Ronin Arts -- Fourth Millennium Releases Today

[JamesM]

Very nice PDF, Mr Reed.

And a tip of the hat to Mr Maliszewski and Kevin Brennan. Good stuff.

Thanks for the kind words.

BTW, James, no less than four people asked *me* if you were at GenCon this year - I had to talk them down and explain that we've only worked tangentially together in the past, ONCE, and that I had -no clue- if a super-star like yourself was at the Con.

That's strange. That you'd call me a superstar, I mean. I'm just another minor laborer in the gaming field, especially now that I'm doing much less freelance work than I had been in the past few years.

FWIW, I wasn't at GenCon this year, as I had too many other commitments during the summer. Next year, I most likely will attend, if only to get a chance to game with friends and colleagues I neve get to see during the year. I might also help promote Fourth Millennium's print products, which will have been available for some months by that time.

 

[HellHound]

Cool - it will be nice to finally run into you face-to-face instead of in collaborative email. Odd to travel to the Mid-Western United States to meet fellow Canadians every year.

 

[haiiro]

As an overview, though, let me say that Fourth Millennium is a "transhuman space opera" setting, which is to say, that it uses fairly hard science to tell an epic story: the struggle between humans who have chosen to give up their humanity to achieve "perfection" and those who have decided to remain "flawed."

If you've checked it out, how would you say Fourth Millenium meshes with GURPS Transhuman Space? TS is mostly fluff and background, so I'm mainly curious whether you think the two would work well together, or if there's a lot of overlap. Thanks in advance.

 

[JamesM]

Cool - it will be nice to finally run into you face-to-face instead of in collaborative email. Odd to travel to the Mid-Western United States to meet fellow Canadians every year.

How about meeting an American currently living in Canada instead?

 

[JamesM]

If you've checked it out, how would you say Fourth Millenium meshes with GURPS Transhuman Space? TS is mostly fluff and background, so I'm mainly curious whether you think the two would work well together, or if there's a lot of overlap. Thanks in advance.

Depends on what you're looking for, I guess. The Fourth Millennium Campaign Model is intended to kick off the line and, as such, has a mix of background, rules tweaks, and new rules. Future releases, like the upcoming Parahumans and Future Warrior, Volume One will be more rules heavy and therefore of more use to people who don't want to use the Fourth Millennium setting for their futuristic D20 games, but do want the new rules material.

As for its specific overlap with Transhuman Space, I'd say there's a little bit, although TS is much lower tech than 4M in most respects. The stuff you'll see in the Fourth Millennium line will be much more advanced and over the top and the social context of everything is very different, as 4M postulates a conflict between those humans who embrace technology even at the expense of their humanity and those who instead embrace a technological Stasis to maintain their humanity. As the line progresses, we'll get to see lots of different aspects of this conflict from both a setting and a rules perspective.

So, I guess the question is: what are you looking for? To translate Transhuman Space to D20 or simply to use 4M-inspired ideas in a TS campaign?