First, a new announcement, and then two announcements that I should have made about two weeks ago …
A Monsters chapter has been released for DS3. This is not a full monstrous compendium, but rather a couple of preview monsters, which will be included in the back of the DS3 release, a la The Wanderer's Journal and the first printing of the 3e PHB. A full monsters document is under a Savage Species inspired review.
The second announcement is that Nathan Guest (better known as NytCrawlr) has been accepted as a member of the senate. NytCrawlr has been working on monster conversions, and assisting in the editing of the DS3 documents for some time now.
And the last announcement is that we've found someone to do layouts for us. While we're probably going to keep trying to release the preview documents in a relatively simple, uncluttered form (images tend to make the documents much bigger, fast) the final layout is now in capable hands.
The spells document has been updated, including the long-missing spell list for the Templar class. There should be another update to this document, as well as the magic chapter, before the month is out, revising the Defiler / preserver rules.
As you might have noticed from the last releases, we’re getting into the state of working on layout for the DS3 core release. What you see in the Races and Classes documents is about the best that Gab and I can do, neither of us being professional layout artists, and both of us stuck using a sub-standard tool for that job (Word2k) …
So, if you think what you see in those two documents is good enough, you're probably not the guy we're looking for. ;) What we are looking for is someone who can do layout work for us<0>. End result is PDF document. Source documents are in Word 2000 at the moment, and we can supply a bevy of images to sort through. (Preliminary versions of the documents didn't include images because they increased the file size of the source docs by *two* orders of magnitude ... no good when you're passing them back and forth a lot.)
DS3 being what it is, you have to be *available* and willing to deal with changes and the like. This go-round is only a playtest, after all. And I'll want copies of the files used to generate the PDFs, so we're not SOL if you get hit by a bus. ;)
The best we can offer for payment is the satisfaction of seeing your name in the credits ... but if that's enough for you, send a note, and a URL to some samples, to senate@athas.org ...
<0> I know I've gotten offers for this in the past. I lost my mail archives a few months ago, so, sadly, I don't have any of them anymore. Otherwise, you'd've heard from me a few months ago. :/
Also, I just uploaded a new short story, "An Athasian Story" by Siri Khalsa. I'm also in the process of formatting another, which should be posted in a day or two ...
We’re revisiting some of the classes, after feedback and consideration.
A quick rundown of some (not all – we’re not entirely done yet)
of the changes:
Psionic Combat has been restored to Psions and Psychic Warriors.
(Too many adaptations to the psion class depend on having those combat
mode slots available. By dropping them, the classes are cut off from
quite a bit of official material)
Druid spellcasting is restored to the PHB style and progression.
A Templar core class is being added (This has been the source of
quite a bit of the delay)
Bards are being reworked (any class that people are afraid to even
playtest has problems ...)
No promises on the bard, but we’re going to release a new revision of
the classes document once the Templar writeup is complete. There’s
still some debate over their spells, so no promises on exactly how long.
Hoping for sometime in the next two weeks.
