Robots, Rapists and Pagans

Well, what's been going on the last couple days as my state has been flooded severely? I've been inside for most of the last week, doing some work on three different projects.

The first two projects are Black Tokyo related. Two or three weeks ago, John came to me with pretty much every thing I needed to write a soucebook: a new player race, tons of NPC ideas and cultural notes, and multiple pieces of art. A little effort and polish later, and Plastic Hearts: Tetsujin is the end result.

The Tetsujin are a big, bulky race of labor robots, and make an interesting contrast to the setting's POETICA androids. If POETICA are basically Chi from Chobits, the Tetsujin are more like Bioshock's Big Daddies, albeit a little friendlier. They're a massive, imposing class of robot, but have a working class stoicism and chibi, squeaky, girlish voices and that contrast between their imposing appearance and rather gentle natures was a ton of fun to write. They're I think the sixth major robotic race in the Otherverse Games canon: they join the Star Droids, Ero-bots, Synths, POETICA and Battlechangers, not to mention the occasional fully sentient AI from Otherverse America.

The next project on deck is a fuck-ton darker. Basically its a build your own adventure module and mini-bestiary focusing on the Rape Pure Fight marital arts tournament, introduced in the Black Tokyo Unlimited Campaign Setting. It's going to be a very dark, mature reader's book, which focuses on what's basically Mortal Kombat with added sexual violence. Basically the book is going to be filled with an assortment of really nasty fucking villians the players are going to enjoy killing. I'm almost done with the text, and since most of the opponents in the book will be hominids, John Picot will be doing most of the art for this one.

Third up is the Choicer sourcebook I've been working on for a while now. I'm going to just release it as a big, all encompassing guide to creating Choicer characters, with feats, traits, and all the major Choicer-specific races (plus a few new ones) from Species of the Otherverse fully revised to Pathfinder rules. At this point, I'm going to be including Ubasti (definitely, because the big pro-choice kitties are awesome), variant race rules for Otherverse America's specific breeds of Light and Heavy Cyborgs from Polymer Path, the Fluxmind and Softling Healers (and maybe an additional Sanger creation or two?) and the Half Grey, since the majority of Half Grey on Earth live in Choicer territory. I also plan to add a new, modular race: Demi-Gods. Half human, half something else, possibly post-human, possiably the incarnate children of Pagan deities, these guys will basically blend the back story and in-game flavor of the Dreamborn Mau (who are getting abandoned as a standalone race) with the modularity and flexibility of the Military Post Humans from Psi-Watch: Black Operators.

The Choicer book will be coming later this year, hopefully before August. Not sure exactly when, because it will need a lot of art, and I"m still not satisfied with the text. One thing I want to do is make it better reflect what it means to be both pagan and feminist in 2015 and beyond, rather than just going with the vision of the world I had when I started work on it in the late 1990s, or when I first published the book in 2007 or 2008. Anyway, its somewhat a trip working on the Rape Pure Fight monster-book and this one at the same time, as one is all about toxic masculinity and the other is very female centric, or at least has a better view of what a man should be built in.

Meantime, I'm doing additional work on Heavy Future, Battlechangers: Multiverse and a few other projects in the background between the main books.
CHRIS