A View from the Bridge

It has been, by my own count, roughly a dozen years since the last of these editorials went up. I owe you an explanation, and a bit of an apology, for the silence.

Real life did what real life does. Work took over more than a few years. Family responsibilities piled up the way they tend to. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Paleotechnic Press went quiet, even though I never actually stopped working on it. I kept drafting articles, kept researching canon, kept reading through period material, kept sketching out scenarios and supplements, but I never had the stretch of time needed to finish anything properly or get it uploaded. A half-finished blog post is worse than no blog post at all, so I just let the drafts pile up in folders instead.

Then, this past year, I moved into a new home in Syracuse, New York. As anyone who has packed up a house knows, moving has a way of forcing you to confront every box you have been avoiding for a decade. I found several of mine, stuffed full of old notes, printouts, and half-finished manuscripts, sitting in the back of a closet. Some of it I remembered writing. Some of it I did not. All of it deserves better than a cardboard box.

So here we are again. I finally have the time to work on (and hopefully finish) some of what I started, and, this time, to actually publish it. My plans are deliberately modest, because I have learned my lesson about biting off more than I can chew. That said, after digging through the boxes and sorting the salvageable material from the scrap, some upcoming efforts will include:

1. Finalizing the Mars city route calculator, an interactive distance-finding tool I have been quietly building alongside everything else.
2. Finish and post the pieces that are furthest along, starting with articles related to a Martian railway venture as well as a Sky Galleons of Mars battle report, scenario, and short story.
3. Continue work on some old adventures that were parts of a campaign that I ran back in the day. One is a trilogy set on Venus, another is the middle chapter of a three-part campaign arc that grew out of Canal Priests of Mars, and a Wild West adventure that sends Buffalo Bill's touring company to Mars.
4. Get back to a regular posting schedule, real-life permitting.

Space: 1889 itself has not exactly stood still while I was gone. In fact, the most recent development landed right as I was writing this. Strange Owl Games, working under license from Ulisses Spiele, is currently running a BackerKit campaign for Space 1889: After, a full conversion of the setting to 5th Edition rules. Rather than rehash the old ground, "After" jumps the timeline forward a decade and puts players in the role of explorers rediscovering the inner worlds fresh, with new threats, new playable species, and a premium offset-printed rulebook to go with it. The campaign is already well past its funding goal and closes on August 7th, for anyone who wants to back it before then. I clearly have a good deal of catching up to do, and I will save a proper look at how "After" squares with the classic canon for a future post.

To anyone who bookmarked this site a decade ago and just never got around to un-bookmarking it, thank you for your patience, whether you knew you were being patient or not. To anyone new, welcome aboard. Either way, happy gaming.

~Joe

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