Cosmic Patrol

Make sure you’ve got your atomopack on and rayguns charged, because there’s Cosmic Patrol action at the Origins Game Fair 2012.

If you’ve wanted to play to see what all the excitement’s about, come check out a game! (All games are at Franklin D / Table 6)

Thursday
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm (6180)
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm (6276)

Friday
8:00 am – 10:00 am (6419)
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm (6575)

Saturday
8:00 am – 10:00 am (6682)
8:00 pm – 10:00 pm (6870)

We hope to see you there!

Catalyst Game Labs

The excellent sci-fi website io9.com has an fascinating series of photos showing Space Shuttle Discovery’s last flight. I remember drawing the shuttles when I was a little kid and it’s just amazing to see them retired. I realize it was probably a good thing they weren’t armed with ray gun cannons…but it would have been cool.

One Other Note

The forums are having issues. I’m usually able to fix it quickly, but I just haven’t been able to get to it due to a massive amount of work to do ahead of convention season. Since this is a recurring problem, I’ll likely ray blast the whole thing and install something better, I never really liked PHPBB anyway…

We’re super stoked (like blazing, twin-atomorockets excited) to have Cosmic Patrol participating in Free RPG Day this year, June 16th.

Don’t know what it is? Well check the Free RPG Day website out for more details.

If your interested, make sure your local retailer knows about Free RPG Day so they can sign up and you can get your hands on the Cosmic Patrol Quick-Start Rules on that day.

Hope to see you all participating!

In Cosmic Patrol the Mission Dossiers are more than just adventures. They really allow for easily and quickly fleshing out additional parts of the universe for players, all while providing the seeds they need for a night’s cosmic adventuring!

Since the Core Rulebook needed, you know, rules and a pile of Patrolmen Dossiers, didn’t leave us that much more for including too many Missions. Into the Cosmos allows us to remedy that, providing over twenty different Missions, covering a wide range of different, cool actions. Here’s a random adventure I grabbed to preview.

Till next episode!

Randall

One of the few critics we saw when the Cosmic Patrol Core Rulebook was released was something akin to “your game is ‘rockets, rayguns, robots’ and yet no illustrations of rocketships?!”

Well, we heard you loud and clear…and we’re getting in some great Comsmic Patrol-style rocketships, from a variety of races, you’ll see in future books.

Below is an Uth hive ship, once again drawn by the wonderful Leanne Buckley. Basically an asteroid hollowed out and strapped with engines and other mechanical devices…the perfect lair for the Uth to keep all they’ve scavenged from dozens of worlds.

Till next episode!

Randall

As I’ve mentioned before, Cosmic Patrol was an experiment for us in a lot of ways. As such, we kept budgets and concepts very tight, such as no “scene” illustrations. With the success of the Core Rulebook and moving onto the first sourcebook, Into the Cosmos, we’ve the chance to have even more of Leanne Buckley‘s fantastic art.

While the final bits of the book are still being written and flowed into layout, I couldn’t resist sharing how it’s turning out. Here’s a sneak peak of the first two pages of the short story in Into the Cosmos, as well as one of those scene illustrations I’m talking about.

Till next episode!

Randall

I’ve written/developed a number of quick-start rules over the years. And during all of that time, it’s almost always a case of taking a many hundreds-page rulebook and condensing it into 24 or 32 pages.

While Shadowrun was rather complex, due to all of the sub-rules sets, BattleTech and Leviathans were relatively straight forward, as huge swaths of the rules could be trimmed out without an issue.

As I announced yesterday, Catalyst Game Labs is participating in the Free RPG Day and in addition to A Time of War: The BattleTech RPG and Shadowrun QSRs, we’re creating a Cosmic Patrol QSR.

However, I’m running into an interesting situation where the rules of CP are so light to begin with, it’s far more difficult than I imagined to shave text. In place of cutting off whole sections and pages, the trimming comes in short paragraphs, sentences and even sometimes snipping out words to try and shave it down enough to fit in a printed QSR.

I am enjoying the work, both for the different skill set it’s flexing, but also as it highlights how tight and sweet the Cosmic Patrol rules really are.

Till next episode!

Randall

Catalyst Game Labs has has recently migrated servers. The new machine is substantially more powerful, which has improved the performance of all Catalyst-hosted websites, forums and the BattleShop store. While we’re confident there are no major issues, if anyone notices any web-related problems, feel free to let us know on the forums.

Once again, thanks for your patience and your passion for our games!

Catalyst Game Labs

Catalyst Game Labs is upgrading its server to accommodate our expanding websites and communities using those websites. This should decrease load times on all our websites, as well as expand our ability to respond to website issues.

Starting next week, this website (along with the forums), may be down intermittently for maintenance and migration. We hope to keep that downtime to a minimum.

Thanks for your patience and your passion for our games!

Catalyst Game Labs

In a previous blog post I included the details on the complete art notes for Into The Cosmos, the next Cosmic Patrol book.

I thought I’d share some of the art that’s come in. Once again, the fantastic Leanne Buckley is creating all the illustrations for this next action-packed installment.

Here’s the art notes for one of the new races:

ZHOP THE HUMUNGULOUS

Explanation
The Humungulous are a race of giant (compared to humans) explorers that roam the cosmos in their huge, slow ships. Zhop is just one of them, a captain of a small cutter.

Illustration Description
Zhop is a standard Humungulous: large oddly shaped head with big bug eyes and short stubby antennas. Their torsos are round and only slightly larger than their heads. They have spindly legs and arms that look much too thin for their bodies. The arms end in hands, but the finger don’t look like they have bones, resembling short tentacles more than fingers. They wear very basic clothes – tight-fitting tunics. For this illustration, Zhop should be looking down between is feet with a very curious look on his face. He’s looking at a Cosmic Patrolman who only comes up to Zhop’s knees.

Based on these bad boys.

Leanne turned in the follow sketch based off of those notes:

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