• We released several Eclipse Phase supplements: Gatecrashing, a sourcebook on exoplanet exploration; Continuity, a PDF-exclusive adventure with audio components; and Ego Hunter, a PDF-exclusive adventure I wrote where everyone plays a fork of the same character. These can all be found on our Releases page.
• In 2010, Eclipse Phase won a Gold ENnie Award for Best Writing and Silver Awards for Best Cover and Product of the Year.
• The 2010 End-of-Year Report for Posthuman Studios provides a break down of how our first year went, offers some transparent numbers about sales and other biz, and explains some of our philosophy behind Creative Commons licensing.
• Our Sunward sourcebook for EP was nominated for an Origins Award this year for Best Sourcebook, but sadly did not win.
• Fellow Posthuman Adam Jury posted up his Ignite presentation on our publishing efforts and philosophy.
• We took Eclipse Phase in for a third reprint. This one has some new art (all Creative Commons-licensed now), is updated with all of the errata, and features a better paper stock and two bookmarks.
• Posthuman Studios recently went independent from our previous publishing partner, Sandstorm Productions.
• Eclipse Phase received 6 ENnie nominations this year. Gatecrashing is up for Best Writing, Best Supplement, Best Production Values, and Product of the Year; the Continuity adventure is up for Best Electronic Book; and the EP Gamemaster Pack is nominated for Best Aid/Accessory. Voting is already over, we hear the results at the Gen Con ENnie ceremony on Friday August 5th.
• Our next sourcebook, Panopticon, is shipping now from the printers — we’ll have it at Gen Con!

If you’re not familiar with Eclipse Phase yet, go download and check it out now. Some thoughts on our nominations:

Best Cover Art: Stephan Martiniere, who illustrated the Eclipse Phase cover for us, is a phenomenal and well-known sci-fi artist (you’ve probably seen some of his novel cover work). The piece he did for us shows a transhuman fleeing into space from a derelict space station (in orbit over a devastated Earth) while a mechanical tentacle grabs them and pulls them back. We were aiming for a sense of bleakness and loneliness here, and he nailed it spot on. I’ve actually seen a couple of reviewers comments exactly on that point, so I’m glad it was conveyed. Note that the cover wraps around front to back (some pics of the book only show the front cover half). You can see the full piece on the front page of our website.

Best Writing: The team that did the writing for Eclipse Phase is likely the best group of writers I’ve ever worked with on a book. They all know transhumanism well, have intriguing ideas, and are fantastic wordsmiths. While Brian and I came up with the original concepts, Jack Graham and John Snead ran with those ideas and really succeeded in capturing the setting. Lars Blumenstein knocked out the groundwork for the psi and mesh rules, helping us do something different and keeping it functional. The opening fiction piece, “Lack,” written by myself and Davidson Cole, did a solid job of introducing the setting and what players will do and go through in game. We also had help from other talented folks like Tobias Wolter, Randall Bills, and Bruce Baugh.

Best Production Values: Adam Jury rocked the graphic design of this book. I cannot emphasize that enough. He took some of my initial ideas, some of which were fleshed out and most of which were nebulous to the point that they were probably frustrating (we went through a lot of early concept prototypes) and invented a look for the book that just kicks ass. It looks amazing, it’s visually distinctive, and he threw lots of little elements in that really succeed in making it user-friendly. To go along with his masterpiece, the cabal of color artists that art directors Mike Vaillancourt and Brent Evans pulled together did an out-of-this-world job and delivered the visual sense for the setting that we hoped to achieve.

Game of the Year: We have a well-rounded game that’s innovative and pushes sci-fi gaming in a new direction. The setting is detailed yet accessible, the artwork is amazing, the game is easy to learn and play, and the book looks great. We also made some leaps forward with the Creative Commons licensing approach we took, and our success with it is already inspiring others. So, yeah, we think we deserve this award.

We have some heavyweight competition, so every vote will count. I’ve seen some people note that some of our main competitors are re-packaged versions of previously-released games, but I think each book deserves to be considered on its own merits. I’m sure a lot of work went into redesigning and updating those projects–possibly more than people realize. That said, I’m looking forward to seeing how these votes play out. There are a lot of deserving people and titles on the nominee roster. Good luck everyone!

Oh yeah — if you’re going to be at GenCon, Posthuman Studios is also up for an ENnies Dream Date auction. The winner gets to hang out with me, Adam, and Brian during the awards, gets a signed copy of our upcoming Sunward sourcebook, and gets their name or a character’s name used in an upcoming book! We promise to make your night interesting!

Right after we were back from Origins, we passed our first Eclipse Phase sourcebook, Sunward: The Inner System, off to press (check out our first art preview). It should debut at GenCon, where will we be hanging with our Sandstorm peeps at Booth #2009 and engaging in various sundry activities, from biz to games to mayhem. One thing we hope to do there is pick up one or more of the four ENnie Awards for which Eclipse Phase has been nominated (in the categories of Best Cover Art, Best Writing, Best Production Values, and Game of the Year). We have some stiff competition (Pathfinder is the behemoth in the room), and are even running against ourselves in some respect (we are up against the 20th Anniversary version of Shadowrun, Fourth Edition, a full-color update of a game on which I was lead developer, in two categories).

