So what did happen to the GSA?

Okay, I've been asked this by a number of folks, and while I'd prefer to keep my thoughts to myself, I do think

What happened to the GSA?

Some time back, there was an idea, the brainchild of Dave "GM Dave" Villegas and Brian "Fiddleback" Casey.  Called the Gamer Security Agency, or GSA for short, it was meant to be a kind of repository for various members of the Gamer Nation to write and post articles discussing various aspects of gaming, and likely also a means to advertise Gamer Nation Studios and their line of games.  Not too surprisingly, given that most of the d20 Radio community were big into Star Wars (heck, it was a Star Wars RPG podcast that lead to the formation of the d20 Radio community), when FFG's Edge of the Empire Beta got into our hands, the GSA had almost become an EotE fan site instead of the general gaming web site that had been intended.  And then, Brian departed to go do his own thing, and the GSA pretty much went into hibernation.  A lot of contributors, such as myself, waited to see what would happen... only for nothing to happen.

Now to be clear, I have ZERO idea as to what actually caused Brian to take his ball and go play in a different yard; that's something you'll have to ask him.  But if I had to speculate then I'd say that Brian and Dave had differing ideas about where the GSA should go, and thus parted ways, with the GSA lying dormant and no updates being made.

Then something happened a couple weeks ago, that took a number of folks by surprise.  The GSA website vanished.  Honestly, I'm not surprised at this, as I'm sure that paying money for a website that wasn't being updated and wasn't doing much to draw traffic to the d20 Radio website was a fiscal drain that Dave and Chris could do without.  Frankly, I'm more surprised the site stayed up as long as it did.

So what does that mean for the content that was on the GSA?  Given most of the contributors have either gone their own ways or jumped ship over to Brian's GSA knock-off site, odds are good most of those articles are lost to the ether and will require the Internet Wayback Machine to dig up.

Luckily, I saved soft-copies of all the GSA articles I posted.  So as the weeks and months go by, I'll start posting some of those items here, such as the various starships I did for the "Exploring the Galactic Fringe" section of the Equipment Labs, the much enjoyed Unofficial Species Menagerie (more on that in a moment), and even some of the Heroes on Demand, though I will probably have a number of new ideas to offer given how many more books are out.  Though with HoD, I may wind up revising several characters to account for the new core rulebooks but that will depend greatly on time available.

As for the Unofficial Species Menagerie, there had been plans to do a Version 4, but frankly those plans fell completely through.  From the start, I had meant for it to be a joint project between myself and Ben "Cyril' Erickson, but it's become pretty clear that Ben's interests have moved away from Star Wars RPGs as well as his own personal life having several demands on his time.

True, I probably could forge ahead without him, but doing just feels wrong to me.  Like I said, it was meant as a joint project, and if Ben's not contributing, then I feel the best thing to do at this point would be to set any further updates of the USM aside.  Plus, there's the fact that a lot of the species we'd created are getting covered by FFG in their sourcebooks, so I'd be placing more and more species into the archive chapter than I would be adding new species.

That being said, I will post a link to the USM for folks to reference now that the GSA has passed on.  I'm not sure yet if I'm going to push ahead with the mostly updated version that I have, or just simply post the link to version 3.5 and leave it at that.