Subj: Re:Mayfair Date: 97-01-31 10:41:22 EST From: Lee at MG Posted on: America Online Since it's been all but confirmed, I'll make it official. As of today, Friday, January 31, 1997, Mayfair Games is basically closing up shop. All remaining employees except for Lou Rexing and an accounting staff person are being laid off as of today. Mayfair will continue to operate taking and fulfilling orders for the time being, and all phone numbers, email accounts, etc. will still be in use and valid. Leaving Mayfair today are myself (buyer/production/Chill line developer) , Faith Price (corp. communications/PR), Jay Tummelson (production manager), Danny Procell (sales) and Chris Vande Voort (art director.) The good news (at least for us) is that all five of us being laid off will begin work with Wargames West Distribution in Albuquerque on or around February 17th. All active development on game lines is suspended (duh!) but I will be continuing to support Chill on my own (with Jay helping) until a new home is found for it. Anyone interested in the company, any of its lines, or individual games can contact Darwin Bromley at Mayfair Games. And, to place orders, call Lou Rexing at same. ---Lee Calamaio ---Mayfair Games (until 5:00pm...)
INWO fans, check out the auction . . . a complete Limited Edition set, and a batch of playtest cards, are now on the block.
And INWO is now a registered trademark!
GURPS (along with a few hundred other SF games and books) appears in the new Sci-Fi Channel Trivia Game CD-Rom, from Byron Preiss Multimedia.
NOVA, one of the oldest and proudest AADA groups, now has its own web page.
And we just got a copy of the French edition of GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade. Looks very nice!
We are actively trying to fill several staff positions and freelance slots. Visit our jobs page for more info.
Enough of that. I'll be running demos of In Nomine, plus an INWO tournament, Knightmare Chess and Dino Hunt. We'll be providing prizes, giveaways, goodies, first peeks at new books that aren't in the stores yet, and lots more. There will be lots of other games going on, too, of course.
So if you're in the neighborhood, please come by.
-- Scott Haring
Visit our auction page for some new auction offerings, including a complete mint set of the original INWO limited edition; some INWO playtest cards, and more diabolical goodies from the Warehouse.
And speaking of INWO, take a
look at our new and improved INWO web
pages! And if you just can't get enough, you might visit
the #INWO channel on IRC (dalnet), hosted by our
INWO rules net rep & goddess,
Lynette Cowper.
-- Kira
We shouldn't say "completed," though, because Richard's going to continue developing new material, revealing more about the world of Ogre.
So stay tuned.
-- Steve Jackson
Yeah, yeah, it's a local con. So if you're reading this in, say, Finland,
you're pretty much out of luck. But if you're here in Austin or
thereabouts, come on by. Why? First off, game conventions are big fun, and
gaming in Austin needs a successful local con. Second, I'll be there
running the first ever official games of
In Nomine, with the
real printed rulebook and everything! I'll also have advance copies of
GURPS Autoduel 2nd Edition,
GURPS Warehouse 23 and
Pyramid #23, previously
unseen by human eyes. So you should definitely drop by and say hello.
-- Scott Haring
Black Ops is sort of like, well, I guess The X-Files is where you'd start,
but instead of sending a couple of sexy FBI agents to investigate,
you send in the squad of space marines from Aliens to just blow the hell
out of whatever it is. It's very cinematic, very high-point level, and very
cool. If all goes well, we'll have it out this summer. Go check it out.
-- Scott Haring
"Mike Sullivan began playing role playing games while in the seminary in the mid 80's. He was brought into the great Steve Jackson Games cult when he discovered GURPS in CompuServe's Role Playing Games Forum, and from there, managed to become the company NetRep to CompuServe. Online, he is better known as 'Moriah'. Mike is one of the charter members and the '97 Coordinator of *Dreamsmiths*, a prestigious club of Game Masters which run various games and tournaments at GEN CON. Mike has been known to give lots of critical feedback to various Steve Jackson Games projects. He hounded us about In Nomine until we punished him by making him the line editor.
"Mike is a full time parish priest in the Roman Catholic Church. When asked if his hobby or In Nomine poses any conflicts for him, he replies that it's just a game."
-- Scott Haring
You've eaten it for years, but what do you really know about the foodstuff
we call toast? Here are a few web sites to expand your toast knowledge,
including the bizarre cult surrounding the
Shrine to Toast,
the unusual Nuclear Toast,
and, of course, the
Toast Homepage,
which will provide you with a variety of links to other toast pages.
And remember, the Center for Weird Studies takes its thermal bread very seriously. You should too.
- Matthew D. Grau
As always, not quite with it.
Just posted: a long collection of variant rules for Dino Hunt, including suggestions from gamers on the Net! Thanks to everyone who contributed to this page.
In other news, GURPS Compendium I is now out of print. We thought we had printed a year's supply - and ran out in about 7 months. We'll reprint it, but it will be gone from the stores for a couple of months; if you have been intending to buy it, grab one now or plan to wait a while. Congratulations to compiler Sean Punch for creating a reference book that our users really like!
