiritual sequel to the Menagerie, will provide updated rules for alien species, governments, and the associated trait system that allows players to create more colorful and unique empires in their games. There is going to be a shift away from the leveled traits of 1E to more flavorful, interesting traits that are only applied once but have distinctive characteristics. For example you might run into a Scavenger that has bad construction capacity at its colonies but can salvage ships after a battle. That sort of thing. There is also a good chance that this book may end up containing some of the advanced system generation rules to tie in with the alien species components, but that is still being decided.
A DISTANT STAR, the solo campaigners guide. This is the book for people that want to play a solo campaign. After years of 2E development it became clear that many of the elements that I feel are core to the game experience are of less interest in the multiplayer arena and fit better in a book that is all about solitary play. Non-player empires are going to find their home here, along with low tech powers and a different take on standard system generation (based on the star types that were in previous 2E drafts). The focus of this book is giving the player all of the tools and guidance they need to sit down and play a solo campaign from start to finish.
WITH A PURPOSE, a guide to local campaigns with an objective system for the game for players that want to play a different kind of VBAM campaign. This concept builds on the 1E materials that were originally developed for Federation Admiral, but revised and updated to work with the Second Edition.
These are the products we'll be focusing our efforts on. The 2E COMPANION is still in the mix, but at this point most of the important rules from that book are either already in the 2E Campaign Guide or another product or just don't gel with the direction that the game is headed. Most of the advanced star system rules are going to end up joining the NPE rules in A DISTANT STAR, most of the combat updates are already in the CAMPAIGN GUIDE, and the elite officers are going to live again in THOSE WHO SERVE -- it's just that THOSE WHO SERVE is of a lower priority at the moment. We also have quite a bit of pirate-related content that will probably make it's way into a folio release after 2E is released, but we haven't made any decisions on that point yet.
What players should also look for in the future are a lot more DLC style content from VBAM Games in the form of map, scenario, and faction packs that are intended for players that just want to pick up a pre-generated scenario and play. How many of these we do will depend heavily on how well they sell, obviously, but we feel that this is a good way to keep releasing new content for the game in between our major releases.
With the CAMPAIGN GUIDE releasing around the first of June, I'm fairly sure that the first of the three follow-up supplements will hit in August. The reason for this fast turnaround is that the rules have more or less been written -- many for several years -- they just need to be updated to the current 2E rules and then prepped for release.
Thank you all for your patience over these last several years. We hope that Second Edition will reward that patience with a system that is easier to play and more robust than the First Edition. We're very excited to be this close to release.
