May 27, 2012: Break Time Will Reshuffle GURPS Pipeline

Recently, our small, but efficient, but SMALL staff has been getting a bit fried. Randy Scheunemann has rejoined us (Welcome back, Randy!) and is taking on vital convention and Revolution!-brainstorming tasks. But too many of us are developing that thousand-inch stare (Hey, I'm nearsighted . . .)

I've agreed to let Phil send me home for a couple of months, provided he and others take some breaks too. I'll be out of the office for a couple of months, starting about a half-second after Ogre goes to press, and not returning till sometime in August. I will probably be writing during that time, but it won't be for Munchkin. There's at least one GURPS project I want to pick up, and one off-the-wall thing that I would really enjoy working on if it didn't have a deadline. So it doesn't!

Andrew has already started his vacation. Monica will take serious time off starting as soon as Ogre gets out of here, and won't come back until after Worldcon.

Phil promises to take a real vacation too, real soon now, honest.

So what does that do to the schedule?

It doesn't affect Ogre. That game will leave here before I do.

It doesn't affect announced Munchkin releases. We pushed back the schedules on a couple of unannounced ones to focus on Munchkin Apocalypse. And it went to press, and we are happy. Things after that will also just get pushed back, because Andrew and Monica are both vital to getting Munchkin things to print (I sometimes help a little, too). This also means that John Kovalic will get to take his nose away from the Munchkin grindstone for a while, so when he comes back, he'll be all tanned and ready. (Can you even GET a tan in Madison? But I digress.)

The schedule that gets reshuffled the most is GURPS. Monica is a key part of the GURPS process. She's the last copy editor and proofreader to see each GURPS release, and she does the proof checking. Sure, we have backups for some of the things she does. The chief ones are named Steve and Andrew . . . who are also Out Of Here.

So the bad news is that the steady flow of new PDF releases will remain choppy at best for the next few months. We'd rather delay these than send them out without the final check.

That, however, means that more of our old GURPS books will be released in PDF.

But the really good news is that, once we accepted that the flow of new PDFs would be broken up, that freed the writing side of the team to work farther ahead.

• GURPS Line Editor Sean Punch will finish editing the new edition of GURPS Discworld. Then he'll start writing GURPS Zombies, a new hardcover planned for a 2013 release. (Hmm. I don't think we had told you about that one before, have we? Surprise! Kromm, zombies, awesomeness!)
  
  
• Assistant GURPS Line Editor Jason Levine will dive into the Girl Genius Sourcebook and RPG, editing existing text and writing more, so this long-delayed book can also appear in 2013.
  
  
• Pyramid Editor Steven Marsh, with the help of e23 Editor Nikki Vrtis, will work to get ahead on Pyramid issues so that we have a stockpile of issues ready (which will make the fall easier on us all).

So, in theory, some of the people here will get less crazy, and you'll see Ogre and Munchkin Apocalypse in 2012 and three new GURPS hardbacks in 2013. Wish us luck!

-- Steve Jackson