Omaha, NE, March 16, 2010 – Crafty Games today announces that its award-winning OGL action and intrigue game, Spycraft, will see a Third Edition, powered by the acclaimed Mastercraft system and with a renewed focus on espionage, in Spring 2011

"We've been considering the merits of a new edition for some time and with the incredible success of Fantasy Craft and the Mastercraft system the pieces just came together," said Patrick Kapera, Crafty Games partner. "Updating Spycraft gives us the chance not only to synchronize rules across all our core games but also lets us bring the focus of the Spycraft brand back to espionage. We can still stretch the genre with dedicated supplements and — with products like Ten Thousand Bullets — other compatible Mastercraft core books, and this really frees us up to dig into the Great Game in ways that we've never done before. This time around you can expect a lot more tradecraft and as much real world intelligence detail as we can manage (without getting our offices raided, of course)."

"Third Edition will be all about customization," said Crafty Games partner Alex Flagg. "You'll be able to build your own home office and your GM will be able to create criminal masterminds, henchmen, and minions of all stripes, and place them at the head of any type of organization he can imagine. Super-science will be adjustable as well, letting you run a game with everything from completely realistic gear to over-the-top gadgets bordering on magic. And of course the Mastercraft system lets you tweak the rules to support any flavor of play you want as well, though we'll be expanding the rules for the heightened lethality so popular in recent spy thrillers."

Crafty Games plans to release a final series of Spycraft 2.0 products through the summer, including the last of its Saturday Morning Spycraft PDFs and new fiction and adventures set in the World on Fire. The final Spycraft 2.0 product will be World on Fire: Born of Ashes, a definitive guide to the setting's heroic factions along with the grand finale to the setting's huge story arc and a new campaign for those setting their sights on the Alliance of Evil Geniuses.

Read the Crafty Games Spring 2010 State of the Company here.

About CRAFTY GAMES
Crafty Games, LLC was founded in 2005 by the creative team behind the popular Spycraft, Stargate SG-1, and Spycraft 2.0 roleplaying games, and offers an array of critically acclaimed products in print and PDF. Its reputation for high-quality, engaging games has earned nominations for multiple EN World ("ENnie") fan awards and the prestigious Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. Crafty Games' newest project, Fantasy Craft, is available now. Find out more at www.crafty-games.com

Crafty Games books are available from Studio 2 Publishing. Distributors and retailers interested in stocking our catalog should contact our print representative, Jim Searcy.

Jim Searcy
jims@studio2publishing.com
(865) 637-0616
FAX: (865) 637-0619

Studio 2 Publishing
www.studio2publishing.com
1828 Midpark Rd. Suite I
Knoxville, TN 37921

For those of us who have been out of the loop, what's the mastercraft system?  It looks like it's still a D20 system?  What sets it apart from all the other D20 variants?

Quote from: Nicephorus;367589For those of us who have been out of the loop, what's the mastercraft system?  It looks like it's still a D20 system?  What sets it apart from all the other D20 variants?

Thanks for asking Nicephorus!

Mastercraft is the engine we used to power Fantasy Craft. It's a generic bed of base rules we built with three goals in mind - to make it easy to "skin" it for any genre or time period, to allow for as much campaign and character customization as possible, and to do those things without superfluous, confusing, or overly dense rules.

We won't be releasing a "Mastercraft core book" - rather, each Mastercraft core book focuses on a genre and the engine allows folks to play a relatively fast and fun game in that genre, or mix-and-match between books to build their perfect campaign.

Fantasy Craft was the first of these books and early next year we'll have Spycraft Third for espionage and Ten Thousand Bullets for crime noir. More will follow in time.

To answer the other half of your question, it's a d20 variant, yes, but it's three generations removed at this point (we branched out from 3.0, skipping 3.5 with Classic Spycraft, or first edition, then went through Spycraft 2.0 to get to Mastercraft). The core six ability scores are still there, for example, but we balance their use in play to avoid dump statting. We have feats, but ours tend to be multi-faceted, so even in the rare instances when you see a flat bonus you'll still get a cool trick to go along with it.

If you'd like some good examples of the differences, and especially the level of customization, check out the free preview for Fantasy Craft over on DriveThruRPG. Among other things, it includes the base rules for creating NPCs, which is one of our most applauded revisions (it's sort of like point buy, except that as you add free-form options you raise the NPC/monster's XP).

I'm subscribed to this thread, so please feel free to ask any other questions. Thanks again!

Thanks for the link for the preview - I didn't know you had that.  I found Spycraft 1 solid but never advanced beyond the core book of the first edition for the pragmatic reason that I haven't played a modern/near future game in many years.