As you've probably guessed from the fact that we haven't posted here in over a year and a half (and the last one wasn't even M-Force-related) and the fact that 2012 is almost over, the new edition of M-Force is going to be released (quite a bit) later than we originally hoped. Initially, we were shooting for a mid-2012 release date for the core rules PDF. Obviously, that didn't happen.
What slowed us down? In a word, Hobomancer. Hobomancer was originally scheduled to be released in October of 2011, but it kept growing. And growing. And growing some more. In the end, we ended up with a 160-page book that wasn't finished until the end of May 2012. Usually when a book ends up taking six months longer than expected, that's a bad thing. In the case of Hobomancer, it was a very good thing, because all of that time was spent refining the game into exactly what we wanted it to be. So definitely worth the extra time we spent, even if it did delay M-Force 2E by at least a year.
By the time we got Hobomancer out the door, we were right at the beginning of convention season, which cuts into our working time even when we're not trying to recover from a project that ended up being two or three times the expected page count. To make matters worse, we had people moving, having kids, switching jobs, taking on other projects, and all that other "real life" stuff that can really cut into a part-time game company's production schedule.
That's not to say that there hasn't been any work done on M-Force 2E. In fact, if you go to the downloads section, you can find the newest version of the playtest draft. It has more setting information as well as some rules changes and a few other tweaks as well as an expanded Big List of Words.
The main rules change from the previous draft is on the artist formerly known as Competencies, which are now known as Specializations. Originally, Competencies were sort of "super skills" to help differentiate different M-Forcer's specialties. In playtesting, that idea didn't work, leading to characters rolling against targets of 20 or higher way too frequently when Competencies were stacked on top of regular Skills. In the new version, Specialties add to the Success Degree, not the chance of success. So, for example, if a character has a Job Number of 12 and a Specialty of +3, he still rolls against a 12 but adds +3 to the result if the roll succeeds. A roll of 11, for instance, would give him a Success Degree of 14.
In addition to working on a draft of the rules, I also wrote an M-Force novel for National Novel Writing Month. You can read the rough draft here, but be warned that I have not looked over it since finishing at the end of November and I didn't even have time to copy edit the last half of the book (I think Chapter 12 was the last one I've looked over at all). So there will definitely be lots of dumb spelling and grammatical errors, and there's a very good chance that the whole thing is terrible. If you decide to read it, keep in mind that it was written in 30 days and you're not paying for it.
So, do we stand on M-Force? That's hard to say at the moment, since we have several projects in various stages of development right now. I'm personally hoping to keep my writing commitments for most of our current projects to the "contributor" level so I can focus on M-Force, but I'll still be on the hook to help with editing, layout, and of course dealing with the day-to-day business stuff that we have to keep up with. If everything goes smoothly, we'll probably get at least the first few M-Force PDFs released in 2013. But, as I stated in the first blog post on this site, we're not promising anything. We want the new edition of M-Force to be exactly the game we envision, and if that takes longer than expected, so be it. That plan worked pretty well with Hobomancer.
I'm going to try to at least post more frequent updates to this site over the coming months--I'm pretty sure I can beat that "one every year and a half" standard. In the meantime, you can download PDFs of the first edition as well as the current playtester draft of M-Force 2E from the downloads section (if you don't have a copy of QAGS, you can download the Qik Start rules from the Hex web site. Feel free to look over what we've got so far, give the rules a spin, and let us know what you think, either in the forums or through email via the "Contact Us" link to the right.
Happy (Monster) Hunting,
Steve Johnson