And Now For Something We Hope You'll REALLLY Like!

With Outremer out, I can concentrate on the game projects that have been neglected while I worked on it. Here are the projects that are some way along in development:

In The Beginning

This is a game set up as a prequel to StarCluster 3. The setting is the Solar System, as it is before the discovery of the calamity that was to come. Of course, it is fully playable without said discovery - if you want to bang around in the system and forget aout the Cluster, that's totally cool too. Earth has colonized many places in the system, from moons to planets to asteroids to habitats. We have also sent out colony ships to Alpha Centauri and other stars, and the Centauri colony is flourishing, though this game will not talk much about them. They are there in the background, though.

Fusion torch ships will be the primary mode of transport between worlds for people and perishables, but slow freight will take slower - and cheaper - modes of transport, from light sails to ion jets, almost exclusively robotically guided. There is no FTL, nor any anti-gravity, as yet in the game. I was originally going to do this as a free setting for SC 3, but there is so much work involved - from setting development to tech to new professions - that I have decided to make this a complete new game.

In Harm's Way: Pigboats

This game will be about World War II submarines, American, British, German, and Japanese. I may throw in others as well. The Soviet Union, the Netherlands, and Italy all had respectable submarine fleets as well. I will be (severely) adapting a new version of the air combat system from previous IHW games to use with submarines. This is another of my "special" projects, near and dear to my heart, like IHW: Napoleonic Naval and Tools of Ignorance, where I don't care if there is a market or not. I know Rich Rogers is writing a new baseball RPG, just as Neil Gow wrote his Napoleonic Naval game, so maybe markets can be developed ab initio.

"Lowell Was Right!"

This game is still under a working title I will not be using for the final product, which is why it's in quotation marks - it refers to astronomer Percival Lowell's sightings of canals on Mars. The premise here is that science as of the Fin de Siecle - c. 1900 - was basically correct in all important ways, and projecting those theories forward to approximately now. This means that clown Einstien was totally wrong, and the Michelson-Morley experiment proved the existence of the Luminiferous Ether. This will NOT be some Steampunk game - no Science!, just science as it was understood back then, projected forward.

Science theory in 1900 was very, very different to what is accepted today. There was no DNA, not solar fusion, no relativity. Unfortunately researching this period is proving very difficult. Science prefers to ignore its dead ends or to ridicule them. I want to explore them and extend them. This will be a hard SF treatment of discarded theory, as if it were true. Expect this to crawl along at a snails pace as I painfully accumulate enough knowledge to do this concept justice.

-clash