So now that the shadowrun4.com is updated, it's quite clear that there is much more than SRM to the Missions.

The SRM I can buy from the usual e-pushers, but where on Earth can I get my hands on the CMP and the PM scenarios?

Good question... I had wanted to do some CMPs for a gaming convention I work with, but Bull seems to be ignoring my PMs on this board and my emails.

Sorry Crypto. Been crazy busy as of late, and messages just tend to get buried Generally if I don't reply within a few days, i missed the email.

As for CMP availability... I hope to have something to announce soon.

It's no big deal... in this case the convention I'm working with the collective players have no experience with SRM... so I'm running SRM Year 3 at them.

But I've got 4 different cons that are all related... so if I can get the CMP's for years 10, 11 and 12 before September.. I'll have a lot of material to keep the players busy for quite some time...

Any idea when "soon" will be?

Sadly, no. They're out of my hands at this point. I've handed things off to various folks to get finished, and it's pretty much a matter of when they can be done and when they can fit into the schedule. And with convention season in full swing, the pipeline is clogged to hell and back.

Yeah, what he said.

"There are also Convention Missions (CMP) adventures, which are exclusive to conventions that Catalyst and Agents for the Catalyst Demo Team are running events at for the year. These Missions are looser and not tied to a specific location of storyline, and will be made available the following year."

Is this accurate or is someone blowing smoke?

I wouldn't call it 'blowing smoke', since that implies a deliberate attempt to deceive. Only one of the CMPs from 2010 is publicly available, and that's as part of the download of one of the Season 4 Missions which includes it as source material for the GM.

Neither.

It's not accurate, because things have fallen behind that schedule. But it's also not someone blowing smoke, because that makes it sound like Bull is some mustachio-twirling villain who is up to nefarious and manipulative schemes. The proposed release schedule was not a lie, it was just a schedule that wasn't kept up.

But even if he was, we all know that he would be able to hide the fact, since he is also "The Best Ork Decker You Never Met".

But now it's out in the open, and he has to change it to:

Bull - "The Best Ork Decker & Mustachio-Twirling Villain Who Is Up To Nefarious And Manipulative Schemes You Never Met"

Are they going to be released individually like the missions are or are they going to be a pack?

I will get smacked with an NDA and probably run over by Bull if I steal his thunder, but...just...keep an ear out for an announcement soon.

While there are some things I can't really talk about, I do try and be as open as possible about how I run Missions, so here's the deal...

The 2010 CMPs were a bit of a mess, developmentally speaking.

I got hired as Missions Developer in Mid March, 2010. The idea for the CMPs were already in place at that point, but many didn't have a writer yet, all we had were titles and a 1-2 line concept (Which we had to have to get the events registered for the cons). All 8 CMPs had to be written and ready for Origins in early June. Besides those, I also had several SRM Season 3 adventures taht were being worked on AND I was starting to outline Season 4.

During all of this, I was learning everything mostly from scratch, and this was the same time CGL's financial and legal issues cropped up.

So the net effect is that while the adventures were good, they weren't ready for publication. They were a new idea taht year, so developmentally speaking they were all over the board. They were done in Season 3 style, with Table Ratings. A couple tied into Season 3 itself and were set in Manhattan, while others were "prequels" to Season 4 and set in Seattle, and others were in random locations. Some were done very well and highly polished, some were very last minute rush jobs.

They were playable, because convention GMs can and will roll with things and adapt things as needed. But they were not publishable. They had errors, they had typos, stats were wrong, etc. These were very, very rushed.

I had planned to go back after the cons and work on them some more, clean them up, do some heavy editing, etc... But with con season past, we began wrapping Season 3 and starting Season 4. I ended up writing the first two Missions for Season 4 and I was working on several pieces for Artifacts Unbound. I had to do the FAQ, work up the Promotion system, and to top it all off, I moved and started a new job that took up a lot of hours. And we started a whole new batch of CMPs for 2011. So I ended up badly overwhelmed, and a couple things had to go to the bottom of the pile: The 2010 CMPs, since tehy were the lowest priority.

In 2011 I ended up organizing Gen Con and Origins again as the coordinator for the last few years had stepped down. This coupled with everything else kept me crazy busy. And as usual, as soon as the cons were done for 2011, I had to start looking at 2012.

