So Where’s IO?

I’m sure that’s on most player’s minds…been weighing mine down for a long time. I’ve said for a ages that this would be the most difficult of all the books…and it absolutely is.

However, let’s be honest…if I could’ve worked on just this book it’d be published by now. But my days are split among a huge variety of duties, from management to production, other game development to marketing and more. As the company continues to grow and expand our various game lines, my time is split more and more.

And of course the horrendous manufacturing issues we’ve had over the last two years have lost me hours beyond counting. We have to follow up on everything seven and eight times, not to mention how much time I’ve spent trying to find new foreign manufacturers as well as trying to bring as much printing to the US as possible.

Course, none of that really means anything to you guys…you just want the rulebook!

Most of the really painful production issues will be out of the way starting in September, which means I’ll be able to get back to 3 hours every day on IO. Why not after Gen Con? Cause Pax Prime is at the end of August and we’re attending in a big way this year…which hopefully is nothing but good things for BattleTech as we try and bring awareness and more new blood into the game we love.

Now the bright spot in all of this on IO, is to re-iterate that you are going to be involved in its development. Soon after Gen Con I’ll have a solid draft of the Creating a Force rules (from our resident science expert, Mike Miller) and I’ll post it as a Public Beta Test to any of you that would like to tackle it and provide feedback.

And I’ll be doing the same with most of the book. More than than any other aspect of BattleTech, what we’re covering now has perhaps had the least amount of rules dealing with it. As such, we don’t have the endless years and rules editions to really give us the best metrics on what the community wants. That means bringing this to you at every stage to ensure we make it the best it can be and hopefully make it what you want it to be.

Thanks for your patience in all of this…but I’m going to put you to work on this soon enough…

Type at ya after Gen Con!

Randall