Greetings, all! Thanks for stopping by.
I know it’s been a few weeks since my last post, but we’ve had a bit of reorganization here at Wizards, and my job’s changed a little bit. I am now the RPG Group Manager, which means that I’m leading the team of RPG designers and editors. In essence I have the job that Mike Mearls had, and Mike is now the Senior Manager for RPG R&D (which includes novels, boardgames, DDi, and D&D-based licensing). I’ll be doing a little less design and a little more management and planning, which is something of a mixed blessing—I enjoy design work, but I now have a chance to influence strategy across the whole D&D RPG line. I expect I’ll be able to find time to keep up with some A&A minis design here and there and contribute some more Nerathi Legends articles, since those are fairly small commitments, but I probably won’t be leading design on many large projects for now. It’s my job to look at everything we’re doing for D&D and help to make it better, not just the products with my name on them.
Speaking of which, the next big D&D release with my name on it is our Elemental sourcebook (title still TBD), which will be out early in 2012. I collaborated with Rob Schwalb (actually, Rob did about 75% of the book), and worked on an interesting new take for a sorcerer as well as some fun elemental-themed themes, paths, feats, and more. The book is currently in development; I’ll say a little more about it when we get a little closer. Other than that, several of the titles I’ve worked on recently are actually out right now, including Conquest of Nerath, the Dark Legacy of Evard encounter season, and the recent set of theme articles in Dragon. Sometimes our schedule fluctuations “bunch up” things us designers work on so that a number of them come out at once, and then you go months and months before anything else appears under your name, which is always a little depressing.
Axis & Allies Air Force Miniatures
We’re rolling along with the new AAAFM game, which is now largely in the hands of our overseas manufacturers. Just yesterday I spent a few minutes with Ryan Sansaver (the art director) looking at the stat card layout. The stat cards are going to look pretty slick; we’re actually putting a picture of each painted model on its appropriate card, so you won’t even need to compare collector numbers or base text to figure out which piece is which. In the “class” information line we’re noting the exact model and version of the planes we’re representing – for example, Messerschmitt Bf 109E-4 or Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat. Right now the plan is to put a full set of the stat cards in the starter set (and hopefully online), but we probably won’t include them in the boosters. I know that’s a bit of a change, but we don’t think that will impede playability, and it helps to manage collation costs.
Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures Set 6: Surface Action
It’s been a while since I talked about the upcoming War at Sea set, so I figured it’s past time to say a word or two. First things first: We’re planning to release Set 6 late in October. I know that’s a delay of a couple of months from the original launch date, but we had some unavoidable bottlenecks to fight through. Anyway, the paint masters for the set look very good, and I think this might be one of the better-painted sets we’ve done. By way of apology for the long delay between posts, let me spoil a couple of units in the upcoming set… USS Edsall, and the Elite A6M2 Zero.
USS Edsall (DD 219) is one of the old “four-piper” destroyers of the Clemson class. She was in the Dutch East Indies early in the war, and had the singular misfortune of blundering into the Japanese First Air Fleet with their battleship escorts on 1 March 1942. Edsall managed to embarrass the pride of the Imperial Navy for hours, dodging and weaving to avoid heavy gunfire, before she was finally sunk. It’s an amazing story—go look it up. Anyway, not only does Edsall provide an old, cheap US destroyer with smokescreen and Chase the Salvoes, she also stands in for the fifty Lend-Lease destroyers sent to Great Britain and thrown into the Battle of the Atlantic.
The Elite A6M2 Zero is a reprint of our set 1 Zero model. We’ve been hearing from the audience that early-set planes are hard to come by, so we’re including a couple in War at Sea 6 to help out fill out your carrier decks. This particular unit is modeled on the famous Tainan Kokutai (the squadron of Saburo Sakai). It’s not land-based only, but we included the Excellent Endurance special ability so that if you use it as a land-based fighter you get to use it two turns in a row. We also included a new special ability, “Ace,” which lets you reroll an AA attack once per game, and High Agility to survive an 8-point hit. All in all it’s a good representation of a Zero squadron with highly skilled pilots, and provides the IJN with a more robust early-war fighter unit to take on those tough US planes.
Anyway, that’s all for this time. I’ll be heading out on my summer vacation later this month, so it’ll be a few weeks before I’m back with a new post. Enjoy the summer, everybody!