Now, the 2011 CMPs are in much better shape. I had a much better idea of what I was doing by then and had the process streamlined quite a bit. We even have a number of the CMPs laid out in PDF. But they're also not quite release ready yet. The PDFing was done mostly to make them cleaner, nicer, and easier to read for GMs and for when we sent them out to folks running at conventions. It wasn't the design we had in mind for the final release. And layout never managed to find the time to tweak them of finalize them, especially as we wanted to get the 2010 ones out first.

So where do things stand now?

The 2010 CMPs have been handed off to someone else to finish up, leaving me free to focus on new releases. He's been hammering away at them, cleaning them up, rewriting some of them, and bringing them all better in line with the Season 4 standards. But, it's a lot of editing to do, and he is just as underpaid as the rest of us, so his day job and such take priority. So it's been slow going there. It is being worked on, and we do hope to have something in the near future.

The 2011 CMPs will likewise get a look over once the 2010 ones are done. I expect they'll be much quicker, since they're in better shape.

the 2012 ones are even better organized, and we did some different stuff with them, centering two sets of 4 CMPs in different locations (London and Tir Tairngir/Portland) so taht they provide something of a mini campaign as well as working as stand alone adventures.

Now, Prime Missions are another story. They're a story of failed deadlines and some flip-flopping on what we wanted to do.

In late 2010, we contracted two writers to work on teh first two Prime Missions. Both writers missed several deadlines, and eventually backed out. I put the PMs on hold until after the conventions, because by that time con prep was in full swing. After the cons, I contracted two more writers for two new PMs. Same thing happened. In early 2012, I was looking at the Prime Mission concept and decided to shelve it for the time being. We'd already missed a year of play time, I reasoned, and my experience was that we didn't seem to have all that many players who had been promoted to Prime Runner status, so there wasn't a lot of call for the PMs, since they weren't going to be designed for regular Missions play, just the Promoted Prime Runner characters. I also knew by that point that we would likely be wrapping Season 4 up and moving to Season 5 early in 2013 to tie into some new products we were working on.

I've since changed my mind, and am going to try and get two PMs out the door by the end of the year, ideally one in September/October and one in December/January. These will partly be a test run to see how they sell, and partly a design test to see what we need to do different with them. We do hope to have these in full production for Season 5, as I expect there will be a lot more Prime Runners then.

At the end of the day, Missions suffers as something of CGL's red-headed step child. We've vastly improved production quality (In my not so humble opinion), and actual sales have improved some, but it's still a very niche product that sells very low on the CGL food chain (Being taht it generally only sells to GMs, and even then only to a select group of GMs.) And being PDF only doesn't help sales any (PDF sales are generally much, much lower than print sales). We're last in line for layout, we pay some of the lowest rates not just for CGL products, but in the industry as a whole. It's rough going.

There are some plans in the works I'm told to help promote Missions and get more use out of them. CGL has a new marketing guy who wants to do some stuff with Missions(though I can;t talk about specifics yet). We're going to be trying a few other things out in the coming year, and if successful will help give me a bit more pull to move Missions along faster and smoother.

I would also note taht sadly, the website rarely gets updated, outside of th wordpress blog on the front page. We don't really have a web guy right now (Which is a huge issue, IMO, but not something i can control). So unfortuantely the Missions information is a bit out of date. It's all I can do to get the SRM sales pages linked on the downloads page.

So all I can say is please, have patience with us, and my apologies for not communicating better. We're full on in convention season right now, and I'm organizing things as well as doing missions and freelance duty, so my free time is pretty much nil. Not an excuse, just hopefully something of an explanation.

Also, if you're on facebook, check out our Missions Page there. I try and post information there about what we're doing and how things are going, and usually post art sneak peeks and the like when I can.

Bull

Thank you.

For those wondering about at least a few CMPs being made available for sale, here's a little something straight from the horse's (or would that be Bull's?) mouth:

I want the limited print, but how can I get that when I'm nowhere near an American convention?

From the sounds of things, CGL isn't going to put it up for sale (unless maybe POD?) or anything, so I'm not sure of any "official" method to get a copy to Denmark for ya.

So the traditional answer to this convention-conundrum would be "find someone going to the convention, pay for the book and the shipping, and ask them to buy and mail you a copy." Lots of folks do it with other convention exclusive books (or even convention premier pieces, just out to get them as early as possible). The problem there is, of course, finding a secure way to handle the payment without major hassle, trusting them with it, etc, etc.

That said? I happen to know a guy who's gonna be there, who has a vested interest in the book selling well, and who would be happy to sign any copies he picks up for people.

