Chastity and Depravity.

Well, well, well. After a while, Black Tokyo II: Chastity and Depravity is entering the home stretch. Mark is working on the final layout, and it should be up soon. His layouts tend to take a lot longer than mine, but the final product always looks pretty polished so all's good.

With BT II, you can expect nine or ten new player races, including the very creepy Ubume, superstrong unicorn girls called the Daughters of Kirin, a couple of different races of evil, manipulative seductresses and shapechangers and the heroic but bitchy Futakuchi, among others.

I've got some new classes, including the Hanging Maiden and the Chaste and a few very cool surprises.

There's alot more world information, including dozens of new factions, threats and monsters, some new spells and something new: Starting Talents, which you can add to the D20 Modern Starting Occupations to give your game a more anime feel. I really like starting talents, in that they add so much flavor to the setting.

Also, I'm working freelance for Louis, awaiting his initial editing pass on Pirates of the Bronze Sky. Let me assure you that it's looking really good that one will be ready long before the July 4,2011 release date Louis has planned. We seem to be on the same page with that project, and coming up with content for Pirates has been alot of fun.

Ok, I'm re-writing Otherverse America. It's too much to talk about in this post, but I've completely tweaked the layout. One of the biggest questions I always face when laying out a core game book is whether to put history and world info before character creation info or vice versa. It's not an inconsequential decision. Look at Rifts, Forgotten Realms, Aberrant, Vampire. They all go about it in a different way. FR has the races and classes right up front; Aberrant has about 150 pages of world info before you even start assigning stats. There's no right or wrong way to do it- it's a matter of personal preference. It's actually a big decision.

Right now, we've got world info,races then starting occupations, , classes, feats and gear. I'm almost using the idea of following the cycle of life in the layout. Your character is born, grows up in this world, hears about the history in school, and only then begins choosing a starting and heroic class. I've got a few bits of rules info scattered throughout the world info to keep the crunch fans happy, usually in sidebar format. Many of the civilian Affiliations are found as sidebars to the world info, because these may be the organizations that have the most influence on your character's early development.

I'm adding a bunch more historic info and will be consolidating alot of content from other sources into the core book. Right now, everything written to date will remain cannon and will be usable with the revised core book, with the exception of the APEX soucebook. I'm really not satisfied with that one, and will be revisiting how and why APEX exists, though most of the crunch from that book will remain valid. If you've got a "Nathan Rice" shell suit or are playing a nanofeaster character, that's skill cool.

Anyway, gotta go.
Blessed Be,
CHRIS