We’ve also taken the opportunity to experiment with some new digital releases. Two fiction pieces I authored, “Lack” (from the EP Core Rulebook) and “Melt” (from the upcoming Sunward book) are now available in ePub and MOBI (Amazon Kindle) formats, in addition to PDF. We’ve also released the sample characters from the EP Core Rulebook in iPad format. Adam notes some lessons we’ve learned from these experiments so far.

• Catalyst Woes: In March some unfortunate news came to light at Catalyst Game Labs concerning, as they put it, the improper “co-mingling” of company funds. I’m not going to comment on the situation here, but you can read what CGL has to say in the press releases on their website and there are numerous threads full of rumor and speculation on various RPG forums. Due to what was going on, however, both Adam Jury and myself decided to part ways with CGL. We also immediately went about severing the license between Posthuman Studios and CGL for Eclipse Phase, so now that game is entirely back in our hands. Many of our friends and former colleagues have also distanced themselves from CGL, and WildFire also severed their license and reclaimed their Cthulhutech line. It remains to be seen how the CGL situation will play out, but I’m very sad that many of my friends have had their livelihoods disrupted by this turn of events.
• Posthuman Futures: On the positive side, Adam, Brian, and myself are making progress on taking Posthuman Studios up a few notches. We plan to continue publishing Eclipse Phase (and also some other games) in the future and are arranging our business so that Posthuman will handle all EP production itself. We are making an arrangement with a new publishing partner who will handle our printing, warehousing, and fulfillment. We’re doing our best to turn misfortune into opportunity, and we have some exciting plans in the works, so expect to hear much more from us soon.
• EP Gamemaster Pack: The EP Gamemaster Pack is now available in PDF format. You can see what it’s like here. There are two versions, the regular one and a Hack Pack that provides the construction files so that fans may take advantage of the Creative Commons license and make their own. The hardcopy EP Gamemaster Packs will be arriving at  the warehouse soon. Posthuman Studios is currently negotiating to buy these away from CGL, along with the core book reprint. There will be a small delay as we re-sticker these, but we hope to have them out into stores as soon as possible.
• EP Award Nominations: Eclipse Phase has been nominated for the Best Roleplaying Game for this year’s Origins Awards. We’re in good company, so the competition is tight. We were also nominated for this year’s Grog d’Or, though Cubicle 7′s Dr. Who claimed that win today — congrats guys!
• EP FTW: Eclipse Phase has done amazingly well so far. Our first print run sold out in 4-5 months and there’s a significant demand for the second printing. Our PDF sales have been phenomenal, despite the fact that the game is freely available for download. We attribute a big part of this to going for the low price point of $15. As Adam noted, this was a decision we had to struggle with CGL over, and in the end we placed our royalties on the line to prove it would work. Our risk paid off. The original requirement with CGL was that we had to double the sales of an equivalent core game PDF that was priced at $30 within an 18 month period. We exceeded that goal approximately one month after the PDF was released! This success prompted CGL to not only lower the price point on all of their core rulebook PDFs, but also to license their next game line, Leviathins, under a Creative Commons license.
• PDF Updates and Amnesty Program: We recently issued an update to the EP Core Rulebook and EP Gamemaster Pack PDFs. We also set up an amnesty program for customers who had purchased our PDFs on CGL’s Battleshop online store, so that they can receive PDF updates from One Bookshelf (DriveThruRPG/RPGNow).
• Site Updates: I recently added some new material to my Work  Samples page, and I updated the EP Core Rulebook PDF link to the most recent version. I’ve also set up an Eclipse Phase PDFs page for easy access to the latest PDF versions of EP products.

• Interview with Blue Alien
• Audio Interview with Kevin Zero/Grinding.Be
• Interview with Humanity Plus Magazine
• Audio Interview with the Hebrew Gaming Podcast
• Audio Interview with All Games Considered
• Video Interview with Fear the Boot

I’m sure there will be more in the future. I’ll archive the links here.

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Artwork credit: Posthuman Studios, piece by Daniel Stultz for Eclipse Phase RPG. Some rights reserved.

Eclipse Phase’s themes, politics, and transhuman outlook seem to have hit a chord in the gaming community. We have unexpectedly become a bit of a favorite on rpg.net forums and elsewhere. We had hoped that EP might be the forerunner in a new genre of transhuman RPGs, much like Shadowrun did for cyberpunk, and so far that prospect is looking positive.

The core rulebook will be followed up with additional releases in the near future, including an EP GM Screen with adventure (going to print soon); Sunward, a sourcebook on the inner system (in layout); and Gatecrashing, a sourcebook for the Pandora Gates and exoplanet exploration (in editing). We’re also looking into doing a number of PDF-only releases. (More info here.)

It’s exciting to have a game that we designed from start to finish be released to such positive acclaim. I’d like to give a major thanks to everyone who’s contributed to the Eclipse Phase project so far and also all of the fans who have embraced it so energetically. I’m really looking forward to moving this game forward!

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We don’t have an explicit street release date yet, but it’s still a couple of months off, as we’re printing it overseas. We will be previewing and demoing the game at GenCon of course, and the PDF and Quick Start Rules of the book will be released by then as well. We’ll be posting more artwork and preview material to the website too, so stay tuned.

(Artwork by Ben Newman, Creative Commons licensed)