-- The Golden Apple Corps
But we got two advance copies, and the book is beautiful.
To kick off our auction-neat-stuff-to-pay-for-our-own-webserver program, we are auctioning off Copy #1 of In Nomine... in advance. We will close the bidding Jan. 27 and send it out that day. You'll have the book about a week before anybody else.
It will be autographed by Derek Pearcy, Steve Jackson, Scott Haring, and others who worked on it.
To bid, visit our brand new auction page, and help us test it by bidding. Updated bids (amount and name) will be posted there and on the In Nomine web page.
Our office was closed Monday and some of Tuesday due to bad weather. Weather a few degrees below freezing, and a quarter-inch of ice on the road, is no big deal in the North, but down here -- where there are lots of people who have never SEEN ice except in their drinks -- it can close the city down. And it did. But today is beautiful, sunny, no coats needed. Texas weather...
SJ Games has an alpha version in house for evaluation - we'll tell you more soon.
Derek leaves a tremendous legacy at SJ Games. Derek was the first editor of Pyramid magazine (he preferred the term, "Architect") and was also responsible for the graphic design that set it apart from the many other magazines that have come and gone in the nearly four years we've been publishing it. Derek also handled much of the graphic design and most of the painstaking production work on Illuminati: New World Order, the INWO Assassins supplement, Dino Hunt and Knightmare Chess.
And, of course, there's Derek's work on In Nomine. Derek has poured his heart and soul (how literally you want to take that is up to you) into this game for the past three years. And now that he has successfully midwifed the game to the printer, he's moving on.
Now, I don't want to make this sound like a eulogy or something, because Derek is neither dead nor gone. As a freelancer, he's working right now on sections of the first In Nomine supplement, Night Music, and will continue to write for In Nomine. He's still dpearcy@io.com, so if you want to thank him yourself for all his hard work on SJ Games' behalf, you can drop him a line. See you around, Derek.
-- Scott Haring
I don't make it every year, but I went last year on my own dime. This year I'm a guest, which is even better (grin). I'll be running Darwinopoly. No, there's no web link for that. We oughta do one someday.
In the meantime, it's May 23-25. See you at Miscon. . . ?
-- Matthew D. Grau
Eye in the sky, Nose in the dirt
Speaking of alien infiltration, it's now apparent that someone has broken the weather satellites... either that, or all this ice and snow is our punishment for enjoying that springlike weather last week. Personally, I think the alien satellite-grabbers are just playing a nasty trick on us...
They've also made off with my list of Illuminated sites to watch, so if you know if any (Illuminated sites, not aliens) that are particularly noteworthy, please stop lurking and tell me about them. Misdirected alien reports will be forwarded on to the Secret Masters.
-- Kira
Happily retiring as CFO is Joyce Jackson. Yes, I put my mother to work a few years ago :-) She's good . . . She'll be staying on our Board of Directors, watching over our income tax situation, and probably finding time to help IO through their new growth spurt.
We greatly appreciate all of the retailers you folks entered into the contest. But unfortunately, only 61 people could win prizes. And the biggest prize of all went to Ryan Beall of Mayville, WI! Congratulations, Ryan! He's going to have a lot of SJ Games stuff to read when he gets done.
Thanks again to all of you for making our contest such a success!
-- Matthew Grau
Issue #31 of Shadis had this to say about GURPS Dinosaurs: "The book is imaginative as well as informative; not only does (author Stephen) Dedman know his stuff, he has a good time imparting it too." And about GURPS Vehicles, 2nd Ed., they said: "One of the best things about the book is its staggering versatility. Role-playing covers such a wide variety of times, places, genres, it seems impossible that any one book could be useful for all of it. But this one is. Or at least, anything can be created with the material it provides, which is just as good. Few, if any other products in the history of gaming have had such a wide applicability."
Thanks, guys.
-- Scott Haring
We saw the advance printed copies of
GURPS Autoduel,
2nd Ed. today, and it looks very nice indeed.Now, since I co-wrote (with Aaron Allston) the original Autoduel, and since I edited this edition, you might think me biased when I say that this is an outstanding roleplaying product, worthy of space on any gamer's shelf. And you'd be right. But that doesn't mean it's not true. It's a pretty cool book, expanded from the 80-page original, with updates on the ten years of future history since the last edition, an expanded Road Atlas, and vehicle construction rules entirely compatible with the standard set in Vehicles, 2nd Ed. Plus it's got lots of new cool Dan Smith art. Check it out.
We got the advance copies today, which means the rest are on the truck and on the way; we'll ship them out to distributors later this month.
-- Scott Haring
Those of you with America Online accounts might want to drop by the Online Gaming Forum (Keyword: OGF) tonight at 10 pm Eastern (that's 9 pm Central, 7 pm Pacific) and participate in a live chat conference with Scott Haring, editor of Pyramid magazine and Managing Editor of SJ Games. We'll talk about In Nomine, the future of Pyramid magazine, the latest industry gossip, and tons more.
And hopefully soon we'll have some web-based conferences online too, for the anti-AOL crowd.
-- The Trilateral Commission