EDIT: To clarify, I meant me, not Bull.

And just to add to this, if sales are good, that helps give me some clout to do more of these as print, and gives CGL more incentive to help get the other CMP's together and released.

Never understood this sort of thinking. All you need to play is the core book and enough premade missions to keep going when life gets too busy to write them yourself. A constant pile up of splatbooks is more of an annoyance than anything else - the main reason I like pathfinder is the focus they put on their adventure paths. Also thank you again (not that it really helps me ).

Splatbooks generally sell better that adventuers. More books sold = better profit, and management always like profit, nomatter which market we are talking about.

Then I don't understand the buying of splatbooks

Splatebooks are for everybody, adventures are only for GM that don't create their own.

So the market for splatbooks are bigger than the market for adventures.

So bigger markat = more sale.

Soo... is that like an offer for the Danish crowd? I would be very interested in both the book and the cards.

Well, it is, but keep in mind that upon further research, we were looking at $100+ for the shipping part (to get it overseas, from the FedEx shippers at the convention and/or hotel). My terribly limited travel space (since I'm flying this year) means I can't get swag home, I can only pick it up for people and ship it from Indianapolis directly. Which would mean paying like $150 for a $15 book.

So it's looking less and less like a good idea, sadly. Y'all may just have to wait for the pdf of the book, looks like.

That can't be right I bought the slumbering tsar from FGG and that cost $60 to ship to Australia and it's 3' thick and weighs 6lbs.

The problem is the it is FedEx, instead of USPS.

Tak a look at FedEx.com -> Get Rates -> From USA, 46225 -> To Denmark, 4180, Sorø -> 1 package, 0.5 lbs, drop off at FedEx-> send 17th August -> get quick quote = $108,75 or $94.88

~100$ is too steep. But if an USPS International Flatrate Box is a possibility (max 20lbs 13-5/8" x 11-7/8" x 3-3/8") @ 75$, and I could find somebody who would also like a book or two I might consider it. (Larsine do you need something )

But I would only ever consider it if it is no bother to you Critias.

I'd like to help out, but really FedEx is my only shipping option (because it can be done right there, at GenCon). I'm flying instead of driving this year, so luggage space is at a tremendous premium, there's really no way I can get a bunch of stuff home from Indy in order to then get more reasonable shipping rates.

Ah, sorry I didn't catch that FedEx was the only option from GenCon. Just that you offered it is much appreciated. Have a good Con.

Larsine, sds, check your PM boxes. Due to a miscommunication with a GenCon-going buddy, I've got a few extra copies. If y'all are still interested, we can work out some shipping costs and see if I can't sling a little Elven Blood your way after all.

I'm now the lucky owner af a signed copy of Elven Blood

Cool, glad y'all got it. That was quicker than I expected, with overseas shipping!

Enjoy!

That's why you're my favorite freelancer Critias. That right there.

Are you sure it's not just 'cause I write about elfy stuff every chance I get?

Both? Ok ok, guilty as charged.

Elven Blood is now released in pdf format. Go forth, sling dice, and have fun.

Still prefer my dead tree version

I was just looking through SRM 4-10, and it says that Romeo & Juliet is a direct sequel to CMP 2010-04 Humanitarian Aid, and that the CMP should be run first. Problem is, where do I get it?

I guess I don't understand why it would say to run a product that isn't available.

All CMP missions are convention-only releases for their initial run.

The plan being they later get gathered into collections and sold.

If you want them, you need to be running events at a convention or other event open to the public, and get in contact with Bull. You might want to ask in the official Shadowrun4.com forums if Bull doesn't show up here.



-k

Well, since there are no conventions in the area that I live in, and there is very little interest in anything that is non-Pathfinder except for a handful of people (who arein my group already), that doesn't really help me any.

But I guess I still don't understand why they would put that snippit in and not have it available...

As far as I understand, the plan was to make them available roughly one year after they were used, but that has got delayed for various reasons.

Yeah, to free me up, we have someone else who's been working to clean up and gather the CMPs into collections like Elven Blood (The early ones needed some love to make them publishable), but there have been numerous delays on his end due to RL stuff. So it's taken a lot longer than planned. The first 4 CMPs (Which included Humanitarian Aid) was supposed to be out befor ethe conventions.

So the CMP packs are still on the release schedule. Good to know. I guess a 'when' is difficult to say? Still, even that is good to know.

What about PRime missions? Canned or shelved, or also still WIP?