You might be wondering why there’s not been a Sprawl Gangers update in a while…well, I’ve not had my head in it for the last two months. Convention season always swallows up swaths of time, then there’s the work on the Shadowrun Introductory Box Set and Shadowrun: Crossfire, as well as other work, that simply has been swallowing up most of my time.
Add to that that Playtest Cycle 3 was wrapping up, and well…didn’t have my head in the rules/presentation side very much.
Now, that doesn’t mean that work on the production side has not been progressing. I’ve been in numerous meetings with various people that we hope will help us solve the miniatures production issues and give us high-quality miniatures within a time frame that is appropriate. In fact, I’ve got another such meeting this week.
In the meantime, I’ve finally got enough bandwidth to be allocating some time each day to starting to review all the playtest reports from Cycle 3, compiling them, making notes on which issues are brought up by multiple groups and which, despite vociferous arguments, are just an issue with a single group, which issues I immediately see a solution to and which I’m currently at a loss for how to handle…and so on, and so forth. Pretty standard process, but it can swallow a lot of time, especially as I wear a lot of hats (as much of you are well aware).
In the meantime, thought I’d try something a little different. I really enjoy pulling back the curtain, so to speak, and showing off how the whole process works. And at this stage, the easiest way to do that is to share a playtest report. I’ve scrubbed out the names of the individuals involved, but really beyond that, this is a straight report from players: Sprawl Gangers Playtest Report 3-1.
Now imagine about 15 to 20 of these (some much shorter, some much longer; though in the first playtest cycle we got back almost double that number), and hopefully you’ll start to get a sense of the work involved in digesting it all and bringing it into a sense of order that is helpful when making calls on what needs to change and what doesn’t need to change.
Randall N. Bills
