I should expand on this, so that folks understand the outlook I have, and which many of my colleagues have whether or not they mention it.
Y'all are being good sports about it. It's just that we keep running into folks out yonder *waves hand at the Internet* for whom the presence of one thing they expect not to like must mean that the whole thing's ruined, and they spend the next however months until release badmouthing the offending book as crap, sight unseen. Nor, alas, am I exaggerating.
Advance info is tricky. Our goal, after all, is to get you into the store to check things out and hopefully buy them. So we need to motivate you a bit to do that. But we can't tell you enough to risk very many people deciding "Aw, heck, I know it all, I don't have to bother." We don't want you all to feel committed to purchase or anything like that, either - we want to keep you interested, keep the thing alive as a topic of occasional conversation, but we don't think we're providing you with full disclosure of the sort that actual sound shopping calls for. Nice as we are (shut up, you in the back, we
are nice, and if you argue anymore I'll hit you again
), this is, at heart, advertising, with its strengths and limits.
Also, a full discussion of an issue often just plain requires a lot of space. I can sympathize with not finding the Wealth system ideal, but to explain why I like it in Gamma World, I'd have to get into the rules for synthetics' self-repair, the recovery of pre-war resources from damaged goods, one application of our new investigation rules, and several other things. And that's spread over four chapters. I think you'll find that we integrated it into the framework of the game so as to solve several otherwise potentially messy problems, but I can't prove that right now, not without quoting way more material than my bosses would allow. So I have to do what some economists call "spending reputation capital", which amounts to saying "trust me, because I have a history of playing far".
There are things in here you folks haven't seen before, and I'm really looking forward to reactions to them. In particular, we've got rules for statting up communities with abilities comparable to those of individuals and classes based on the community's origins and history. Different types of community confer somewhat different benefits, and there's a simple "character sheet" for communities that lets you measure the effects of good and bad fortune on the community's overall happiness, strength of leadership, dealing with nearby groups, and so on. It's a blast. We've also got a fresh take on what d20M wisely calls the FX. The nanotech system in particular is a gem, very flexible but not "I get whatever I want". And oh, man, the example locales.We don't have an extensive definition of the setting, but there are writeups of New York and Portland, Oregon, and Silicon Valley and somehwere in the Australian Outback and at the ruins of...something cool...in New Mexico and in the caves of southern France. And they are
great. Story hooks and exotic niftiness till the cows come home.
I'm happy with the book, as I think you can tell.
) I'm looking forward to seeing how it turned out. 
