Looks like it's gonna be quite a week

Well, for starters, I'm another year older today.  How much wiser is up for debate though.

As of Friday, FFG has announced that (much to my surprise) they are doing an Age of Rebellion Beta for their Star Wars Roleplaying product line, much as they did with Edge of the Empire.  Given the very aggressive testing window (ends in the middle of October), I imagine they'll have copies for sale at GenCon.  You can ready Brian "Fiddleback" Casey's GSA article about the upcoming AoR Beta here:

http://gsa.thegamernation.org/2013/08/09/age-of-rebellion-5-questions-answered/

To be honest, I figured that once the basic dice rules had been nailed down as of the EotE Beta, I figured that FFG wasn't going to do Beta rulebooks for AoR much less Force & Destiny.  But, if they are doing an AoR Beta, then that means a F&D Beta is probably also in the cards.  Which means we've only got to wait until 2014 for FFG to pull back the curtain on full-blown Force-users such as the Jedi.

Speaking of Force-users, I've been working on some additions and revisions to my Ways of the Force fan supplement.  One of the major changes was revising the layout of the Jedi Initiate, as there were a few things about it that were bugging me.  However, with the prospect of another Force-sensitive specialization in Age of Rebellion (the Force Sensitive Emergent), I may wind up revisiting and revising all three of my Force-Sensitive specializations, particularly if there are new talents in the AoR Beta that look to be a solid fit for them.

I've also been working on a prototype for a Farseeing power, but that might be all for naught depending on what new Force powers we get in Age of Rebellion.  I'll just have to wait a few more days and see.  The power as I've currently got it requires a fair amount of GM adjudication, but that's generally been true of Farseeing in all the prior Star Wars RPGs from D6 to Saga Edition.  There's not much in the way of Upgrades to be purchased (2 Control, 2 Range, 1 Duration, 1 Strength), but that's fine as well, but it's also more expensive to activate, especially if you want detailed information and want to see something other than than a snapshot of the present.

Also been working on the "Fallen Stars" module, a backer-only reward for the recent Order 66 Kickstarter.  Not quite as far along as I'd like (frankly, I'd like to be done with the module), but I've made pretty good headway.  As is the standard for the RPG market, I won't give any kind of target date for when it'll be completed or sent to the backers; the latter especially as that decision will be up to Chris and Dave.  The only thing that I'll commit to is that it should be in folks' hands well before the end of the year.

Sadly, a lot of my mental bandwidth has been taken up by my day job.  To be honest, I'm amazed that I was able to handle a three-person workload by myself for over a month without having a nervous breakdown, though it did mean a lot of days where all I wanted to do after getting home was crawl into bed.  Thankfully, a few job positions have been filled, which means the strain on me should be reduced by a decent amount.  Which also means I won't be as mentally drained when it comes time to working on various RPG-related projects.

But, as mentioned previously, GenCon!  This will be my third year going (I seem to alternate years due to the expenses involved in both airfare and hotel), and oddly the first year where I deliberately don't have things on my schedule for every single day.  I'm hoping that with a looser schedule, there will be the opportunity for me to get into some pick-up games, be it Star Wars (Saga Edition or EotE, either one is good) or Dresden Files or maybe even some Marvel Heroic RPG.

On the subject of RPGs, while the Sunday Saga Edition Skype game came to a pretty epic close and the Sunday EotE Skype game that's going to take its place is on the horizon, I've still been able to get some face-to-face gaming in, mostly D&D 4e (Dark Sun setting) on Wednesdays as well as bouts of 7th Seas or 4th Edition Legend of the Five Rings on Saturdays.  Granted, there's been some schedule issues making it tough to get everyone together some weekends, but not enough to warrant putting the group on hold thankfully; I've seen too many gaming groups wither and die after being put in "indefinite hiatus."  While I've not run anything beyond a few one-shots of EotE for the Saturday group, there was some excitement out of the prospect of Age of Rebellion, so maybe I'll be able to get a mini-campaign going for that.  If so, I may very well wind up using several of the many WEG Star Wars adventures and simply adapting them on the fly to FFG's Star Wars system.  But we'll have to wait and see how that plays.  Could be that I run a single session, enough of the group decides they really don't like the system, and that'll end my GMing stint real quick.